Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Years ago, I watched as a team member struggled to find their footing, paralyzed by the fear of rejection. It was a moment that truly resonated with me, echoing the stories of legends like Michael Jordan and J.K. Rowling—individuals who turned failure into stepping stones toward greatness. This episode of Escaping the Drift is dedicated to unraveling the complex relationship between confidence and success. We explore how rejection, often perceived as a barrier, can be reframed as a positive force driving us toward our goals. With anecdotes and practical insights, we dive into the subtle power of body language and posture in boosting self-assurance and attracting opportunity.   Moving forward, the discussion shifts to the importance of setting purposeful goals and embracing tough decisions to foster personal and professional growth. Reflecting on my own journey, from launching a book to overcoming imposter syndrome on the path to becoming a world-class speaker, I share the valuable lessons learned along the way. By focusing on our accomplishments, we can validate our presence and potential. Through a personal story about encouraging my son, we touch on how self-belief shapes our narrative and influences our path. Join us as we explore these themes and invite you to be an active participant in crafting your own success story. Don't forget to visit our website, escapingthedrift.com, for more insights and to support the podcast with a review or by sharing it with others.   💬 Did you enjoy this weekly drop? Tell us all about it in the comment section below!    ☑️  If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford  ************* 💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space.   ➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company.   ➡️ Streamline Home Loans - An independent mortgage bank with more than 100 loan officers. The Simply Group, A national expansion vehicle partnering with large brokers across the country to vertically integrate their real estate brokerages.   *************   ✅ Follow John Gafford on social media:   Instagram ▶️ / thejohngafford   Facebook ▶️ / gafford2   🎧 Stream the new Weekly Drop here: Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9 Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283    *************   #weeklydrop #johngafford #confidence #success #rejection #bodylanguage #posture #goals #impostersyndrome #selfbelief #personalgrowth #professionalgrowth #podcast #support #review #sharing #michaeljordan #jkrowling #booklaunch #worldclassspeaker #accomplishments #potential #activeparticipant #crafting #narrative #influences #path #buildingconfidence

From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift. This is the weekly drop with John Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now the drop back again for another quick man little weekly drop. Just me on my solo pod here from the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And this week we're going to talk about confidence because it is in my opinion, the most important thing when it comes to success. Yesterday, I was sitting in my office and my office is adjacent to where my real estate team is. And I can hear the people that work for me in there on the phone. And I've got some absolute

savages on the phone. I mean, they are just, these guys are really, really talented at communicating very quickly why the clients that choose to work with us and our team will have the best probable aspect or the best outcome they could have in purchasing or buying investment properties or their own property for that matter or selling a property. They're very good at articulating that to our clients. And yesterday I was sitting in my office and I was listening to a call as I tend to because they're right there so I can kind of hear what's going on. And the call that I heard quite frankly was just dreadful. And what it was lacking and this is

a this is somebody that's been with me for like a year and what it was lacking 100% was confidence and the reason it was lacking confidence is this is a person probably it's been struggling a little bit lately um kind of got in the wrong groove and and we're trying to refocus him and get him moving again. But it, but it got me thinking how important confidence is to success, not just in business, but in life and everything that you do. And if you're somebody out there that is lacking confidence, you're probably going to have a problem. This is something that I have probably been accused in my life of having too much of sometimes.

So I probably can speak from a place of expertise on this stuff. So the first thing that I'm going to say is that that mindset of confidence can be shaken so easily, not just in sales, but in life, in dating and everything and every aspect of life. The thing that shakes confidence more than anything else is going to be rejection. It's when you get rejected and you look at, you know, there's, there's millions of stories you can recap. Michael Jordan got cut from his basketball team, you know, his high school basketball

team, JK Rowling got turned on by 12 people before she finally published her about Iry Potter. All of that stuff is great, but the difference becomes in the lesson from all that is learning how to turn those negatives and that rejection into fuel instead of baggage. And one of the things that I want that I teach to all salespeople, and I think you could probably apply this to all walks of life of whatever it is was to value the no. I mean, I don't know how you could do it with dating because I don't know what the no

act. I don't know what the pod, the yes would be or the value of it. But if you're in any type of a situation where you have to sell something or make a bunch of calls and you result in the end with a pot, with a sale and there's a certain number of calls or touches or whatever it is that you have to make before you get a sale. And the problem is, especially if you're using the phone for that type of sales, there's a lot of serious negativity. When you call people, they're like, you know, suck it, you know, F you whatever, and they're

hanging up on you and that can start to wear on you. But you've got to do two things. And the first thing I'm going to say is you've got to reframe that in a way where you got to understand that, especially if you're making calls, they're not hanging up on you. They don't know you they don't know you're a good parent. They don't know you're a great spouse They don't know you're a hilarious person to go out with you're just somebody that interrupted them with a phone call So if they're hanging up on you, they're not hanging up on you. They're hanging up on the phone call So first of all reframe it that way But the most important thing to me that

you have to do is you have to value the no. And what I mean by that is this, let's say that you've got to make 100 phone calls before you get a yes to whatever you're selling. So that means you make you get 99 nos and we'll call it. We'll say you got to make 101 calls. So you have one call that says yes and a hundred that say no. Now let's say that when you, somebody does say yes, you make a thousand dollars. So that means that every single person that told you no, you made 10 bucks.

So if I told you that your job was to call people and have them curse at you and hang up on you, and every time it happened, you made $10. Would that change the way that you looked at that, that negative rejection? Absolutely. It would. So having that mindset, and there's a book actually called mindset that I like by Carol Dweck, the talks about developing a growth mindset by looking for rejection and seeking it out as a challenge rather than as a failure.

And I think if you can value the know, you can do that. You know, the second thing that I see, and I see this a lot of my son, which is the world will give back to you what you give out to the world. So body language is so crucial, so important in what you do and how you carry yourself. If there is one thing that I would say that we correct or try to try to help my son with as often as possible, it's his posture. It's always sit up straight, shoulders back, always that, always that. You know, we hate when he hunches because when you, if you walk around a hunched over dude, the world is going to give you back

the energy that you're putting out. And I tell people this all the time. If you want to change how the world perceives you, do this one exercise for a week. Do this one thing, which is walk around. Imagine there's an imaginary string tied to the middle of your chest, pulling upward, not forward, but upward. So you have your chest out, your shoulders back and carry yourself like that for a week and see how much different that the world actually perceives you.

Now don't believe me there's a book called Cuddy's Presence and it's by a girl named Amy Cuddy who had a terrible car crash, a terrible wreck, a terrible early in her 20s and she was convinced because of that that she was never you know it impaired her to a certain amount. She was convinced herself that she was never going to finish college. She was never going to mount to mount to anything. So she just began doing one thing, which was developed this concept of what she called power posing, which is everywhere she was when she would prop herself up in a certain way, she would make herself look as powerful as possible. And the way that the world reacted to her, because of that, the energy that she was putting out, not only finishing college, but becoming

a bestselling author and becoming a TED speaker. And it was all about how she presented herself to the world. So if you're having a problem with confidence, a very simple thing you can do is change your physiology to change your psychology. It's very simple to do. You know, when I think about my favorite thing I think about is the lobsters, man, if you've ever heard the lobster story, the lobster story is there's actually a hierarchy within lobsters that some of them that carry themselves meeker if they carry themselves meek, they actually die and get sicker quicker. They've done studies on this probably funded by the government. So Elon's going to kill any future lobster studies.

I'm sure. But they've done studies that the ones that carry themselves meeker, they actually die faster because because they look meek, they're fearful that they'll constantly be attacked and that stress on their internal systems of the fear of being attacked because they carry themselves in a meager stance. The stronger ones do start to pick on them and they die earlier. So there's evolutionary truth in how you carry yourself. The world absolutely will reply to it.

Now, I love that people talk about a good way to establish confidence and you hear this all the time as I say, fake it till you make it. Fake it till you make it. Just fake it. Just act like you have everything. Just act like you're great. Act like this. Listen, I am not a fake it till you make it guy. That's not who I am. I am a replicate, not imitate guy. And what I mean by that is I think if you want to get somewhere in life, if you want to get anything, studying those that have already gotten there before you studying those that have reached that place or gotten there, I think that just makes sense. But you don't want to fake it because people can smell non-authenticity on you. I think authenticity is, I don't know if it's still the buzzword for like five years. Everything had to be authentic. It was like, that was the buzzword. But I think it's true. People can smell when you're being in authentic, if you're being fake. However, if you are carrying yourself the way that you like, you see somebody where you want to be and you carry yourself that certain way.

If you are doing certain things that certain way that then there's nothing wrong with that. For example, there are some changes that I've decided to make in what I do for the upcoming year based on some goals that I have. And I've looked at some things that I do and I asked myself, okay, like here are these here these people that are where I want to go within a certain thing that I want to do. And I asked myself, okay, like here, these, here, these people that are where I want to go within a certain thing that I want to do. Right. You know, I have the book coming out, not in the not too distant future. There's going to, I plan on touring the book. I plan on stages. I plan

on all of those things. So my thing is, okay, I need to get back into emulating, not imitating, but emulating the world-class speakers that I know. And I know a bunch of them. And I asked myself, where are they? Where do they go? What rooms are they in? How are they being perceived by everyone around them?

And I've got to set myself up to be perceived the same way. If I am, if I am, it's like, I guess it's a good way to say it is you can't get on the stage if you're sitting in the audience. And if everybody sees you sit in the audience saying you can see on stage And that's kind of some tough decision-making that I've had to make this year They're coming up here things that I generally like to do But I don't think they serve my greater purpose As far as where I'm trying to get and they're damn sure not things that the people that I'm emulating Do as well.

So you got to make that decision. And then going further with that, talking about where I'm trying to go, you know, imposter syndrome is a real thing that creeps in and damages confidence. It really does. I mean, you look at, you know, Tom Hanks has, has been on record many times as saying that he constantly thinks people are gonna figure out that he's not much of an actor. They're constantly gonna figure that out. And I think anybody, if they're being honest,

that has any level of confidence has this crisis of confidence. There's days when I wake up and I'm like, okay, so we got this book deal and the book is done. Who's going to be like, who's going to read this thing, right? Like who's going to buy this thing? Like I was like, I hope it sells in. And then, and then you hear like the beta feedback and you're like, man, that's, that's really good. And I guess that's it. So like looking for ways to get yourself out of imposter syndrome is really

focusing on the things that establish your competency rather than focusing on things that potentially take it down. Now what I mean by like what I just just said, if you look at this, when I have a crisis of confidence for my book, that's about to come out. I look at, you know, my, my literary people that I'm working with ran it through a beta group. So like they had 50 people read it and then these are people that just love to read books and then criticize them The beta feedback was amazing according to the people I'm working with I didn't

That's not sugarcoating it. So whenever I'm having a crisis of confidence, I look back at that moment. I go. Well, okay Hang on a second. These are people who are literally being paid to pull this apart and I got a good I got a good report card on it from them so that's what I choose to hang my head on so if you're having feeling like man I don't belong here I'm not good enough to be here I'm not there focus on the things that got you in the room and validate you being there don't focus on any shortcomings he may have everybody has shortcomings everybody's always trying to get better I don't care who you are. I don't care what you do

But just focus on what got you there in the first place the last thing I'm going to finish with is just Confidence is very much about what you see in the mirror. It's about Believing in the direction you're going. It's about being happy with who you are day in and day out. It's about believing in what you are. You know, my son who works for me is a little challenge because some of his friends have a little bit higher paying jobs than he does.

And he's a kid. So he said, don't think I'm, I'm, I'm slave driving. I'm trying to teach him a lesson by not giving. He's earning everything he gets. And you know, yesterday I told him, and I think he was really surprised by this. I told him, I said, man, you have the ability because you're a really smart kid, you're a good looking kid. And you're, you're really dedicated to what you do. If you're not happy here with what you're making making you can change this and do whatever you want to do The world is not happening to you. You're happening to the world and I think at its core

that belief that you are happening to the world is Where confidence is born? So hopefully each and every one of you can figure out a way to find that belief. We'll see you next week. What's up everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com,

you can join our mailing list, but do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you, hopefully you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.