338. The Confidence Sessions: The Two Beliefs That Drive Action

I'd like to continue today with what he breaks down as four different types of confidence, and he breaks this down into can happen beliefs and can do beliefs.

As we established in the episode last week, confidence makes you do things, take action.

Anxiety saps action.

It stops you doing things.

It holds you back, and you will likely recognize that if you are very anxious with the language and with English, you will not take up as many opportunities potentially, or you won't speak up as much.

You won't say yes to the networking event.

Whereas if you feel more confident, you're more likely to say, "Okay, I'll give it a go." I don't think that necessarily means you think it's going to go perfectly, but as we established last time, confidence is almost a prediction machine.

So you're looking at what you've done before and you're saying, "Well, the chances of me being successful are strong.

It might be a little bit challenging, but, but I can do it." So you go to that conference, you do that keynote speech, you speak up in the meeting, you take the opportunities.

So he breaks it down into four different types of confidence, and this is coming back to what I mentioned last time about confidence being a bridge into the future.

And to get across the bridge, what he argues is that you need a combination of a can-do belief and a can happen belief, and I'm gonna break it down for you here.

You might recognize yourself actually in some of these quadrants.

The first quadrant then is can't do it, can't happen, and what this leads to is paralysis, so you stop doing things 'cause you're like, "Well, I can't do it anyway, and it's not gonna make a difference to anything." And that's the can happen part, right? The can do is this internal thing.

Yes, I feel that I've got the skills, and if I apply them, I will be able to make a difference.

That's the can happen, which is the external thing.

So if we put this into your position, it would just be like, "Well, I can't do it anyway.

You know, my, my vocabulary is terrible.

I, I sound really basic.

And, you know, even if I learnt some of the things that you talk about on the podcast anyway, Anna, it's not really gonna make a difference.

I'm still gonna be in the same position as I was before." As I said, this leads you to paralysis, and you're just like, "Well, there's nothing to do because it's not gonna make a difference anyway." You may have been in that quadrant at some point in your career with English, but I would say that if you're listening to this podcast right now, likely you're not there because you recognize that actually investing some time in listening to a podcast like this could help you move forward.

So I'd argue that you're probably not in that quadrant.

But you may find yourself or have found yourself there at some point, and maybe will in the future, you know.

Life changes, things happen.

Confidence isn't necessarily a steady thing.

It's not like once you've got it, it stays like that forever.