Keys to Building Unshakable Confidence | Mark Manson EP 499

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11how does someone prepare themselves for success to keep their self-confidence and expand it not dim their light honestly the thing that ultimately worked for me is to just kind of maintain that bottom of the mountain mindset you know there's like a famous cliche about you know there's you get to the top of the mountain you realize there's a taller mountain behind it you know and so it's figuring out what that taller mountain is, right? And a lot of times you just invent it. You just pick something out of the air. You're like, you know what? I'll make this my mountain, right? Because there's a certain amount of freedom and maneuverability that comes with seeing yourself as a beginner, seeing yourself as somebody who doesn't have anything to lose or doesn't have all the answers.

0:55And for me, it's been psychologically very, very beneficial to find a way to keep that and not put all of my identity and self-worth into that because if I did that, then I'd be terrified to get out of bed in the morning. So when you were saying that, for those just listening, you're pointing at the book, putting your self-worth and identity into the success of the book, right? What should we put our identity and self-worth into if it's not into our accomplishments, our career, or our wealth? I personally believe that you should treat your identity or your self-worth the same way you treat a good investment portfolio, which is you diversify it across a lot of things that are not correlated to one another.

1:41The same way you want to split up your money between stocks and bonds and cash and real estate because those things don't always move in the same direction at the same time. You want to put your self-esteem in things that aren't going to go north or south at the same time. That's interesting, yeah. For someone listening or watching, what does that look like in a day-to-day life? You should have a lot of your self-esteem tied up in your career and accomplishments. I think that's healthy. That's good. Like your skill sets, the things you're learning and developing and the impact you're making. You spend half your waking hours working on something.

2:13So you should care about that something and you should take some amount of pride in it. Like I think that's healthy. But with that, I would put relationships, both family and friendships. I would put knowledge, learning something, having some sort of hobby or interest that you do simply for the sake of doing it. You know, I think for a lot of people, you might throw religion or spiritual practice in there. For me personally, I'm not very spiritual or religious. I just kind of see it as like charity or generosity. You know, it's like do good things for people. being generous human being. And that doesn't mean you have to give all of your time, but just being kind to people.

2:55Yeah. You know, opening the door, being courteous, being appreciative. Or, you know, volunteering, helping somebody out, you know, whatever. I'll speak from a personal experience here. Whenever I was in challenging intimate relationships, it didn't matter how successful my business or how talented I was as an athlete. I always felt like my self-worth was a lot lower. if my intimate relationship wasn't successful or if it was up and down and emotionally challenging too much. And I don't know if that's just me, that I was just really bad at them, but how much do you think our intimate relationship is tied to our self-worth?

3:34It's funny because I think it's a little bit of a chicken-in-the-egg thing where people tend to struggle in their intimate relationships because they don't have a lot of self-worth outside of their intimate relationships. Right. And so one way you solve that is finding self-worth outside of it and like building that identity for yourself. And that tends to help you generate better relationships, which then also give you a lot of self-worth. So it's like, it's interesting. I feel like intimate relationships, they drive happiness more than any other thing. Any, you know, more so than career success, more so than money, more so than hobbies or friendships or whatever.

4:12It's generally like when you look at all the data on happiness, it's how good are your relationships? If they're good, you're probably a happy person. And if they're not good, you're probably not happy. And those two statements are going to tend to be true regardless of whatever else is going on in your life. But I think when it comes to self-esteem, self-worth, I do think there's a large component of it does seem to be driven by feeling useful in some way, feeling competent, feeling that you're able to do something in the world.

4:48Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

5:42Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.