How Your Thoughts Create Or Destroy Your Confidence

0:04This is the Ed Milet Show. Today, we're going to talk about how to build unlimited self-confidence. And the reason that I'm covering this topic today is probably more than any other topic I've been getting asked lately about the struggles people are going through with self-doubt, not believing in themselves, negative thoughts about themselves. And I believe the solution to self-doubt is to build something bigger than that doubt, which is to build our self-confidence. And one thing to know about the fact that you doubt yourself is one, I struggle with it as well. One of the reasons I've had to go learn to build all these tools for myself is because in my life, my baseball career, my academic career, my business career, my speaking career, I've been riddled with self-doubt.

0:47That creeps up all the time in our lives. Am I enough? Am I good enough? Do I deserve this? Is this something that's part of my destiny? Should I be doing this? And if you're a religious person, I believe the adversary, if you believe in the adversary, I believe the adversary's greatest tool that he could use against you to get you to lose in your life is to get you discouraged and doubting. These are two of the most chaotic things that the adversary can do to us or that we do to ourselves in our own minds is to get ourselves doubting, to get ourselves discouraged because you can't win when you doubt and you can't win when you're discouraged.

1:20What I found out though about self-doubt is that you don't overcome it. You build something bigger than it, which means you build your self-confidence. And the greater and greater your self-confidence gets, it minimizes the impact self-doubt has on us. Now, why is that so important? It's important because you have to understand one thing about the doubts and the negative thoughts you have about yourself. As hard as this is to accept, these are not your thoughts. You weren't born doubting. You weren't born discouraged. You weren't born thinking negative things about yourself. Those were thoughts that were placed in you and given to you by an external source at some time in your life It could even be our parents.

2:01Don't do that. Be quiet. Sit down. Be a good boy. Be a good girl Maybe it was criticism you received as a as a little one that you may not even remember to this day It could have been a school teacher. It could have been ridicule at school from other children But when you were young in your formative years these negative thoughts about yourself were planted in you by an external source That's so powerful to understand because these things you think you believe about yourself that have become really true to you You don't even really believe they were not your original thoughts But the power of belief is so incredible in our lives It's so insidious because when we have a belief about something even if it was given to us by somebody else Our mind goes to work on proving to us that this belief is true A belief is almost like this table right here Just the top once we get it and what our mind tries to do is it tries to build legs under the table to reinforce that belief So somebody told you you weren't enough or you weren't smart enough or pretty enough or fast enough or strong enough Or you don't come from the right place or you're not in the right culture the right race the right religion the right height The right IQ as a young person or you were put down and these beliefs were given to you What happens is your mind tries to prove beliefs true.

3:14So it finds references so once you think it your mind finds an example of your life where you weren't enough another one where you weren't enough you weren't smart enough you weren't pretty enough you weren't handsome enough you weren't strong enough and it finds these references and it builds like a leg and multiple legs under table and pretty soon you can't move it and it's stuck in there as a firm belief that's why we have to guard our beliefs so preciously because our mind goes to work on finding these legs, these references, which are real experiences in our life to prove to us that that belief is true.

3:47And so although you may believe it to be true about you, these doubts and negative thoughts you have, these were not your original thoughts. That's a powerful thing to understand because you weren't born this way. You weren't born doubting. You were born perfect. You were born believing you were going to do something great. You were born happy. You were born believing you were going to do something special with your life. As a baby, I promise you, you had no negative self-talk. You had no negative self-doubt. These are external sources. It's so important to know because those thoughts aren't really who you are.

4:16They're somebody else's thoughts they gave you because of how they felt about themselves. And so today we're going to talk about how to build self-confidence and how to eliminate self-doubt. So how do we build this self-confidence? The process of building self-confidence is actually very easy, believe it or not. Self-confidence is self-trust. Self-confidence is building a reputation with yourself that you keep your word to you, that you keep the promises you make to you. When I meet somebody who has a ton of self-confidence, I don't look at that as somebody with a big ego. There's a difference.

4:48Somebody with self-confidence has a reputation with themselves that I do the things I say I'm going to do. That's where self-confidence comes from. When I meet someone who is not self-confident, I know this is someone who has consistently made promises to themselves they've not kept. They've started a diet and done it for a while, but not kept it. They've made a commitment and goals to go make a certain amount of money in business. And they started down the road, but then they didn't deliver on it long-term to get up at a certain time in the morning and then they don't do it. And so they have a process and a habit in their life more often than not of not keeping the promises they don't make to other people.

5:22They don't keep the promises they make to themselves. And so the cool thing is self-confidence is an internal game. You do not need external accolades, external admiration in order to build self-confidence. You don't need any of those external forces. It's all done internally. You control this and you control this by beginning today to keep the promises you make to yourself. And you have to stack the deck in your favor, stack the game. So you win. It's not good enough just to keep the promises you make to yourself. You must acknowledge it when you do it to you to give yourself credit, to create confidence.

5:55Momentum is what I call it. So whether that's setting the deck where you're going to get up a little bit earlier, you're going to make a certain amount of phone calls, you miss a certain amount of appointments. You're going to eat a certain amount of calories in your fitness. You're going to spend a certain amount of time with your children or your parents and you begin to do these things you say you're going to do. You say simple things like I'm going to lay out my clothes the night before I go to bed every night before I go to sleep. So when I wake up, that decision is made for me. And believe it or not, the fact that you just do something that simple that you then deliver on begins to build confidence.

6:26You say, I'm going to stretch in the morning when I get up and you do it all of a sudden. I'm not going to check my phone for 30 minutes. all these habits I teach, when you just begin to do the things you tell yourself you're going to do, you begin to build self-confidence, which is this reputation with yourself. So ask yourself a question right now. What is one thing right now, one promise I can make to myself that I'm going to begin to keep starting this minute and begin to do it? It could be how often I'm going to pick up a book and read it, but you begin to stack things you commit to do, and then you deliver on them and you acknowledge them to yourself.

7:00You're in the process of building self-confidence. Why is that so important? Of all the athletes I coach, when my athletes are performing at their peak level, they're at their highest self-confidence level. In fact, I love when I watch some of the athletes I coach get interviewed and they kind of do this aw shucks, humble routine in their post-game interviews. Yeah, you know, just part of the team. You know, I got a lot, I could have done a lot better today. But inside, I know these people are incredibly self-confident people. Any of you athletes listening to this, you know this, the great athletes you know have incredible amounts of self-confidence.

7:31You have to believe in you when it's a battle, when you're a hitter against a pitcher, or when you're a quarterback against a defense, or you're a defenseman in the NHL against their best offensive player, or you're a golfer, and you have to make a nine-foot putt to win a tournament, right? You better have self-confidence. In fact, the separator, more often than not at the highest level in sports, is not they're a better shooter, or a better putter, or throw the ball a little bit faster, because everybody throws hard in the major leagues nowadays it seems, right? That separators their self-confidence.

8:01It's true in being a parent. It's true in being a business person. It's true in every area of our life. The separator at the top levels is self-confidence. So now you have that first thing that you're gonna commit to that you're gonna deliver on. Now what I would ask you to do that now that you've done that is if you really wanna build self-confidence, can you begin to extend that list to five, eight, and 10 things that you are going to begin to do that you commit to you that you're gonna do every single day to begin to stock that self-confidence. That's gonna change it. Now let's go back to the self-doubt for a second.

8:30Self-doubt is the inverse of that. I don't trust me. I don't think I'm good enough. These are thoughts placed from the outside inside your mind. The minute you acknowledge that, that's not my thought, that's someone else's. That's not, you begin to eliminate. I call it like scratching the CD. When I begin to have negative self-talk, negative thoughts, I literally picture, and I'm old by the way, but I picture an old record player or a DVD and I just scratch it. I scratch it. That thought gets scratched. I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not good looking enough. I'm not fast enough strong enough I'm not prepared enough.

9:01I once they enter that's not my thought That's something someone gave me when I was a kid and I scratch it and I literally say to myself scratch it scratch it scratch it And over time it's like a it's like a DVD or a CD or a record player Over time that thought can't be played again in your recorder when you scratch it enough times So I literally picture scratching and I say scratch it I experienced self-doubt I experience negative thoughts and I scratch them. I scratch them. I scratch them. And over time, it almost becomes funny. It's that thoughts impact on me starts to be minimized over time.

9:35Every time I scratch it, I picture scratching it like a DVD or a record or a CD. And I say it to myself, scratch it, scratch it, scratch it. And what it does is it acknowledges the thought. It loses its power over me. The first time it's still got some impact on me. The second time it But the fourth, fifth, seventh time, all of a sudden that thought just doesn't have the impact on me anymore because I acknowledge it's not mine. I've scratched it. And over time, my mind just doesn't want to play that song anymore. It doesn't want to play that movie anymore. And so that's how I begin to eliminate those thoughts in my mind.

10:06I build up my self-confidence and I scratch my self-doubt. There's also this misconception from people that you are certain things. meaning some people have this misconception that I am what I possess. In other words, I am my possessions. And so they link their self-confidence to their possessions. And so they're constantly trying to acquire more and more possessions thinking that's where they get their self-confidence from. That's how they're defined as a person. I am my possessions. Couldn't be further from the truth. It's a hollow way to try to gain self-confidence by possessing things. Nothing wrong with going for material possessions.

10:45I have all kinds of them, but I don't link my confidence to those possessions, nor am I deluded into thinking if I could just possess more things, then I'll feel better about myself. So this is a mistake. There's a flawed thought. Number one flawed thought, I am my possessions. Second flawed thought, I am my accomplishments. In other words, my self-confidence is only linked to what I'll accomplish. So because I haven't accomplished certain things, I don't have that certain title, that certain award, that certain recognition, I don't believe in myself. I'm riddled with self-doubt. I'm defined by my accomplishments.

11:18The difficult thing about that is now all your life, you're gonna have to accomplish more and more and more in order to feel self-confident and eliminate self-doubt. You are not your accomplishments. You are not your possessions. You are you. You are perfect. You are beautiful. You were born to do something great with your life. If you're a person of faith like me, you believe God made you in his image and likeness and wants you to do something great with your life, not that you are your possessions, not that you are your accomplishments. And this is the social media insidious influence it has in our lives.

11:50People are like, I don't feel good about myself. I've got this self-doubt. The gateway to me feeling more self-confidence is if I could possess more things or if I could accomplish more things. Yes, having nice things will make you feel better about yourself. Yes, accomplishing things certainly is a reinforcement for self-confidence, but it's not the pathway to getting it. The pathway to getting it is doing something great with your life where you keep the promises you make to yourself and acknowledge this self-doubt, this self-thought, this negative talk isn't even mine. It was given to me when it was impossible for me to offend myself as a child.

12:26And maybe it even happened in adolescence. And probably some of those instances have happened for you as an adult. And these ones as an adult are like that thing I said earlier, oh, it's another time I reinforced the table. I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not prepared enough. I'm not the right race. I'm not the right gender. I don't come from the right kind of family. I don't have the right education. And we find these references as adults to reinforce these self-doubting beliefs we were given by somebody else as a child. Flawed belief is that you are your possessions. You are your accomplishments.

12:56Third flawed belief, I am what other people say I am Wrong you are not what other people say you are good or bad I see too many people that if someone says something negative about them They believe that's who they are. This is the flawed third belief. I am my possessions I am my accomplishments and you know what or I am what other people say I am Let me be clear with you. You are not what other people tell you you are It wasn't true when you were 18 months old five years old or 55 years old You are not what other people say you are. So stop letting that dictate your self-confidence or fill you with self-doubt.

13:35And for the record, you are also not the good things people tell you you are all the time. Don't live for likes. Don't live for comments on your social media. Don't do things in your life just to solicit someone saying something great about you. It's a cheap, shallow, hollow way to try to gain self-esteem and self-confidence. It's fleeting, it's short-term, and it's needy. In fact, the fact that it is a necessity for you to get liked, to get people to say good things, to get comments on your social media, or to do so in your presence indicates a lack of self-esteem and self-confidence, because we know self-confidence is an internal game where we keep the promises we make to ourselves.

14:19The fourth type of flawed thinking is I am what I look like In other words if I don't look a certain way Like what the magazine says I should or social media says I should if I don't look like these people I shouldn't have self-confidence and that's ridiculous. I can tell you straightforwardly. You're beautiful as you are Especially the ladies listening to this or watching this the world is constantly trying to get you to believe you're not enough You don't look right. You should lose this weight. You should gain this this should be smaller that should be bigger, whatever it might be. They're constantly messaging women.

14:53You're not enough. You're not enough. You're not enough. You are what you look like. And this is true for men as well. Let me tell you straightforwardly. You are not what you look like. You are your soul. You are your spirit. You are your gifts. You are the contributions you make. You are your intentions. You are perfect as you are. That doesn't mean we don't want to look better. Doesn't mean we don't want to get into shape, but we want to do that to feel better about ourselves, not for the accolades from other people. We want to do that to feel healthier and stronger and be the ultimate version of ourselves.

15:21But by no means does that mean you're not perfect as you are. By no means does it mean you are defined by what you look like. You are not defined by what you look like. You are defined by the content of your character, the way you treat other people, and the difference you make in the world. So the four flawed thoughts that I see most right now is, I am my possessions. No, you're not. I am my accomplishments. No, you're not. I am what other people tell me I am and say I am, good or bad. No, you are not. And fourth, you are not what you look like. These are flawed beliefs that lead right to self-doubt and away from self-confidence.

15:55So the things we need to do to change our self-confidence is A, keep the promises we make to ourself and B, very important, we must begin to give ourselves credit for those things when we deliver on them. I want you to remember this as well. There's a power to the way we use the two B's, our brain and our body. See, self-confidence can also be a state, a physical state. It's very difficult when you're moving your body, sitting up straight, breathing deeply, right? You're in that physical strong state of being, right? Right after a workout, during a workout is when we feel our most confident because our body's at a peak state.

16:27One way to generate self-confidence is to move your body into a strong state of being. Move your body. Literally movement creates confidence. If you think about some of the peak times of your life, whether that be the fun time you may be having with your partner physically, intimately, or laughter, or peak performance running, right? Or your great accomplishments. Yes! There's a commonality to the way our body is moving at that time. If you think about the times when you're the least confident, it's usually when you wake up in the morning, isn't it? It's the most down, the most fearful, the most anxiety, or before you go to bed at night.

17:02These are two times most people experience the most amount of self-doubt is right before bed and right when they wake up. Isn't that interesting? One of the reasons is because of how we're moving. We're laying down, we're hunched over, our breathing is shallow, there's no physical movement whatsoever. This creates a state of self-doubt right before we sleep, right when we wake up, or if you're just kind of depressed or sick, self-doubt starts to kick in, doesn't it, right? If you ever had an injury and you couldn't move like you'd like to. That stagnation of the body begins to create self-doubt and strips us of our self-confidence.

17:34So moving our body is a gateway to self-confidence. And then our brain as well. We have to take control of our thoughts. We have to scratch the negative ones when they come in and replace them with great ones. Now, I don't believe self-talk works all the time, but I believe saying I am strong. I am good. I intend. I'm a good man. My intentions are pure. I'm a good person. I make a difference in the world. I'm kind. I'm gentle. I'm generous. I'm strong. I'm faithful. Beginning to repeat these thoughts to myself and these words do generate self-confidence. I keep the promises I make to myself. I'm a man of my word.

18:10Begin to talk to yourself and think these thoughts. When you combine your brain and your body, scratch the self-doubt, you lose those four stupid beliefs. I am my accomplishments. I am my possessions. I am what other people say I am, or I am what I look like. These are completely flawed beliefs. We scratch those. We scratch them. We understand the process of stacking self-confidence in our life. We know we are the content of our character. And lastly, give yourself some credit. Will you please? And I'm going to tell you where to give yourself credit. And that is in the area of your intentions.

18:42A lot of my confidence comes from the fact that I keep the promises I make to myself. I know my self-doubt are thoughts that were given to me when I couldn't even defend myself as a young little boy. I know that I'm not my accomplishments. I know I'm not my possessions. I know I'm not what I look like. And I know I'm not what other people say I am. I understand the process of building self-confidence. I scratch the negative thoughts in my life. But I can tell you this, the last place I get my confidence from is my faith and my intentions. See, I know I intend to do good. Not enough of you are giving yourself credit for your inherent goodness.

19:19And I mean this, you're special in that regard. You're perfect in that regard. Just ask yourself, what are your intentions? As an individual, as a man or a woman, do you intend to do good in the world? Do you intend to want to help people? Do you intend to be a light in people's lives? Do you intend to make a difference? Do you want to live a good life where you've helped change the world and change other people's lives? Have you ever just asked yourself that? Do you? Because if the answer to that is, you know, I don't spend enough time thinking about how good my intentions are. I don't want to hurt people.

19:52I don't want to do bad things. I don't want to take advantage of others. I really intend to do good. You know what? You need to give yourself more credit for the power of your intentions. There's a power in life of giving ourself credit just for the intentions we have. Just ask yourself that there's two types of people in life There's the people who intend to do harm to take advantage of people To cheat to cut corners to cause hurt to others for what they think will be their own game Then there's people who want to be a light. They want to make a difference. They want to help they want to contribute They want to be somebody they want to honor their God They want to make a difference in the world and their intentions are good Too often in life people with great intentions don't give themselves credit for how beautiful and wonderful those intentions are And so today just take this inventory of all the things that are wonderful about your intentions And then just take an inventory of your faith as a person of faith.

20:51I know that i'm favored I know that god wants me to do good in the world. I know that I was made in his image and likeness There's a power to that. There's a comfort to that. There's a confidence that comes from that Kind of a swagger. See, people aren't smirking at me anymore, I'm smirking at them. See, I know I'm not what I look like. I know I'm not my possessions. I know I'm not my accomplishments. I'm not what other people say I am. I understand the keys of keeping the promises I make to myself. I understand scratching those limiting beliefs. I know I intend to do good. I don't always do good.

21:25I make mistakes all the time. I'm not a deity, I'm not a god, I'm a man. But I intend to do good. And my guess is so do you start to give yourself a little credit just for your intentions Know you're perfect as you are and then to begin to take these massive action steps The final piece of the puzzle is this is that you have to believe you deserve to win and Sometimes it's not just that we think we're good, but that we've done so much. We must be worthy of winning See there's this adage in life Good people in life won't take more from the table of life than they think they're worthy of and they deserve See, in business sometimes, short term, we've all seen this, someone with bad intentions can get ahead short term.

22:08But you always reap what you sow. Karma is always a real thing. And eventually the people that take shortcuts, that cheat, that hurt other people, that have ill intent, the world, the universe, God sort of finds a way eventually to get them where they're supposed to be. But good people will never take more than they think they're worth, which is why the mandatory requirement for good people to win is they believe they deserve it they believe they're worth winning and sometimes it's not just who we are that we need to believe in but what we've done in this sense that sometimes you've got to outwork everybody and you've got to be willing to do the things nobody else is willing to do so you begin to convince yourself man i'm doing all the things everybody else is unwilling to do so i deserve to get the results other people aren't going to get I'm doing the things other people aren't willing to do.

22:58I'm paying a price that's so much greater than other people That I'm worth it that I deserve to get results They don't deserve to get because I've been willing to do the things they've been unwilling to do So the last piece is often self-confidence can just frankly come from out working everybody and convincing ourself Man, I've been doing the things nobody else is willing to do. I deserve to get the results nobody else deserves to get. And that's a shift in building self-confidence. So anyway, I hope these tips today have helped you. If they have, I ask you one thing. Please spread the word about this audio or video to other people.

23:36It's the fastest growing program in the world, fastest growing personal development, system concepts and strategies on planet Earth. Real detail, real content that real people need to hear more of. I'm here to help you and I hope you're maxing out your life. God bless you. This is the Ed Milad Show.