The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 86 - How To Turn Your Fear Into Fuel: James Smith

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Rather than looking for shallow reasons to change your life, in this moment James Smith asks you to examine your ‘pain points’. Whether it is in fitness or business, James believes that we should draw on our deep rooted problems or fears and transform them into lasting motivation that will fuel us through the difficult improvements we have always wanted to make in our lives. As expectations influence outcomes, James says that it is crucial to break away from societies fear of failure and change our internal narratives and perceptive and adjust towards optimism. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/8UhGwGTkpvb James: https://twitter.com/jamessmithPT_?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor https://www.instagram.com/jamessmithpt/?hl=en Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. In the start of this book, in chapter chapter one you investigate this idea of pain points as it relates to confidence what do you mean by pain points so we could look at this in the form of sales as well so i cannot sell to someone unless i understand their pain points and i use an analogy that probably is the one i've had most experience with with people in the gym they come

they sit down hi james i want to get fitter I want to lose a bit of weight. I want to tone up. And I'm like, that's not really what you want. That's not a pain point. That is a knee jerk reaction to what you think I want to hear. And when you delve a bit deeper, they go, my husband stopped fucking me. You know, every time I stand up in a meeting, I've got to pull my top down over the layers of flab that I have. I don't feel confident in areas of my life that I should because I'm so crippled by the confidence I have with my physique. I'm not taken seriously. The pain points are deep and people need to draw on those because the day that you're getting out of bed and you feel like shit and you're tired and you want to give up, I want to be toned isn't going to do it. The fact that your real pain point is that you're lonely and you're getting older and you're worrying about the fact you might not find a compatible companion ever that is a strong enough pain point

for you to change being more toned isn't so interestingly for some you know i know people that are in that exact same situation and i've debated for many a year whether someone's you know the situation you described that i'm getting older'm lonely, I'm scared I'll be alone forever. I know people in that exact same situation that are exhibiting the fear of the consequences of a lifelong loneliness, but they still don't do anything about it. Is there such thing as like wanting to want to be someone? I'm not sure to answer your question, but one of the things I would say to that person is you're in the and i'm only using this an example i think dating is an analogy i love to use i actually use it when i talk about business talks i say marketing is like dating you know and we

won't get down that too much but you look at the person at the bar you you feel the fear rather than counting down from five five four three two one three, two, one. Oh my God, I've got the confidence. Let me go talk to them. They could instead just for a flash of a moment, just think to themselves, I'm lonely. I don't want to be lonely. What out of these two things is more uncomfortable for me? The idea of going another week, another month being single or the idea of talking to a stranger. And surely when you add and level those two things up, the pain point of being lonely should be much worse than the pain point of talking to a stranger. If you feel undervalued at work, the idea of talking to your boss and expressing how you feel, that's a pain point. You're like, you know, that's gonna make me feel uncomfortable. But then the pain point of feeling undervalued and not being given

the bonus you were promised a year ago, you level them up and you're like, there's always two directions in which you can go. And you've tweeted and mentioned this before. You say saying nothing is still saying something. Doing nothing is still doing something. And they also say, whatever you're not changing, you're choosing. And these are really important because that person, and again, same analogy, whatever it is, when you're at that place of feeling that you don't have enough confidence it's actually a crossroads it's a left and a right it's a dichotomy of action and inaction and if you are controlled by fear and you don't muster the courage to do what you need to do

especially by using the pain points to motivate yourself you are choosing inaction by doing nothing that is a choice and people just seem to think that, you know, not starting the passion project, not posting or expressing something on social media. They seem to think if they do nothing, that it's a void in our reality, but it's not. It's still a choice of an action.

I used to think of like, people ask me about confidence a lot and it's taken me quite some time to develop my thoughts on it because, you know, when you, I think level one of the confidence self-help guru is like, look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you love yourself. Like that's like step one. And then eventually, hopefully your thinking progresses when you find the holes in that thinking. And then I arrived at the conclusion that confidence, as we kind of like say it, talk

about it in culture, I know there's multiple definitions and lots of nuance, but confidence as we describe it in culture is really just, um, is based on the evidence you have in yourself. Like all beliefs are based, are evidence-based, subjective, correct or incorrect evidence. And therefore, if it is evidence-based, the only way to build your confidence is to go and get evidence. And therefore, if it is evidence-based, the only way to build your confidence is to go and get evidence. And I say this because there's a lot, there's a narrative that you can just kind of like write down in your book or look yourself in the mirror and say, I'm going to be confident, I'm going to be sexy, I'm going to be a millionaire, which I don't think is factually supported by how other beliefs work. So confidence, so when I started writing the book, I wasn't think is factually supported by how other beliefs work.

So confidence. So when I started writing the book, I wasn't sat there like, I know everything about confidence. I was sat there going, I couldn't answer. If you were to say, James, what is confidence? When I start writing, I go, I don't know. So that's why I was so excited about writing it. But one of the interesting kind of ways that I wrote about it, and one of the points was, if you imagine confidence on a spectrum with anxiety on one end and confidence on the other, anxiety is predicting failure and confidence is predicting success. And that is a really important thing to think about because our expectations massively influence the outcome

of things. And like you say there, if people just go into a room and go, I'm, you know, I'm amazing. I'm whatever. It's not really going to work. Even as one of your previous guests said about interrogative self-talk, asking yourself questions is a more positive thing. Instead of saying, I can do this podcast today and do well. I asked myself, can you do well in this podcast today? And the answer, you know what I did all right in the last one, it got a lot of downloads. So it is one of those things that is in so many different spectrums and it has so many different meanings, but a lot of it points towards predicting success and things. And even if you don't have the evidence to predict success, we should be able to be wrong. If there's something I want to accomplish, I can't let my mind and my thoughts take over.

I must, in some sense, be overconfident and predict success. But if I'm wrong, that's fine. But what I can't do is just set every single default to being, this isn't going to work. Because if you don't think something's going to work, you're already tripped at the first hurdle. And there's a guy, David Robson, who wrote a book called The Expectation Effect. And in that book, they got a group of people, I can't remember how big the study was, but they lied to them and said, this group have got a gene that is going to hinder their turnover of oxygen, and this group over here doesn't. And they got them to perform fitness tests. And the people that were told they had this gene mutation performed a lot better than the other people who didn't.

And even just being primed with a lie completely changed their output in a fitness test. So schools don't teach confidence. Society doesn't really breed confidence because although on one hand, confidence is essential for innovation, if we don't have confident people, you know, Elon Musk,

he was confident enough to say, that rocket, we could land it back on earth. people know you know you're crazy but society doesn't care if you're confident or not society doesn't care if you talk to that person or not society doesn't care if you get a pay rise no one in the world is going to come along and care about your levels of confidence it's something we need to do ourselves on in that example of them priming to you know there's been two groups and they tell one of them a lie and then the one that believes that they have a genetic advantage

performed better, right? Yeah. So is that not the case then for lying to yourself? So fake it till you make it. I don't particularly like that terminology and in the book I write about it because what's your metric of success in that? To fake it until you get recognition for something.

I think with that and with the book and with expectations, you've got manifestation and the placebo effect and they're intertwined, but they're both separate. So manifestation, I think is a very dangerous thing where people think, oh, I'm just gonna think about success. You know, I'm gonna meditate about success. I'm gonna get it. But then things like the placebo effect is also a powerful thing.

Sham surgeries that were performed on people, they would be cut open. They would do nothing. They'd stitch them back up. And up to 50% of people reported feeling better. That's crazy. When people take, or 30% of people that took the vaccine in the trials that were given the no vaccine felt ill afterwards because they thought they were going to feel ill. I've seen as well, I didn't put this one in the book so I couldn't find the study, the size of the pill you take as a painkiller, even with placebos can impact the levels of pain that people, you know, report disappearing. So although we can't say, you know, I'll just, you know, pretend you're going to be confident, pretend all of this.

In the same sense, we do need to instill a level of belief in ourself that we are able to accomplish stuff. And if we try and we falsify that optimism and it doesn't work out, we create another building block to step on. And behind everyone who's an expert in anything, there is a level of mastery and failure is put in such a negative light in society but failure is the most cases the pathway to development so even if we do you know point the dial towards optimism if things don't go right that's fine we're allowed to be wrong we're allowed to make mistakes you're allowed to try that endeavor that you want and for it to all fuck up i think that i was just thinking about that then the i guess the difference is with the placebo effect, you don't know that it's a lie. Whereas if I

looked at myself in the mirror and said, you are in fact Jesus Christ, I would know that that was a lie. And so I guess, you know, the placebo effect stuff can work. And even in that operation, they didn't know they were being lied to. In those two control groups where one of them believed they had a genetic advantage, they thought it was was true the problem is we can't actually lie to ourselves and the the example I always give sometimes when I speak about confidence on stage is like if I had your mum in a headlock and I was pointing a gun at her and I said you have to believe I'm Jesus or she dies everything's on the line and all you could do is pretend you couldn't actually believe I was Jesus if everything was on the line you could only blow pretend. You couldn't actually believe I was Jesus. If everything was on the line, you could only believe. And so that for me was the clearest evidence I needed that I can never

really lie to myself about who I am. It doesn't have to be a lie as it could be even just a change in narrative. So I remember so many times throughout my life, just before I was about to go on a date with a stranger, which I found incredibly daunting. It's one of the reasons that I drank on dates for the first 25 years of my life. But that voice in your head, you don't have to light yourself, but the voice in your head goes, what if this is the worst date I'll ever go on? But all you need to do is change that to say, what if this is the best date I'll ever go on? That's all I'm saying. And that is a change in expectations. It's a different change in thought. It's a different perspective on your reality that's upcoming.

I don't think we should ever lie to ourselves, but we should at least turn the dial towards optimism because we are inherently pessimistic with our biases.