From South Side to White House - Building Unbreakable Self-Belief | Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson

0:00I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:38Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:50How did you build belief in yourself that you were worthy of the success at such a high level? You as a coach and in the business world and the NBA and even going from a small little apartment with both of you to being in the most iconic house in the world. Like, how do you believe you're deserving and worthy of that life when you come from such smaller, humbler beginnings? Well, it's a step by step process. And if you got good, smart parents like we did, you know, who don't even know what's coming, but they understand they understood for us that they wanted to make us feel that way at our little kitchen table.

1:36So you begin feeling that because you feel it. You see your excellence in the eyes of your parents. like we had parents that really thought we were smart and funny and interesting and and they reflected that back to us they they wanted to hear what we thought they so we grew up thinking we're so funny you're so smart you know we're so interesting you know I know you want to hear what I have to say I know I'm five but let me tell you my opinion about these things right so it starts there. And especially when you're poor black kids from, you know, on the south side of Chicago, I think our parents knew that what was coming for us was the absolute different message.

2:23Interesting. That at every turn, what was awaiting us, regardless of who we were, there were going to be teachers and people who would be constantly lowering our bars for us anyway. So I think they fueled us with a level of can do it, must do it-ness. Interesting. That would give us a kind of armor as we went out and sort of started getting dinged. In the world. In the world. Yeah, yeah. So what are they instilling you to keep your self-confidence high when the world was trying to take you down? So I'll give it to you in coaching terms. Before people were coaching confidence, they were coaching confidence.

3:06Interesting. What would that look like? What would they say or do or react? This is what it would look like. Mom, how do you learn how to read? And I'm four years old. Instead of saying, you put letters together, she said, here, go get a book. I'll show you how to read. and she taught me how to read when I was four years old because I asked her, how do you read? And every time I asked her, how do you do something? She stopped what she was doing and she showed me. So then I felt, and then she would talk about how wonderful it was that I could read or that I could tell time or that we could go around the block on our bikes by ourselves.

3:51And that, it's really interesting because today people talk about coaching confidence and leading with confidence. When we grew up, leaders didn't do that. They broke you down to build you back up. They yelled at you. They yelled at you, and it was just a different mentality back then. Even in corporate America back then, people put you through the gauntlet and didn't coach confidence. They told you how poorly you were doing, and then they hoped that the cream would rise to the top. Our parents did the exact opposite. How did they learn how to do that? Like, they were ahead of the game. And as mom said, she tried to do the opposite of what was done for her.

4:34Because she came out of a generation of, of that generation of, you know, they didn't know what they were doing with parenting. There was no philosophy. Kids were seen but not heard. There was no conscious parenting. There was no conscious parenting. And our parents were smart people. They weren't college educated, but they could have been. You know, my mother could have been a teacher. She could have been a professor. You know, she just didn't. There was no pathway that she saw for herself. So just like all of us, I mean, while there's some insecurity there, there's also in each of us this level of I know more than they're giving me credit for.

5:15Right. I think it's it's already there. And then it gets beaten out of you. It gets abused out of you. It gets, there are other things that get in the way. I think my mother always felt like every kid has the power and the ability to learn if you get out of their way. Right. And if you fuel it and you don't suffocate it. And my parents were sane people and just, we were blessed in that. And so that established a foundation for us to then go out in the world with this belief of, I'm pretty confident and competent because that's what our parents get. They forced us to be that way. And every time you succeed, you know, and sometimes we rob kids of that, parents today, because we're trying to make sure kids don't fail.

6:08We're trying to avoid our hurt and our embarrassment with them failing. So we never let them, we never really hand them their lives. And so they don't get those experiences. And so they miss out on those early, you know, sort of building blocks of confidence that you need. Our parents handed that to us. And so then there were the experiences that went along with it. We were, we came into the world as good people, polite kids. We knew how to engage with teachers. That multiplies that confidence and competence because, you know, teaching your kid how to be socialized helps them. Because better socialized kids, they get better feet back from the world.

6:56Yes. And we were always the kids that the teachers liked and loved. And so now you get a little bit of that. and then now you learn how to do that, right? And then so you just keep succeeding. And for me, one of the aha moments was actually going to Princeton because I wasn't confident then because I wasn't a great test taker. I was a great grade getter, but I wasn't good on SAT. So I had good grades, not great scores. So all the scores said, you don't belong at Princeton. And there were people who saw me, saw the color of my skin and said, you're aiming too high, right? So luckily he went. Yeah.

7:39You were already there for two years, right? Or a year or two? Yeah, I was there for two years. And she was, she's being nice. But what she really said was, if this dude can get in, I know I'm getting in. Yeah, I'm smarter than him. She is a better student than I was. I was a guy who could do well on tests. I never studied. Interesting. So my first years at Princeton, I got killed because you have to be able to study there. Wow. But my sister is studious and smart and just the bad. She got frazzled on the test. Yeah, yeah. And me, I was like, you know, process of elimination. Can you imagine going to these schools being told that you're not ready?

8:21And that was my first insecurity of thinking, well, maybe I don't belong here. And that's the world telling you that you don't belong. Even though it's like, well, all my experiences up until this point say that why wouldn't I belong here?

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