Afford Anything - The Mental Toughness and Confidence Blueprint, with Dr. Nate Zinsser

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

#460: Mental toughness is the bedrock of starting a business, growing a multimillion-dollar portfolio, investing in real estate, crushing your debt, retiring early. Today’s guest, Dr. Nate Zinsser, mentors elite athletes, soldiers and executives in confidence and mental toughness. He is the sports psychology mentor for two-time Superbowl MVP Eli Manning and the Director of the Performance Psychology Program at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He’s mentored the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers and NCAA teams, and has been a consultant for the FBI Academy, U.S. Army Recruiting Command, and the NYC Fire Department. He holds a PhD in sports psychology from the University of Virginia. In today’s episode, we discuss how to develop the type of mental toughness and confidence that can help you grow your investments, start a business, take risks in your career, make offers on houses, and overall master your financial life. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode460 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How do military officials, elite athletes, business executives, how do some of the peak performers across a variety of fields develop the confidence that they need to go into some tough situations and to deliver peak performance? And how do we take those lessons and apply that to our own lives? We're going to find out in today's episode. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else. What's most important to you? And how do you make decisions about your day-to-day life that reflect your

deepest and highest priorities? That's what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pan. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast. And today we are talking to Dr. Nate Zinser. Dr. Zinser is the director of the performance psychology program at the U.S. MAPA. Military Academy at West Point. Since 1992, he has been helping cadets at West Point become the best versions of themselves. He has also worked with a number of elite athletes, including two-time Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning. He was the sports psychology mentor for Eli Manning. He's also been the sports psychology mentor for the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers, as well as for many NCAA teams and other elite athletes.

He has consulted for the FBI Academy, for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, and for the New York City Fire Department. He earned a PhD in sports psychology from the University of Virginia, and he is the author of a book called The Confident Mind, a battle-tested guide to unshakable performance.

We are going to talk in today's interview about how we can take the same coaching that he delivers to West Point cadets and to Eli Manning, how do we take that coaching and apply that to our own lives when we invest in the stock market, build a retirement portfolio, buy rental properties, when we pay off our credit card debt, when we decide that we want to crush our debt,

to grow our net worth, to retire early, to start a business, whatever it is that we want to do, whatever our goals are, how do we take those lessons, take that coaching and apply it to our own lives. That's what we're going to discuss in this interview with Dr. Nate Zenser. Hi, Dr. Zee.

Good afternoon, Paula. Great to meet you. Great to meet you too. Thank you so much for being here. You write about confidence. And to kick off, I want to go over your definition of confidence. You define it as a sense of certainty about your ability, which allows you to bypass confidence.

thought and execute unconsciously. That's a lot of words. Can you break that down? That's a lot of words. It's the sense of certainty that you can do something without having to think a whole lot about how you're doing it while you're doing it. For example, tying your shoes, that is a very complicated motor skill. It requires many muscles, many joints, all kinds of sensory and motor nervous system pathways. Yet we can all do that unconsciously. We don't have to think about each islet, each step, we start, we finish, we're okay. Once upon a time, we had to be very deliberate and careful and conscious about tying our shoes. But after some practice, we could just make a decision, okay, I know how to do this. Wouldn't it be great if we could

approach our business negotiations, if we could approach our weekend tennis game with that same degree of certainty. Okay, I know how good I am. I know my product. I know my client. Now, let me be natural and automatic in my actions and communications rather than being extra super careful and self-conscious, all of which breeds muscular tension and contributes to, I'm sorry, mediocrity. Right. So let's walk through this example, because when it comes to tying your shirt, shoelaces, that is a discrete action with a very clear beginning, middle, and end when it comes to, by contrast, starting a business. That is an ambiguous action with really no clear middle or, I mean, there may be a discrete beginning, but there is no clear middle or ending. How do these

concepts then translate? I think you have to break that process, that big process down into bite-sized chunks. And if you have to study or acquire competence in any given area, you certainly have to do that. Success in any profession or in any sport is a mixture of competence and confidence. To get back to your question, it's a matter of breaking down that big, long-term, somewhat ambiguous process into very discrete actions that can be pursued in the relatively short term. With regard to then breaking that down into a series of discrete actions, there are a couple of challenges that I see people encounter.

One is the challenge of the unknown unknowns. We'll stay with the starting a business example. If a person has been a W-2 worker their entire life, they know that they have very little experience in starting a business, and they also know that they're about to wait into a field of unknown unknowns. how do they then start to develop confidence in even assessing what it is that they need to do? I think that begins with the process of internal reflection. What are my skills?

What do I know having been in the various jobs or in the various situations in my past? What have I learned about success by working with firm X or firm Y or firm Z? now that I know that I have a sense of my competence. I can be certain about that. And if my reflection reveals that, okay, I am deficient in a given area, well darn it, that's where I got to go to school, develop the competence, and then make the decision about the level of certainty I have in my newly acquired competence and move forward that way. So it really begins with an honest assessment. You know, where are you now relative to the outcome, relative to the destination that you want to travel to? Now, with regard to that assessment, people are often bad at making an honest assessment of their own skills.

You know of the Dunning Kruger effect, right? And to describe it to the listeners who might not be familiar with it, those who often are unskilled believe that they are more skilled than they are because they operate at that level. level of unconscious and incompetence. And by contrast, those who are highly skilled are aware of how much they don't know and therefore actually underestimate their skills. How can a person overcome that cognitive bias, that tendency to be overconfident when it's unwarranted and underconfident when it is? Well, that's what they call the school of hard docs, Paula, okay? You have to operate with the knowledge that you have. Maybe the knowledge that you have is insufficient. get feedback as far as that goes very, very quickly. We cannot anticipate, we cannot account for all

of the unknowns, you know, especially in the entrepreneurship universe. It's all about launching your ship into a sea that could be a little bit stormy and you have an idea of your destination, but a whole lot of things can happen. That could blow you off course. So it really is an exercise in being patient with yourself and being ready to learn and learn and learn day after day, day after day, day day after day. But how do we assess our own skill level in various tasks or in various things? How do we gauge that? I think we can look for quality mentors or I think we can look for, you know, advisors or

good friends that we've had in the past and ask them to hold the mirror up in front of us and so that we get to see what we actually do have and actually don't have. How are we able to distinguish a good advisor from a mediocre one? Well, how about somebody who's been where you want to go? Someone who has been close to where you want to go. I think it's very important that if you're picking a particular sport or picking a particular career, surround yourself with two or three people who have been there and done that and then be patient to work just with that small group of trusted advisors,

as opposed to trying to learn from everything everywhere all the time, and that just creates greater confusion. Every successful athlete I know, every successful CEO I know, has a relatively small, close circle of great advisors. We're talking three, maybe five. This person is really good for physical training. this person is really good for logistical support, this person is really good for emotional support. I know where to go to get what I need. And I'm not going to expect one person to be all things

in all aspects of my profession or pursuit of excellence. I'm going to surround myself with a small cadre of trusted advisors. People who have been where I want to go, people who have the ability to communicate what really matters. People I trust. And I wish there was a simple formula for achieving all that and gathering all those people around you. It unfortunately is one of the things that just have to try. If it doesn't work, you keep your head up and you find the next person. And eventually you will come across that team that helped you move. How do you know if it's not working, given that sometimes growth can take years? I think it's, everybody knows intuitively when they are making progress towards something. I think everybody knows

intuitively that I am doing as well as I can with the skills that I have. And everybody knows intuitively, I really am better than this, but I'm not showing it. I'm not expressing it on the golf course, on the tennis court in the negotiation. I know I'm better, but I'm not showing it. What's holding me back, you know? So I think, you know, so much of what we're talking. about is the willingness to look at yourself carefully, not necessarily critically, but carefully. You want to be your own best friend. You want to be your own most honest friend as well as your harshest critic at times. Most people are really good at being a harsh critic, but they're not very good at being an honest friend to themselves. When it comes to being an honest friend to

yourself, you can look back on what you've done and take a look at your own accomplishments and view those accomplishments as evidence of capability. You know, there's a temptation to disregard your own achievements and say, hey, my success is actually not the result of my own agency. Can you address that? Wow, is that ever the case, Paula, you nailed it. There is a tremendous tendency to, as you say, discount our own achievements. When you think about the pursuit of success in anything, okay, it requires what I refer to as a workhorse form of discipline. You have to put in the hours, you have to do the formal study, you have to do the exercises to develop the competence, and this is how you learn the fundamentals of your craft, and this is how you improve

your level of skill in your craft. But by doing that, almost inevitably, we also develop the tendency to analyze very specifically, to judge if we are doing it right, and to criticize ourselves if we're not getting the results or not doing it the way we think we should. So really, the pursuit of success in any field is fraught with this sort of dark side. of getting you to be very, very self-critical most of the time. Now, sure, you've got to be self-critical and analytical at times, but you also have to be accepting and supportive at other times, especially when you're about to perform or release or step into your particular arena.

But our cultural fabric has really emphasized very much, think carefully about what you're doing, take yourself seriously, work hard, study hard, practice more. And if that is your primary approach to success in your given profession or passion, then it's really hard to find that those moments of instinctive grace and real confidence and immersion in your activity, it's those moments with those qualities that really show how good a person, person is, whether we're talking sales, law, surgery, any kind of physical sport, any kind of

performing arts. If we are overly analytical, we engage parts of our brain that are unnecessary to the performance of a given task. And the neuroscience is very clear on this point. The brains of people who are engaged in high levels of concentration show a remarkable economy of activity. A couple places in the brain are all lit up because they're necessary to the performance of the task. But the other portions of the brain, the ones that, you know, judge and evaluate and criticize, those parts of your brain are not necessary to the performance of a task.

They drop out. So what we really have is a relatively quiet mind. and if we forget about honoring ourselves, if we continually indulge in our self-critical, overly analytical, overly judgmental tendencies, then we carry that into our performance. And we don't achieve that economy of brain activity that typifies great performance. So what you just said reminds me of something that you said in your interview with Ryan Holiday, where you said there's a time and place to be realistic, but it's not in the middle of a game. Absolutely. Here you are in the middle of a golf match or a tennis match or in the middle of any quote unquote performance. In those moments, you want to be locked into the moment. What is going on? And trusting your knowledge, trusting your skills, rather than thinking, uh-oh, this isn't right.

I'm in trouble here. What do I have to do? That brings up a lot of unnecessary brain activity. If you've done your homework, if you have a degree of competency, you know what you have to do. Now, just pick out your target, focus your eyes on where they need to be, and do it. Okay? We'll save all the analysis for Monday morning if you're an NFL quarterback. We'll save the analysis for, you know, the after-action report, which is a very valuable activity. But in the moment, I want to trust my eyes, I want to trust my senses, I want to trust what I know, and be as natural and automatic and, yes, unconscious as possible.

If you ask the best surgeons, the best athletes in any sport, tell me about the moments when you've been really good at your job. They sort of stare off into space and say, yeah, it's kind of weird. It's like part of my brain just shuts off, and I'm on autopilot, and I make great decisions, and I read my audience or I read my customer beautifully. I can see the movement of all my teammates, almost in slow, motion on the field. Those are really wonderful moments. Those are the moments that we live for. And you're not going to have too many of those moments unless you give yourself credit for what you know.

And if you decide as you enter your arena, I know what I know, I know what I'm up against, I am enough. Let's go see how good I can be. And that's the advice I give to a lot of people when they're stepping into their arena. What strikes me about that is that sports competition, you know, performing a musical instrument on stage, making a major presentation in front of a boardroom, taking a test as a student, these are episodic. Again, we go back to something being discreet. There's a very discrete game test presentation. How does this apply if you are doing something like, let's say, that you decide to decide to. to buy your first rental property. You've never done that before. That's the type of experience for a beginner that can really test your confidence. Do you believe that you can go put six

figures down on the line, especially if you come from humble beginnings? But there isn't any discrete hour like there is in sports competition that tests you. It's more of a chronic activity than it is episodic. It's a chronic activity, but within that long term, there are discrete actions, functions, dare I use the word performances? And I would encourage any entrepreneur to think of herself as a white-collar athlete. You're stepping into an arena, you're pursuing a goal. You are contending for a prize. That, by the way, is the English translation of the Greek words that produce the word athlete, Athlon, Contest, Ethlos, prize. If you're contending for a prize, you're an athlete. And back in the days of ancient

Greece, they would give Olympic awards to not just the people who could run fast and throw the javelin. They gave it to people who could debate. They gave it to people who could compose poetry. So here you are as an entrepreneur. You're stepping into an arena many, many times a day. That phone call is a performance. The writing up of that proposal is a performance. The gathering of that proposal is a performance. The gathering of that data in a way as a performance. How are you going to think about yourself throughout all these activities? Will there be a great deal of uncertainty and hesitation? I don't know about this. How do I get this right? Or will there be, okay, let's see how I can get this right. Who do I have to ask to get the right information? What sources are readily available to me?

So it's a way of sort of twisting, if you will, your perspective of yourself and actually looking for little discrete wins, little discrete performances that are happening many, many times a day. And the sum total of all of those compromises your overall performance. Right. You mean comprises your overall performance. Exactly. You can see, you know, this long-term project as a series of small wins or small potential wins. the tennis player goes to practice every day. What is she learning? What is she getting better at? Presumably each one of those small wins and small improvements in practice contributes to a greater understanding of her capabilities when it's time to play in the league championship or the state

championship. What should be the balance then, take that framework and we'll apply it to a software engineer who wants to buy their first rental property, right? How much of that person day should be spent in performance, in doing those things that require focus, but also drudge up fear, like making that phone call, gathering that data, writing that email that is a little bit difficult to write, right? How much of their day should be spent in performance versus in practice or in assessment, given the need to shift between one versus the other, how do they make those shifts? What we're talking about is basically a blend of the discipline to, practice and prepare and the discipline to sort of release, let go, and perform.

Depending on where one is in the day, depending on where one is in one's career, that blend of the two different forms of discipline, you can think of the workhorse and the racehorse. At different times of the year, the blend will be different. Okay, if I'm preparing a proposal, well, I'm pretty much workhorsing away. If I'm given the proposal, that's when I become a racehorse. So one way you can look at it is in terms of preparation to do something and then the delivery of that same thing. The workhorse is careful and methodical and analytical, gets everything done, dots the eyes, crosses the T's, prepares the doctor, but then when it's time to step up into the negotiation, to step up into the stage or the arena,

that's where we make the transition to the racehorse. And that transition is enabled by your conscious decision to give yourself a little bit of a pep talk. I've done the work I can do. Now is my chance to knock it out of the park. Let's see how I can do. And then you take a breath or two or three, and then you put your eyes into your senses where they need to be. I scan the room and I make eye contact. I settle myself into the seat and I go. That transition from workhorse to racehorse, confident thought, breathe with your whole body,

and then attach your attention to what's important. CBA, confident thought, breath, attach your attention. That's a deliberate process. which allows a lot of what we're talking about to take place. Right. You've also referred to the C as cue your conviction. Yes. In the book, I use that particular language, but the underlying concept is the same. It's an actor on cue. Okay, this is my cue. Let's see how good I can do this. I'm as prepared as I can possibly be. Let's rock. I'm queuing up a sense of conviction about myself.

And then I want to breathe really big, because when you breathe, deliberately and consciously, you bring yourself into the present moment. It's really hard to be focused on your breathing and be thinking about something that happened a long time ago or something that might happen down the line. If you're really focused on your breathing, you're in the moment, which is a good place to be. And then I'm deliberate with where my eyes and where my senses are. I got to lock in with this individual. Or if I'm the tennis player and serving, I have to lock my eyes into that corner of the service court where I want to put the damn ball. That's how I do it. Being deliberate with my attention, following an absorption into the moment via the breath,

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not being just one thing, but many things for our customers. Big bank muscle, fintech hustle. That's your commercial payments a fifth-third better. In addition to that CBA, conviction, breadth, attention, the other acronym that you've talked about is ESP. Can you describe what that is? No, yeah, ESP is an acronym to guide a reflection on one's day, a reflection on what one has been doing all day long. E stands for effort. S stands for. success, peace, dance for progress. In order to build that sense of certainty that we've been talking about, we have to look for the best in ourselves. And as we've discussed, there's a tremendous tendency

to overlook the best in ourselves, to discount or devalue our small accomplishments. But I want to encourage people to look very carefully for those small accomplishments. And we start with E for effort. Where did you give honest effort in your day today? Where did you overcome a little procrastination, where did you knock out something that you really didn't want to do, but you did it? You should give yourself a little credit for that. That's worth noting. So just put a big capital E on the left hand margin and just write out an episode or two of quality effort for the day. Skip a line, write a capital S stands for success, maybe even small success. Who did you connect with? What little project did you move along? Where did you succeed?

What did you get right today? If you look for these things, you'll find them. And so you scribble that down. Peace stands for progress. On the basis of my effort, on the basis of my success, even looking back a day or three, well, what am I getting better at? What is my team getting better at? Where are we making progress?

This is the searching for evidence that we've been talking about. It's this precise process of reflecting on your day and basically fill. filtering these constructive memories day by day by day, it's the filtering and the acknowledgement of effort, success, and progress. That helps us create a greater sense of certainty about ourselves. And it's a five-minute exercise. It doesn't take a lot of time. Do you recommend at the end of the evening tangibly writing down, hey, here's my ESP check-in for today? Oh, absolutely. I I recommend that as a regular drill, a practice drill. If you're writing mass transit home at the end of the day, it's a wonderful way to spend five minutes of that time.

It can be a just before bed exercise. And I have found that if you deliberately write it down, at least at first, maybe in three months or six months, you won't have to write it down because you'll just automatically be thinking about it. it'll just be part of the way you think about yourself and your world and the various things that happen in your world. I had one CEO for a consumer products company out on the West Coast. He took the ESP concept and he changed it to EPS. The effort produces progress. The progress produces success.

He wanted to think of it that way. It was also easy for him because EPS reminds him of earnings per share. Good personalization of the concept. Right. Yeah, that was honestly, that was my first thought. When I read ESP for the first time, I thought, yeah, seems a little bit more intuitive. Effort yields progress, which then creates success. But I see it in both ways, right? Because you have daily small successes as well, and those daily small successes contribute to overall progress. Right. That's exactly the way I thought about it. But I encourage people to personalize this in any way, shape, or form that works for them, as long as they get in the habit of searching for that

evidence. If you search for that evidence, you'll find it. And you're going to need that evidence at some point when you are indeed stepping into your arena. You're going to need to be able to look back and say, yep, I did this, I got this done, I succeeded here. That is evidence that I can succeed now. Back to that evidence that you can succeed. and as we've talked about our tendency to discount our own past successes.

One of the things that I hear from people in this audience, from friends, I often hear people point to external circumstances, such as, hey, you know, we were just in an 11-year bull run. So of course my investments did well because we were in a bull market from 2010 until 2020. In this new set of circumstances, maybe we're in a recession, maybe there's runaway inflation. How do I know that in this new set of circumstances, I can still do quite as well? So how would you address that?

My quick answer is that you don't know. You don't know for certain. The whole entrepreneurial process is an exercise in negotiating and dealing with the uncertainty. Your thought process, controlling what you can control and doing the best you can in influencing, not controlling, but influencing the things that you can't control. Well, I'll put it this way. We live in an uncertain world. There are numerous factors outside of our control. Everybody is human and makes mistakes.

Every team is comprised of humans. There will be mistakes made. Are we going to be fixated on the mistakes and the setbacks, or are we going to learn from them as they happen and remain fixated on the outcomes that we want? That's the big question for all of us. With regard to mistakes, you wrote about how berating yourself depletes your mental bank account. Berating yourself is counterproductive.

Why then are we inclined to do it? Why then are we inclined to do so? Because so much of our schooling, so much of our upbringing, emphasized, look for the worst in yourself. We grow up primarily in a red pencil mentality. We get the spelling test back in second grade, and all the words that we misspelled are circled in red pen. And so we have been trained, educated, socialized, dare I say, brainwashed, to be continually on the lookout for the worst things that we're doing. And sort of, oh, oh, oh, oh, I can't do that, I can't do that, I can't do that, I can't do that. Avoid, avoid, avoid, as opposed to, let's be drawn to what we're doing.

doing right. And all of your listeners, you know, you are all very lucky if you had teachers, coaches, mentors, friends, family, who encouraged you to look for the best in yourself, who continually communicated, hey, you've got opportunity, you've got potential, you've got ability, as opposed to, now be careful, now be careful, now be careful, look out for this. The world is a minefield. Well, yeah, there's plenty of minds out there, but around the mines, there's all kinds of great territory. You can find the minds. Keep your eyes on the prize, as it were. We could talk for days about how we are socialized to always think that more work and more practice is the solution about how the team that makes the fewest mistakes wins. These are underlying beliefs that

tighten us up, drain the mental bank account. No, the team that makes the fewest mistakes is not necessarily the one that wins. It's the team that plays pretty darn good between the mistakes that they make. And that's what the best mentors and coaches are communicating to their teams and their advisees. Yeah, you're going to make mistakes, but get over it quick and do good work until you trip again and then get up and do some more good work then until you trip and then get up and do some more good work as opposed to you can't trip. Don't trip. Be careful. That just tightens up everybody. I like that saying there are a lot of minds out there, but around that minds there's great territory. But that said, how do you balance confidence with caution?

I think a little bit of it has to do with where the stakes are. If the stakes are really, really high, maybe you want to be six parts caution, four parts, confident. If the stakes are really, really high. And when I'm talking stakes, I'm talking about physical danger, a big, extreme sports, racing motor cars, things like that. You really have to be careful. You have to know your equipment and you have to know your environment. You have to know your surroundings.

There's a heck of a lot of knowledge involved in that. So it really is a case-by-case basis. But I think the higher the stakes are, the more cognizant you have to be of your environment and in the way you have to be a little bit more careful than otherwise. Where does humility play a role in all of this? In acknowledging, well, this is what I don't know. These are the areas I have to improve in.

So turning the unknown unknowns into known unknowns. Exactly. And I say, you know, a little bit of humility is great and then curiosity about what it is that you don't know. I realize this about myself. I have not developed this particular skill or this particular attribute. Okay. I can't pretend that I do have what I don't have.

Once I know what I don't have, I just have to be curious enough about, okay, how do I develop it? And then disciplined enough to actually go develop it. What's the biblical phrase, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom? You can translate that or you can reinterpret that as, you know, awe of the unknown is the beginning of magic. So, yeah, I know what I don't know, but I'm kind of curious about it. And that curiosity is a wonderful form of energy. You lead confidence training and mental toughness training at West Point.

You've worked with athletes, including Eli Manning. You've worked with many CEOs and business leaders. Are there any differences when it comes to this kind of confidence building? Are there any differences that you see that relate to the discipline, and the field that somebody is in? Sure, there's some discipline. There's some differences. But I think there are so many similarities.

There are really more similarities than there are differences. What an entrepreneur needs to do, what a professional football player needs to do, what a college student needs to do, what a working mom needs to do. I mean, yeah, okay, the outcomes are different that we're striving for. But the underlying processes, you know, developing competence and then trusting that competence when it's time to step into one's respective arena, that process is very, very similar across all of these activities.

I was joking a little while ago about having made a list of all the different performance contexts that I am dealing with now with my various clients. I started an alphabetical list. It had archery and axe throwing up at the top, and then it went right down through the bees, you know, with baseball and bond brokerage and CrossFit for C's. And it went all the way down to wrestling for W. I haven't found a Z yet, but maybe that's coming. And with all of these folks, so much of the underlying mental processes that underlies success, are similar, despite the, what is more different from archery and wrestling? What is more different

from competitive archery and private equity execution? On the surface, they could not be more different. But the trust of oneself in the moment, when you're on the firing line and you're releasing that arrow, and the trust of oneself in the moment when you are securing, you know, from a limited partner so that you can indeed complete a transaction, that trust the belief in oneself is very, very similar, much more similar than it is different. At least that's been my experience with this. Thinking again about how to believe in yourself when you're doing something in business or investing, when you're doing something scary, when you are making that investment, when you're making a phone call to a client for a business that you just started a month ago.

Calling someone cold, you mean? Could be cold calling. I mean, there are any number of things that we do in business and in investing when you're making an offer on a home, right? What if you've talked about looking back at your own experience as evidence that can underlie that confidence? What if your past experience is one of a series of failures? You know, what if you look back on your own personal history and say, you know, I actually

I don't see any evidence that can underpin my confidence. In fact, all I see is evidence to the contrary. I'd say a couple things about that. First of all, you may not be looking deeply enough. Maybe the deal didn't go through, but did you get it halfway, three quarters, seven-eighths, you know, how did you get that far? And what did you learn as you were getting it as close as you got it about the process of success? in that particular context. Yeah, lots of failures. However, each of those quote, unquote, failures is indeed a learning opportunity. So you have to be very careful about how you think about

the bad things that happen in your world. I cite the example in my book of a West Point graduate who was badly wounded in a friendly fire incident in Iraq. You talk about a bad thing. He lost the use of both his legs, and now he has to walk around on prosthetics, and this was a very physical, you know, young man. But his response to that moment was, I'm going to have a great life. I will never feel sorry for myself. And if he walked into your office wearing long pants, you would never know. He has one above the knee amputation and one just below the knee amputation. He has learned how to be comfortable. He has learned how to be certain. He has learned how to be happy and optimistic. despite a really significant setback for a 24-year-old young lieutenant in the Army. And we can really learn a lot from people like that. How does he maintain his optimism in the face of what any of us would consider to be a very, very significant failure in my life? How does he maintain his optimism? Because he keeps his eye on all the blessings in his life.

You know, wife, kids, the opportunity to share with, say, cadets at West Point or other members of the Armed Forces through organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project to really help people know that they have a choice that they can make minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. And it's those choices that determine ultimately our joy or our despair. And if we are in a joyful state, we're probably going to execute a little bit better. And we all have the capability to make that distinction and that decision. I feel like this example kind of touches on this, but where does confidence intersect with courage? That is a wonderful question, Paula.

And I got to say, I've done about 40 of these podcast interviews since the book was released. You're the first person to have asked that question. Where does confidence intersect with courage? I think it intersects with courage in acknowledging one's fear. There is no courage without fear. I do not have to be courageous if everything's going fine. But if there's some difficulties, if there's some landmines out there, I have to be courageous in the face of those.

I have to be certain enough that I can navigate the mind. field, that I can steer the ship, I have to be certain enough about myself in the face of potential difficulties and in the face of potential failures. I'm trying to envision sort of a then diagram looking at the intersection of those two qualities. I think confidence maybe is what allows one to be courageous. A sense of certainty, I know I have this particular skill, and that particular skill allows me to step into a scary arena, an intimidating stadium, and execute pretty darn well. Maybe that's the intersection that we're looking for. Great question. Thank you. That question was inspired, actually, by a story that you told on a different interview that I was watching in preparation for this, the story of Kyle Carpenter. Yeah, for your listeners who don't know the name Kyle Carpenter, he is the youngest Medal of Honor recipient in the history of the Army.

And he did something rather remarkable in Afghanistan. He basically jumped onto a hand grenade to save his buddy, and he lived to tell the tale. And it's a remarkable story about, again, dealing with a very unfortunate circumstance and finding his own sense of work. worth. His book is entitled, You Are Worth It. I've had the pleasure of meeting the fellow, and he's just such a stand-up guy, and I recommend his book to everyone. Because you've got to feel like you are worth it if you're going to persevere through all the inevitable difficulties that this life presents to us. Right. And that is the ultimate example of courage and moral courage, true moral courage. Yeah. I mean, you jump on a hand grenade. You usually don't live to tell the story.

His body armor turned to dust. He absorbed the blast and the one side of his body, considerable injuries, months and months and months of recovery, and a whole lot of soul-searching and self-doubt. But he has come out of it beautifully. And he's a great example for anybody who thinks they're up against a tough fight. Read his story and you'll get a little inspiration. Does confidence and courage, does Eben F,

flow or does it also on something of an upward trajectory, like almost like the stock market where there might be daily volatility, but we can grow it steadily over time? Well, you can grow your confidence over time, but it is a very active and deliberate process. Once you have achieved a certain level of confidence in a given activity or a given skill set, you're going to have to take care of it and protect it. Confidence is not something that remains once it's achieved a certain level. I use the analogy that I heard from my professor at Virginia, Bob Rottella. Confidence is kind of like the sand dunes on a beachfront community. Those sand dunes are constantly being pounded by the waves and they're constantly being worn away. So the beachfront community periodically

has to rebuild the dunes. And we all have to periodically rebuild, maintain our confidence, Because the imperfect world that we live in, all those minds out there can indeed erode it. So we have to be very careful about it. How do we be careful about it? By continually looking for the best in yourself day by day, and by consistently reinterpreting the reality of your setbacks and mistakes. You can look at a setback and say, uh-oh, here I go again, or you can look at that same mistake and say, okay, it happened, it happened that one time, or those two times. They're temporary. You can look at

a mistake and say, oh my gosh, this mistake means that a lot of other things could go south. Or you can look at that same mistake and say, yeah, that's a mistake, that's unfortunate, but it just happened in that one situation. It just happened in that one setting. It just happened in that one place. So we want to keep it temporary in terms of when it occurred. We want to keep it limited in terms of where it occurred. And then most importantly, we got to look at those mistakes and say, hmm, does this really tell the truth about me? Or is this somewhat non-representative of me?

Those are mechanisms through which we protect the confidence that we build up by being very careful about our memories, by being very careful about the stories we tell ourselves, by being very careful about, you know, the pictures and the short video clips that the video studio in our imagination is constantly producing. Right. So what's interesting to me about that response is that it sounds like the same way that we discount our successes, which is to say to take a past success and attribute it to simply a result of the external circumstances. We attribute it to something outside of our own agency. we do the opposite, you know, when it comes to... When it comes to mistakes.

We own them. Oh, we own them. Yes, I always do it this way. Or I'm very bad at that. You're quite correct, Paul, in that there's a complementarity in terms of how you look at your successes, how you look at your setbacks. I'm encouraging people to look at their successes, be they as few and far between as they might be. I want people to look at those successes as permanent. The setbacks are temporary.

The successes are global or generalized and the mistakes are limited. The successes are internal. I am the agent of those. The mistakes, the setbacks are not the truth about me. They are inaccurate reflection, but the successes really are a reflection. And everybody can create their own reality, working their own particular variation on those themes. We all live in our own personal reality as it is. There's a song lyric. There's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie. I've got to rise above. We all construct our own version of what we think is real. And the only question is, does that version really help us accomplish what we're after in this life?

View your successes as representative and your failures as non-representative. Absolutely. Which is the opposite of our inclination. Of how we tend to think. Yes, indeed. Well, I really want to thank you for this opportunity. You are a wonderful interviewer. Thank you. Thank you so much. And people can find your book, The Confident Mind, wherever books are found. It's a wonderful book. Wherever books are sold. Paperback coming out this year. Oh, fantastic. Well, thank you for spending this time with us.

Well, thank you for the invitation. My best to you and my best to all your listeners. Thank you to Dr. Nate Zinser. What key takeaways did we get from this conversation? Here are three. Number one, we have a lot of buzz inside of our brains, and sometimes that buzz pulls us astray. Dr. Zenser describes what happens in the brains of people who are focused on a specific task. He tells us that the areas of their brain associated with that task light up while other areas get quiet. And that economy of activity in our brains, in the brains of peak performers, that hushes the inner monologue and silences the disquieting thoughts that can pull somebody off of their game. The brains of people who are engaged in high levels of concentration show a remarkable economy of activity.

A couple places in the brain are all lit up because they're necessary to the performance of the task. But the other portions of the brain, the ones that, you know, judge and evaluate and criticize, those parts of your brain are not necessary to the performance of a task. They drop out. So what we really have is a relatively quiet mind. And if we forget about honoring ourselves, if we can, continually indulge in our self-critical, overly analytical, overly judgmental tendencies, then we carry that into our performance.

And we don't achieve that economy of brain activity, the typifies great performance. Many of us have a tendency to disregard our own achievements. But if we can overcome this tendency, then we will no longer hurt our own performance because the tendency to doubt ourselves, to underestimate ourselves, often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Dr. Zinser says, there's a time and a place to be realistic, but it's not in the middle of a game. And it's not in the middle of a negotiation, a presentation, a meeting with a client, negotiating for your salary or for a house or for a car, a big-ticket item. Those are not the moments when you should doubt yourself. Those are the moments when you need

the quiet mind, the economy of activity in the brain. And that is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two. Dr. Zinser describes how to use the ESP method in order to build confidence, and I will let him describe, in his own words, what the ESP method is. ESP is an acronym to guide a reflection on one's day, a reflection on what one has been doing all day long. E stands for effort. S stands for success. P stands for progress. progress. In order to build that sense of certainty that we've been talking about, we have to look for the best in ourselves. And as we've discussed, there's a tremendous tendency to overlook the best in ourselves, to discount or devalue our small accomplishments. But I want to encourage people to look very carefully for those small accomplishments. And we start with E for effort. Where did you give honest effort in your day today? Where did you overcome a little procrastination? Where did you overcome a little procrastination? Where did you

knock out something that you really didn't want to do, but you did it. You should give yourself a little credit for that. That's worth noting. So just put a big capital E on the left hand margin and just write out an episode or two of quality effort for the day. Skip a line, write a capital S stands for success, maybe even small success. Who did you connect with? What little project did you move along? Where did you succeed? What did you get right today? If you look for these things, you'll find them. And so you scribble that down. Peace stands for progress.

On the basis of my effort, on the basis of my success, even looking back a day or three, well, what am I getting better at? What does my team getting better at? Where are we making progress? This is the searching for evidence that we've been talking about. It's this precise process of reflecting on your day and basically filtering these constructive memories day by day by day, it's the filtering and the acknowledgement of an effort, success, and progress, that helps us create a greater sense of certainty about

ourselves. The process that he describes is a guided meditation that can help people build a certainty in themselves and question themselves less. And it's a daily practice. much of what is worth achieving comes from daily practice. This is one of many examples. So that's the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three.

And this takeaway begins with a question. We know that berating ourselves is counterproductive, and yet we are inclined to do it anyway. Why is that? Well, it might be because of a phenomenon that Dr. Zinser describes as red pencil mentality. Because so much of our schooling, so much of our upbringing, emphasized, look for the worst in yourself.

We grow up primarily in a red pencil mentality. We get the spelling test back in second grade, and all the words that we misspelled are circled in red pen. and so we have been trained, educated, socialized, dare I say brainwashed, to be continually on the lookout for the worst things that we're doing and sort of, oh, oh, oh, oh, I can't do that, I can't do that, I can't do that, I can't do that, avoid, avoid, as opposed to let's be drawn to what we're doing right. And all of your listeners, you know, you are all very lucky if you had teachers, coaches, mentors,

friends, family, who encouraged you to look for the best in yourself, who continually communicated, hey, you've got opportunity, you've got potential, you've got ability, as opposed to, now be careful, now be careful, now be careful, look out for this. The world is a minefield. Well, yeah, there's plenty of mines out there, but around the mines, there's all kinds of great territory. You can find the minds. Keep your eyes on the prize, as it were. So this description of red pencil mentality, of drawing your attention to the thing you're doing wrong, right? This brings a massive awareness to how we're socialized, right, from early childhood, and how we form these internal thoughts that might still be with us and that might be pulling us off of our game.

being aware of that and actively working to address it through things like the ESP method, that's the third and final key takeaway. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Nate Zinser, the director of performance psychology at West Point, and the mentor to quarterback Eli Manning, NFL quarterback Eli Manning, two-time Super Bowl MVP. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant.

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This is the Afford Anything podcast. And I will catch you in the next episode.