Moment 86 - How To Turn Your Fear Into Fuel: James Smith

00:03in the start of this book in chapter one you investigate this idea of pain points as it relates to confidence what what do you mean by pain points so we could look at this in the form of sales as well so i cannot sell to someone unless i understand their pain points and i use an analogy that probably is the one i've had most experience with with people in the gym they come they sit down hi james i want to get fitter i want to lose a bit of weight i want to tone up and I'm like that's not really what you want that's not a pain point that is a knee-jerk reaction to what you think I want to hear when you delve a bit deeper they go my husband's not fucking me you know every time I stand up in a meeting I've got to pull my top down over the layers of flab that I have I don't feel confident in areas of my life that I should because I'm so crippled by the confidence I have with my physique I'm not taking seriously the pain points are deep and people need to draw on those because the day that you're getting out of bed and you feel like shit and you're tired and you want to give up I want to be toned isn't going to do it the fact that your real pain point is that you're lonely and you're getting older and you're worrying about the fact you might

01:05not find a compatible companion ever that is a strong enough pain point for you to change being more toned isn't so interestingly for some you know I know people that are in that exact same situation and i've debated for many a year whether someone's you know the situation you described that i'm getting older i'm lonely i'm scared i'll be alone forever i know people in that exact exact same situation that are exhibiting the fear of the consequences of a life lifelong loneliness but they still don't do anything about it is there such thing as like wanting to want to be someone is it i'm not sure to answer your question but one of the things i would say to that person is you're in the, and I'm only using this as an example. I think dating is an analogy I love to use. I actually use it when I talk about business talks. I say marketing is like dating, you know, and we won't get down that too much, but you look at the person at the bar, you feel the fear rather than counting down from five, five, four, three, two, one. Oh my God, I've got the confidence.

02:05Let me go talk to them. They could instead just for a flash of a moment, just think to themselves, I'm lonely. I don't want to be lonely. What out of these two things is more uncomfortable for me? the idea of going another week another month being single or the idea of talking to a stranger and surely when you add and level those two things up the pain point of being lonely should be much worse than the pain point of talking to a stranger if you feel undervalued at work the idea of talking to your boss and expressing how you feel that's a pain point you're like you know that's gonna make me feel uncomfortable but then the pain point of feeling undervalued and not being given the bonus you were promised a year ago you level them up and you're like there's always two directions in which you can go. And you've tweeted and mentioned this before. You say saying nothing is still saying something. Doing nothing is still doing something. And they also say, whatever you're not changing, you're choosing. And these are really important because that person, and again, same analogy, whatever it is, when you're at that place of feeling that you don't have enough confidence, it's actually a crossroads. It's a left and a right. It's a dichotomy of action and

03:10inaction and if you are controlled by fear and you don't muster the courage to do what you need to do especially by using the pain points to motivate yourself you are choosing inaction by doing nothing that is a choice and people just seem to think that you know not starting the passion project not posting or expressing something on social media they seem to think if they do nothing that it's a void in our reality but it's not it's still a choice of inaction I used to think of like people ask me about confidence a lot and it's taken me quite some time to develop my thoughts on it because you know when you I think level one of the confidence self-help guru is like look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you love yourself like that's like step one and then eventually hopefully your thinking progresses when you find the holes in that thinking and then I arrived at the conclusion that confidence as we kind of like say it talk about it in culture. I know there's multiple definitions and lots of nuance, but confidence as we describe it in culture is really just, um, is based on the evidence you have in yourself.

04:14Like all beliefs are based, are evidence-based, subjective, correct or incorrect evidence. And therefore, if it is evidence-based, the only way to build your confidence is to go and get evidence. Um, and I say this because there's a lot, there's a narrative that you can just kind of like write down in your book or look yourself in the mirror and say, I'm going to be confident. I'm going to be sexy. I'm going to be a millionaire, which I don't think is factually supported by how other beliefs work. So confidence. So when I started writing the book, I wasn't sat there like, I know everything about confidence. I was sat there going, I couldn't answer. If you were to say, James, what is confidence? When I start writing it, I go, I don't know. So that's why I was so excited about writing it. But one of the interesting kind of ways that I wrote about it. And one of the points was, if you imagine confidence on a spectrum with anxiety on one end and confidence on the other, anxiety is predicting failure and confidence is predicting success. And that is a really important thing to think about because our expectations massively influence the outcome of things. And like you say there, if people just go into a room and go, I'm, you know, I'm amazing. I'm whatever. It's not really

05:27going to work. Even as one of your previous guests said about interrogative self-talk, asking yourself questions is a more positive thing. Instead of saying, I can do this podcast today and do well, I asked myself, can you do well in this podcast today? And I answered, oh, do you know what? I did all right in the last one. It got a lot of downloads. So it is one of those things that is in so many different spectrums and it has so many different meanings, but a lot of it points towards predicting success and things. And even if you don't have the evidence to predict success we should be able to be wrong if there's something i want to accomplish i can't let my mind and my thoughts take over i must in some sense be overconfident and predict success but if i'm wrong that's fine but what i can't do is just set every single default to being this isn't going to work because if you don't think something's going to work you're already tripped at the first hurdle and there's a guy david robson who wrote a book called the expectation effect. And in that book, they got a group of people, I can't remember how big the study was, but they lied to them and said, this group have got a gene that is going to hinder their turnover

06:37of oxygen. And this group over here doesn't. And they got them to perform fitness tests. And the people that were told they had this gene mutation performed a lot better. And the other people didn't. And even just being primed with a lie completely changed their output in a fitness test so schools don't teach confidence society doesn't really breed confidence because although on one hand confidence is essential for innovation if we don't have confident people you know Elon Musk he was confident enough to say that rocket we could land it back on earth and he would know you know you're crazy but society doesn't care if you're confident or not society doesn't care if you talk to that person or not society doesn't care if you get a pay rise no one in the world is going to come along and care about your levels of confidence is something we need to do ourselves on in that example of them priming to you know there's been two groups and they tell one of them a lie and then the one that believes that they have a genetic advantage performed better right yeah so is that not the case then for lying to yourself so fake it till you make it i don't particularly like that terminology and in the book i write about it because what's your what's your

07:43metric of success in that to fake it until you get recognition for something i think with that and with the book and with expectations you've got manifestation and the placebo effect and they're intertwined but they're both separate so manifestation i think is a very dangerous thing where people think oh i'm just going to think about success you know i'm going to meditate about success i'm going to get it but then things like the placebo effect is also a powerful thing sham surgeries that were performed on people they would be cut open they would do nothing they'd stitch them back up and up to 50% of people reported feeling better. That's crazy.

08:18When people take, or 30% of people that took the vaccine in the trials that were given the no vaccine felt ill afterwards because they thought they were going to feel ill. I've seen as well, I didn't put this one in the book, so I couldn't find the study, the size of the pill you take as a painkiller, even with placebos can impact the levels of pain that people, you know, report disappearing. So although we can't say, you know, I just, you know pretend you're going to be confident pretend all of this in the same sense we do need to instill a level of belief in ourself that we are able to accomplish stuff and if we try and we falsify that optimism and it doesn't work out we create another building block to step on and behind everyone who's an expert in anything there is a level of mastery and failure is put in such a negative light in society but failure is the most cases the pathway to development so So even if we do, you know, point the dial towards optimism, if things don't go right, that's fine. We're allowed to be wrong. We're allowed to make mistakes. You're allowed to try that endeavor that you want and for it to all fuck up.

09:22I think that, just thinking about that then, I guess the difference is with the placebo effect, you don't know that it's a lie. Whereas if I looked to myself in the mirror and said, you are in fact Jesus Christ, I would know that that was a lie. And so I guess, you know, the placebo effect stuff can work. And even in that operation, they didn't know that it were being lied to in that in those two control groups where one of them believed they had a genetic advantage they thought it was true the problem is we can't actually lie to ourselves and the the example i always give sometimes when i speak about confidence on stage is like if i had your mom in a headlock and i was pointing a gun at her and i said you have to believe i'm jesus or she dies everything's on the line and all you could do is pretend you couldn't actually believe i was jesus if everything was on the line you could only and so that for me was the clearest evidence I needed that I can never really lie to myself about who I am.

10:14It doesn't have to be a lie as it could be even just a change in narrative. So I remember so many times throughout my life, just before I was about to go on a date with a stranger, which I found incredibly daunting. It's one of the reasons I drank on dates for the first 25 years of my life. But that voice in your head, you don't have to lie to yourself, but the voice in your head goes, what if this is the worst date I'll ever go on? But all you need to do is change that to say, what if this is the best date I'll ever go on?

10:38that's all i'm saying and that is a change in expectations it's a different change in thought it's a different perspective on your reality that's upcoming i don't think we should ever lie to ourselves but we should at least turn the dial towards optimism because we are inherently pessimistic with our with our biases