The Mindset Mentor - The Skill of Self Confidence

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

What if confidence doesn’t come first — and competence doesn’t either? In this episode, I break down the Confidence-Competence Loop and why the only way to build either one is through action.  Reveal the hidden patterns shaping your choices, habits, and success. Take my FREE Identity Quiz to discover who you really are and how to break through to the next level.Join here 👉 https://www.identityunlockquiz.com/ My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the mindset mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. Today, we're going to be talking about how to be more confident. And we're going to talk about the process of mastery. I think that one of the beautiful things about being a human is that we can decide what we want to master in my life, in my life, but also your life as well, I guess. I have a tattoo that's on my wrist, I only have two tattoos, but the tattoo that's on my wrist, people always ask me on Instagram when they see it,

what's that tattoo on your wrist? It is a Roman numeral X with a line above it, which is the Roman numeral for 10,000. And the reason why I have this tattoo is because I love the idea of the 10,000 hour rule, which means that if you put 10,000 hours into deliberate practice at something, it usually takes around that, give or take, you know, some hours to master something. And I love that because I love the idea of mastering myself. I love the idea of being a human in deciding that we just want

to be good at something. And as long as we put in the work, we can become good at it. But that requires us to put in the work. So we're gonna be talking about confidence and how to become more confident with that. But we're also gonna be talking about something that's called competence. If you've never used the word competence, it basically is what it means the definition

is having the necessary ability or knowledge or skill to do something successfully. And we're going to dive into something called the confidence-competence loop, which basically means that you become more confident as you become more competent at something, but you also become more competent at something as you get more confidence around that thing. So you look at that, and that's really awesome. I can become more confident at something as my competence gets better with it, but also I become more competent with something because I have more confidence which allows me to

take more action. The challenge in this situation though is when you're brand new at starting something, you are neither one of those things, right? You are not confident that you can do it and you are also not competent in the fact of actually doing it. And so it kind of turns into like the chicken and the egg situation where it's like which one comes first? Does the competence come first or does the confidence comes first? And the answer to that is if you're confident, how do you become competent? And if you're confident, if you're not confident, excuse me, how do you become competent? And if you're not confident, excuse me,

how do you become competent? If you're not competent, how do you become confident? And so the answer to that is neither one of them comes first. They happen together at the same time. What must come first is some form of action. Some form of action that you need to take. And usually what happens to us is at the moment

when we decide to do something that we've never done before, try to improve at something that we're not that good at, we start to realize, okay, I'm not really confident that I can do this. And as I look at my skills, I'm not really competent at this thing. So who the hell am I to think that I could do this? And this is usually where the

imposter syndrome comes in. And we start thinking to ourselves, like, I want to do this thing, but I'm not good enough. I've never succeeded this. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm not, I don't feel confident in myself. I don't feel really competent in my skills. And this is the reason why is because you have to sit there and you have to realize I don't have confidence, I don't have competence, but this is something that I want to get better at. And, you know, I'll give you a really good example. Like when I decided to become a podcaster in 2015, I had the idea to start the podcast in January of 2015, but I had hardcore imposter syndrome. And the reason why I had imposter syndrome is I thought to myself, I'm 29 years old, I've been working on myself for about 10 years at this point,

but why would somebody listen to me when they can listen to Tony Robbins? Because Tony Robbins has been doing this for like 40 years at this point. So I'm like, would they listen to somebody who's never podcasted, barely been out there teaching this stuff, or would they just listen to somebody who's kind of a master at this thing?

Nobody's gonna wanna listen to me. And I thought this for a really long time. I wasn't a confident podcaster before my first episode. I also wasn't a competent podcaster before I started. And so I had the idea to start the podcast in January of 2015, and I waited eight months of ideas of wanting to do it, of thinking to it, before I finally put out my first episode.

I think my first episode was August 21st of 2015. It took me eight months because I did not believe in myself and I did not believe in my abilities. I was not competent and I was not confident. And I'll give you a really good example of something that's been happened in my life recently. So Lauren, my wife, decided she wants to start playing tennis. She's never played tennis before. She's never played any sport or you hit any balls or anything like that. And so she had her first lesson and I hired a guy to come out and teach her for an hour. And she missed, if I'm being honest, like 75% of the balls, like I'm talking about the ball would come at her and she would try to hit it and she would completely miss the ball. And when she did hit the ball, she would launch it into

another court. She will launch it into a different direction. And in she did hit the ball, she would launch it into another court, she would launch it into a different direction, and like 5% of them, of the balls that she was trying to hit, actually landed in the other side of the court. And so she did this, and then she was like, man, that was a lot of fun, I can't wait to do it again. Because she knew she was a beginner, she wasn't comparing herself to like, any of the professionals, She wasn't going, oh my gosh, well, I suck because look at Serena Williams, she's so much better than me. Lauren was thinking to herself in her head,

I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm a beginner. So I should suck at this. And we should suck at things when we're brand new at them, right? And so what happened was then, you know, a few days ago we went to a tennis court and we practiced and I had her to literally just

drop a ball and hit the ball just drop a ball and hit the ball and drop a ball and hit the ball. And it was crazy because she did so much better at hitting the ball than she did in her first lesson. And she became more confident in her abilities as she started to see little tiny bits of improvement. So as her competence to do it got a little bit better, she doesn't think she's a pro at this point, obviously, but she was able to see, oh my gosh, I'm not just missing the balls anymore as much as I was. I'm not launching into other courts.

I still am a little bit, but it's starting to go over the net onto the other side. As she started to get a little bit more competent, she started to get more confidence. And so she became so much better and it gives her more excitement to show up because she can see herself getting better versus not even hopping on the court and saying, oh, I'm just not going to be good at this thing. And as she continues to keep showing up and start

getting a little bit better, she's going to get more confidence. And as she continues to keep showing up and getting a little bit more better, she's going to get more competent. And this is what makes you continue to keep showing up. When you frame yourself as a beginner, and you actually say, I'm not gonna be perfect at this, and I give myself permission to suck, that's when it really starts to become better. And you embrace being a beginner, which we'll talk a little bit more about. But when you keep showing up, you keep improving. And as you keep improving, you start getting more confident in your abilities. And there's actually a lot of studies on this of the competence-competent loop. And there's a study done in 1977 by Albert Bandura on self-efficacy.

And what he found was that individuals with higher competence, you know, the people who believe that they can perform well, are more likely to view difficult tasks as something that, that is, as something that they should tackle so that they can master it rather than something that should be avoided. So as we start to get a little bit more confident and get a little bit more competence, we start to actually tackle the harder things

versus trying to avoid those things. When we don't view it as something that I'm a beginner and I'm trying to get better at, and we don't view it that way, we tend to avoid what is difficult. And so let me give you guys just a couple tips on how to actually build your confidence and your competence as well. The first one that I'll give you is something called deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is huge. I first heard about deliberate practice in a book that I read probably seven or eight years ago that was called Talent is Overrated. And the phrase deliberate practice was created by a psychologist named Anders Eriksson. And he coined the term deliberate practice while he was researching how people become

experts at something. And while studying all of these different experts in different fields, such as people that were masters in science, but people that were also masters at music or people that were masters at a sport. When he was studying his experts from all of these different fields, he was able to completely dismantle the myth that experts have this innate talent built into them. They don't have the talent that's actually built into them. What they have is the talent that's actually built into them. What they have is they've been showing up over and over and over and over and over again, and they've been using deliberate practice.

And so deliberate practice is not just about showing up and being very repetitive. It's about being focused and extremely intentional on the repetition of improving at one specific thing, something specific. So it's the difference between like mindlessly playing a song on the guitar versus meticulously working on something like a challenging solo or a challenging chord transition until you have that part mastered. And so it's not about playing the entire song perfectly, and just being able to go from start to finish. It's about, hey, how can I take the next two bars of music and play them to the best of my abilities and try to master it? And the reason why deliberate practice works is because it pushes you slightly beyond your comfort zone. And when you're slightly

beyond your comfort zone, it shows you and ensures basically that you're always learning and that you're always growing. And the key to this with deliberate practice is that you should be if you're playing guitar, you should be playing something that you can play to your abilities, but is a little bit outside of your abilities. So you should be messing up when you're trying to get better at something with deliberate practice, approximately 15 to 20% of the time. It's not about sitting down and being like, okay, I can play this piece of music.

It's about, hey, I'm gonna play something that's a little bit outside of my abilities, and I'm gonna focus on the parts where I mess up, and I'm gonna focus on them and play them over and over and over again until I don't mess up anymore. And this kind of practice is often really challenging and tends to be very uncomfortable for people,

but this is the real space where your growth actually starts to occur. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And as you become a little bit, you start to overcome a little bit of the challenges and you start to get better at playing guitar and your skills start to grow, your confidence in playing the guitar gets better. And so for me, like I use podcasts as an example, but also another example I can think of off top of my head is like when I first started public speaking, I was terrified and did not

want to hop on stage, but the company that I worked for just kind of three into the fire and said, go for it, go screw it up. And they did it over and over and over and over and over again. And as I started to do it, I noticed I was getting a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better. And so people always ask like, what's the key to being good at public speaking? I'm like, just continue to do public speaking. And eventually you start to say, oh, when I emphasize this word, people tend to get it. Oh, I have to need more voice inflection when I speak versus just speaking very monotone

whenever I'm in front of a bunch of people. And so really what it comes down to is realizing that as you continue to keep showing up, you start getting better. And as you start getting better, you start getting more confident, but you can't have one without the other. And so how you wanna actually use this and implement it

is to figure out something that you wanna get good at. Figure out a specific thing that you wanna get good at. And so it could be tennis, it could be music, it could be understanding the human brain, whatever it might be. What you want to do is identify a specific area that you want to get good at and then figure out something that's in there that's a specific skill set that needs to improve. And then what you do is you break it down into smaller more manageable tasks. So instead of saying I want to learn the entire time Pink Floyd solo, you say I want to learn these two bars and I want to make these two bars of music the best that they can possibly be. And you focus on just those two bars until you have those two bars down. Then you can go to the

next two bars. And so you take something that's longer and you break it down into smaller, more manageable tasks. And then what's really important is if you really want to improve exponentially while you're doing deliberate practice, see if you can hire a mentor or have somebody who's a friend that's better than you at this thing, they can help you get a little bit better.

Because as you start to get better at this, if you have somebody else that's around you that is way outside of your skills set and way better, they can help shorten your learning curve. And so like an example, like I'm not great at tennis. I'm pretty good at it. I used to play with my grandparents when I was younger. And so I know how to hit a tennis ball. I'm pretty good at pickleball. I played baseball for a long time when I was younger so I can hit a ball and play. Right. When I was working with Lauren and we were just trying to

get a little bit better, we never tried any backhands. What we tried, I never even hit any balls to her from across the other side of the court. All I did was I just had her drop a ball and hit it and drop a ball and hit it and drop a ball and hit it and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. Right. And she started getting a little bit better and she started getting a little bit better. And it was interesting because it wasn't like she was actually trying specific things, but it was almost like she would hit a ball. Now it would go way left and she would, her brain would kind of recalibrate and say, okay, that went too far left. She would hit another one and then we'd go too far, right. And her brain would recalibrate.

And then she started hitting them and they were going directly straight over. And she was, she wasn't, she still to this day hasn't even tried to backhand after those two sessions, but she's starting to get a little bit more competent in her abilities to actually hit it over the net and get it into the court. And she's also getting more confident as she's starting to see the ball fly into their side of the court. And as you get better, it's really important that you remind yourself that you're getting better. And so for me, it was really important to her on the ride home to give her positive affirmations in case she wasn't noticing how much better she's gotten.

And so for me, I was like, Oh my God, Lauren, you were, you were so much better this time than last time. And she goes, Oh really? And I was like, yeah, like think about how many balls you missed last time you were in your first session and how they were launching into other sides of the court. Like by the time we left, almost every ball that you were hitting was literally going over to the other side of the court. Like you're actually getting better. And she's like, that's amazing. And she started getting a little bit more confident in herself. What happens now? She wants to keep showing up, right? So this is really important to make sure that you understand the practice of deliberate practice and how to do

it correctly. You should be failing 15 to 20% of the time while you're doing something. So that's the first tip to being more confident and having more confidence as well. The second tip is to start to visualize your success. Using visualization, creating the mental image of what you want to happen, how you want it to feel, and what do you want it to look like. And it's a technique that it's amazing to me, the amount of successful athletes that are coming out and talking about how much they've been visualizing their entire life. Like I was watching the Arnold Schwarzenegger Documentary and he was talking about when he was a kid when he was in Austria He was a teenager like 13 years old and he would but he would rip out

pictures of these guys in magazines that were these bodybuilders and you put him up on his wall right above his bed and Every night he would sit down and he would visualize himself becoming a bodybuilder becoming the number one bodybuilder in the world And what happened he visualizes so much, it ended up happening. And the reason why the visualization process works is because it starts to prime your brain for success. When you repeatedly imagine a successful outcome, you're basically training your brain to believe that it's possible. The belief is the thing that allows you to start taking some action. You can say, yeah, I'm not confident in myself. I don't know what I'm doing, but I believe that I can get better at it.

And it's almost like brainwashing yourself into finally believing in yourself versus constantly believing that you can't do something. And that belief is what makes you more confident. And it makes you more confident that, hey, I'm not good right now, but I can get better at it. And so I'm not good right now, but I can get better at it. And so I'm going to at least try. And then you try and you get a little bit better and you notice your competence getting

a little bit better. And so visualization has been proven to help reduce the anxiety around starting something new or trying something that you've never done before. And it also tends to increase your focus because you actually become more confident through your visualization process. And so it's real simple. Just set aside a few minutes every day and just close your eyes and try to vividly imagine yourself successfully executing that thing that you want to do. Whether it's tennis, whether it's playing guitar, whether it's doing the presentation that you want to do, being on stage in front of a thousand people. You just imagine yourself doing it and because of the fact that your

brain and your body don't know the difference between what's actually truly happening in reality and something that you're visualizing, you're becoming more confident because you're actually, your brain and body actually think that it's something that you're doing. And so really you just try to immerse yourself into what it would be like to be in that situation, to be where you want to be and to succeed. So that's tip number two. And then tip number three, which I kind of mentioned in the beginning,

is to just have a beginner's mindset. Just think about life as being a beginner. When you start, try to go into doing something and really get rid of all of your preconceptions around it. And just go in it like a child, just open and eager and just go in it like a child, just open and eager and just wanting to learn and have fun. The reason why the beginner's mindset works is because you're opening yourself up to new

experiences and learning and you're not just judging yourself for when you fail because you're going to fail anyways. And it really helps you approach challenges because you don't have to think about all of the past failures in your life, or the pressure of trying to become perfect at it. You're just being curious. You're just falling in love with the learning, just having fun more than anything else. Because whenever you approach a task, you can look at it and you can say, oh my God, I don't know if I could do this because there's so many things that I failed in the past. Or you could say, you know what? I'm new. I don't know what the f*** I'm doing, but I'm just gonna go and do it many things that I failed in the past or you could say, you know what? I'm new.

I don't know what the f*** I'm doing, but I'm just going to go and do it anyways. And I'm just going to just try to be like a child. Just try to have fun. Try to have no preconceptions around this, no judgments around it, any of that stuff. I'm just going to be curious. I'm going to ask questions. I'm going to be open to being a sponge, to new perspectives, to learning new methods and then be open to just messing up over and over and over again.

Because it's really important to remind yourself, whenever you're starting something new, you're going to suck at it. One of my favorite phrases that I came up with is, fuck it up and figure it out. Like just be okay with just fucking everything up, and then just getting a little bit better. Because that's what life comes down to,

is if you're not gonna allow yourself to be a beginner, you're never going to be a master. I think there's a phrase that says if you don't allow yourself to be a foolish beginner and to mess up everything, you will never be a graceful master. Messing up is the process of becoming better at something. And so really what it comes down to is if you want to start becoming confident at something, you have to build your competence in it. But in order to build your competence in it, you also have to start being a little bit

more confident in it. And what it comes down to is allowing yourself to be new, to be a beginner. Don't tell yourself you're an imposter. Don't judge yourself compared to somebody else. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday and continue to remind yourself of the incremental improvements which happen to help you get a little bit more confident, which makes you show up again. And as you show up again, you try something new and try a little bit outside of your comfort zone and you get a little bit more competent.

And this loop happens over and over and over again. And really what it comes down to is you just deciding that you want to seek mastery at something in your life, which is one of the most amazing parts about being a human is that you can master anything that you want to master. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it, Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And with that, I'm gonna leave the same way I leave you every single episode.

Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.