The Resilient Mind - The Science of Confidence: Rewiring Your Brain For Success - Simba Nyazika

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

In this episode, we explore how transforming your thoughts to increase your confidence with Simba, an accomplished confidence and communication coach. With over a decade of experience and a strong educational background in Neuroscience and Psychology, Simba brings a deep understanding of the human mind to his coaching. His expertise, honed through 10 years as a Behaviour Consultant using evidence-based protocols, equips him to help individuals overcome social anxiety and enhance their communication skills. Simba's results-oriented coaching style ensures positive outcomes, whether you're looking to improve public speaking or achieve personal growth.Download the worksheet: https://bit.ly/download-belief-worksheet Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠Download Mindset App for free and listen to 5000+ of the World's Greatest Motivational Speakers and Thought Leaders: https://bit.ly/mindsetxTheResilientMind  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to The Science of Confidence, Rewiring Your Brain for Success with Simba Nazica. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. The OOV today is we are going to introduce the idea of our confidence, what it is, to ensure that we've got the same starting point, how you can actually start understanding and framing confidence in a way that will help you be better. able not only to understand it, but to be able to achieve it. We are going to look at some of the definitions of some of the terms that are related to confidence such as self-esteem or self-image

and get a solid understanding of how all those psychological terms do relate to each other. I'm going to be talking about the barriers to confidence and, of course, how to overcome those barriers. So one of the things we have to think when we talk about the sense of confidence, is really asking what confidence is. And sometimes a lot of people will come and be like, oh, I lack confidence in public speaking. I lack confidence in dating. I love confidence in being a leader.

But we don't really necessarily have an idea of what confidence is and how it differs from self-image. So confidence, the definition, is that it is the belief in yourself that you are able to accomplish a specific task. they believe in yourself that you are able to accomplish a specific task. And this definition is very important because that belief is related to a specific task that you want to accomplish. So, for example, as you are listening to this, most of you, I think, would agree that you are confident in your ability to walk,

you are confident maybe in your ability to ride, in your ability to drive a car, in your ability to or some of you to cook. And so all these examples, all these context, those are areas that most of you will feel really confident in. And so one might argue that if you are confident in, let's say, ability to walk, that means you don't lack any confidence because in that context you are confident. But what a lot of people actually mean when they say that they lack confidence is that they're actually referring to their self-image, their self-esteem,

how they feel about their ability in specific situations. So confidence is context-dependent, while your self-image is a little bit more general. So if I was to ask you, again, how confident are you in your ability to drive a car? Most of you to your license will raise your hand up and be like, yes. But if I ask you, how confident are you in your ability to be able to fly a plane? Most of you, unless you're a pilot, will say, when I'm not confident. Your self-esteem, on the other hand, in terms of how you see you, yourself, how you feel about yourself, right?

Mike is not going to differ regardless of those contexts. So if I ask you about the car, you're going to be like, well, I have a healthy self-esteem. I see myself as a person who's capable, who's able to learn things, who's able to be able to embody new experiences. So if you put me in a car, how they're able to do that? No problem. If you put me in a plane, I'll be curious. I'll be like, okay, I can't do this, but I know that I've got the capacity to learn.

So you won't actually feel bad about yourself when you're trying to. to fly a plane because you know that you lack the skill and it's not going to impact how you feel about yourself. So even though we are going to be using these two terms interchangeably, it is very important that when people talk about lacking confidence or not feeling good about themselves, not feeling that they're enough, they're really talking about their self-image, how they see themselves and their self-esteem, how they feel about themselves. And being able to address those concepts is going to help you feel good. good about yourself, regardless of the situation that you go into.

And so if your situation is public speaking, if you've got a healthy, positive self-image and self-esteem, you might be a little bit hesitant about doing it, but your self-image is not going to end up having you freak out about doing it. You'd be like, okay, so I don't know how to do this. What do I need to learn? What are the steps do I need to do for me to be successful in this? Well, if you're just strictly focusing on confidence or if you don't, you don't, don't have a healthy self-image, then you might just shy away from it and avoid it at all

cost, of which of course we know that public speaking is one of the biggest fears that people do have. And so understanding this is very important, but also taking it a step further, we really want to think about the idea of self-esteem and where it came from. And so originally the concept was actually discovered by Dr. Maxwell-Miles in the 1950s, Iberts. leave, and he was a plastic surgeon. And what he realized when he provided a lot of his patients with corrective surgery, which meant that, let's say, a person was in an accident, and their nose was deformed with their scars on their face, and they came to him for surgery.

Most of the people, once the surgery was completed, felt a boost in their confidence, felt a boost in their self-image. However, there was a small subset of his patients that didn't feel this way, that even if he fixed their nose, for example, and showed them through a mirror that, hey, your nose looks better, they still didn't feel good about themselves. They still felt that, okay, there was something wrong with their face. And so he started reasoning that there is the image that we have, that people have of who we are, and then there's a self-image, this mental model that we also hold of ourselves.

And that self-image guides a lot of our thoughts, a lot of how we see ourselves. how we feel about ourselves, how we show up in relationships, and also how we end up behaving in different situations. And our ability to be able to shift our self-image from a negative or disempowering self-image to a positive one was associated with so many benefits, including changes in children's grades, in which he did one study that he helped students see themselves as a student,

versus F students, and by changing their self-image, those students, without any extra tutoring or any extra support, were able to bring their grades up to an aid. It talks about the part of the self-image in people trying to achieve a healthy weight, in which he talks about how certain people might try to, let's say, lose weight as an example, but they don't actually change their self-image.

So they'll do everything right that they need to change, behaviorally, but because the self-image is not changed, they'll lose the weight and then they'll gain it again. They'll lose the weight and then they'll gain it again. Because the self-image is what was in forming where they believed their weight was supposed to be. And so without changing the way they saw themselves, the external changes in their behavior and their results always ended up going back to where their self-image was. And so if we want to change how we show up, If we want to change anything about our health, our finances, our conditions in life, one of the things we need to ponder and consider is how do we see ourselves?

What is the self-image that we hold of ourselves? Do we see ourselves as someone who is worthy of love, worthy of success? Do we see ourselves as someone who is a leader, someone who deserves to have a good relationship, someone who is enough in terms of their got the capacity to learn what they need, need to learn. Or do we see ourselves as someone who's not worthy, someone who's not lovable, someone who's not respectable? And so the way we see ourselves right now might be subconscious, but pondering on those questions can actually start helping you, start thinking about, okay,

how am I seeing myself? How is it impacting myself image and how I feel about myself? And then how is it impacting how I end up showing it? I believe all of you are here because there's an aspect of yourself, even if you do have a healthy self-image, that you want to boost it a little bit further. And so I won't be talking about this a little bit further as we move forward, but do keep in mind that when I say confidence and self-image and I use them interchangeably, what I'm really talking about and the tools that are going to be talking about is how can we start changing the way we see ourselves so that we can feel more confident regardless of the situation that we are in. So for us to understand why we are the way we are, we have to take a few steps back or go

a few years back to have an understanding about this idea of paradigms. Parodons are basically subconscious and some of them can be conscious beliefs that we developed pretty early on in our childhood. So between the ages of zero and seven, all of us were very suggestible. And basically what that means is that everything that happened from 0 to 7 went straight into our subconscious map. So how we see ourselves, how we feel ourselves today is based on how our parents and the people around us responded to us. And if we grew up in an environment that was positive or generally positive, then we generally have a healthy self-image about ourselves which makes us feel confident about ourselves in a different situation.

If we grew up in an environment that was not so positive, then we might have beliefs or paradigms that are unhealthy in relation to ourselves, which impact how we see ourselves, our self-worth, our value that we put ourselves. And even though we might conceptually know that maybe we are valuable or that maybe we've accomplished all these things in our life, there might be a feeling inside that maybe we don't deserve this, or we might feel like an imposter in our jobs or in our communities because there's a part of us that doesn't quite feel like it's right

or that we deserve it. And the reason why there's usually that disconnect is because that paradigm, that belief system, based on the experiences we had as children, is still activated, is still playing out within our minds. And our beliefs will be able to understand and become aware of it can allow us to start to reshaping that belief system so that we can actually start changing how we see and feel about ourselves.

It is important that we are aware that as children and all children, we have two primary psychological needs, right? We have other physical needs, but we're going to focus on these two primary psychological needs because they impact our confidence and how we're going to be showing up in our life. The first need is the need for attachment. And we've all heard this need in terms of attachment styles. So talking about secure attachment, anxious, avoidance, ambivalent, all those attachment styles are related to this psychological need

for the need for attachment that we have as a child. So the need for attachment is the need to feel loves, to feel connected, to feel that you are surrounded by people that care for you. The second psychological need is the need, is the need for authenticity. This is the need to connect to how we feel and to be able to express ourselves authentically based on how we are feeling.

Now, most of us, myself included, we quickly learned that our need for attachment and our need for authenticity were incongruent, which means that within our household, both of them could not be expressed. And so whenever we tried to be authentic, let's say we spoke back to our parents or we swore or when we're frustrated, we set boundaries.

We quickly, either consciously or subconsciously, through our caregiver's response, learned that we can not express our authenticity. Some cultures, again, you get punished or speaking up or speaking against what an elder say. If you don't pass, if you're struggling with the course, everyone around, you might start saying that you have failure. And so we learned to suppress that need for authenticity

because we did not want to sacrifice our need for attachment because we already knew as kids that our caregivers were very important to our survival. And if we were to lose that attachment that we had with them, we would not have been able to take care of ourselves. So many people have learned over the years to suppress their need for authenticity city in order to maintain that need for attachment. And based on, again, how healthy the environment was, if it was healthy, you have a secure attachment, not only with yourself, but with the people around you.

If you ended up developing the other attachment styles, avoidant, dismissive, any of those other attachment styles, that means something in your environment might have hindered your ability to create that secure attachment. and so you still need that attachment, but now how that attachment showed up in your young age is influencing how you're showing up in your relationship,

especially those relationships that are close to us, such as those romantic relationship. The reason why I'm saying this as being important, our self-image, our confidence is very correlated to our ability to be ourselves, our ability to be able to express ourselves. So if we've been suppressing that need for authenticity for 20, 30, 50, 70 years, and now we want to learn how to start expressing it, it's going to feel a little bit uncomfortable.

It's going to feel out of our comfort zone. And that's totally okay, and we are going to talk a little bit about that. But we realize that those two psychological needs from a young age are always going to be needs that we have as adults. So as a doubt right now, if we have not addressed that need for authenticity, and we are still sacrificing our need for authenticity for that need for attachment, then our current relationships might not feel valuable, may not feel meaningful, may not feel deep towards us because we are always going to be engaging in things, in behaviors that are going to, or lack of a better word,

we are going to be people pleasing with the people around us who are afraid to say no or are afraid to be ourselves because you are afraid of what people think. And so if that is you are going to be talking about how to start breaking that or shifting that a little bit further. So your need for attachment, which we can get rid of,

is going to be there, but we're going to start elevating that need for authenticity so that you can start becoming comfortable, not only connecting to your emotions, because that's the first part, being able to connect to how you're feeling, the thoughts that you're having, but also to start being able to express that. And so I really mentioned that it might be a little bit uncomfortable when you start doing it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the people around you may not be too happy about that, but it's important to realize that even though there might be discomfort, even though there might be resistance from the people around you, as you start working on this and as you start improving your need for authenticity, it is also a lot of, going to allow you to create space to create more meaningful relationships with the people around you. One of the things I hear quite a bit is that people feel a lack of connection to the people around them. And one of the big reasons is that they've suppressed their need for authenticity so much that when they meet people that will resonate with them, those people

don't even recognize that individual because they are trying to act in ways that is expected of them based on their past condition. So we spoke in the previous slide that, again, how we see ourselves and how we feel ourselves, the relationship we have with ourselves and the relationship based on others is based on our beliefs, our paradigms that we're created from an early age. And with this, think about it this way. How we see ourselves has been based on our environment. And so our environment has been shaping how we think and how we feel.

This is not stopped. In today's society, as we speak right now, we are undergoing thousands, if not millions, of different inputs that are coming towards us that are still conditioning us, shaping how we see and feel about ourselves. And so we need to start thinking about, okay, so how is our current environment

influencing or conditioning how we see ourselves? Because most of the things that are in our environment, right now are pretty much disempowering. They don't make you feel good about yourself. And most of this is actually done on a more subconscious level. And I'm going to give you an example about that. Most of advertising shapes their product around you needing their product to fuel a certain way. So if it's a makeup brand, it's going to be, say, something along the lines,

all beautiful with brand X. What it is telling you on a subconscious level is that without buying our product, you are not beautiful. And some products, some car brands will be like, oh, enjoy freedom. And so they've got their car outside in the forest going through different terrains. And then they're like, if you buy our car, you're going to feel free. The subconscious messaging there is that without our car, you're not. not going to feel this emotion. And so we have to realize that there is a lot of information out there that is influencing how we see ourselves and is telling us that for us to feel a specific

way, we have to get something from the external environment. For us to feel confident in our beauty, we have to get this beauty product. For us to feel confident in our dressing, we have to get this tuxedo or this dress. For us to feel confident in whatever this, this, you know, This is, we have to get this from the external environment. And this is happening on an ongoing basis. And so the framework to start shifting is you can continue being exposed to this mental conditioning or you can start becoming aware of it and start asking yourself, do you want to leave the conditioning to an organization or a company?

Or do you want to take control of that conditioning process? because when you start choosing to take control of that conditioning process, then it's actually going to start influencing how you feel. And how do you take control of that conditioning process? One of the simple steps is to actually start choosing the information and the people that you're around. You being here today, I know I should probably not say this or listening to this. You being here today are being mentally conditioned by listening to me.

the condition is an ongoing thing. So I'm actually mentally conditioning you based on the information that I'm presenting to you. Now, because now you are aware of that, you can be a little bit more conscious whether you want to accept this information or you want to reject that information. But do keep in mind that any person you listen to,

any new source, any media outlet that you're listening to is on some capacity conditioning you. And the question is, conditioning going to empower you or is that condition going to disempower you? And the next thing is, again, what kind of conditioning can I start creating so that I can start feeding my mind things that are positive and that are going to help elevate my confidence level? And so with this, it is important to realize that again, with all the information are being exposed to and everything that has happened in our past that we have remembered or even some of these things.

stuff that is in our subconscious mind that we might not remember, but we might have strong emotional responses to, our brain is basically a record of the past. It is a record of every single experience that we have had. And so when we remember that we'll reinforce that pattern, when we experience the same media outlet, we'll reinforce that pattern. When we are around the same people, we reinforce that pattern. When we engage in self-talk, where we say, I'm not good in. enough or no one will ever like me or what don't good things ever happen to me. End of that self-talk. We are reinforcing that neural pattern.

But our brains are very plastic. They are very dynamic. They are never actually just static. And what I mean by that is it's not like your muscle fiber that once it's developed, then it stays constant. And then if you work it out, then the muscle fiber grows bigger. our brain is always going to have these connections that are going to change based on the thoughts and the emotions that we are going to be having. So by you listening to me, your brain is actually learning something new, learning a new piece of information, learning a new perspective.

And that new piece of information is actually creating thousands of new synapses in your brain. I'm going to play this video, which is going to show you exactly. what is happening in your brain when you learn something new. But this is a neuron, something new is happening, it's going to create those extensions, dendrites, and then boom, it connects with another. You learn something new, your brain is actually changing when you are learning anything positive or negative.

And so there's a lot of research to show that when we learn something new, I believe it's almost like 24,000 new synaptic connections are created. after something new is learned. But if we do not review that material in the next 24 to 48 hours, those new neuronal connections that were created will actually start pruning again.

And they'll go back to their old structure. So learning something new is great, but you should also find a way to reinforce that information so that you can actually maintain that neural structure that you have created. I don't know if there are any geniuses here or genesis listening, but most of us when we have an exam that we have coming up, we will never read something once and be like, okay, boom,

I read it once, I remember it, I'm ready for the exam. For us to actually retain that information, we have to study, we have to read it again and again and again and again, so that the new neuronal pathways that we are creating are reinforced long enough for us to actually write the exam and be successful. When it comes to confidence or how we see ourselves or our self-image, we have to realize that when we learn something new, when we do something different,

when you start changing the way we think, we are also going to create those new connections. But we have to engage and make them a habit so that we can actually maintain them. Otherwise, you learn them. Feel good maybe for a few, a short amount of time, and then end up going back to that default way of feeling and thinking. So think of an area in your life right now that you want to improve.

So we are here talking about confidence. But if you think like, okay, so let's say I have low confidence because I think that I'm not good enough, or I think that I'm not worthy or no one likes me, that again happened from a young age. That foundation was created and maybe I reinforced it by thinking that way, which impacted how I'm feeling. And because I showed up in my different relationships in that way,

I've had additional evidence to show me that I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy. And so I've practiced that neuronal pathway for years, right, depending on your age, it might be 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And that neuronal pathway has become a habit. And a habit is something that we can do without thinking. It's automatic. So maybe it's okay.

practiced the feelings of not feeling like I'm enough so many times that when I wake up, I don't even have to think about it. The second I wake up, I feel crappy. The second I wake up, I feel anxious because that pathway has been activated on an ongoing basis. And so we have to, A, on one end, realize that we have that neuronal network that we have developed over years and years of repetition, and that neuronal network also has an associated chemical environment in your body. So if I feel like I'm not good enough, I'm usually, that means I feel down, I might feel anxious when I'm in different situations, those feelings are created based on the emotions in my

body. Most of the time, they're stress hormones. So maybe I'll end up having nine levels of cortisol. high levels of epinephrine if I'm an anxious person. And so on one end, you repeat that neuronal pathway to the point that it becomes a habit and well-ingreding your brain. And then on the other end, your brain gets so used to that chemical environment that when you start trying to change, it almost feels addicted to it.

It almost feels like, okay, this change feels so uncomfortable. I'd rather feel bad because it's familiar for me than change and feel good. And so there are two areas that you want to think of changing when you start becoming more confident or changing yourself image. On one end, we want to change our current neuronal pathway and we'll talk about that a little bit later. And then on the other hand, we have to teach our body

to become comfortable with a different chemical environment. And so with the tools that we're going to start covering is once you start applying the tools, So let's say one of the tool is changing yourself talk or something that is commonly known as affirmations or in some contexts they call it auto suggestion. When you start changing the way you talk to yourself, that might not feel comfortable, right?

So if you feel like you're not enough and then you start saying, I'm enough, it almost feels like you're lying to yourself because you're like, that doesn't feel right. And the reason why it doesn't feel right because what you're actually doing is you're now creating a different neuronal system to replace the one that you've currently been activating.

And so anything we do by habit feels comfortable, feels natural, even when it's not serving us, or even when the behavior is not giving us to results that we want. And to illustrate this, if you're not driving, I'm going to get you to just cross your arms. So everyone just cross your arms right now. And once you've crossed your arms, notice whether you put the left arm on top or the right arm on top.

So notice which one's on top, which one's on the bottom. Perfect. Now that you've noticed it, I want you to switch the arms. So the one on the top, you're going to put it on the bottom, and the one on the bottom you're going to put it on top. How does that feel? For most people, it's going to feel a little bit awkward, a little bit uncomfortable.

And this, again, is illustrating that when you start changing what we're doing, what we're thinking, how we're feeling, there is going to be a little bit of discomfort associated with them. And so when you start implementing these tools that we're going to be talking about, expect some discomfort. Expect that it might not feel natural. But the repetition of these tools and those behaviors is going to reinforce, a, that neuronal pathway that you are creating based on you doing something different

and to the hormonal environment, the chemical environment within your body. And so with that repetition, with that practice, is going to start shifting what's going on within your body. And eventually, with that repetition, with that practice, you actually start replacing those synaptic connections to be something a little bit more empowered and is going to change and be mirrored within your body by changing that chemical composition.

An example of this is, let's say, someone has got a lot of anxiety, right? The person has been suffering from anxiety for whatever the reason, right? So they've been suffering for anxiety. anxiety for 20 years and they decide that, okay, I want to overcome my anxiety so that I can become a more confident person. Initially, when they start changing the way their thinking is going to feel uncomfortable, when they start doing things that they are avoiding is going to feel uncomfortable. But that repetition is going to start changing again, the neuronal pathos in their brain,

but with anxiety, there's a lot of stress hormones associated with it. So the cortisol, the epinephrine that are usually elevated are going to start decreasing and reducing. And the more confidence hormone are going to start increasing. So hormones such as testosterone will start increasing. And so as that person starts changing and implementing the strategies, their body starts getting used to a different chemical environment. And if you keep continuing, you'll get to a point that it is possible for you to have the habit of being confident, the habit of feeling good,

the habit of having a body in a state that is calm, in a state that is confident, in a state that is assured, but it's going to require you to be conscious about the process. Because in addition to what you've already talked about, again, having done it for all these years, but you have to keep practicing and getting used to that chemical environment so that you end up becoming used to it and making it into a habit

of creating a new chemical environment. I can tell you this right now that it is very possible to wake up in the morning feeling absolutely confident. It is very possible to wake up feeling excited about the challenges in your life. And one of the techniques that I use I didn't put it in the slides,

but I'll talk about it right now, is the idea that even when we are facing situations that might make us feel anxious or make us feel not confident. Changing your perception in terms of, okay, I don't want to do this situation. By changing your mindset around that, you say that this is an opportunity for me to practice being confident. This is an opportunity for me to practice being assertive or maybe not eliminate 100% like those are more negative feelings, but it allows you to address.

or to meet that challenge with a different perspective. And so when you start seeing some of those challenges in your life or things that you're avoiding as opportunities to practice, then that is also a mental tool that can help you be better able to address them. And so, yeah, there's a comment here. So part of that is also unlearning, right, unlearning what you've learned before. And out of the unlearning process as well is

sometimes people will be like, I guess, want to stop doing this. and the best way to unlearn something is to replace it. So a lot of these tools is not necessarily about stopping something, but that is the goal, but is to find a way to replace it and create a new neuronal system or neural network that is going to replace the old pathway. I love this quote from Albert Einstein, which says we cannot solve our problem

with the same thinking we used to create that. And so part of this is just again, that a lot around confidence and being able to change it is going to revolve around us changing how we think. So what are some common barriers to confidence? Again, there are more barriers than this, but these are the main ones that a lot of people face. Number one, the first one is self-doubt.

Self-doubt is simply the idea that I am not enough, right? I'm not smart enough. I'm not good-looking enough. I'm not tall enough. Any version of I'm not enough is an example of self-doubt. And the reason why you might feel self-doubt, again, we can look at our early childhood. If that was something that we might have experienced, we can look at maybe the mental conditioning that we might have experienced. Where for you to feel good about yourself or to feel good about your life, you have to meet certain requirements.

Right now, like again, there's a lot of, if you are in the entrepreneurship space, right, you need to be working hard. making a million, going for an IPO, all that, all those components. And if you are unsure about how you're able to get there, or if you are not at the level that you think you are, then you might end up engaging in self-doubt where you feel like, oh, maybe I'm not smart enough, maybe I'm not cut out for this. The next one is self-criticism.

And self-criticism is simply, I don't like myself. Comments like, I hate myself. Why don't, why doesn't anyone love me? Why am I so stupid? Any form of that self-talk is examples of self-criticism. And again, because when we engage in that self-talk or when we have that belief system, it's going to have, again, the associated chemical environment within your body. You self-doubt, self-criticism, all those have also got a chemical environment within your body.

The final thing is comparing ourselves to other people. Most of us sometimes we assume that other people are doing much better than they're actually doing. Because social media allows people to basically show the highlights, the highs in their life and then hide the context in which they are actually living. Maybe some of the not-so-good things that are happening. And so sometimes you might end up comparing ourselves to other people and think that we are not where we are supposed to be in life and that will make us feel bad about ourselves.

But if we are aware that comparing ourselves to other people is some that might impact our confidence, and this is usually easier say than done, start comparing ourselves to who we were yesterday so that we know that we are on our own path, we have our own things we want to achieve, and the way that we're going to achieve those and accomplish that, the timing of that is going to be our own.

Some people might do it quickly, some people might do it slower, but we have our own, our way that we're going to be able to accomplish that. So think about the barriers of confidence. think about yourself and ask yourself, do you sometimes engage in some of these barriers? And then with the tools, we're going to be talking about how to start overcoming those barriers. Before, we can even go into those tools. One of the foundational thing that I would recommend we all work on practicing and becoming more unsplentening is our ability to consciously control our attention.

And what I mean by this is our ability to focus on certain things, not only in our environment, but within our body. The reason why this is important is what we are focusing on in the moment is going to influence what we are thinking, is going to influence how we're feeling, and ultimately is going to influence how we are going to behave. So if we continuously focus on the negative things in our life, if we continuously focus on what we did wrong,

or we continuously focus on how not good enough we are, then that's going to have a corresponding emotion and ultimately influence how we are going to behave in our environment. But if we start realizing that our ability to focus is a skill, it's a muscle that we can learn to actually start mastering and consciously control, then our ability to strengthen this muscle is going to make it so much easier to implement the tools that are going to be talking about that will allow you to develop a more positive self-image.

And so the practical example for this is, again, if you're not driving, you can participate, is in your environment, look for everything that is brown. So in your environment, look at everything that is brown. Look for brown, everything that is brown encountered. Perfect. Fast. Now, tell me how many things were blue in your environment. how many blue things were in your environment.

Now, if we did this when you're doing the first part, when you're looking for brown things, there's probably a lot of blue things that you ended up missing. But when you started looking for the blue things, you ended up finding more blue things that were in your environment. The reason why we do this is what we focus on, we become aware. And there's a lot of things that has happened in our lives in the past that sometimes we forget to focus on the positive.

aspects of our life, on the things that we've been able to accomplish because we are so focused on our failures or on what did not go well. And so our ability to realize that our attention is very important to be able to master it is very important. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do our first activity, which is called the Confidence Resuming. What I'm going to give you is about two minutes to write down 10 things that make you feel confident about yourself. Ten things that make you feel good about yourself. There could be big things like graduating from school or paying off your mortgage or seemingly small things like I was able to do my workout this morning. I was able to get my kids to school on time. So anything that makes you feel that

of accomplishment, that confidence, write down about 10 things, and then we'll continue in two minutes. But the intention of this activity, like number one, is for us to actually start becoming conscious and directing our attention to the things that are going well in our life, to the things that we might not consider we've been able to accomplish in the past or things that we have forgotten, or maybe we dismiss that these things are not significant, these things are not important. And so part of the challenge, usually a lot of people have for this task, is that we probably, and lots of us have this, myself included, we have practiced self-criticism so much that is our default path pathway. It is easy to write a list of things that are not good about ourselves. It is easy to write a list

about the terms that we messed up or why we might not be worthy because that is the neural network that we have practiced. By writing this confidence resume, what you're doing is like, okay, I've been focusing on this most of my life, but now I'm going to start training my brain to start focusing on some of the positive aspects in my life.

And so if you start taking the confidence resume and you take that as an activity that you do on a daily basis. And what I mean by that is, at the end of every day, add one more thing to the bottom of that confidence resume. Every day.

One thing that makes you feel good and makes you feel confident. And by doing that on a daily basis, basically you're starting to train your brain to focus and also move its attention to things that make you feel good, things that make you feel confident. it. In my program that I did for six months, I had the people that participated in that program

do it for 90 days. 90 days. And what happened is that after day 60, you almost feel like you're running out of stuff. But what it does is that during the day, now you're thinking about it. Okay, what am I going to add? What am I going to add? What am I going to add? And by focusing on what you're going to add on that list, you are not actually thinking about all the disempowering, negative things that you might have been thinking about on an ongoing basis. So for this one, my recommendation is on a daily basis, after work, come back, and then just add one thing. Add one thing for the next 90 days.

And if, and hopefully you get to that 90 days, you will have at least 90 things that you can look back and be like, I've got 90 reasons to feel good about myself. I have 90 reasons to feel confident. And by rereading those reasons, it will app as a reminder for you as well, especially in situations or circumstances that you might not be feeling too good about yourself. And so use that confidence resume as a way not only to train your brain, but to help you start focusing your attention on some of the positive aspects that are happening in your life. The other thing that I wanted to touch on a little bit earlier was one of the other reasons why we have to do this.

this on a conscious level is that our brain, basically our whole biology, is wired for survival. And this means that our brain is very good at remembering things that did not go well or the times that we messed up because it's like, we messed up here, we don't want it to happen again, because if you mess up again, it might influence my survival. Now, the way the brain might interpret this is that if people atroise you, if people are not happy with you. The evolutionary part of our brain is that, well, if they're not happy with me, then I might not be part of their group.

So everything your brain and your body is doing is trying to protect you. Hence, it remembers all the times you messed up. It remembers most of the bad things that took place. And then it tends to disregard all those positive things or dismiss those positive things. And so we want to train our brain to be like, it's okay to actually be looking at these things as well. Like we might not necessarily stop this, but we want to spend the majority of our attention remembering that we have accomplished this.

We have showed up for the things that we wanted to show up. We are on the path of taking the steps in order to start changing our lives and reminding us out on a consistent basis to the point that your brain and those neuronal pathways will be able to activate and be more sensitive to activation, than the default ones that are currently being activated. And so with that, it is also important to become aware of these things that weaken our attention because one of the things that is going to influence how confidence you are is what you're paying attention to.

So anything that weakens your attention makes it more susceptible to be drawn in by things that are happening in the environment. And so if you hear a story about a negative thing happening, whether it's on the news in your community, in your family, and then you're just like automatically drawn in without having it at the very leasty past to be like, okay, do I want to engage in this right now, or should I engage in this on a different time?

Then if our brain is just taken by that attention, then that's going to influence again what we're thinking, what you're feeling, and that will further continue conditioning ourselves in ways that may not be positive towards us. So realize that, again, our devices is amazing, They are, right, really have started weakening our attention. And a lot of the attentional issues and the challenges, a lot of kids are facing today,

are highly correlated with the increased use of our screens. And so there's debate saying, okay, is our screens the cause or what's going on? But our screens have been shown to start to weaken our attention. and they've been designed to allow us to passively taking information in shorter and shorter and shorter bits to the point that sometimes it is difficult for us to maybe even watch something that is long or watch a long podcast because we are like, oh, we need to see something in 30 seconds. If it doesn't grab our attention in 30 seconds, we don't listen to it. If it doesn't grab our attention in 15 seconds, we don't listen to it.

That is a sign that global attention is weakening. And the more it weakens, the more it becomes. susceptible to the external environment. And so become aware of how much you're using, screens are much you're using technology, because that is going to influence how strong that attentional muscle is going to be. What sort of things can you do to weaken to strengthen your attention? So the confidence resume is one. Reading a book.

I don't know when the last time you read a book that is not a novel was, but most of the time I listen to books and I listen to podcasts. when I got a book that I wanted to read, after reading one page, my brain was actually mentally exhausted. It was as if my reading stamina since university had absolutely disappeared. And so being able to read a book

even if it's one page a day allows you again to help consciously attend to something for a certain amount of time. The other thing is writing helps strengthen your attention because when you write something, especially let's say if you practice journaling,

during that time, your attention is on what you're writing. And it also helps you again take your thoughts and put them on paper, which allows you to also be able to clarify what's actually going on in your mind. The third way to strengthen your attention is to meditate. And if you try meditation and you found it really difficult, that's great. That means that, okay, when you sit down and you try to control your mind to focus on your breath, and you realize that your brain is thinking about all these gazillion things, just because you realize that it's thinking about all those things,

or you think it has started thinking about those things, that's not the case. Those things are already going on in your mind. By sitting down and watching your thoughts, you are only becoming conscious of them. And so meditation is a very effective tool because, to be honest, it's not really that exciting, it's not that interesting. Sitting down, closing us for 15 minutes, there's nothing interesting about that. But if you do it on a consistent basis,

basically what you're telling, your thoughts and your body is no, consciously I'm in control, not the thoughts and the motions that want to be moving up and around. I'm in control. We're going to sit down here for the next 15 minutes

and we are going to be in silence. Anytime you feel like looking at your phone, realize that's conditioning. You want to look at the phone because you've been conditioned to do that. You become aware. of those sensations. Become aware of the sensation to want to look at your time or to want to avoid it or to want to cut it short. Become aware of that because as you're meditating,

you're actually becoming now conscious of how your physiology is influencing your behavior about the sensations that you might not actually be aware of that are actually impacting the decisions that you are making. Powerful now, Akhtali is a good one for living in the present moment. And thank you for sharing that, Lisa, because the first time I actually really became aware of the idea of thoughts, and we can do this activity together. It's been 15 years since I read it. But in the path now, is God this idea where he gets people to close his eyes, to close their eyes. So I'll get you all to close your eyes again if you're not driving. And I'm going to take a deep breath in and we're going to breathe out. I'm going to do it again one more time.

breathe in and read out. Now become aware of the first thought that pops into your head. Open your eyes. How many of you had a pause between, when I said become over the first thought, had a pause and then the first thought came up. Did anyone have a pause between those, that statement? And that was also similar to what happened with me. like it went blank for like just a few seconds before I became aware of those thoughts.

And one of the things Eckhart Toller says is that again, we are not our thoughts, right? We are the observer of our thoughts and that space, that blackness is actually who you are. And so with meditation, we can actually increase that blank space to go to a place where there is no thought. And the implications they are very powerful, which are not, which are beyond what we're talking about. But it goes on again. When it's blank, you increase that blank. That's a place of peace. That's a place where you can center yourself.

And a lot of the emotions that you might be healing that you want to overcome, instead of trying to replace them, being able to go to that blank spot is a very effective place to be. So again, meditation, I cannot stress this enough. It is very powerful. There are different kinds of meditation. There's the meditation where you can sit down and in silence. They are walking meditations. the meditations that you can do when you're engaging in an activity when you're going to flow,

there isn't necessarily one way to meditate. So my recommendation is do activities that strengthen your attention because once you start becoming more conscious and able to direct your attention, then all these tools become much easier to use. The other thing is that if you're engaged in negative self-talk and you become a whole of your attention, you can actually be like, nope, I don't want to think about this. I'm going to think about this.

instead. And because you've practiced that, your brain actually listens to you. And then you literally just push away or push aside the thought that you were having before. So now we're going to go into the tools that will start helping you become more successful. So one of the things to think about is we always want to continuously be evaluating our beliefs. Because as mentioned earlier, right, what we believe about ourselves, about the world, is all based on our past experiences. And the truth is that beliefs are just beliefs. They are not facts. I'm going to say that again.

Beliefs are not facts. Can I say I add a hundred dollar bill? And I asked you what that is. Most of us would be like, well, that's a hundred dollar bill. It's Canadian. I can buy this amount of stuff with it. But realize that the idea of currency is a belief that we've alled. all agreed on as a human population.

What a $100 bill is, it's actually a piece of paper with incontent. That's all it is. It is no different from this piece of paper, but we have an agreement that they are all going to believe that this holds value, and that belief in that value is what allows our economy to take place. When people stop believing in a currency, what happens to the currency, the currency starts devalu. And so, realize that, again,

and the beliefs that we have about ourselves, even though they might feel that they are true, they are just beliefs. They are not facts. And what we want to do is start thinking about, what do I have to believe about myself to make me feel or to make me feel this way? So if you are struggling with confidence

or if you want to elevate your confidence, what beliefs do you think you currently have right now that are preventing you from being the most confident, version of yourself. What belief do you currently have or beliefs do you currently have that you think are preventing you from being the most competent version of yourself? Feel free to either add it in the chat or you can unmute yourself. So if you're thinking, I'll share one of the beliefs that I discovered when I was going through this activity. So as mentioned, I'm originally from Zimbabwe. And one of the things that when I came to Canada

was that, well, because I'm black, I'm not able to start a technology company, right? Because I all day want to buy software from me, am I good enough? And so in my head, that belief system was actually hindering me not only in terms of like the decisions that we were going to do in the company, but even when I showed up into a room filled with people, that's all I was thinking, oh, they're going to see my skin color, they're going to see my skin color, they're going to see my skin color.

And because that was my belief, It was impacting how I feel, how confident I was presenting the company, and then it ended up influencing their response to me. So we didn't end up making the sale or I didn't end up being able to hire the person I wanted to hire. And then almost like a self-reinforcing thing. I'd be like the reason why they said no was because of the color of my skin. I later realized when I started evaluating my beliefs and realizing that they're not fact, no, the reason why they said no was that my beliefs were important.

influencing how I's feeling. How's feeling was influencing how as acting. And how as acting was going to get people to respond in ways that reinforced that belief system. And so the beliefs that we have right now are actually being reinforced in our life because they're being expressed through our words and our actions. I'm going to say that again. The beliefs that we have in our lives are being reinforced because of the way we are speaking and the way we are acting. And so, for example, Tina said fear. We cannot have a feeling without first having a belief about something.

So fear is the byproduct of a belief. And so the question is, what is the belief that you have that is creating or generating that fear? Then I said, speaking with a slight accent, I feel if the room, so that the room will not take me seriously. so I stay in deep background. Great one. I don't know for sharing that because that's also one that I had, right?

I have an accent. If you have not noticed, a pun, I don't sound Canadian. I always think I've been here long enough to sound Canadian, eh? But clearly not. But that's also a belief that I had, right? And then, of course,

straight is going to influence how you're going to show up. And so once you're aware of that belief and you realize that A, it's not true, you ask yourself, how do I, like, what do I want to believe instead, how do I want to replace that belief? And so around the accent, I realized that, you know what?

The fact that I have an accent, it makes me more memorable. It makes me more exciting. Because everyone is speaking with this regular accent, but I come down, I'm speaking with this unique accent. So people want to listen to me because of the uniqueness of my voice. And so when I started changing my belief about how I sounded, guess what? I embraced my accent. I started enjoying it. I didn't do like maybe sometimes people

will try to reduce the accent, but I didn't do that because I was like, I like the accent because they're part of me. It separates me from the competition, separates me from people that are in my industry, separates me from people that I work with. It's a unique part of me. And so by changing and reinforcing that belief system,

now the way I show up and see my accent is completely different. And so hopefully that can. kind of gives you a sense of if you can start identifying your beliefs, you figure out a way to replace them and you practice that replacement, then you can actually truly start empowering you because, again, beliefs are not felt. If you say, oh, no one loves me or I'm unlucky, all those are beliefs. All those are beliefs.

And if you're like, it's difficult for me to change those belief systems, that's also a belief. So if you think it's going to take a long time, that's a belief. If you think it's difficult, that's a belief. So the process of evaluating your beliefs is an ongoing process. It's not something you sit down before and be like, oh, I'm done. It's something that you're going to keep looking at. You go into a situation and you get an emotional response. You feel fear.

You feel anxious. You're feeling like you're lacking confident. Ask yourself, what do I believe? What am I believing to be true in this moment that is making me feel those emotions? because you cannot have an emotion without first having a belief about something. A way to also think about this is I'm going to say something to you and I'm going to in the chat let me know how you feel about it. And so if I say to you, Dino Kufarira, how do you feel about that?

Dino Kfarira. There's a little bit of interest, maybe a little bit of curiosity, absolute matter said curiosity, like it sounds cool. I mean of you are offended by me saying that. I mean of you feel bad about it. So in general, most of you, like, I don't know whether to take it as a compliment and feel good about what I said or to feel bad and feel offended about what I've said

because I cannot interpret. I cannot assign meaning to what was just said. This is very important because our brain, is automatically assigning meaning to all the events in our lives based on our beliefs or our paradigms. So if someone comes and let's say say something to you and you get offended, your question is to be like, how am I interpreting this situation? What belief shelter am I utilized to interpret the situation in a way that is offensive?

Because what that person is saying is not inherently offensive because if they say it in a different language, guess what? You wouldn't be offended. And even if a person says something nice to you, right, and you're like, oh, I like how this person said about, like, the way I know, call my presentation. Realize again, you're interpreting that way through your belief system. Right, when they say these words, I believe that it was good.

But realize that your mind is automatically assigning meaning on an ongoing basis and those, that meaning is being filtered through your beliefs and those beliefs were created based on your past experience and the current mental condition. Drogafarite translates to, I like all of you. I'm happy that you are here. That is the English translation. I like all of you, I'm happy that you're here.

Now that's the English translation. Now there's an emotional response. Either you're like smiling or you're like Simba who just met, whatever it is. Now you've got an emotional response because your thinking is providing that emotional response. the way you are, like the way you are seeing and reading the situation is giving me that emotional response. So if you feel fear, ask yourself, how am I interpreting the situation?

What do I have to believe is true that is creating that fear? If you feel anxiety, it's just a signal that the way you are perceiving that situation is, it's in a way that is making you feel that emotion. And if you realize that you can perceive it in a different way, then you're going to feel a different emotion. And so within beliefs, we talked already about the idea that, again, if you've practiced a belief long enough, it's now a habit. And so from a neuronal or neurobiological level, we have those structures. But there's also other components we need to keep in mind that are called the structure of beliefs that make negative beliefs self-perchuating. Negative beliefs are beliefs that don't empower you, beliefs that prevent you from being who you are,

prevent you from getting the results that you want. One of the things about negative beliefs or disempowering belief is always to realize that they are so tied into a fight-to-flight system that they feel real. Like they feel real. So if someone says come and give a presentation and you are petrified of giving a presentation, you're like, no, I know it's true because I feel,

I can feel it in my body, but you're feeling it in your body because of negative beliefs are so tight to your fight-of-flight system, which goes back to what we spoke about earlier that your body and your brain are geared for survival. And so in addition to that, negative beliefs make us feel like there's no choice. So if someone is like, oh, you can do it,

or if someone says, oh, you are worthy of love, if someone says, I like you, or you can change the way you see something, you almost like say, no, that's not true. I cannot believe anything that is outside my current belief system. So they make you as rigid in how we see the world and prevent us from taking in information that is actually going to make us feel better.

And so the tricks that negative beliefs use and I'm going to just go quickly through them is that it might use rationalization. We might use an excuse to be like, oh, I can never do that because I'm not good at speaking, or I've got an accent, or because I'm of the color of my skin, or because of my gender orientation.

It can use justification, or why didn't you speak up in that meeting? Or why I wasn't the right? time or someone else was going to speak up. So justification happens after the behavior is taken place. The rejection of new ideas or perspectives that are not in line with that belief. If you think you're not worthy and someone comes and says you're worthy, you might end up saying, what do you want for me? You're weird. I'm just going to avoid you and reject you as a person or reject your idea. The fourth trade projection, right, where when we see the world and we talk

to people who start projecting that negative belief. If you're afraid of public speaking, that one says, oh, I'm going to give a speech next week. You might end up saying, are you sure? Is everything okay? Have you practiced enough? You're basically projecting that fear to the other person, and most of the time is happening when the person

not conscious of it. Projection is a very important concept to realize because all the negative beliefs that you have about yourself were basically projected based on your past environment. If our parents or caregivers were not aware that they're projecting something that was disempowering that was negative, then we'll have picked up from them. But then they might have picked it up from somewhere else. And so all of us are constantly projecting our fears, our anxieties, and most of the time

we are not aware of them. We rationalize by saying that, oh, it's for the person's safety. Or I care for you. That's why I'm worried. But it might really be related to a negative belief that is, boarding itself and using, again, that projection and that rationalization trick to keep you from acting in a specific girl, prevents you from acting in a way that you really want to act. Paranoid, right?

So if you go into the situation, you might be paranoid that people are seeing me in a specific way, or people are making fun of you, or no one likes you, and then finally, reward. And so let's say you don't give the presentation, and the person who gives the presentation, they mess up, then you feel relief. Oh, thank God. it's not me. And so that ends up reinforcing that negative belief system. And so the reason why I share this is for you to be aware of those different tricks. Reflect on the tricks that you use yourself because when you notice that you're utilizing them and you're like, well, I'm rationalizing

this. I'm justifying. I'm giving an excuse. Realize that, ah, that's just a negative belief trying to keep me where I am. But now I'm aware of the tricks that it utilizes someone to overcome that. The structure of positive beliefs is much more simpler. It is knowing that you've got the choice in how you're going to see the situation. There's a common saying that it's not what happens to us. It's what we do with what happens to us. And basically that embodies that perspective. That yes, I can read the situation as people are not going to like me because of my accent, but I've got the choice to see that situation in a different way. Yes, I can take the person rejecting me or saying no to me in a negative way that I'm not good

enough, I'm not worthy, or I've got the choice to perceive it in a way that it's a good thing that they told me about this right now. Now I've got the space to find someone else. Now I've got the space to be able to reevaluate what I'm actually looking for in a friend, in a partner, in a family member, whatever it is. So the idea of choice is always realizing that everything is neutral. We talked about that when I say the word. Our brain is always assigning meaning to things,

our belief systems, and we have the choice to be like, okay, I might have perceived this right now, but I'm going to choose to see the situation in a different way. There is a saying, I think it's in Bruce Almighty, where Morgan Freeman is like, if you ask for courage, do you think you are going to get courage or the opportunity to be courageous? If you ask for love, do you think you'll get love or the opportunity to love?

If you ask for compassion, do you get compassion or the opportunity to be compassion? And I think that's also a smart way to really think about shifting our perspective, having the choice to see situations that might disempower us in a way that is empowering to us. And once we start doing that, then again, our confidence is not being impacted. Because now we are realizing that, hey, I can choose to see this situation in a way that's not going to hinder impact how I see myself. And so when we start talking about transforming your beliefs, the first step is you want to become aware of it. That is number one, asking yourself continuously, what do I have to believe is true for me to feel this way? Once you become aware of it, if you keep choosing that emotional state or that behavior, it becomes a choice.

Because a habit is something that you do without your awareness. Once you become aware of it, it has become a choice. And right now society doesn't quite frame it this way, but we are talking about next level thinking in these like series. And the reason why I'm saying is a choice because we want to start thinking about, okay, if we become aware of a belief, we become aware that thinking this way or behaving this way is not serving us, why don't we change that belief?

Why do I keep choosing to feel this emotion? Why do I keep choosing to feel disempowered? Why do I keep choosing to feel anxious or to feel unworthy or to feel like I'm not good enough? Why do I keep choosing that? And so, in the reflection of our beliefs, it's really important that you realize

that we are always going to hold on to beliefs we think serve us. This is human behavior one-on-one. We do things that we believe, again, key thing we believe will either benefit us, either by having a positive outcome, or through avoiding a negative outcome. So if you notice that you're engaging in a specific behavior that is disempowering, and you keep doing it, you have to go down and ask yourself, because there's a belief underneath that belief.

The alternative of doing this behavior is more painful than the current behavior. So it's going to be more uncomfortable for me. And so that's a belief. And so you have to keep again digging in to what that belief is. I'm sorry, I'm hammering on beliefs because this is the core of it. Our lack of confidence, our lack of self-work is all around the things that we believe about ourselves. That's it. And if you're going to evaluate those beliefs, start changing those beliefs, keep evaluating

those beliefs, keep changing those beliefs, then regardless of what happens in your situation or in your life, you're always going to feel conflict about. You're always going to have a healthy self-image because you'll be perceiving it in a way that is positive. That is not going to end up having you feel either self-critical or feel like you're not enough. The second tool, mastering yourself talk.

So again, whatever we believe is going to come out through the words that we say. How we talk to ourselves and the words that we use on our day-to-day conversation. monitor the words that you're saying, monitor how you're speaking, not only to other people, but to yourself. Are you using words that are confident, that convey that you've got a solid belief about yourself, or do you use words that show that I don't have positive beliefs about yourself? And so you want to start becoming conscious of that. And again, through journaling, utilizing affirmations, sometimes people ask, do affirmations work? Yes, they do, because we are always going to be using affirmations, whether we are aware of it or not.

When you say, why doesn't this person like me? Guess what? That's an affirmation. I'm not good enough. That's an affirmation. Things don't go my way. That's an affirmation.

We are always going to be used in affirmation. But the idea of affirmation is to be conscious of that process so that again, we are not having the default habitual way continuing to go. Because one thing is, again, we want to engage in changing the way we think by looking at our beliefs, changing our self-talk. We also want to. target the body and start changing the chemical environment within our body to make us feel good.

And so certain things that can make us feel good, for example, these trying something new, learning a new skill, right, overcoming challenge. One of the biggest things that I've realized that most of the times that we've been very confident in ourselves, it's when we've overcome something we thought we couldn't overcome. Unfortunately, once we've overcome it, sometimes you're like, okay, I'm good and never want to go through that again. Well, I finish with school, I don't do that again. But if you find more positive way or fun ways, they start overcoming and learn new skills, then we are going to continually be able to boost our confidence. When you start changing the mental skills and the physiological

skills together, then you start accelerating your level of our confidence and how you feel about yourself. And so this next slide goes through the different and the main main. neurotransmitters in your brain and the corresponding activities that help you actually shape how you feel about yourself. So dopamine is a feel-good hormone connected to the Lod center. It's something that, again, a lot of social media marketing. Individuals are very aware of this and they use it to get us stuck on our devices. But dopamine is a feel-good hormone. So low-dopamine levels can make us full depressed. And so how do we start increasing? using our dopamine levels in a way that is adaptive.

Reducing junk food, getting enough sleep, meditating, exercising, reducing social media use and doing the things that you love. Serotonin is a mood stabilizing. Low serotonin are associated with depression as well as sexual desire. So how do you boost your serotonin levels? You need to be eating specific foods because one of the ingredients of serotonin comes from a the food that you eat. So if you're not eating the right serotonin foods, then your brain is not going to be able to produce enough. I'm not a nutritionist, so just type into Google foods that are high in

serotonin, getting sunlight, which explains again why people's mood decreases during winter, going for a massage, physical exercise, listening to music, practicing gratitude. Oxytocin, the love connection hormone. How do you boost that in a way that is healthy? spending quality time with friends, telling someone you love them, hugging or cuddling a person or a pet, doing something nice for someone, making something for someone. And finally, endorphins. These are more like the pleasure of the pain relief, neurotransmitters,

physical exercise, acupuncture, having sex, laughing with friends, acts of kindness, and enjoying a massage. Now I'm sharing this not to say you have to do all of them, But when you look at your week, you want to ensure that you at least have one activity that you're touching on at least every few days and make it part of your routine. Because this is going to make your body feel better. And that's also going to make it easier for your mind to feel better. The fourth tool is change your input. Again, we talked about, again, conditioning is going to happen for the rest of your life.

Take control of your conditioning. Don't leave it up to chance. Don't leave it up to media. Don't leave it up to organizations. Take control of the input that is going on in your mind. And one of the analogy I use is that we know propaganda works, right? Like if you think about propaganda in which like a government might use messaging to get a whole population to think in a specific way.

And they in and date that message to that population to the point that people start thinking a specific way. Take the principle of propaganda and propaganda yourself into feeling confident, into feeling good about yourself. And part of that is again listening to podcasts, listening to audiobooks, coming to sessions like this, like writing things down, making sure that the people around you are positive. And one of my business courses 10 years ago, before I started my businesses, say that every single time you're by yourself, you are walking at the gym, you're in the car, make sure you are listening to an audio recording of someone positive,

some self-development, guru. And that's all I listen to. And today that's all I listen to. Because you input good things into your brain is going to think different. It's going to become more positive. You put junk into your brain, they are going to get garbage thoughts. So change your input, get control of your input,

and be mindful of the things that you're consuming. And the more you control that, the more you're aware of that, the more are going to change how you feel. Tool 5, learning to say no. I don't know if you've ever accomplished a goal where you either are saving money, you say no, or you have to start for a program, but you feel good after being disciplined.

In the moment, it might not be good, but one of the biggest things that will boost your confidence is the ability to say no to yourself. And the ability to say no to immediate pleasure because you've got a long-term goal is also part of you starting to control your thoughts, but more importantly, your behaviors. If you keep doing something, let's say if you keep eating junk food

and you want to stop, you are not in control of that process. But once you start changing, then you are in control of that. And the more you are in control of your thoughts, you're emotional on your body, the more confident you feel, and the more you are able to actually influence the world around you. The last tool is feel the fear and do it anyways. You cannot read, study your way to confidence. You can listen to all these lectures.

You can listen to all these books, which is great, but you need to do the things for you to be able to overcome your fear. You might create conditions for you to be able to do them in a way that is safe. So if you are, let's say, got social anxiety, maybe you're going to say, okay, every single time I talk to my barrister, I'm going to say hi. That's my goal. and every single time I'm going to say hi

okay I've got that done I'm going to say that to the librarian whatever it is you actually have to do the action because the action is also going to teach your body that it is safe to do this behavior but if you keep thinking about it and say I'm going to just think about it

and don't actually do it then it's a concept that's not grounded well and you never actually end up doing the behavior so there's a book called Feel the Fear and do it anywhere, which is basically the title. So I highly recommend you read that book if you enjoy that. But the idea is that if you are feeling scared, if you're lacking confidence, do it scared. Do it scared.

All the companies have started, all the presentations I've given, the first few times with petrifying. But I've done it enough times that I don't get scared as much anymore. And I always feel good after. I always feel more confident after. So as mentioned, all the tools that we talked about, their mental tools, that package your brain as well as physiological tools, and the combination of both of these is going to allow you to become a more confident person.

And you'll continue doing this, because if you do it for only a few days, or if you do it for 21 days or for 90 days, and you stop, guess what happens? Those old past pathways that you have been doing for years will start strengthening again. So the old ways of thinking will come back. You want to do this enough times

that this becomes a new pathways. Every single day, you'll be thinking about something to feel good about. Every single day, you'll be practicing gratitude. Every single day, you're engaging in a confident boosting activity. It becomes a part of your habit because confidence is not something that you have. And then, like, a degree you're done. It is the things that you're doing every day, the things that you're thinking every day, the emotions you're having on a daily basis and the behaviors that you're engaging.

And finally, realize that all of us have got a level. of confidence that we're at on a more consistent basis. And if let's say, for example, like, let's see if I was like a guilt or shame, right, I'm basically depressed and I decide that I want to start increasing my confidence. There may be other emotions that I'll feel on my way to improving my confidence. The first thing that human motives is there's going to be a decrease in the intensity of those or those negative emotions. So if it's, again, if it's guilt, if it's shame,

if it's anxiety, if it's fear, they're not going to be as intense when you start implementing these skills. And that's a good thing. And you'll end up starting to get glimpses of some of the other emotions. So you might feel, so as you go through the process, right, so you start in guilt and shame,

and then you're like, okay, I'm not going to be more confident, I'm going to do ABC. And then when you start committing to that, you might feel fear. And then you do those a few times. And so your new level is now fear, right, because you're scared, right, or failing or what people think. But if you stick with it, if you stick with it, then you're going to have either some success and you're going to feel

pride or some failures and you might feel anger. But if you stick with it and you keep going, you keep learning, you keep refining, then you'll get to a point that you're actually going to feel confident. Not only in your ability to accomplish that, but also just the way you see yourself knowing that you've been able to accomplish that. And that's what you're going to be able to accomplish that. And that's when you get to the point of courage, where you feel good about yourself. You've got a healthy self-image. But I'm sharing this so

that you know that when you start making your way too confidence on a consistent basis, there might be some emotions you might feel along the way. Take those emotions as being positive. Take those emotions as waypoints. Okay, I used to feel depressed now

and feeling angry the whole time. That might feel like a bad thing, but with anger you have more energy and in anger there is hope. In anger there is hope. Now the idea is not to stay there, the idea is to recognize where you are and keep moving forward

so that you get to a place where you feel confident. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.