You're Not Unprepared, You're Afraid to Start | Lewis Howes

0:01Lewis Howes:The best habits are the ones you can actually stick with, and nutrition is no different. If every healthy choice feels like a sacrifice, it gets harder to stay consistent. That's why I like what Stars and Honey is doing. They're making protein bars that support your goals and still taste like something you actually want to eat. Each bar has 15 grams of protein and only 4 grams of sugar, with flavors inspired by desserts. You've got iced lemon cookie, mint chocolate chip, red velvet, peanut butter mousse, and dark chocolate coconut. Stars and Honey finally gives you that balance between something that's better for you and something you genuinely enjoy.

0:41Lewis Howes:And when you enjoy what you're eating, it's a lot easier to keep coming back to it. Stars and Honey Protein Bars are now available at Target stores nationwide. Pick up a box during your next Target shopping trip. Support for this podcast is brought to you by Walden University. Ever think, what if you could go after what you actually want and make a real difference? You're not alone. For over 50 years, Walden University has helped working adults get the W, the knowledge, the skills, and the confidence to build the future they want. If you've been waiting for the right moment, this is it. Head to waldenu.edu.

1:19Lewis Howes:Walden University set a course for change certified to operate by Shev. If you're a small business, you know, one great hire can change everything. And maybe it's someone to keep the day running smoothly, find the right producer, or take work off your plate so you can focus on what you do best. Finding that person matters. Indeed sponsored jobs get you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast.

2:04Lewis Howes:That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. The School of Greatness is presented by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work, a new way to work in ChatGPT, can help you organize multi-step projects. ChatGPT Work can use your apps, connected tools, and files to create things like landing pages, trackers, even web apps. You can also make ChatGPT Work more specialized by installing specific plugins. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

2:55Lewis Howes:This bonus episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. If you've ever started a big project, you know one of the hardest parts is figuring out where to begin. You might have research in one place, notes in somewhere else, feedback coming in, and a bunch of ideas you're trying to make sense of. ChatGPT is moving beyond answering questions and helping people get real work done. Later in this episode, I'll share a simple workflow that shows how starting with a clear goal and the information you already have can help turn scattered ideas into meaningful progress on your biggest projects. projects. Today, I want to talk to you about something that I still experience from time to time.

3:37Lewis Howes:And I also think a lot of people who are very ambitious experience this as well. You have something important in front of you. You have a big project, a conversation that's important, a business that you want to start, some side hustle, or maybe like a big presentation that you have to give or an opportunity you've been waiting years for. And instead of starting it, Instead of getting on that task, you freeze up. You freeze and you tell yourself that I need more time. I need more information. You need to think about it a little bit longer. You need to do more research. You need to get organized.

4:10Lewis Howes:I need to clean my room first. You need to feel more ready before you begin. But sometimes the problem isn't that you don't know where to start. Sometimes you know exactly where to start. You're just terrified that when you actually do begin, you're going to find out that you are not good enough. And that is what I want to talk about today because I've spent years interviewing some of the most successful people in the world. We're talking about Olympic champions, billionaires, scientists, best-selling authors, world-class entrepreneurs. And if there's one thing that I've learned from watching people perform at the highest level, it's that the work doesn't start when the camera turns on for me.

4:52Lewis Howes:The work starts long before anyone can see it. And I think that's the secret that most people miss. The people at the top aren't always more confident than you. They aren't always more talented, smarter than you, things like that. But they have learned how to move through the moment when they don't feel ready. I've done thousands of interviews at this point. And people sometimes assume that means that I can just walk into a room, sit down with anyone and have an incredible conversation. But that is not how I think about it, because every time someone sits across from me, I feel a duty, a responsibility.

5:31Lewis Howes:I feel a privilege. This person has a story. They have a background. They've spent years, sometimes decades, learning or mastering a skill. And I want to try to pull out as much great information that can serve you and the entire audience watching or listening on how to improve based on their story. And I might have one or two hours to find the part of the story that could change someone's life. And for me, that matters to me. And the more something matters to you, the easier it is to become afraid of getting it wrong as well. This is why so many people have a goal or dream that they care about and they wait years to get started because they're afraid.

6:12Lewis Howes:What if it doesn't work out? What if I bomb? What if I get criticized or embarrass myself? and I remember the first time I had Tony Robbins on the School of Greatness. It was probably, I don't know, nine or ten years ago. We've had him on many times now, but the first time he was like a big guest that I really wanted to get for the first few years and I'd been working on trying to book him and I finally booked him and he had a book coming out and I was like, I need to do as much research as possible because I was a little bit nervous. I was a little intimidated. I was still early in the interview game.

6:49And for me, this was like a big individual in the industry

6:53Lewis Howes:who had decades of experience and someone I really wanted to interview. And I remember reading the entire book, and this was like a 500-page book. It was huge, and I'm a very slow reader. But I was like, I want to find out what are two or three things that most people wouldn't know to ask or I wouldn't be thinking about. What's something that people never ask Tony Robbins? Because I'd seen a lot of content, seen a lot of interviews, and a lot of people were asking the same thing. So I was like, I need to find two or three things. And I remember in that interview, I was impressed that the fact that he said, man, no one's ever asked me that before.

7:32Lewis Howes:No one's ever asked me. I think he said a couple of different times, no one's ever, what a great question. No one's ever asked me that. And my whole, and this is not to toot my own horn or anything, but my whole goal was to say, how can I get him thinking outside of the box of what he usually talks about? And if I could get him to say, huh, let me think about that for a second. I was like, then that's a win for the audience. Not necessarily for me, but for the audience. Because it means that we did the research to try to get him off of the script that he normally shares. And here's what I want you to notice about that.

8:02Lewis Howes:From the outside, it looks like maybe a preparation problem. Like I have too much information. I spent all this time reading a 500-page book and I prepared a lot. I don't know what to focus on. I don't know enough yet. And I need to keep reading more. I need to keep preparing. I need to keep watching more of his interviews and doing all these things like I did. But underneath that can be something completely different also. It can be fear because preparation can become a very sophisticated form of procrastination. And this is the thing I hear from a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs that reach out to me or that want coaching from me, it's like they just continue to prepare without launching, without starting, without acting.

8:46Lewis Howes:It's like, okay, I could have read one more article about Tony. I could have read another book of his. I could have watched more videos. I could have had one more day to think about it or to review it or to obsess about the preparation. And this can feel very productive because you're doing something, you're researching, you're learning, you're developing, you're gaining more information. But there's a difference between preparing to do the work and preparing so that you never have to begin the work. I've done both, and maybe you have too. And in this instance with Tony Robbins, I think the beautiful part about this is there was a deadline.

9:24Lewis Howes:There was a deadline of when the interview was happening. There was a scheduled time. I flew to New York City. There was an hour of time that we had. So I needed to prepare, but eventually I had to take action and sit down, even when I was afraid, even when I was nervous, even though I felt like, ah, I still don't know everything I need to know about Tony to do a great interview. I had that feeling. And so if I didn't have the deadline, if I didn't have it scheduled, I maybe would have just kept preparing for as long as it took and would have never felt ready. Today's bonus episode is brought to you by ChatGPT.

10:00Lewis Howes:And one thing I've learned over the years is that great work usually starts with a lot of information coming from a lot of different places. And maybe you're preparing for an important meeting. Maybe you're researching a new business idea. Or you're working on a creative project and you've got notes, you've got feedback and ideas scattered everywhere. The hardest part isn't collecting the information, it's figuring out what to do with it. that's where ChatGPT work comes in. You start with your goal and the context from the apps and files you choose to connect and ChatGPT can help organize that scattered information into something practical like a strategy brief or a project outline that gives you a clear place to begin.

10:42Lewis Howes:What I really like is that you're always in control throughout the process. You can review progress, answer questions, change direction whenever you want and approve important actions before anything gets moved forward. It helps you spend less time organizing information and more time focusing on the work that matters most. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode. Available on plus and pro plans. Think about something that you've been circling in your life right now. Something that you've been thinking about. Something that you've been really, you know, obsessing over. Not something you don't care about.

11:19Lewis Howes:Something you really want. whether it be like, I want to launch a business. I want to do that book or this project, or I really want to do this side hustle thing. I want to make a new career change. I want to have that conversation with that person who's going to help invest in me or whatever it might be. The project that has been sitting in your notes app or sitting on your heart for months or for years. And the real question for you is what are you waiting for? Seriously, what are you waiting for? Are you waiting to have more information if it's the right thing to do? Are you waiting for more time, more confidence, more skills, more permission?

11:59Lewis Howes:What is the thing that you are really waiting for? I honestly want to know, what are you waiting for to start the thing? This doesn't mean you have to complete the thing, but starting it. Are you waiting for the moment when you can guarantee that you will not fail? Because I'm telling you that moment does not exist. And I think this is where so many people who are extremely smart, extremely gifted, extremely talented, get stuck. People say, I'm not ready yet. But what this really means is I'm not certain I'll be good at it. I'm not certain I'll be good at it, that it will succeed. And of course you're not certain.

12:42Lewis Howes:You haven't done it yet. You cannot have the confidence that comes from doing something before you've actually done it. Just thinking about doing it doesn't give you confidence. You've got to put yourself out there and do and learn and fail and make mistakes. You have to move first. The confidence comes after. And this is especially hard for high achievers because you know what it feels like to be good at something. You know what it feels like to work really hard and accomplish something. So being a beginner again for a new project, a new idea, a new thing that you're really excited about, it doesn't feel good.

13:21Lewis Howes:You would rather prepare for another year. Think about it. Ask friends. Do research. Use AI to learn more about it first before actually taking action. But you cannot become great at something. you refuse to be bad at first. And you cannot think yourself into the experience that only action can give you. So here's what changed for me. I stopped believing that preparation was supposed to remove fear. It's not. When I had Tony Robbins on, I did all this prep. I read a lot of books and watched a lot of content and I could have done a lot more, but I was still nervous. You can prepare for weeks and still be uncertain and still be on edge, still be a little nervous.

14:05Lewis Howes:You can have every note in front of you. You can have all the preparation and still wonder if you're good enough and still wonder, but can I do this? Can I be good at this? Can I succeed? Are people going to like this when I put it out there? And the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. The goal is to trust yourself inside of it. That is a completely different way of working because when you don't trust yourself, you're trying to prepare for every possible outcome. What if they say this? What if that doesn't work? What if somebody asks me something that I don't know the answer to? What if the plan changes?

14:42Lewis Howes:What if I fail? What if I get criticized? What if no one buys from me? But when you trust yourself, you don't need to know exactly what is going to happen. You need to know why you're there. And I remember a time I had an opportunity to interview another huge guest that was on the School of Greatness, Kobe Bryant. And I didn't have time to prepare. I got a call the night before the interview was going to happen. And it was maybe five o 'clock at night. And our team was on the phone with Kobe Bryant's publicist who said, hey, we want to come on the School of Greatness because Kobe has a new podcast and he wants to promote it.

15:25Lewis Howes:But his only time was available like a month out. And I told one of our team members who was on the phone with publicist, I said, don't get off the phone until you get it confirmed and book it the first thing tomorrow morning. I'll go anywhere he is. I knew he was in Los Angeles where we were at the time. And we got the interview for the next morning. Now, I didn't have time to prepare. I just got the call the night before. I didn't have time to prepare. I did as much preparation as I could within that night and then on the drive that morning to his office. But I didn't have the normal preparation time.

16:06Lewis Howes:And it ended up being one of my best interviews as well. Because I wasn't focused on trying to be overly prepared. I knew that I needed to trust myself in that moment. And that's the paradox. The more I trust myself, the more present I can be. and I'm not desperately trying to prove that I did my homework. I'm listening instead. I'm curious. I can follow something that I didn't expect, and I think this almost applies to anything, and listen, that day when I interviewed Kobe Bryant, it was chaos also. There was so many people at his office. There was a team of publicists that were like, here's everything you can't talk about lists of, you know, all these questions and topics that were off limits.

16:55Lewis Howes:I had a time crunch. I only had 20 minutes. There were more production companies setting up for interviews the rest of the day. It was kind of like overwhelming and a little unsettling. And I just said, you know what? I'm going to show up and give my best, even though I'm not fully prepared, even though I didn't have the time I would like to have had, but I'm going to be as genuinely curious as possible within this timeframe. And I think this applies to almost everything. Preparation should give you the confidence to be flexible, not the need to control everything. And the top 1 % prepare differently.

17:33Lewis Howes:There's a lot of people that I know who prepare extremely well, but then they trust themselves enough to let go. And this is something we do. I have notes of information that my team helps me prepare for every episode. I do my own research as well. But at the end of the day, I may not ask any of the pre-planned questions that were on my list. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. But the goal is to be prepared enough so that I can pull out something whenever I need to and really be present in that moment. And there's another part of this that I think a lot of us miss. Before you ask, how do I do this? Ask instead, what am I actually trying to create?

18:19Lewis Howes:And those are two very different questions. Because you can spend an enormous amount of energy doing things that have nothing to do with actually what you want. And I know I've done this before where I'm just like, okay, I'm going to have busy work. You can be incredibly busy and still be avoiding the one thing that matters. And you can have this thing listed on your screensaver and on your notes app and on your journal with your goals and your dreams and all these things you want to do. But for whatever reason, just be distracted by so many other things. For an interview, my goal isn't to prove that I read every article about the person.

18:56Lewis Howes:I know everything about their backstory. It's not to act like I'm the most intelligent person in the world by asking some awe-inspiring questions. It is to create conversations that serve you. Literally, my goal is to think about when I'm sitting across from a guest, how can I be of service to you? What are you experiencing in your life right now that I can pull out of this guest that will help you, that will improve your life that will make your life easier, happier, healthier, more abundant. And I'm thinking about you. Yes, in some ways I'm thinking about me of how can I learn how to apply this to my life, but I'm also thinking about the comment that I got from you a couple of days ago and what you said you were struggling with.

19:44Lewis Howes:And I'm going through all those comments and conversations or emails I get from people, or when people come up to me on the streets and say what they're experiencing or what they're challenged with. I think, how can I apply this to the next interview to serve you, the person watching, the person listening, the person that constantly shows up here. And it also changes a lot of what I can let go of because when the goal is clear, when I have a clear intention, a clear vision, you don't have to chase everything. You don't need every piece of information. You don't need to spend years of getting all the certifications possible in order to launch.

20:26Lewis Howes:You don't need every possible answer. You need to know what you're trying to create. What is my intention? What is my vision? And how can I bring that to life energetically? And that is one of the biggest differences that I've seen between people who consistently do great work and people who are constantly overwhelmed by their work and constantly delaying their goals or their dreams. So I want you to go back to that project that I was talking about and I asked you to think about a little bit earlier. The one that you've been circling, the one that you've got on your app, the one that you've got on your gratitude or dream or goal journal, whatever it might be, the one that you talk to all your friends about constantly but you haven't acted on yet.

21:11Imagine you stopped asking yourself or others, am I ready?

21:18Lewis Howes:And instead you started asking, do I trust myself enough to begin? Because once you actually start, something changes. The project stops being this enormous elephant in your mind that's like, ah, I don't know how I'm going to tackle this thing. Instead, it becomes real. and there's a first page that you start writing or a first phone call you start having with someone to get them enrolled in your goal or your dream or your vision. There's a first draft. There's a first conversation. And real things can be improved. You start to get feedback. You start to see what you need to continue to work on, what's working, what's not working.

21:54Lewis Howes:And imaginary things can be only worried about. And that first version is allowed to be pretty bad. It's allowed to be rough. It's allowed to fail. It doesn't have to be perfect. And this is one of the things that I see so many people struggling with is that they feel like it needs to be perfect before they put something out there. But I'm telling you, greatness starts with giving yourself the freedom to fail. It starts putting yourself out there knowing it's not going to be perfect, knowing it's not going to be exactly the way you want it. And if I think about this podcast, for example, I had no clue what I was doing when I launched this show.

22:34Lewis Howes:I had no clue about audio equipment, video equipment, interviewing people. I didn't know how to prepare for interviews. I literally just thought to myself, I need solutions to challenges in my life. And I ask a lot of people in my mind what I thought were just kind of silly, basic, dumb questions. But for me, I needed to ask those questions in such basic, dumb ways that would give you me the answers so I could understand things. Because a lot of things in school were so complicated for me to understand. I needed someone to simple them down, to make them easy to understand. And the more I asked those questions, the more I got incredible answers from people and incredible information that I was like, oh, I can apply this to my life.

23:25Lewis Howes:I can apply this to my relationships, my business. And the more I took action on those things from this show, I got exponential results. And I started to see that, oh, people enjoyed the way I asked these questions in a certain way that I did because I was trying to understand how to simplify things in life that felt so overwhelming, so hard, so challenging. And that experience becomes evidence. You start, you survive, maybe you even do well when you start doing this thing. And for me, that's what I did. I started, I had no clue what I was doing. I was like, let me record on my iPhone. Let me ask these silly questions.

24:05Lewis Howes:Let me put it out there the best way possible. It wasn't edited the best. It wasn't, you know, the best design, none of those things. But it got started. Then I got feedback and then I improved it every week that I did it. And I said, how can I be better? And, oh, I made a mistake here. Let me take the feedback from the audience and see how I can improve. And now the next time your mind says, you're not ready. You have something to answer it with. And I've been here before. I can figure things out. I did this in the past, in this project, in this process, in this goal, and I wasn't ready for any of them, but I figured it out along the way.

24:39Lewis Howes:And that is how self-trust gets built. Not by promising yourself that you'll never fail, but by proving to yourself that failure doesn't get the final word. Failure doesn't own your confidence. Failure doesn't stop you from going after what's on your heart and on your mind for who you want to be and what you want to create in the world. So here's the simple version I promised you. The simple version is this. You already know the two hard parts. You get clear on what you're trying to create and use what you've already have instead of waiting for more. And the third part is the one that actually changes anything.

25:23Lewis Howes:And today, I want you to take one real action on it, not a plan, not a list. One thing that turns this from something in your head into something that exists. So here's what I want to leave you with. There is something in your life right now that you have been preparing to start. This is something we talked about from the beginning of this. You've been circling around. You've been thinking about. You've been ruminating. You've been telling friends and family. You've been telling your audience online, I want to do this thing. and maybe your preparation has been great. Maybe it's real and maybe there are still things that you need to learn to master this.