The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance by Dr. Nate Zinsser

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance by Dr. Nate Zinsser Believe and be unshakable. The Director of West Point’s influential Performance Psychology Program shares the secrets of mental toughness and self-belief in this definitive guide to mastering confidence, the key to performance in any field. Dr. Nate Zinsser has spent his career training the minds of the U.S. Military Academy’s cadets as they prepare to lead and perform when the stakes are the very highest—on the battlefield. Alongside this work, he has coached world-class athletes including a Super Bowl MVP, numerous Olympic medalists, professional ballerinas, NHL All-Stars, and college All-Americans, teaching them to overcome pressure and succeed on the biggest stages. Dr. Zinsser has come to understand that one single trait above all others makes peak performance possible: confidence, or the belief in oneself. Whether your mission involves leading a platoon into combat, returning an opponent’s serve, or delivering a sales pitch to a roomful of skeptical prospects, you perform best when you are so certain about your abilities that your flow of fear, doubts, and confusion slows to the barest minimum. What’s more, Dr. Zinsser has come to understand that confidence is a skill that can be taught, improved, and applied by anyone to enhance nearly every aspect of our lives and careers. Now, for the first time, Dr. Zinsser distills his research and years of experience, offering a fascinating guide to the science of confidence and providing readers with a practical, step-by-step program to best harness their belief in themselves to achieve success in any field. The Confident Mind 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 most.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. Who knew we'd do it again? Like just hundreds, if not almost a thousand podcasts uh we're getting almost there to a thousand i don't know what we're gonna do when we hit a thousand maybe we should have a celebration but anyway guys to see the video version of this you can go to youtube.com fortress chris voss hit the bell notification button it's that little ding button it's such a great button it makes you feel like you're part of the chris voss show family only the beautiful part is we don't judge you. So that's

like the best family ever. We're like your dog. We just have unconditional love for our people, as long as you're a good person. Anyway, go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification over there. One of my books is still on a giveaway thing. Take care of that. You can get a free book or something. Also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all the different things that we have. There's 132,000 group on LinkedIn if you haven't signed up. And our LinkedIn newsletter is killing it. It grows like by 100 people a day over there. I think it's up to like almost 4,000 people. Check that out. We put that out every day and it's a pretty awesome feature of a lot of different authors that come on the show.

And it's on LinkedIn, so it's a lot of business people interact with. It's pretty darn cool. We have an amazing author on the show. He is the author of the new book that's coming out January 25th, 2022. Oh my God. It's a whole new year. In fact, that's the day before my birthday. The Confident Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance. You guys can order it for my birthday by Dr. Nate Sinzer. And he's going to be on the show to talk to us about it. In fact, he's sitting right beside me if you're watching this on YouTube, which you should be as well, because then you can see the wonderful samurai swords. He's got his back. He's got this incredible background. But Dr. Nate Sinzer is the director of the performance psychology program at the

United States Military Academy at West Point, the most comprehensive mental training program in the country he runs. And he, since 1992, has helped prepare cadets for leadership in the U.S. Army. He has been the sports psychology mentor for numerous elite athletes, including two-time Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning and the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers, as well as many Olympians and NCAA champions. He's been a consultant for the FBI Academy. We have a few FBI people on. U.S. Army Recruiting Command and the Fire Department of New York. He earned his PhD in sports psychology from the university and his senior black belt rank from the, let me get this right here, blocking with a cable, Shotokan Karate of America. Welcome to the show.

How are you, Nate? I'm doing great, Chris. Thanks for that introduction. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be here. It's a Monday for me. Pleasure and a privilege to have you. Congratulations on the new book. These are always fun. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure thing. Confident Mind by Dr. Nate Zinsser. You can order it from any of your favorite outlets,

Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, etc. Also available at your around the corner neighborhood bookstore. If you're curious about finding out more, DoctrinateSensor.com is my site, and I'd love to make your acquaintance out there in Chris Foss land. There you go. The Chris Foss land, is that what they're calling it nowadays? Is that what the kids call it? I think everybody occupies their own little fiefdom or planet these days in the interweb.

Oh, you know, that's what I should call it, the Chris Voss Fiefdom Podcast, because that would be pretty cool. So what motivated you to write this book? The number of people who have walked into my office over the years who said, I used to play the game at a pretty high level. I used to feel pretty darn good about myself, but here I am now, I just have lost my confidence. And they almost treated it like a set of keys that they once had that they can't find anymore. And so it became very clear to me many years ago that if there's one area of mental toughness that is crucial and that everything else hinges upon,

it's one's ability to be confident about oneself at the moment of truth. If you don't have that, you're in big trouble. That makes all the difference in the world. So you work at West Point, is that correct? That is correct i am at the u.s military academy at west point been here since 1992 i'm an institution almost and west point puts out like some of the top echelons of those who are familiar with it they put out some of the top echelons of people in the military correct that's correct. Our graduates, once they complete the 47-month, quote-unquote, experience, are commissioned to second lieutenants in the Army.

They serve a minimum of a five-year service commitment. Many of them serve for a lot longer and rise to some of the most important positions in the Army. We've had some chief of staff. We've had some chairman of the joint chiefs of staff we've had presidents eisenhower we've had very important historical figures omar bradley douglas macarthur george patton there are a lot of people who have walked the these grounds over the years over the decades over the centuries and they've had an impact on U.S. history.

Yeah, definitely. We probably won some wars because of these gentlemen. I grew up reading the bios of when I was, I don't know, fourth grade or fifth grade, reading about Patton and Eisenhower and World War II theater and stuff like that. Crazy times. So you helped teach performance psychology program, and you put into the book, I guess, the secrets of mental toughness. Let's talk about what that is and what that's

about. When I explain the term mental toughness, I really try to make an analogy between the mind and something that everybody recognizes as being universally. The misconception is that mental toughness is all about waking yourself up at five o'clock and putting yourself through a grueling workout when you really don't feel like it. I wouldn't call that mental toughness necessarily. I think I could probably get my dog to do that. Mental toughness instead is you having deliberate control over the stream and the trajectory and the arc of your thoughts. You have to understand how do you want to feel when you're taking a physics exam? How do you want to feel when you're stepping out to attempt a field goal that might determine the outcome of the Army-Navy football

game? How do you want to feel when you're in front of maybe a three-star general and you are outlining an operations order that you've put together and you're about to execute? How do you want to think and feel in those moments? And you don't have the luxury of letting your mind wander, waver, change very much. So your mind's got to be tough. Yeah. I think of the analogy of a 45-pound Olympic plate. That is one tough thing. And you can drop it off the top of a six-story building and it won't break. You can leave it out in the freezing cold, it won't crack. You can leave it out in the heat of summer, it won't melt. Mental toughness is like that in terms of your state of mind. You have to have a state of mind that is not vulnerable to, and let's come up with a way of maintaining that, building it up, maintaining it,

and applying it at the moments of truth in your life. And I imagine the theater, war, is probably the biggest pressure cooker that the military teaches its leaders to operate in because that's a pressure cooker. That is the ultimate stressful condition. Yeah. Combat. Ground combat.

Bullets flying, explosions going off, and you as an officer have a responsibility to communicate, to facilitate, to bring them back alive. Yeah. And you're in a, this is life or death. This isn't just me making decisions from a boardroom. When I was writing my book this last year, one of my friends that I game a lot with,

I have a lot of military friends, but he turned me on to be no do and some of the leadership principles in the military. And it really hit me. I'm like, duh, the military puts out people that we ask people to put their lives on the line and go into theaters of war and do stuff. And they teach an incredible amount of leadership skills and qualities. And then, of course, a lot of these people really succeed in areas of leadership,

especially in the echelons of our company or our country. And so there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. Do you want to tease out any tips that people will find in the echelons of our company or our country. And so there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. Do you want to tease out any tips that people will find in the book that they can use to apply in their life or some of the different things that you teach people? I think readers of the Confident Mind book will be immediately struck with how many common misconceptions exist out there in the world about confidence. Confidence is not outspoken arrogance or chest pounding or bravado. Confidence is not something that's necessarily built up by success and accomplishment and positive feedback, although all that stuff is good and it can be useful, nor is confidence necessarily weakened, diminished, destroyed by setbacks, errors, mistakes, and simple human imperfection. idea that your confidence, your sense of certainty that allows you to execute at your top level is really a function of how you think about yourself. It's a function of what you choose

to remember. It's a function of the stories you tell yourself about yourself in the present moment. And it's a function of all the pictures and short video clips that your imagination produces about your future. You put all that mental activity together, the memories, the stories, the fantasies about the future, and that collection, that repository, that storehouse of thoughts, brother, that's what your confidence is composed of. Definitely. Definitely. You better be darn careful about how you think about yourself, about the profession that you're in, and about all the things that happen to you in the context. The one thing I've been seeing is people with leadership confidence and attitude is super important. And people really aspire to leaders

that are confident, especially in situations where, like an example is Steve Jobs, somebody who is known to lead people into waters that are largely unknown, to move mountains for him, to what was the reality distortion field that people said he operated in? One of my friends was on the small team that built the first iPhone. And the task they were trying to accomplish was daunting because they were trying to shove all these things into this small little piece of work. And even the announcement, it still wasn't working for the phone. And it was a hell of a crunch time. So, you know, leaders that can take and do that spectacular thing are really amazing. How does one temper having extreme confidence without being maybe narcissistic or maybe some people confuse narcissism with confident?

Or how does one temper being confident but also aware of reality and factoring for that? That is a very interesting and ever-changing balancing act. It's not a balancing act of you standing on one foot. It's a balancing act of you standing on whatever foot you need to stand on as the floor beneath your feet is constantly gyrating. I look at confidence as a sense of certainty about an ability, and that is very situation specific. You can be ridiculously confident about your ability to drive the golf ball off the tee, but you can still be a scared little rabbit trying to putt from 10 feet out. You do indeed have to balance that sense of certainty. I have the skill to do this.

I am enough for this particular challenge in my life. And the balance comes from where you have, you have to know that you have put in some of the work, that you have put in some of the effort, that you have indeed developed a level of skill that can help you succeed at the moment. So it's not about just throwing your chest up and thinking, I'm the greatest thing that happened to the world. Narcissism being that

much in love with yourself, that's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about a functional appraisal of your capability based, again, as I said, on how you've thought about yourself, a functionally effective appraisal of yourself. And you make the conscious decision that what I got is up to the task before me. I make that conscious decision to believe that I'm enough for this moment and I'm going to enter the boardroom. I'm going to step onto the wrestling mat. I'm going to step out onto the dangerous streets of Fallujah, knowing that I've got what it takes to execute the mission. And you state in your book that there is one single trait above all others that makes peak performance possible,

and that's confidence, is that correct, or the the belief in oneself and this arcs through everything women are attracted to men who are more confident whether you're men are attracted to women who are confident too oh really that's interesting that's interesting so yeah the i never really thought about it i guess maybe i am for some sort of genetic level or some sort of hind brainin thing that I don't really think about. But I imagine so when you're dating and presenting yourself and there's that dance of flirtation when people connect. Boardroom, of course, the boardroom is almost like a theater or it's not life or death, but it can be for a business. It's a very fluid situation. You've got to be able to maintain and go through it. How important is it to really prepare for going into battle, whether it's for war or business or anything else in your life?

How is it important to prepare for this? And does it take a lot of time to get this down? Or what are some things people have to overcome? Success in any field is a matter of competence and confidence. You have to put in the effort. You have to do the drills to build the skills, to pay the bills, whether we're talking about basketball or whether we're talking about business. You got to know your product. You got to know your customer. You got to know your skills. You got to know the opponent that you're going out on the hardwood to face. You have to know, you have to prepare physically. You have to know the opponent that you're going out on the hardwood to face. You have to know.

You have to prepare physically. You have to have the skills. You have to have the knowledge. But then you also have to decide that the level of skill that you have, the level of knowledge that you have, is enough for you to execute more or less unconsciously in the moment. So in order to develop that confidence, you have to be very good at selectively picking out the memories from your past that build energy and optimism and enthusiasm for yourself. I devote a whole chapter in the book to just how to manage your memories, how to extract from the things that happened to you over the course of your life,

over the course of just yesterday, and what just happened in the last hour of your workday. What just happened in the last drill at football practice? What can you take from that? What little moments, what episodes of effort, what episodes of small success, what episodes of progress can you extract from your memories, long-term, short-term, and immediate, that build that sense of optimism and enthusiasm for going forward? There are all kinds of drills that are outlined in the book that allow you to do that. There is a whole series of guidelines in terms of how to tell yourself an effective story about yourself so that you're setting in motion a constructive, self-fulfilling prophecy. We all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. We all are under various

impressions about how good we are at this, how good we are at that, how good looking, how bad looking, how competent, how incompetent we are. And we tend to live up to those stories that we set. You know, and you can look at the breakthroughs in any field. I was just reviewing again this morning a few of the facts about Roger Bannister's first successful sub-four-minute mile in May of 1954 under rainy and windy conditions where this skinny little medical student did something that nobody thought was possible. Everybody was under the impression this cannot be done and banister was constructively delusional enough to say hey i think it might be possible and as soon as he broke that barrier other people started to do it and do it and do it and come on come on chris what's the world record for the mile now? 3.46?

I'm not even sure. But, yeah, him breaking that mentally, I remember the story on it, him breaking that mentally, like no one could break through it mentally. And by him breaking through it mentally, everyone was like, oh, it's doable. Right. It was not a question of what the heart and the lungs and the muscles are capable of doing. That wasn't the question because those physical symptoms are at the command of things that go on in the brain.

Yeah. And if you can discipline your thoughts, your body will follow right along. That's the mind-body connection that we hear talked about so often. Okay, you got to work your mind right if you want to get the most out of your body. That's true. And now over 100 people have broken a four-minute mile. High school kids have done it. We've got cadets here at West Point who have done it.

I remember preparing the first cadet to break a four-minute mile, having him deliberately envision each and every stride on the track that he knew he was going to run it at. And he could envision that within about a second and a half of his actual time. It was remarkable. He envisioned it on a Thursday, and he did it on a Friday. He did it on a thursday and he did it on a friday he did it on a saturday indoors i might add on a short not a lot of people run a sub four minute mile on a 220 yard indoor track is the pre pre-planning of it the pre-thinking of it the pre the pre-supposition of success where you're assuming and you're not just assuming but you're that mental preparation of the pre-play knowing the game plan before you go in etc etc is that how important depending on

the game that you're in it's crucial you know if you know the environment and i talk about this in the chapter of the book about entering your performance arena confidently, the setting, you know exactly the task before you, and you have envisioned that is vividly seeing it in your imagination, bringing in sound, bringing in smells and textures and the whole emotional complex. How are you going to be feeling there? What's the atmosphere going to be like? And then can you walk yourself through it minute by minute for a short event, like a four minute mile, or can you take just pieces of it? Like the opening drive in a football game, the two minute drive in the second quarter, a two minute drive in the third quarter, a close, the closing two minutes. Can you see what you're going to see when you are in your

position, whether you're talking about a offensive tackle or whether you're talking about the star quarterback, what are you going to be seeing right there? How do you want to, one of the things like the Superbowl, you've worked with people like Eli Manning and other Olympic athletes. I know one thing they always talk about with the Superbowl is when you first show up for the Super Bowl for your first time, Tom Brady, he'd probably just say, whatever, another day. Yeah, whatever. Like, he doesn't smoke clearly. At least, I don't know. Maybe he does. But one of the things they have is they get the jitters when they show up because they're at the big show. And they say sometimes it can take a little while for a new quarterback or a new player who's not used to that arena and the intimidation of the arena. When they go in, it takes them a while to get the jitters down, the nervousness, and the here we are at the big show.

This is something I've gone after all my life, and I'm finally at this moment. And sometimes that can really screw people up. Give us some ideas of some of your thoughts on that. It can screw people up if you don't prepare for it. Yeah. And anybody who I advise who is going to perform in a new arena, you better get some pictures of that arena. No, seriously, you should get some pictures.

And you should, once you arrive at that arena, two days or three days or in the case of the Super Bowl, a week ahead of the game boy get some time go into the actual arena itself i tell guys to climb up as high as you can into the cheap seats and get a big bird's eye view of that field oh yeah you know yeah big bird's eye view and okay this is where our bench is going to be and there's where the scoreboard is and this is where our bench is going to be. And there's where the scoreboard is. And this is where the American flags are going to be flying. I want to make myself attuned to that particular arena. I would say the same for a lawyer in a courtroom.

I would say the same for any musicians do this all the time. They're going to go on the stage hours beforehand. Okay, where am I going to be standing? What's the where's the audience going to be sprinkled throughout this auditorium, in this arena? I want to get that whole picture in my head first and foremost. I want to get emotionally as comfortable as I can with the setting that I'm going to be in. And then, and this is really important, I don't care who you are. I don't care how experienced you are. You're going to feel some nervousness at go time because this is hardwired into the human animal. We are hardwired to experience a biochemical shift when we're about to do something that matters to us.

And it can be something that matters to us because we got to do it, like taking that physics final exam. And it could be something that matters to us because we really want to do it, like being the first cadet to run a subform in a mile. In both of those conditions, your body is going to change. Your unconscious mind is going to send a whole bunch of neural impulses down through your spinal cord. They're going to find their way to your adrenal glands and your adrenal glands are going to respond and you're going to get some basically a state-of-the-art performance enhancing chemical pumped into your bloodstream and it's going to go everywhere and it's going to accelerate your heart and it's going to oxygenate your blood a little more and it's going to basically

turn you into a stronger, faster, more alert, more perceptive version of yourself. And this is going to happen whether you're a rookie at a Super Bowl or whether you're Bill Belichick going for number nine, ten, okay? You're going to experience some butterflies. It doesn't matter who you are. Accept that and be willing to look at the gift of an enhanced biochemical state. You have been, your body has provided you with a state-of-the-art performance-enhancing chemical, custom-made for you, that's going to show up when you need it in the proper dosage.

It doesn't cost you a dime, and it's legal. How about that? It's the best caffeine in the world. Best stuff going. So you might as well expect this to happen and respect your body's wisdom. And when it kicks in, embrace it the same way you used to embrace the excitement of your birthday coming up when you were a little kid. Yeah. There's times where people talk about being in the zone. I've had times where I've

prepared for different events and I've been nervous about them and I get the pre-show jitters and whatever. But then all of a sudden, because I prepared for them and really spent hours focusing on preparing and thinking about it and pre-showing it, pre-processing it in my mind, doing the plan, it's a weird place where the zone kicks in and I just go into autopilot and I'll be sitting there going, wow, okay, this is working out great. But then there are other times where people can get really screwed up. I can't remember the chess champion.

It was in the book, 48 Laws of Power, the story was told. But it was a chess champion competition years ago. And there was a mental game that was played between two things just on the lead up and arguing about the event. And that whole sort of setup threw off the competitor who was a really good chess player and actually ruined him for life. And so a lot of times you have a lot of outside things, even outside the game that can screw you up, where you have competitors or people you might need negotiating with

that will try and throw you off your game and try and throw you off your confidence, I'd imagine. And that's when you really have to have your head screwed on tight. I actually will sit down with a competitor, going to somebody who's headed for, say, the Olympic trials or the NFL combine or something like that where they're going to be on stage. And one of the discussions we have is, okay, let's identify a few things that could really mess you up. And let's outline a little plan to address them should they arise.

Okay. What are you going to say to yourself? What are you going to change? How are you going to get back on track? I tell all these folks, did your father insist before he let you drive the car, the family car away that you knew how to change a flat tire. And a lot of people said, no, he didn't do that. I said, well, your dad kind of messed up. Because do you really want to have to change a flat tire for the very first time in the dark, in the rain, on a strange road? You got to dig out the owner's manual from the glove box and find where the spare is, find where the jack is, find where the tools are. No, don't you want to know how to address that and get back on the road as quickly as possible? It's that kind of mental preparation that's hugely important. One of the

stories I tell in the book is Army wrestler, Philip Simpson, class of 2005. He's in the national semifinals, okay, broadcast live on ESPN. and there he and his opponent are at opposite ends of the mat and they're bouncing on their toes and they're finely tuned animals and they followed their pre-game routine right down to the letter and they're about ready to step onto the mat and do battle and bang tv timeout wow one minute two minutes, three minutes. Phil Simpson's opponent is beginning to lose his stuff because there's this delay happening. Phil Simpson is just sitting there mat side, breathing, tapping his feet, completely poised. We had practiced anticipating setbacks flat tires like this that one minute

two minute tv timeout turned into a five minute delay which really disrupted his opponent's composure didn't bother phil in the least he goes out and wipes out this guy ate to nothing this guy had beaten phil before, by the way. But Phil ate his lunch in the national semifinal and got a shot at the national championship. So you got to be ready for those little setbacks. You got to be somewhat realistic about what might happen out there and then become certain in your ability to handle it. Yeah. In fact, I was just thinking of the, I pulled this up here.

I think it was the 49ers and the Saints or it seemed like it was the Saints, but it was done at the New Orleans Super Bowl. So that's probably when I'm thinking of the Saints. I think it was the Ravens and 49ers where they had the outage of the power and interrupted the game. Yeah. And there's always been speculation that that threw the game off for whoever was ahead in the game.

And by giving them time to catch up, get their heads about them, get everybody calmed down, it threw off whoever was in the lead. I don't remember exactly. I'm just going off a vague memory here. But that was an event that threw off the people who were doing well in the game and changed the game because it just probably mentally threw people off. That's right. That can happen. If you have prepared yourself for a whole list of likely interruptions, then when you get something out of the blue like that, you are a lot less likely to be affected by

it because you have so thoroughly practiced getting your ship back righted so that it can move forward and in that case i mean who could predict that there's going to be a power outage at an nfl games okay and then sitting around for 34 minutes. And then sitting around. Okay. Now what's my smart response here? I got to get my body warmed back up again. Maybe I go through my entire pregame warmup because I'm starting a new game. It's up to me to make sure that I get my head in the right space so that I can execute the stuff that I know at the moment I'm called upon to do it. And you talked at the beginning of the show about how you work with athletes that sometimes get off their game. They lose their confidence. Maybe they're overthinking

stuff. How does that work and where do people fail? Because I've had times in my life where I've smacked a lot of home runs in business. And then all of a sudden, I don't know, I just start whiffing everything. And you're just, how did I get off my game? See, that's precisely, Chris, the wrong question to ask yourself. Why did I get off? The question to ask yourself is, how do I get back on my game and stay on it? Those two questions sound rather similar at first, but the process through which you go through to answer those two questions are very different.

Why did I get off my game? Okay, I did this wrong, I did this wrong, I did this wrong, I did this wrong, I did this wrong. And then you've got to build yourself back up. If you ask yourself the question, how do I get back on my game and stay on my game? It's a much shorter list. I got to do this. I got to do this. I got to do that. I'm good. Saves a hell of a lot of energy, gets you to where you want to be much more efficiently. Wow. This has been quite insightful, man. I can't wait to get ahold of this book. I want to order it now and read it. I think maybe I have a press copy that we have in the office, but if not, I'm going to ask for one because I want to get ahold of it.

I think this is brilliant. And anything more you want to touch on or tease out on the book before we go? I don't want any of your listeners or viewers to think that, oh, all I got to do is think happy thoughts and my life is going to unfold beautifully like a fairy tale. I think we've been influenced way too much by Disney movies where some fairy godmother sprinkles us with pixie dust or we spend a couple hours in the presence of wise Mr. Miyagi type folks. And now we know all the secrets and everything just falls in place. It's not like that at all. Okay. Confidence is fragile. You got to work at it.

And just because you get it once or twice or 10 times, it doesn't mean you can stop building it. One of my cadet trainees fellow who's out there now, Connor Hannafie, former wrestler, he finally realized in his senior year, and the way he put it was, I realized that confidence and mental toughness has no decisive once and for all victory it's a constant war of attrition that you got to keep fighting there's no psychological equivalent of an atomic bomb that you can drop on the enemy and the war is over it's an ongoing battle against all these insidious little forces that are seeking to tear your confidence down and make you question yourself. So things are going to go wrong.

You have to have the ability to react and respond to them constructively. You're an imperfect human being. You're going to make mistakes. When you make a mistake, are you going to be telling yourself, oh, here I go again? Or are you going to be telling yourself, okay, here I go again? Or are you going to be telling yourself, okay, it happened. It just happened that one time. Now let's get back in the game. So it's not a measurement.

Confidence is a measure of just pumping yourself up and telling you pretty thoughts. Yeah, I'm going to be great. I'm going to be great. I'm going to be great. It's actually really developing your mind, having mental toughness, having a state of mind, and pre-presence of what you're doing and how to do it and stuff like that. It's not just simply repeating a bunch of affirmations or having a vision board. No, it's certainly not a matter of doing just those things. Although there's nothing wrong with having a vision board.

And I devote a chapter to the functional use of affirmations and affirmational style thinking. That's good stuff. Those can build up that mental bank account of thoughts and memories that comprise your confidence. But boy, you better have some coping skills. When I devote a whole chapter to that, some coping skills to deal with your own human imperfection, the imperfection of your teammates that you work with, and some coping skills to deal with your own human negative thinking that's just part of us because we came about as a species during some very difficult survival conditions. I'm talking about the Pleistocene, the ice ages, where our human ancestors had to deal with cold, had to deal with privation, had to deal with competition for resources. And so we got a little worry built into us as a survival mechanism, and that's going to get at you. You've got to be able to work with that and deal with it, and there are guidelines in the book for doing just that.

That's awesome, man. Confidence is so important. One thing I've been reading about is when you walk into the room, people notice if you have confidence. There's like a tell that you give off, where just as we're programmed, I think, as a species to notice that. And we recognize that whether we're hardwired to realize it or not, or whether it's our hindbrain in the background seeing it. I tell every leader and every aspiring leader, the first person you got

to lead is yourself. I like that. That's brilliant. Yeah. There's a famous West Point grad, General Becky Halstead, one of the first female West Point grads who became a general officer. That's the title of her book. Lead yourself first. You have to be in control of yourself. You've got to be able to project to your team, whether it's your basketball team,

your sales team, or your board of directors that you're in control of yourself. You got to be able to communicate. That's part of being a leader that if I could be so bold as to say, that's the first condition of being a leader. If you don't have that, nobody's going to follow you with any degree of genuineness. That's true. That's true. This has been great. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. Again,

drnatesinser.com. The title of the book is The Confident Mind, published by HarperCollins. You can buy it wherever books are sold, online or at your friendly neighborhood bookstore. There you go. Thank you very much, Doctor, for being on the show. We certainly appreciate it. Chris, I appreciate the privilege, and it has indeed been a pleasure. The privilege is ours. Thank you very much.

Congratulations on the new book. Folks, order up the book. It's available January 25th, 2022, The Confident Mind, The Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance. You can get it wherever fine books are sold, but only order where the fine books are sold. Stay away from those bookstore alleyways. All that good stuff.

Anyway, guys, thanks for coming by. Be sure to watch the video version of this. You can go to youtube.com for Jess Crisvoss, hit the bell notification button, goodreads.com for Jess Crisvoss, all the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all that good stuff as well. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.