Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Nate Zinsser on How Do You Create a Confident Mind EP 204

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. And it really comes down to everybody understanding that your confidence is not something that is just going to happen out of the blue. It's going to happen because you deliberately, consciously, intentionally, John, as you put it, intentionally, think about yourself, your life, and all the things that happen in your life in a particularly constructive manner. And that doesn't mean you're a hopeless romantic, nor does that mean you're sort of an arrogant, conceited individual. It's just that you are thinking rationally and constructively. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on

Starting point is 00:00:44 the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to PassionStruck.

Starting point is 00:01:25 And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. In case you missed my interview from earlier in the week, it featured Dr. Dolly Chug, who's a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, an expert researcher on the topic of good people, and we launched her brand new book, A More Just Future.

Starting point is 00:01:46 And last week, we also did two new book launches, including with author Laura Vanderkamp's and her new book, Train Quillity by Tuesday, and how you can turn your productivity into creating your best life. We also head on Dr. Suzanne Gilbert-Lens and release her new book, The Manipause Boot Camp. Please check all those episodes out and if you

Starting point is 00:02:05 love those or today's we would so appreciate it if you gave us a five star review and we're so thankful when you do they go such a long way in helping us promote popularity of this podcast get people to join the community and improve our overall ratings. Now let's talk about today's episode. Have you ever wondered how to harness your belief in yourself to achieve success in any field? Have you ever thought about the reasons why NFL starting quarterbacks like Eli Manning are able to rise to the moment and achieve peak performance?

Starting point is 00:02:36 Whether your mission involves leading a platoon into combat, returning an opponent serve, or delivering a sales pitch to a room full of skeptical prospects. You will learn how you can perform at your best when you are so certain of your abilities that your flow of fear, doubt, and confusion slows to its bare minimum. Today's guest, Dr. Nate Zinzer, discusses this and so much more. Dr. Zinzer has spent his career training the minds of the US military academy's cadets as they

Starting point is 00:03:06 prepare the lead and perform where the stakes are the highest on the battlefield. Alongside this work, he has coached world-class athletes, including a Super Bowl MVP, numerous Olympic medallists, professional ballerinas, and HL All Stars in college All Americans, teaching them how to overcome pressure and succeed on the largest stages. For the first time, Dr. Zinser distills his research and years of experience in his new book, A Confident Mind, which is a complete guide to confidence, how to understand it, how to build it, how to protect it, and how to rely upon it when your performance matters

Starting point is 00:03:42 most. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and Choosing Me to be host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am ecstatic today to welcome Dr. Nate Zinser to the PassionStruct podcast. Welcome, Doxie. Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, it is truly an honor to have you here. And thank you so much for the 30 years that you have given to doing development of the minds of so many great officers who are now generals in some cases or major business leaders or athletes.

Starting point is 00:04:24 So thank you for that You and the nation are most welcome. It has been the honor of a lifetime to teach at West Point and to serve the Corps of Cadets and Mentors and really great young men and women Well, I'm gonna come back to that in a couple questions, but the first question I wanted to ask you is we all have moments that define us. And in the epilogue of your book, and I'll put the book up here, and if you're on YouTube, we're going to put a copy of it up there too, but it's called the Confident Mind. And you talk about an experience when you were on the road to getting your PhD, where you encountered a bus driver and the most unlikely of places who said something that has definitely influenced your life.

Starting point is 00:05:09 What was it? Um, yeah, that certainly was a defining moment, John. I was waiting at a bus stop in New Orleans, Louisiana, so I could take the bus to the downtown area where I was attending a national convention and I stepped up to this bus and the driver greeted me as if I was some long-lost friend of it. He said, good morning, how you doing? Great to see you. We were perfect strangers. I didn't know what to make of it at the time. I took the seat, I pulled out the papers, I was grading, but

Starting point is 00:05:46 the bus driver repeated the same greeting to each and every passenger as the bus went along his route. Good morning, how you doing? Great to see you. He was very enthusiastic about greeting everybody and making the morning commute just something uplifting a little bit and then as the bus proceeded on a busier street with more traffic He looked up into the rearview mirror and basically announced to the entire bus Passengership good morning everybody. It's great to see you. It's a beautiful day in New Orleans. I hope you're all having a good day. If you're having a bad day, change your mind. Have a good day.

Starting point is 00:06:36 And just that simple phrase, change your mind. Really was the sort of basis, the foundation, the bedrock of all the work that I had been doing in my PhD in the psychology of elite performance at the University of Virginia. And here was a guy, a bus driver who seemed to know the essence of the whole process. And just the way he said, change your mind. Just simplified everything that I had been reading in scholarly journals and discussing with professors. And you think about how often the term the phrase change your mind is thrown around. I mean, I changed my mind. I'm gonna have the BLT instead of the ham sandwich. I'm gonna have the soup instead of the salad. I changed my mind, I'm going to have the BLT instead of the ham sandwich. I'm going to have the soup instead of the salad. I changed my mind. Well, how about changing your mind in a real meaningful,

Starting point is 00:07:31 powerful, constructive way, which is what this gentleman will suggest it? Change your mind so that instead of moping around about, oh, geez, it's this, it's this, it's this, and the Lord knows there's plenty of that to get upset about in this day and age. How about changing your mind and thinking constructively about yourself and your life? I don't know the man's name. I never saw him again after that day, but something tells me that when Hurricane Katrina hit in the warlands some years later, he was there helping people. He was transporting hospitalized individuals or handing out water into superdome that after that had been basically transformed into a field hospital.

Starting point is 00:08:13 I just got to believe that he was doing something great like that and he helped other people change their mind. That was a defining moment for me. Well, I love that story. I'm going to relate it to one of the best business leaders I ever worked with, which was a gentleman named Steve Salaji, who ended up at the end of his tenure at Lowe's, running all of supply chain. But when I worked with him, he was running the distribution network, which had somewhere between 30 to 40,000 employees in it. So a big job.

Starting point is 00:08:45 And he was one of the most confident leaders I've ever worked with. And when you would ever ask him, how's your day? He would always just come back with this reply. Today is an amazing day, or today is an incredible day. And as I got to know him, I asked him, why do you respond in that way? And he said, I found myself earlier in my career that I would respond to that question by saying, it's average, or I'm having an okay day or this. And he said just that simple mindset change

Starting point is 00:09:17 of how he was using that to change his mind made such a profound impact not only with how he was leading his day, but his interactions and the overall way he felt about himself. So yeah, that is that is such a powerful illustration of the importance of choosing the right kind of language that you use with yourself. Yes, you can say, okay, it's just an average day. No big deal. Really? I mean, there's nothing interesting happening today. There's nothing potentially interesting happening today is today not when you really think about everything rather incredible. And if you just allow yourself to think about your life in such terms, your life's meaning changes dramatically.

Starting point is 00:10:13 It certainly does, and as we talked a little bit before the show, I had the privilege and true honor of having Admiral Stockdale as a leadership instructor when I was at the Academy. And I remember one of his lectures, he talked about his experience at the Hanoi prison camp and how the fact that he changed his mind and his outlook on the situation, in fact, he discusses it as one of the best defining moments of his life, something he wouldn't have traded because of the way he let his life after that. But I know you're familiar with the stock dell paradox. Can you relate it to this topic of confidence that we're going to cover today? I have nothing but respect for Admiral Stockdale and for the other POWs of that era.

Starting point is 00:11:05 Really remarkable courage and mental toughness under very inhuman circumstances. And the paradox that you refer to is something that I think everybody can learn a little bit from. The paradox is that in the immediate term, right now in front of you, things are pretty darn awful. I'll use polite language, but things are really awful. And you have to acknowledge that. I don't have good food, I don't have good sanitation, I don't have things are really bad. I acknowledge that and I deal with that minute by minute by minute by minute and at the same time, and this is the paradox. At the same time, I maintain a vision of the future that I want. Release from prison, returning home, life beyond wartime, family, etc., etc. I maintain that vision, that level of optimism on a

Starting point is 00:12:08 very deep level while at the same time dealing with the minute-by-minute necessities through which I am suffering. And a lot of people say, well, how can you be optimistic when you're suffering? My reaction to that is how can you not? Don't you have to be optimistic even when things are not going perfectly? What is your alternative? Well, it's just sinking into despair. Unfortunately, when people do that, but Admiral Stockdale just shows us a beautiful example of how you can be in an awful situation right now and still

Starting point is 00:12:46 content with it with a sense of optimism and dare I say joy about your eventual future. Well, I think that's a great backdrop to this next question. And that is, you've been teaching performance psychology at West Point for three decades. What is performance psychology and why even through that lens of Avro Stockdale is it so important to train future military officers in it? All right, well, I use the term performance psychology to refer to all the intangibles that are necessary for high-level human performance, and the intangible of, let's face it, confidence. You have to be confident even when things are not going your way.

Starting point is 00:13:34 Anybody can be confident when they're on vacation and they're having a great time. That's not particularly important or impressive. Secondly, you have to be focused on the right things, despite a myriad of potential distractions. And you have to be self-generative in terms of your energy, despite the fact that you are under a lot of stress, and you have to mobilize energy constantly for many, many hours of the day. And perhaps you don't have the opportunity to sleep as well as your mic. So it's these intangibles, confidence, concentration, composure and energy management. These are the building blocks of a great attitude of a cadet life at West Point,

Starting point is 00:14:28 midshipman life at Annapolis, and what Admiral Stockdale experienced in Vietnam, although you're going to find a whole lot of cadets and a whole lot of mids who are going to complain about how miserable their lives are. But the cadets and the mids all face the same challenges You have to deal with minute by minute hour by hour demands and They suck up your attention and they suck up your energy and you've got to deal with them You've got to deal with them and you've got to deal with them day in and day out and it's a demanding process at the same time You've got to maintain a vision. I'm just saying why are you here? What are you committed to how do you want to be remembered as a member of your company, as a member of your athletic team, as a member of your class? How do you want to be remembered? And what is your eventual desired lifestyle. Keeping all of that just as Admiral Stockdale had to keep all

Starting point is 00:15:26 of that in mind. While at the same time dealing with, okay, I have a history exam. I have a problem set in calculus. I have to go to my tactical officer for a conversation about my summer details. Oh, and then I have to go to boxing class. Oh, in boxing class, we're having a great about today. People are actually going to try to rearrange my face. This is the reality of a kid head in the midshipment. And you've got to handle all that, while at the same time having a sense of a great future

Starting point is 00:15:54 for yourself and your family. Yeah, she do. And I examine this whole topic in-depth as I was reading Angela Duckworth's book, Brit. And if the listener isn't familiar with how she opens it up, it's actually studying West Point cadets. And that's where she came up with the idea that it was passion and perseverance that brought success.

Starting point is 00:16:21 And as I thought through that, and my own lens of what it took for me to graduate and the lessons that I was learning and a side note I was on the brigade honor staff when we had the 1992 cheating scandal. point I'm going to say even more clear. And that is you can have all the passion and perseverance you want. But if you're not intentional about your decisions that make up your day, that passion and perseverance is going to be thrown in the wrong direction. And you're not going to end up getting the results that you want. And it's interesting because as I have been doing this podcast, I've been lucky to have some of the most prominent behavioral scientists on the planet on the show, including Dr. Katie Milkman, Dr. Islet Fishback, Michelle Seeger, who's from Michigan, Don Mour at Berkeley,

Starting point is 00:17:19 Max Bezerman, and all of them, and you touch about this topic in the book as well is the importance of choice points in determining our lives. So why do our choices matter so greatly with confidence? And I wanted you to do this through the story of one of the greatest military generals we've ever had, which was Robert Brown. Why did he believe that faith takes practice and how can we learn about why our choices matter from his story? Yeah, meeting General Brown many many years ago was another defining

Starting point is 00:17:58 moment in my life and I'm so grateful for the relationship that he and I have maintained over these decades. As I was preparing the book manuscript, I asked General Brown, as I asked several other combat veterans and other athletes and other business leaders. Tell me about your most confident moment. Got many great stories that I've included in the book, some of which I didn't have space for unfortunately.

Starting point is 00:18:24 But General Brown told a story of, again, basically the worst day of his life when a suicide bomber detonated his vest inside a mess hall in Iraq, killing a number of people, some of whom were Robert Brown's soldiers, he was a colonel at the time. But I think the message behind his story, and as he told it, he said, this was a terrible moment, but we had to go out on missions that very evening, and we had to continue. And it wasn't a matter of, well, we have time to sort of take care of ourselves and get us back. No, there's a certain urgency. You have to practice confidence. You have to practice making decisions about what am I

Starting point is 00:19:11 going to remember, how am I going to think about myself, how am I going to think about my future in the next few hours, in the next week, in the next months, I have to make decisions about all of those things. And it's up to me to make decisions that are in my own personal best interest and the best interest of my team, my family, my unit, if we're talking in military terms. So general round is generous enough to share with me that story. And it really comes down to everybody understanding that your confidence is not something that is just going to happen out of the blue. It's going to happen because you deliberately consciously, intentionally, John, as you put it, intentionally, think about yourself, your life, and all the things that happen in your life, in a particularly constructive manner. And that doesn't mean you're a hopeless romantic, nor does that mean you're sort of an arrogant,

Starting point is 00:20:13 conceded individual. It's just that you are thinking rationally and constructively, again, borrowing the ethos of Admiral Stockdale and General Ground, you think intentionally, constructively about yourself in the present, in your future, recalling from your past, choosing to recall from your past experiences and memories that build energy and optimism. It's a deliberate choice that we make. We'll be right back to my interview with Nate Zinser. When it comes to your health and longevity, you hold nothing back.

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Starting point is 00:21:50 Avertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com. Now, back to my interview with Nate Zenzor. Well, I think that is an incredibly important point because we are the masters of how we spend our time. Everything we do each day, every day, is a choice. And the truth is, everyone struggles to manage their time, but we all have an enormous amount of responsibility.

Starting point is 00:22:16 So one of the Stoics, Seneca, said that there are three domains of time, the past, the present, and the future. And you cover these in your book. Why are the statements we make to ourselves in the present, the present, and the future. And you cover these in your book. Why are the statements we make to ourself in the present, the most important element of our mental bank account? Because we live in the present, John. It's a mistake to live entirely out of one's past because it's a memory. It's a mistake to live entirely out of one's future because it's a memory.

Starting point is 00:22:45 It's a mistake to live entirely out of one's future. That's a fantasy. That doesn't exist yet. Right now, the present is what we've got, okay? And we have to be very careful about how we think about ourselves, the subtle stories, sometimes the not so subtle stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. The subtle stories, sometimes the not so subtle stories, that we tell ourselves about ourselves. When we are about to step up and deliver a speech, enter a negotiation, play

Starting point is 00:23:15 a tennis match, play a football game. What are we telling ourselves in those moments about our abilities, about our capabilities, and about where we are going to put our attention. We live in the present. We have to be effective with our thoughts about ourselves in the present. Well, I'm going to use what you just discussed to state a quote that I love from the book. And that is the simple truth about confidence. And it has, as you write, little to do with what happens to you and everything to do with how you think about what happens to you. And as I read it, I couldn't put more emphasis on those words because it is so true if you think negatively about a situation

Starting point is 00:24:06 like a speaking engagement or going into combat or whatever it is you're going to do, you're setting yourself up right then and there for failure. But if you think about this through a more positive lens, it completely changes the dynamics. And one of the stories I really liked from the book was you discussed Tony Gwynn, who's probably regarded as one of the best hitters in history.

Starting point is 00:24:32 And I love the story. I'd like you to discuss it because you're going to do a better job of it than I am. But can you do it kind of through that lens of the simple truth of confidence? Yeah. Again, Tony Gwynn is a wonderful example of a guy who realized at some point in his career that he had to be in control of his own attitude. Major League Baseball is an unforgiving experience.

Starting point is 00:24:59 It's a long season. You're in the spotlight. There is very much a one on one almost combative dynamic between picture and hitter. Tony Gwyn was engaged in that dynamic literally thousands of times. What he realized is that he had to be careful about how he thought about himself. So he was very systematic in looking at the videotape of his performance in the batter's box in games. He had his crew and himself edit the various videos of his performance at the plate and into one file went video clips of him swinging away and making good decisions with the ball, all right? Making good contact. He made a second tape of pitches that were thrown to him on which he made a good decision whether to swing or not to swing. Good decisions. And then there was a third file of pitches where he made a poor

Starting point is 00:26:09 decision. Swinging at a pitch, he shouldn't have swung at or holding back against a pitch that he should have swung at. And it was very clear. I take that third one and I destroy it. I throw it away. I delete the fire. I do not need to watch myself, quote unquote, looking like a fool swinging at somebody's curveball. It does not help him to relive, review bad decisions that he made. It made a heck of a lot of sense for him to go back

Starting point is 00:26:44 and watch good decisions that he made against It made a heck of a lot of sense for him to go back and watch good decisions that he made against a given picture. That helps him for his next encounter with that picture. It helps his general confidence for him to look at video clips where he drives the ball deep into right center and advances the base runners. The very simple educational principle is that you want to think about what you want more of. Because whatever your brain is full of, pictures of you hitting the ball well, pictures of you making good decisions versus pictures of you making bad decisions, whatever your

Starting point is 00:27:21 brain is full of, it's pretty much what your body is going to give you. It's just the way the nervous system is wired. And if we were just generally more aware of that and utilize that principle, I think our kids would learn multiplication tables faster. I think we'd all improve our golf games, our tennis games, our fitness performances, let alone have better interactions in the business world. Yeah, so in the ironic thing about this whole topic is that most people tend to dwell on the negative events instead of looking at the positive things.

Starting point is 00:28:02 And that's why I like Tony Guen's example so much, was he just threw that out and said, I don't need that reminder, I need the reminders of when I was doing it right. Exactly, exactly. It is rather strange odd and indeed sad that so much of our thinking is dwelling upon negative past experiences, so much of our thinking is perhaps anticipating future difficulties. I think to a certain extent, this is built

Starting point is 00:28:36 into the human animal. Our early years, hundreds of thousands of years living a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence, which was a heck of a lot less certain than the existence that most of us, especially in the Western industrialized world, after the day. That was a very uncertain existence. Where's the water? Where's the food? Where's the shelter? How do we do this? Our primitive ancestors are kind of looking over their shoulders constantly, worrying about stuff. So we've inherited that. It's something of a survival mechanism. And I think having just a little bit of that in our lives is fine. I'm talking to professional athletes about this all the time. You've got to have a little bit of worry, a little bit of awareness of your shortcomings,

Starting point is 00:29:28 but you use that as energy and excitement to move forward. You don't dwell on it, and it becomes a very small part of your overall thoughts about yourself. So it's understandable that people do this, but it doesn't have to be to the extent that most of us tend to worry about the past, worry about the future, think negatively about ourselves and the present. We can do better than that. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that statement. In my upcoming book, I had the opportunity to interview a pretty famous West Point graduate,

Starting point is 00:30:11 which was General Stan Macrystal. And I remember as we were talking, I asked him what he thought was the most critical factors of leadership. And at the top of that list, he used the word ambitious. And so I wanted to use that because here you have what many regard as one of the greatest military generals

Starting point is 00:30:37 that we've had recently. And how do you distinguish between someone who is showing confidence and someone who is showing ego? Because I think ego takes down so many great people, especially leaders, and how they're able to carry themselves and how people respond. The big distinguishing difference between confidence and ego, I think, especially for a a leader is the question of whether you're doing it for yourself or whether you're doing it for something bigger than yourself. I can be working my job with the sense of it,

Starting point is 00:31:15 aggrandizing myself, benefiting myself, or I can be doing my job with the sense of contributing to something that's bigger than me. I think that is a very important distinction. I make the distinction in the book very clearly between confidence and outspoken arrogance. Confidence is what you have on the inside. It's internal. It's derived from your internal thoughts and it's that mental bank account that you keep. Outspoken arrogance is the way you talk about yourself to the outside world, especially

Starting point is 00:31:52 the literature of sport is full of stories of outspoken individuals who were not particularly well-loved in their prime. Muhammad Ali is the classic example. Of a very outspoken individual, he was very, very confident on the inside, but he expressed it to the outside. He had a big ego, so to speak, and that turned a lot of people off.

Starting point is 00:32:17 I think you better have a heck of a lot of confidence if you're gonna get into a boxing ring with the likes of Floyd Patterson and Sunny Liston. You better have a lot of confidence. Whether you choose to talk about it the way Ali did, the way a conor McGregor or a Ronda Rousey might and their numerous other examples about spoken individuals in the world of sport. Whether you choose to do that is secondary to whether you have that sense of certainty about yourself based upon the conscious, deliberate, intentional decisions that you've been making. I hope that answers your

Starting point is 00:32:53 question. It's a big one. Yeah, I know it is a big one. And I think it leads us to another person that you cover in the book, who I have always envisioned as a very humble person. But I'm going to introduce it like this. In the mid-2000s, when I was at Lowe's, we always had an annual sales meeting. And one of the favorite ones I went to, and they're always in Las Vegas, was we had the mannings come on to be our guest speakers and it was supposed to be Archie, Peyton, and Eli, but Eli for whatever reason was unable to attend. And at this point, Peyton was this extremely well-regarded going to be the next Joe Montana

Starting point is 00:33:40 of football and Eli, people kind of thought of as an afterthought. And it was interesting because when the two of them got up there and they're both very good speakers, paint manning is great. But they were throwing a lot of jokes out about Eli. And remembering back upon it and then reading his story in your book, they were making fun in some ways of his confidence. And so I think we all know that Eli has gone on to win a couple super bowls, in many ways performed at par with his brother on the biggest stages. But when he first came to you, I think he was struggling with confidence at that point.

Starting point is 00:34:23 struggling with confidence at that point. And I think it's a great example of, you can be the greatest at your profession, but it's still that mindset that is gonna take you from going from where you are to where you wanna be. And I was hoping not covering it from when he threw the touchdown in the Super Bowl, but what were some of the initial things that you had to do when you worked with him to guide him to becoming that individual who threw that 40 yard pass

Starting point is 00:34:50 and ended up winning the Super Bowl against Tom Brady? I think probably Eli's biggest takeaway from the work that we did over a period of years. And he shared this in several conversations, is the ability to derive from whatever practice or workout or game or performance, the willingness to extract from that experience or little episodes, if you will, of success. Taking something, energizing, taking something that makes you feel more enthusiastic about yourself from each and every

Starting point is 00:35:36 experience, filtering, if you will. All the things that happened through a kind of mental filter and allowing certain memories and certain thoughts to stay with you, he got pretty good at that. He had to be good at that because he played football in the most vicious media market in the country where people would hoist him up on a great pedestal whenever he had a good game and people would kick him to the curve and cover him with dirt if he didn't have a great game. Whether the good game was his own fault or his teammates fault or the bad game was his own fault or his teammates fault, it didn't matter. He used to send a piece of the team.

Starting point is 00:36:21 He was going to get tons of credit when the team wins. He's going to get tons of credit when the team wins. He's going to get tons of blame when the team loses. And he's got to insulate himself from all of that and be able to say, yes, I had these five great plays in that particular game, even though it was a 30 to 35 loss for his team. But I can look at my good play and I can base 95% of my memories of that game from these successes, these good decisions that I made, these good things that I did, and I'll have only about 5% of my memories of that game I've things that went wrong and I know I can fix those I Know everything that I didn't do right the ways we didn't execute we can fix that so it's not some permanent difficulty That we have it was just a minor bump in the road so we can get better at. And that's really the challenge for all of us.

Starting point is 00:37:25 Elymeaning and Peyton Manning has to do that weekend and week out and week in and week out throughout their entire career. We have to do it too if we want to give ourselves a chance to be greater what we do. Well, I think this is a great lead into another stoicism and Senna Coobley believed that stoicism isn't just about thinking. It's about action and the best way to improve is to review, which is exactly what you just talked about with Eli.

Starting point is 00:37:55 And one of my favorite chapters of the book was chapter two. And you discussed three things in it. The top 10 list, ESP, and the immediate progress review. I wanted to give the audience some practical tools from this conversation. I thought these were three great ones. So I was hoping you could share what those are and how a listener can apply them.

Starting point is 00:38:17 Absolutely. These three tools, if you will, all deal with how we handle our memories. Memories of our long-term past, memory of our short-term past, memories of our very, very immediate past. The first tool, the top 10 list, is as the title implies, a list of the 10 most successful, fulfilling moments that you have had in your career, in your sport, performing your art. What are those memories that give you a sense of, ah, yeah, that was a great moment.

Starting point is 00:39:02 We tend to pass over those in our sort of prejudice toward the negative, but I think it's very important to write those out, post those someplace visible, so you are constantly reminded of how well you did here, how well you did there. This award, this recognition, this accomplishment, your top 10, that's how you filter your long-term past.

Starting point is 00:39:30 Then, moving the lens closer, let's look at yesterday. Or, the last game you played, the last match you played, the last negotiation you participated in. Let's review your day. Can we deliberately extract from our memories of the day an episode of where we put in quality effort? When we sort of got past a little procrastination and did something we didn't necessarily wanted to do, but had to do, but new is important to do, and we did it. Good for us. An episode or two of quality effort. Secondly, an episode or two of a small success. What did we get right? Yeah, I made this point in the meeting. Yeah, I hit this new little personal record in the weight room today. Just small successes.

Starting point is 00:40:24 If we wait around for the big successes, we can wait around a long time. The big successes are always built on little ones. Let's extract the memory of some small ones. And then third, progress. What does it seem like we're getting better at? So your daily reflection is ESP, effort, success, progress, and that's a five-minute exercise at best. But it's a way of making sure that you don't lose any goodness day by day. And then third, taking it even to a more immediate perspective, you can look at your day as a whole series of performances. And as you move from the first meeting of the day to the second meeting of the day to the third, in between those meetings, in between

Starting point is 00:41:11 those work activities, you have the opportunity to reflect a little. What's the best thing I did there? What's worth repeating from that conversation, that immediate progress review. It's amazing to hear the reaction of most collegiate and professional athletes when I say, you can review each and every drill you do in practice. And take with you the memory of your best rep of that drill. And you just quietly keep that as you move into position for your next drill in practice I get a lot of drop draws when I suggest that And they say you know doc I never thought about that and I said yeah, let me guess I'll bet you a thousand bucks right now that you're have it

Starting point is 00:42:00 Is to remember not the best rep of the drill that you just finished is to remember not the best rep of the drill that you just finished, but the worst rep carrying that memory of your worst little performance with you as you get ready for your next drill. Well, they're your violating the basic principle again. You're not thinking about what you want more of. You're thinking about what you want to avoid. And again, your brain, your body is going to give you what your brain is full of. So if you carry, if you're carrying the memory of each little bad rep drilled by drill by drill, you're kind of polluting the whole internal environment. So you've got the long term memory, the relatively short term memory of the day, and then

Starting point is 00:42:43 the very, very immediate memory of what just happened, and you can filter all of that to build your mental bank account. I think it's a very important point and a great takeaway. So thank you for sharing those different tools. And it kind of opens up chapter five for me by what you just discussed. And that is the Shooters mentality. And I remember reading a lot about Larry Bird and Michael Jordan and how they both would show up hours and hours before games to put in the wraps and just shoot hundreds of shots. And in the book, you talk about this through the lens of Steph Curry, who I think everyone can relate to today. And if you look at the NBA finals this year, when he started out in the first few games,

Starting point is 00:43:32 he was not playing it as best. He was missing a heck of a lot of shots. But as that series went on, you saw a change happen, and all of a sudden he started to hit the big shots. But one thing that's amazing to me when I watch Steph Curry, especially since he's such small stature compared to many of the people he plays around, is the confidence that he has to just keep throwing the ball up there. So can you explain why you featured Steph Curry and what this shooter mentality is?

Starting point is 00:44:06 Steph Curry is just a great, relatively present day example of the way all the great shooters typically have thought throughout their career, especially during the productive years of their career. You talk about Jordan, you talk about Bird, you can talk about Magic, you can talk about Bob Poozy, Wilk Chamberlain, Belgian Bailey, you can go back to any of the great shooters. If you look at their biographies and autobiographies, there's always references to a kind of unconventional and almost paradoxical confidence. The conventional wisdom is that if you miss your first three, four shots in a game, you should probably conclude that your shot is off tonight and you should be

Starting point is 00:44:56 dishing off the ball to somebody else because you don't have it that particular night. That's not the way the Jordan's, the birds, the Steph Curry's of the world. Think their mentality is, well, if I miss two and a row, three and a row, that simply means that my odds of making the fifth to sixth to seventh shot have just gotten better. Now, from a scientific point of view, that makes no sense at all, okay? I mean, I have to study statistics and probability. And from a scientific point of view, that's kind of crazy. But it's crazy like a fox.

Starting point is 00:45:38 It's just effective as heck. If you are a shooter, if it's your job to shoot, you serve yourself and you serve your team by thinking, oh I miss two. That means my odds of making the third or better. Oh I miss three. That means my odds of making the fourth are even better. You can go through a series of games like Curry did in the finals. And even if he so-called struggled in the first couple of games, he did not lose any faith in himself. He actually said, well, this just simply means I'm going to be hot as a pistol. Going into game 3, 4, 5.

Starting point is 00:46:17 Lo and Bill, that's kind of what happened. The shooter's mentality is such that you actually gain confidence even when things are going poorly, but you maintain confidence if things are going well. If you hit your first three, four, and a row, you don't think, oh well, I'm going to revert back to my average pretty soon. I have to expect to miss some. You just keep ticking. Okay, everything I look at is going to go in tonight. So it's that ability, and we can all cultivate that, even though it's quite unconventional, it's that ability to expect greater success in the bad times and to maintain an expectation

Starting point is 00:46:59 of success even the good times. You can indeed have it both ways. This is something that every performer has just got to wrap his or her head around. If she's gonna give herself the best chance to be as good as she can be in the moment of truth. Well, this leads me into what I think is an extremely important topic, and that is how do you balance what you just talked about with perfectionism? And perfectionism has come up time and time again in recent interviews. It came up with Vice Admiral Sandy Stowe's who was the former comment on the Coast Guard

Starting point is 00:47:38 Academy when she was talking about life lessons that she was trying to instill on Coast Guard Academy cadets. It came up in talks that I had with best-selling authors Susan Kane, Gretchen Rubin, and Liz Fosslin. And you covered in your book. And what I wanted to ask you is what is destructive perfectionalism, and how is it different from striving for perfection? Perfectionism is a wonderful quality in small doses. Perfectionism works against oneself. When the standards that you have set for yourself are so high, they almost become impossible. And concurrently, you beat yourself up mentally every time achieve those

Starting point is 00:48:27 ridiculously high standards. It's one thing to strive for perfection. Let's make every rep great. Let's make every play great Let's make every sales meeting a slam dunk success. Let's go for it. Let's strive for it Don't success. Let's go for it. Let's strive for it. But if and when we don't achieve that success, we have to be able to say, okay, is there something to be learned here? Can we be just as enthusiastic? Next time? Instead of, while we really messed it up, boy,

Starting point is 00:49:09 I just didn't have a good game at all. The tendency for perfectionistic people is to have their thinking to be entirely dichotomous. I'm either awesome or I'm awful. It's black or it's white. It's great or it's terrible. And we have to be able to look at those shades of gray in between So perfectionism is a wonderful thing to strive for but you have to be able to Accept it when it doesn't happen and then say okay, it didn't happen. It didn't happen in that one place

Starting point is 00:49:41 it didn't happen that one time and even though it didn't happen, that doesn't tell the truth about me. So I have to be very good at how I rationalize, and I use that word to mean how I explain to myself simple human imperfection, because we are all imperfect human beings. We're walking around in this very imperfect physically not so great bag of skin and we're inhabited in society by other imperfect human beings. Things are going to go wrong. How good are we at maintaining an intentional constructive attitude in the face of simple human and simple physical imperfection. Can we treat those mistakes as temporary?

Starting point is 00:50:30 Can we treat them as very limited in where they occur? Can we treat them as not the truth about ourselves? And it's the ability to respond to just the imperfections of our world that helps us protect that mental bank account that's so important. Yes, it is. And when I had Gretchen Rubin on the podcast, I asked her what the key to happiness is and she wrote the happiness project. And her response was, it's the hard fact of knowing yourself and coming to the realization that you are imperfectly perfect. Great way to put it.

Starting point is 00:51:10 Yes. Well, Dougsy, I wanted to open up chapter four. I'm not going to have you tell stories because I want the reader to read this, but you cover athlete Michael Powell, Colonel Kevin Chaprupp and Lieutenant Paul Tachy to open up this process of envisioning. But I wanted to give you my own example, and then I'm going to ask you a question. I happen to have Naval Academy classmate 30-plus year friend of mine, Navy Seal and astronaut Chris Cassidy on the podcast, and not Chris Cassidy on the podcast. And I asked him, was he burned his two bronze stars with value in Afghanistan?

Starting point is 00:51:49 And then when he was doing a space walk with an Italian astronaut, and that astronaut started having water develop in his helmet and Chris, without thinking, just saved the day, brought him in. I said, how are you able to do that? And I wanted to use this to sum up many of the things that we talked about today. He said, it's because I went through the training, had the mental discipline to develop the confidence

Starting point is 00:52:18 and to envision it in the future. So when I was in those present moments, I already knew what the result was before it even happened. And the question I want to ask you because I think what he said was so powerful is how do we ensure that those hard-earned skills don't fall victim to fear, doubt, and worry? How much time would you like me to take to answer that big question? That's a doozy How do we ensure that we do not fall victim to fear doubt and worry? Well, I think your naval Academy classmate in a way answered the question

Starting point is 00:52:57 He said that I had developed the discipline to anticipate what might happen and To rehearse responses to things what might happen and to reverse responses to things that might happen. So he had thought very constructively about the future, okay? I mean, he didn't have a whole lot of space walking experience to base his confidence on. He had to think about what could happen, what is the procedure, what are some of the potential difficulties, if difficulty exercises, what's my response, if difficulty wireizes, what's my response, and the training in all those SOP standard operating procedures is what

Starting point is 00:53:38 key and so many good performers do. They're honest about, I used to turn flat tires. What are the things that could derail our performance? We're going on a spacewalk. We have these objectives. We're there for this reason. We have to check on this. We have to bring back this information. What are the things that could get in the way? Okay. Let's list those out. Let's rehearse either mentally or physically the right response to that so that we do not encounter it for the very first time out there on the spacewalk. I wouldn't want any of your listeners to have teenage children drive away the car for the first time without having reversed how to change a flat tire.

Starting point is 00:54:29 Because we do not want that kid to have to change the flat tire for the very first time in the dark, in the rain, on some strange road. We want that kid to know where the jack is, where the tire is, what the procedure is, so they have some familiarity with fixing that situation. And we can think about so many of the other situations that are like that. And that is a very constructive use of envisioning thinking about what I want. I want to have this good outcome.

Starting point is 00:54:58 Let's anticipate pitfall here and there. And let's spend most of our time rehearsing a constructive fix to that pitfall and getting back on the road quickly. It's not like we're dwelling on the pitfalls. No, we're dwelling on how good we're going to respond to a given situation and any athlete, any business person, any artist, any surgeon can do this for him or herself. I hope that covers the waterfront because that's a big question. It is a big question and I think it's one we all need to dwell more of our personal time and

Starting point is 00:55:32 journaling on uncovering the truth for ourselves. Well, at the Naval Academy and I'm sure it's the same at West Point, the Art of War was a book we all had to study. And I love that you ended your book by using Sun Zoo's quote, which I think just summed up what we talked about with Chris Cassidy. And that is victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. And so I wanted to use that to ask you my final question. And then that is, what do you hope readers of your book will get from it? I hope readers from my book will find one technique or two techniques somewhere in the book.

Starting point is 00:56:20 And they will be very thorough with the application of that particular technique or that particular set. I don't expect everybody to do everything that I explain in the book. But I'm hoping that people will take one concept or two concepts, or maybe three concepts, and be really good at consistent, thorough application thereof. I hope they get that from it. And I hope they get the underlying concept that they can indeed change their mind. They are not slaves to their own thought. They have the ability to be in control of their own mind. And if they start off thinking they're going to have a bad day, they can hear the bus driver say, change your mind and decide to have a good day. That's what I hope folks get from it. Well, doggie, it was a complete honor to have you on this podcast.

Starting point is 00:57:20 I wanted to tell the audience just how much I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I think it's a useful tool to anyone regardless of what your profession is and regardless of your age because we can all learn the skill of confidence which goes such a long way in defining who we are because there are states where we all lose confidence. And your book does a great job of laying out how you can get it back and why it happens. So thank you so much again for what you're doing for all these Hedettes who are out there on the front lines serving like I did and thank you so much for being here today. Well, thank you for the opportunity and it's been a pleasure. I wish the best to you

Starting point is 00:58:02 and all your listeners and all your viewers. Thanks John. What an impactful discussion that was with Dr. Nate Zinzer. And I wanted to thank Dr. Zinzer, Teran Reuter, and Harper Collins for the honor of interviewing Dr. Zinzer. Links to all things, Dr. Nate Zinzer will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the authors that we feature as guests on the podcast. Those proceeds go making this podcast free for our listeners.

Starting point is 00:58:28 Videos are on YouTube at JohnRMiles. Go there and check out over 400 that we have, including exclusive videos that you will only find there. Evertiser deals and discount codes are all in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at John Armiles on both Twitter and Instagram, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

Starting point is 00:58:50 And if you wanna know how I book Amazing Guests like Dr. Nate Zinser, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStark podcast interview I did with Dr. Jeremy Utley, who is the director of executive education at the Stanford D-School in co-author of the new book, Ideal Flow.

Starting point is 00:59:09 There are two kinds of people in this world. There's zero to one people, people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, and then there's one to infinity people, people who can take what the thing that they come up with and they can turn it into something great. And I fundamentally disagree with that premise. And I've said so publicly actually, because there's really two reasons I disagree. The first reason is cognitive,

Starting point is 00:59:32 and the second reason is empirical. Let's put it that way. So cognitively, the reason I disagree with the zero to one premise is that premises, there's some people who start with nothing, and then they get to something. And the truth is, nobody starts with nothing.

Starting point is 00:59:50 The fee for this show is that you share it with others. When you find something useful or interesting, if you know someone who's dealing with confidence, definitely share this episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give this show is to share it with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can give this show is to share it with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, live life passion-strike. you

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Nate Zinsser on How Do You Create a Confident Mind EP 204

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