What Really Creates Unshakable Confidence

So as we covered in chapter one, for the last 70 years, the self-help industry has been selling us the same formula. You feel confident first, then that allows you to act and perform at a high level. This is just simply not true. And in this chapter, we're going to dig into the research of what confidence actually is, how do you actually develop it, and how does it really play out across your life? And interestingly, this started with a single psychologist who stumbled onto this topic on accident, and it involves a room full of snakes, which I'm always a fan of. So the researcher was a man by the name of Albert Bindor, and he was a researcher at Stanford for over 60 years. I did not realize this until we were prepping for this episode, but he was the most cited living psychologist before he died. He was huge. Which you went to grad school. You learned about him in Psych 101 for sure, yeah. Yeah, you went to grad school. I'm sure you heard a lot more about him, but it's just funny. I would never have guessed that he was the most cited psychologist. Bindor had an interesting life story. He grew up in an extremely remote town in northern Canada. He went to a high school with only two teachers, and pretty much from an early age, he learned that whatever you wanted to do, you kind of had to figure it out yourself. Now, he never aspired to be a psychologist. He kind of stumbled into it on accident. By going to such a small school, there was large gaps in the scheduling, and there weren't tons of classes available. So he took an intro psych class just to kind of fulfill a credit and to kill some time before his other courses, and he immediately became obsessed. He couldn't get enough of it, and he would go on to become one of the most revered researchers we've ever had. So the study in question here is a very classic dramatic study. Is it me, Drew, or did they not make psychological studies the way they used to? They have all these review boards now, and yeah, ethical considerations. They're kind of getting away now. I feel like when you read about psych studies from the 50s and 60s, there's crazy ---- going on. The Milgram experiment. Dude, there's like ******* prison experiments, and like snake experiments. Shocking people. Shocking people, and making them thinking that they're torturing somebody in a good old maze. What happened to us, Drew? What happened? This one, they were at least trying to help people. No, this one is awesome. So what he did is he recruited a bunch of adults with life-crippling phobias. So, I mean, we're talking phobias that was deeply interfering with their ability to just get by on a day-to-day basis. And in this case, it was people with extreme phobias of snakes. And so just to give listeners a sense of the extent of these phobias, you had people who changed their routes to work because they didn't want to drive past a park. You had a woman who refused to have never worn a necklace in her life because necklaces reminded her of snakes. You had people who obsessively checked rooms and under furniture. Every single room they ever went into, they would have to obsessively check under all the furniture to confirm that there was not a snake in the room. Like hardcore phobias. And what's incredible is that the intervention that he designed, it involved no pills, no therapy, no visualizations, no mirror affirmations, definitely no ******* power poses. It was a simple intervention that he called guided mastery. And the process was really straightforward. First, they would watch through a window as he handled snakes. And after they got comfortable with him handling the snakes, he would simply invite them into the room. They didn't have to do anything. They just had to step into the room. Once he got them into the room, then he would invite them to touch, simply touch a snake with thick gloves on. Once they were able to touch the snake with thick gloves, he would invite them to take the glove off and then touch them again. And then eventually, he would get them holding the snakes in their laps, putting it on themselves, holding it. And essentially within an afternoon, he would take these people from crippling phobias to holding and handling snakes for an extended period of time. I know CBT and exposure therapy was kind of just getting off the ground around this same time. I mean, he called it guided mastery, but I read this and I was like, that's just exposure therapy, essentially. It's like you break off a little piece of the thing you're afraid of and you do that first and then you get a little bigger piece and then a little bigger piece and then eventually you're not afraid to do it at all. But that's a bit of an aside, because the point here is not about fear. It's actually, you know, this is an episode about confidence. And this was the most stunning and unexpected finding that Bender have found, which was that when he followed up with these people who had the snake experience, they reported feeling more confident in other areas of their lives. They were more willing to speak up in meetings at work. They were more likely to ask for a raise. They were more confrontational with difficult people in their lives. They had a better time sticking to diets, sticking to routines. But basically the snake cure had kind of wide-ranging subtle effects in other areas of their lives. As a specific example, like I mentioned the woman who never wore a necklace because it reminded her of snakes. Sure enough, after the experiment, she started wearing necklaces. And what's interesting is that nobody told her to wear necklaces. She just started wearing them. Now, the reason this experiment is important, the reason this whole concept of guided mastery is important, is that the Peale fallacy tells us believe in yourself first, then act. But what Bender's research shows us is that you act first, then you start to believe in yourself. So confidence doesn't precede experience. It is produced by the experience. A simpler way to put this is that a feeling of confidence, an expectation of success or an ability to handle a situation, it is built through evidence. When you accumulate evidence in your life that you are able to handle certain things, then that is going to create a belief that you are able to handle subsequent things. If you've never handled anything difficult before and you try to believe that you can, you have no evidence to base that on. Yeah, nobody came into that lab like, I want to be more confident in my life, right? They just came in to solve a problem. But they had this crippling problem in their life and they wanted to come in and solve that problem. And they left being like, oh, I can solve problems now. And that kind of gave them a more, just a more confident outlook in life. What you're pointing at, I think, is a very important pattern that we need to hammer on repeatedly throughout this episode, which is that generalizable confidence is not built in general. What happens is, is you build confidence in specific domains, specific contexts. And once you do that enough, it kind of bleeds out into the rest of your life. It's like a skill almost. Yeah. Yeah. And this is what Bandura found, is that confidence is domain specific. You tend to only feel confident about the things that you have already accumulated evidence for, that you've shown yourself that you can handle in your life. And then once you've shown yourself that you can handle that, you tend to feel confident in that specific domain. But you've also built evidence that you have handled something difficult before. Therefore, when confronted with other difficult things, you have a little bit more self-belief going into it. It starts specific and then it moves into the general, not the other way around. It's also related a little bit to the self-determination theory, which is another big theory in psychology that came up by these two researchers, DC and Ryan. We've mentioned it before in a lot of different contexts, but it's a wide ranging theory. One of the key points in that is that people who do seek, like, I want to be more confident and they seek ways to be more confident, end up being not as confident. When the people who just seek out competence in some domain, just like you're saying, they're the ones who end up being confident. It's a byproduct of all of it, right? It's not what they're seeking. They're just seeking competence. They don't really have confidence in mind at all. But then they come back and they're like, oh yeah, since I was able to do this thing and I proved to myself I can do this thing, now I feel a little bit better about all these other things. You know what the irony of this, I want to come back to Norman Minton Peale for a second. The irony is, I imagine what happened. I've not studied his life closely, but he's in seminary school. He's terrified of public speaking. He's extremely anxious. He develops all these little tools and systems that get him up onto the pulpit and delivering sermons. It goes well. There was one domain in his life that he was particularly insecure about. He developed a handful of techniques that helped him accumulate that evidence that allowed him to be confident in that narrow context. And then once he became confident in that narrow context, it generalized a little bit across the rest of his life. But he drew the wrong conclusion from it. He looked at it and he said, oh, it must've been my affirmations and techniques that made me confident, not I got up and delivered a thousand sermons that made me confident. The solution was actually hiding in plain sight and he got the exact wrong lesson out of it. Yes, he did. Yeah. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Quo. Confidence is technically invisible. Nobody can see how sure of yourself you feel. They can only see how you show up, which is brutal in business. You can be the best in the world at what you do, but the second a call goes unanswered, the customer doesn't think you're busy. They think, next. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the business phone system built so that you never miss an opportunity. Quo keeps every call, text, and voicemail in one place. So your team can jump in and pick up right where it left off. Its AI agent even answers after hours while you're gone. It's rated number one on G2 and trusted by over 90,000 businesses. Confidence is not always what you feel walking in. Sometimes it's the call you didn't miss. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash solved. That's Q-U-O.com slash solved. All right, let's get back into it. Bandura though, like he did have this specific framework around what he called self-efficacy. This isn't confidence. It's self-efficacy is what we're talking about. It's competence really is what it is, right? He said, what predicts whether somebody will attempt like a difficult task or try something difficult or something that's uncertain even too, right? Which is really what we're trying to do here with like when people are trying to be confident and then act, that's what they're trying to do. Act on something that's uncertain. He says that it's not about how you feel about yourself generally, but it's whether or not it's based on that actual evidence that they can actually execute those specific behaviors for a specific task, okay? So there's really three features that he highlighted out of this. It's not really a feeling that you have. It's more of just a belief that you can at least address whatever situation you're in. Not even necessarily that you're going to succeed. Just like, well, I can try this, right? So it's not a feeling of, oh, I can definitely do this. Let me give this a shot. Also it's task specific as well. Okay. Like you were just saying, it's not, I have this general belief about myself that I can do anything. No, it's like, here's a thing in front of me. I can probably do this. Let me see if I can. The self-efficacy, this belief in yourself is evidence-based. It's not based on just some affirmation. It's based on experience. It's based on experience with a specific task. You've lived through it. You're not sitting at home putting post-it stickers on your bathroom mirror. You've actually gone out and done the thing a hundred times. So right there, you can just see the whole industry got it backwards, right? It was like, no, you have to act first and then you're going to feel like you can actually do it, right? So if confidence starts with a domain-specific experience, probably what happens for most people is when we hit adolescence, we become socially aware. We start measuring ourselves against others. And when you're a teenager, you haven't done a ******* thing. So of course, nobody's confident. Everybody's highly insecure. And I feel like what happens for most people is that they develop competence around one thing when they're young. That allows them to build confidence, which then allows them to approach other challenges later on in their life. I'm curious what that first thing was for you that allowed you to develop confidence, and do you feel like it bled over into other things? Like I was good at school. I don't want to say that I was smart or anything like that. I just knew I was good at school. And as a little kid, that's probably pretty important for a lot of little kids. If you're not, then that's pretty hard. That makes for a pretty hard life as a kid. So for me anyway, that kind of bled into other areas too. It was like, oh, maybe sports too. And I was okay at some sports as well. And then it did kind of build out from that for me anyway. That's what it felt like. I feel like that's kind of the classic- That's a very classic one. Traditional, you know, like if you talk to parents and teachers, what you just described is like the goal for kids. This is also like when I talk about when and where I grew up, I'm like, it was a really good place and good time to do it. Well, because I kind of fit in with that traditional kind of value, I guess. Yeah. I was a mess. Yeah. I was a mess. Where did you find your first domain of experience that gave you some confidence? Honestly, with me, it probably happened pretty late. We'll get into this in the following chapters. I definitely developed some narcissistic tendencies as a defense mechanism. Interesting. Yeah, we'll get into that. I was not great at school. I was terrible at sports. All the things I was really into, like music and reading and philosophy and art, weren't really celebrated or appreciated where I grew up. So yeah, I mean, the two things I got good at when I was a teenager were music and video games. I guess music gave me a little bit, but honestly, not a ton. I don't think I actually developed real self-confidence until I was well into my 20s. And I think I compensated. Chapter three, we'll talk through some of the coping mechanisms and overcompensations that happen for people who are not confident. I think I definitely struggled through a lot of that through my 20s. I was very insecure for a while. Where's an area now that you still have low self-efficacy, would you say? Anything physical. I'm terrible with my hands. I'm terrible. I'm bad at sports. I'm not coordinated. I'm not athletic. So anytime I'm in a situation where you're supposed to do something that requires a lot of physical acuity or coordination or strength or something, I'm just like, ugh, I'm going to suck at this. Does it really bother you though anymore? No, I don't really care. But when I was young, it did. Yeah, sure. It really did. Certain things get rewarded socially when you're young. For example, the first thing that I was actually really good at when I was young was video games. And I know a lot of people say that, but I competed in tournaments. I competed nationally. I competed internationally. I won tens of thousands of dollars playing video games. Nobody at school thought that was cool. I'd make maybe one dorky friend who was really impressed by that. But it was mostly just me on the internet in the late 90s playing these games with a bunch of strangers. There was no sustenance to that evidence. I built all this evidence that I was good at a thing, but I wasn't being socially rewarded for it. In fact, I was being shamed for it. So it didn't bleed out into other areas of my the way that, say, the snake example did. I didn't feel very confident around girls for a long time. I can tell you that. That's another one. That's a whole nother thing. That's a whole nother one. When you do develop that kind of a base level of, I can acquire these skills and whatever, if anything does seem a little bit out of your reach at that point, I developed imperfectionism around that and an avoidance around it too. So I think that's what some people you've got to watch out for. Because you sit here, like I've been saying, like, yeah, no, I don't do these things and I don't visualize and I didn't have to do all this because I just avoided it. If I didn't feel even a little bit confident about it, I didn't try to make myself confident, I just wouldn't do it. So I think there's some of that too going on. Yeah. Well, we're going to talk about self-esteem and the self-esteem movement in chapter four, because it's one of the things that we have since learned about the self-esteem movement is that if you tell people to feel good about themselves without them earning it, it backfires. What you create is a little narcissist. And I grew up being told that I was amazing and could be amazing at everything without earning it, without accumulating that evidence. And so I became a bit of a narcissistic twat, which we will... We'll get to that. We will definitely talk about that. First though, let's talk about where self-efficacy comes from. So domain-specific confidence. Yes. Let's talk about that. So he came up with, where does this self-efficacy come from? Like, how do we build this? We've talked about the evidence and all of that. He had these four sources that he came up with though. First and foremost, and these are in order of... Of how big of an effect they have. Yeah. How big of an impact they'll have. First is the mastery experiences, kind of what we've just been talking about. You do it, you have some success with it, and it feeds on itself. And you build up that evidence. It updates the beliefs in the most durable way, because you have direct experience with it. You have a felt experience with it. You have all the emotional stuff that comes with it. You have the evidence right in front of you. Importantly too though, early on, failures, especially early on, can kind of wreck that process as well. So it's fragile at first, it gets more durable as you accumulate more and more evidence. That's pretty obvious, right? The second one is vicarious experiences. So watching other people do it and succeed. That can have a lot of impact too. Importantly though, it needs to be someone you see as a peer or near peer. So this is why if you see like a, I don't know, an NBA player doing something crazy, like slam dunking from the free throw line or something. Yeah, you and I have no chance. That is not motivating whatsoever. That does not make me feel like I can do that. But if it's like somebody else who maybe I grew up with, or maybe just a little bit older than me, maybe they're just a little bit ahead of me, that makes a lot of sense to us too. We can watch other people succeed in a domain that we have some experience in. Maybe we're just starting out. Maybe we're just starting those mastery experiences and then we see them do it and like, oh, that's a little bit motivating for us, right? Yeah. I think it's, there's a relatability component that has to be there and it's the role model thing, right? Like it's growing up or having somebody around you that it's like, okay, if they can do it, I can do it. We already ---- on one TED talk, but in general, I do actually like TED talks because a lot of times it's somebody you don't, you've never heard of that has this like amazing talk and they're like, ah, I was this way and then I did this and something happened. I love those. Kind of the people I follow maybe in our industry, they usually have some sort of background where it was like I was in a really ---- place, right? I relate to those people way more than somebody who was just like, oh yeah, I came out of the womb just like ---- and excellence, right? Like this is interesting you bring this up because I actually think you just touched on like a really, really important point about the personal growth and self-help industry in general. It's this piece, right? It's the relatability of the person that you're listening to, right? Like tons of people listen to Mel Robbins. She's a middle-aged woman. I imagine a large percentage of her audience is middle-aged women, right? Moms like with minivans living in the suburbs because it's when you hear it from her, it's going to land differently than if you hear it from me or you. There's a demographic component of this because it's we need to feel like somebody who came from our situation made the transformation that we want to make. It's having those two ingredients side-by-side that is what inspires us. Well, and I think that was the part of the problem with the kind of last generation of the whole self-help thing was a lot of them, you know, were put up on a pedestal or tried to come out and say like, I'm superhuman and here's how you should- It was the guru model. The guru model, yeah. These days it's much more about, hey, I'm just a person like you, right? Which I said I was going to check you if you patted yourself on your back, but I'll pat you on the back a little bit because that was one of the, like early on, you know, you were somebody who was like, man, I fucked this up. Very anti-guru. Yeah, yeah. And that was a big appeal and still is a big appeal to a lot of people that you're very honest about that kind of stuff. And that's what we try to do here too. Right. So I get that. But those vicarious experiences need to be rooted in some sense of reality for somebody to actually be able to relate to them and learn from them and gain some self-efficacy from them, right? Third one, verbal persuasion. So we're getting down the rung here. Okay, pretty quick. Being told you're capable can actually help you develop some self-efficacy. Okay. Again, though, it's very similar to the vicarious experience. This has to come from like a credible source, somebody you're familiar with, and somebody who is giving you some grounding in reality around what they're telling you. A close mentor or coach who you've worked with for a while. They know you, they know your flaws, they know your strengths and weaknesses, all of that. Something coming from them telling you, Hey, no, you can actually do this. And I've seen you do it a few times before. That means a lot more than the guru telling you, you can do this. I know you can, or, you know, just somebody on YouTube staring at a camera saying, I know you can do this. Come on. So the evidence is getting weaker as we go down a little bit here. The last one that he, he, he talked about was physiological and affective states. This one. We talked about this, the, the state pump, the emotional pumps. There's a way you interpret those types of things. So somebody could be like super jacked up, high heart rate, like thoughts going crazy and whatever, and just be like on a meltdown. And somebody could be like, wow, I'm really like, this is awesome. I'm locked in. I'm getting going. It's, it's, it's not real dependable. It's not a dependable source of self-efficacy. So that's kind of the hierarchy he can, he came from again, those mastery based experiences are the ones that produce the most durable, longest lasting states of self-efficacy that we can have. That's what you really should be focusing on. And that was his whole point. I was like, go out and do ----. I think if you look at effective interventions, whether it's Bandura, or we talked a little bit about Tony Robbins, like there's kind of a laddering up of these four sources, right? Like, you know, Bandura just didn't, didn't bring him in and throw snakes in their lap. He like brought him in. He probably talked to him for a while first and kind of like built a little bit of credibility and confidence. Then he had them watch him do it. And he probably did it in a way that it's like, see, I'm just a normal, I'm not even a snake handler. I'm just a guy at Stanford. Right. And then he like, once he's kind of built a little smidgen of self-efficacy enough for them to actually try it and do it themselves, then they get to have the mastery experience. Right. But so many people in the industry just stop at that, those physiological states, right? You just need to pump yourself up and you'll be good. It's like, no, there's a ladder to it. Cause it's easy. Yeah. It's easy and it feels good. And also people spend money when they're emotionally pumped up. But ultimately it's those mastery experiences that you have to get to wherever you start. Okay. So this gets us into like, what is the actual mechanism for building this self-efficacy, this domain specific confidence? You know, in the subtle art of not giving a ****, I had a thing called the do something principle, where I point out that most people assume that the loop is, you have inspiration that creates motivation and then that creates action. And I pointed out that that loop actually starts with the action. Action generates motivation, which generates inspiration, which generates action, right? So it's the entry point is actually the action. It's not the exit point. I think there's a similar loop with confidence. Like people assume that, you know, they have to develop a high amount of self-belief that will create good performance, that will create a feeling of confidence, which will then create high self-belief and so on and so forth. And it's like, no, you actually begin with the performance, the action that builds some self-belief, which then that builds a feeling of confidence. The feeling of confidence is the output at the end of the algorithm. It's not the input at the beginning of the algorithm. So there's actually a really cool meta-analysis in 2018 about self-efficacy and performance. And it found that performance shapes self-efficacy nearly three times as strongly as self-efficacy shapes future performance. So they've actually been able to deduce like a ratio between these two variables, right? Like where it's your belief in yourself is about a third as impactful on your subsequent performance as your performance is on your belief on yourself, right? So the performance is the higher leverage entry point. You're just gonna generate a lot more momentum in your life if you start with the action rather than starting with the self-belief. But the self-belief, you still get something out of that. It still matters. It's way higher leverage if you go at it from the other way. If you start with the performance and the mastery experience. Yeah. I see. And then it builds more self-efficacy that way. Okay. So here's a really important caveat. There's an age split here. So for adults, you get this kind of mutual benefit between performance and confidence. Whereas with kids, it's more unidirectional. So with children, performance leads to confidence. Whereas if you try to make the child confident, it doesn't have an effect on the performance. Wow. So in many ways, telling students that they can do something that they haven't done is not helpful. When we come back to self-esteem in a later chapter, we're gonna discover that it's actually unhelpful in many ways. See, this was the thing, like I said, when I was growing up, I never felt like the teachers around me or anybody said, you can do it. They just said, do it. Maybe that was just my interpretation of the whole thing. I don't know. Maybe it's where we grew up, right? Yeah, it could be. I went to a hoity-toity private school where everybody was ******* special. So we've established this loop, right? The correct entry point is action that kicks off everything else. So then the question becomes like, how do you get the loop going? This is the problem that everybody faces. It's like, how do I start, right? It's a catch-22. I am anxious, insecure. I have no experience. So like, how do I get experience? It's like the confidence version of the classic job conundrum of like, how do I get a job if I have no work experience? How do I get work experience if I have no job, right? It's how do I get confidence if I have no evidence? How do I get evidence if I have no confidence? The trick is to break it down in the small wins. We've talked many times about a concept that I call minimum viable action. It's been in every course I've ever produced. It's been in like probably a third of our episodes of Solve that we've done. It is the solution that just comes up over and over and over again throughout any psychological intervention, which is whatever the desired action or behavior is, you break it down to a point that it feels feasible and doable, and then you just start there. A really simple example that I use all the time is meditation, that if it feels intimidating to sit down and meditate for 15 minutes, sit down for one minute. If one minute feels intimidating, then just ******* sit down. Close your eyes for five seconds, right? Anybody can do that for five seconds. And then once you do it for five seconds, you're like, oh, this isn't so bad. Then you do it for a minute. After a minute, you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, I can do this. Then you do it for 15. So the same way we kind of talked about that entry point to building up self-efficacy through guided mastery, there's also just an entry point with the actions themselves. If you can start with the smallest possible action, it removes a lot of the intimidation. It removes a lot of the narratives and what-ifs that are going on. It lowers the stakes to the point that it feels doable. So that's a good example. What are some other examples of this though? Because I think this is a really important point. And there's lots of areas where people aren't confident. We just did a webinar for our community members a couple months ago. And one of the questions I was asked, and I get asked this quite a bit, is that when you started writing, when you first started publishing your writing online, were you confident? Did you have self-efficacy, right? And my answer is no. But the answer I always give people is that when I started writing online, the stakes were so unbelievably low. Like I started blogging because my roommate had a blog and he was like, it's pretty cool. You have some good ideas. You should write a blog. And I was like, okay. My expectation was that I was going to write a couple hundred words each week and like my roommates and my mom would read it. And that was kind of it. I didn't have any of these grand visions about being an author and having millions of readers and followers and all this stuff. If I did, I probably would have ---- my pants and never published anything because it would have been terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. I hadn't built any self-efficacy in that domain yet. But because my audience was just like three or four people, I'm like, well, I talk to my roommates all the time. So let me just write down some of the stuff that I would talk to them about. And then that built up a little bit of confidence and then they started sharing it with some of their friends. Now I'm like writing some stuff for some people that I've maybe met once before or I've heard about once before and they like it. And so they start sharing it with people. And after about six months, strangers start showing up, right? People I've never met in my life. I remember the first time that started happening. I was like, oh my God, I have no idea who this person is. They don't even live in my city and they're like reading my blog. That's like such a strange thing. And so it was a very gradual ascent, right? Whereas like a counterexample to that would be when I went into music, I really did have aspirations of like, I want to be a professional musician. I want to play arenas. I want to play theaters. I want to play stages. I want to record albums. I want to do all these things. And there was just an incredible expectation put on myself. I went to music school where I'm like surrounded by just unbelievably talented people. And it was extremely intimidating. It was very difficult to keep with it. I was insanely insecure, despite the fact that I was good at music. I put myself in an environment where I'm like, okay, I know I'm a good musician, but I don't know if I'm this good. And I'm about to be judged and critiqued and like my life is going to be based on those judgments and critiques. And it was just too much. I couldn't handle it. That's an important point too. Bandura makes that point. And also DC and Ryan and self-determination theory make that point that usually in those mastery experiences, like it has to be kind of like, just maybe a little bit past your comfort zone where you were kind of trying to shoot for, I need to be mega star, mega rock star guy, you know, and you're like, well, no, you need to practice your scales a little bit more. Probably is what it was, right? Okay. Let me return to the blogging example, because like what ended up happening, I ended up mostly writing about my dating life because that was mostly what my roommates and I talked about and that started getting traction. The readership started to grow. And pretty soon, like hundreds of strangers who I'd never met in my life were reading about my dating life and they started emailing me and asking me for advice. Long story short, I became a dating coach and it was my first business. And it was kind of the very nascent stage of this career. And so there was a period of time I took socially awkward single people out and helped them meet other single people. Like that was my entire job. I was like a professional wingman. Even though I'd lived a weird life, Mark. Anyway, go on, go on. It was interesting because it was the exact same principles. I would get these people, it was usually like very nerdy men, right? Like some engineering guy who had read 16 books about evolutionary psychology and mating theories and like social cues and all this stuff, who had all of these aspirations for what kind of woman he wanted to marry and how many girlfriends he wanted to have and what his dates were gonna be like. Meanwhile, I'm talking to him. I'm like, okay, you can't hold eye contact. You don't know how to even say hello to a stranger. You haven't showered in three days. Like, okay, let's take care of the basics first. And so I used to get clients. I was usually the guy that they came to when like nothing else worked because I was very practical and I was very critical of that industry. These people would show up and they're like, I've tried everything. Like nothing's working. I've studied all the theory. I've done seminars. I've hired coaches. I've like hired matchmakers. It's like, nothing's working. And I would take them out and I'd be like, okay, so your goal today is to stop and say hello to 10 attractive women. That's the whole goal. That's all we're doing. Just stop, say hello. How's your day going? That's it. And they would look at me like they would almost be insulted. They're like, I'm paying you all this money and you brought me to a mall to say hello to random women. And I'm like, yes, that is what we're doing. And it was amazing because they had all these theories and ideas in their head of like what was supposed to happen. And it turned out that for the majority of them, if they just walked up to somebody politely and said hello and introduced themselves and asked her for her name, things went pretty well. The piece that was missing was just really basic social skills and kind of getting over that initial anxiety about an interaction. And then once they were kind of in the pool, so to speak, they figured out how to swim. Like the rest kind of took care of itself. I remember regularly having experiences with clients who, they would get angry. Like they would actually like, I would spend a weekend with them and they would get ******* angry because they were like, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars and I've spent two years trying to figure this out. And you took me to a mall and made me say hello to a bunch of random women. And it's like, that's all I ever had to do. That like this whole time, that's what I had to do. And it comes back to the self-efficacy thing of like, they just need to get those small wins under their belts, right? It's like, stop reading about women and actually go talk to one. And then once they talk to one, they're like, oh, this isn't, this actually isn't that hard. Like, why was I obsessing over this? Why was I worrying about this so much? And then, you know, after they talk to a certain amount, maybe they get a phone number, maybe they get a date. They're like, oh, okay. Yeah, I just go do this a hundred times and then I find my wife and like, that's it. I mean, when you break it down like that, it's like, oh, okay. Like it's because you have a very actionable thing you can do that you can approach. It removes a lot of the worry and anxiety around it because that thing is so simple and so low stakes. So I get, I definitely get that. Dating itself is a good example of self-efficacy in general because it is something that you kind of have to be bad at to become good at. And being bad at it is very uncomfortable and very painful. But there isn't really a way around getting good at it without doing it. It's something that you have to actually get out there, experience, build that evidence. Because so much of attraction and chemistry is confidence dependent, right? Like you can't really, truly present yourself authentically if you don't feel good about yourself in that situation. There is no other way to do it than to do it. What about if you're in a relationship and you're not confident in that relationship? Maybe you had some confidence at one point, some self-efficacy at one point, even too. What then? It's interesting because I think in the context of relationships, you know, a lot of the output is outside of your control. So for example, if you're learning woodworking or whatever, the output's a hundred percent It's very tangible, yeah. And so you can watch yourself slowly get better at it over time. And then that build, that accumulates the evidence. It's very straightforward. It's like, you know, a lot of things in life are like that. With social skills, dating, relationships, so much of the outcome is outside of your control. And so much of the outcome is actually dependent on one specific person or maybe a small group of people. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, what self-efficacy are you trying to build? If the confidence I'm trying to build is that my wife likes me, that is not going to go well because I can't control how she feels. She is her own person. She has her own thoughts, feelings. There are so many things that are outside of my control that happen in her life that have absolutely like nothing to do with me, but can affect how she feels about me in that very moment. So if I base how I feel about myself, if I'm using her reactions to me as the evidence for my own self-worth, it's not going to go well. If I decide to build confidence on my ability to manage the ups and downs of a relationship, that is a skill that is 100% within my control. I guess there's a control piece here. Yeah, and where you're targeting your efforts there too, yeah. Well, and this also comes back to SDT, self-determination theory, because I believe part of their framework is there's an autonomy component of it, which means that it's something that you do have control over. If you don't have control over it, you don't have autonomy, so you don't develop that sense of confidence or motivation. And then there's the, with them, I believe it's belongingness. There's a social component of it. Building self-efficacy, whatever you target to build your confidence in to generate that generalizable confidence, it needs to be something within your control. For it to generalize outside of that specific domain, I do think there needs to be some sort of tangible benefit or observable benefit. My problem was the thing that I got really good at was not helping me anywhere else in my life, or it wasn't winning me any points anywhere else in my life. Whereas I guess somebody who got really good at football or basketball, it builds friendships, it builds relationships, it gets them noticed and admired at school, and the teachers take notice and compliment them and applaud them and reward them, right? Whereas what I was doing, I was sitting by myself in a bedroom with a bunch of random strangers on a screen. – Right, right, okay, okay. You were starting to touch on what I wanted to get into next year, actually, which is there's one little gap in Bandura's theory and his framework here, and that is you and someone else, we could go through the exact same experience, right? Same failure, same result, same success, same circumstances. One of us comes out more confident and one of us comes out not so confident, right? Exact same experience. Why is that? It's this guy called Bernard Wiener. – Okay, nice name. – I'm sorry, I'm going to laugh like a little teenager through this. – Around the name Wiener, because this is what got you, okay. – Yeah, maybe it's Wiener, but it's spelled Wiener, so yeah. He has this framework, though, and you just mentioned this. There's two dimensions that matter most. How do you attribute the confidence that you get from these mastery experiences or whatever, right? One of them is the locus of control, what you just said. What kind of control do you think you have? Is it internal, like, oh, I did this and then something happened? Or, oh, I just got lucky, right? So there's kind of an internal versus an external control. That's self-determination theory, too. Yeah, very much so. The other side of it, though, is also stability, okay? So is it the outcome? Is it a fixed and permanent? Is it just kind of what always happens? Or is there some sort of variation to it? Okay, so you have these two dimensions, and then what you can see here is there's like these two axes, you know, and you can get all nerdy about it. I won't get too deep into it, but like someone who attributes their success internally, they said, okay, I did this thing. – Yeah. – I had control over it and I did it. And it paid off. That's internal and it's variable. I did something and it could have went bad or it could have went good, and it went good. If, like, you have that mindset with it, you get a really strong signal of efficacy from that, okay? Maybe that exact same thing happened where, you know, whatever, the interaction went well with someone or whatever, and, like, somebody comes in and they say, okay, I went up to them, I was, you know, made strong eye contact or, you know, whatever it is that they did, and the interaction went well. Cool, I can do this. Somebody else might do the same thing and say, well, they were just being nice to me. And so it doesn't really count, right? – It doesn't build any self-esteem. – Exact same experience that happened, totally different internal experience that happened within them, right? This is part of an attribution theory, basically, that Bernard Wiener came up with. – Can I throw something into this really quick? Because I think it relates to this. So remember Malcolm Gladwell's whole 10,000 hours thing, which turned out to not be a thing? The thing of the 10,000 hour rule that actually is a thing is the concept of deliberate practice. And the researcher Erickson, who did all the research behind the 10,000 hour thing, he actually found some interesting findings that are related to this, which is that when you are practicing the thing, when you are accumulating that evidence, there's kind of two principles at work that are really important. One is that it's more valuable to do things more frequently at kind of a steady state than to just occasionally go all out. Say you want to get good at something, instead of doing it once a month, but doing it really hardcore, it's not really going to build that confidence the same way it does if you do it, like say an hour and a half every single day for 30 days straight. So there's like a consistency that seems to matter a little bit more than intensity. But the other thing that's really interesting is that he found that you don't really build self-efficacy unless you are what he called the edge of your ability zone, which is essentially like you need to find the limit of what you're currently capable of and try to expand that limit. So if you try to do something insanely hard and you fail at it, like dunking from a free throw line, obviously that's not really going to build any self-efficacy. Whereas if you do something extremely easy, and I think this is much more common with insecure people, is they don't want to push themselves to the edge of their ability. So they like stay in the kiddie pool and do things very safe and easily over and over again. That doesn't build self-efficacy either. So if you're not being challenged, it doesn't build any confidence. And then if you challenge yourself too much to the point that it's impossible, it also doesn't build any confidence. He was kind of vocal against the 10,000 hour rule, if I remember right. It was one of those things where like, yeah, it got completely butchered and bastardized by pop psych writers like Malcolm Gladwell. And then he came out and he was like, you know what, forget it. From what I recall, it was like, it was literally just a throwaway line in one of his papers. He was just like, oh, generally it seems that people who achieve mastery, they've put in at least 10,000 hours. But there was like a very wide range of hours that people put in. Like some put in 3,000 hours, some put in 30,000 hours. He kind of just made a generalized statement of like, it seems most masters at crafts have put in over 10,000 hours. And then Gladwell zeroed in on that and turned it into a quote unquote rule. But the reason I bring this up, because I do think it relates to the attribution thing. I mean, ultimately there is such a thing as quality of evidence. The same way there's shitty evidence in a courtroom that like nobody really believes, there's shitty evidence that you can show yourself that you probably won't really believe. And so if you were playing basketball 30 hours a week and you're just beating up on a bunch of sixth graders over and over again, you're not going to build any confidence because that's not good evidence that you're good at basketball. That's bullshit evidence. So the quality of that evidence really boils down to, is it something that's in your control? Is it something that has a variable output, right? Like, does your effort matter? Is it something that you are challenging yourself? Are you at the edge of your ability? And is it something that you're doing consistently and repeatedly? Right. It's like, and if you're hitting all those things, then it becomes good evidence because then you get to see the progress you're making. You get to feel the challenge. You get to feel yourself overcoming the challenge. Basically what you're saying is like the work that you do put in has to be interpreted correctly. Yeah. More or less, right? Like there is a way where we can interpret all of those things in the wrong way. Like, oh, I just got lucky, even though you did put in the work. I actually just thought of a really interesting example of this. So back when I was coaching, one thing I noticed is that, you know, a lot of clients that I worked with had social anxiety. And so I would take them out to a bar or a party or whatever, you know, to meet single people. And a lot of the socially anxious people would drink. And one thing I noticed over time is that all of my socially anxious clients that drank, they never got over the social anxiety. The social anxiety never improved. They used it as a crutch. And I think what was happening, right? Because it's, you know, to build self-efficacy, you need that evidence. But that evidence needs to be grounded in reality. You need to feel like it's you that's doing it. But if you're drunk, it's not you. It's not you doing it. It's the booze. And you're not getting an accurate reflection of the result, right? Because you're drunk. So you probably think she's totally into you and you're just like ******* making up a lot of yourself. It's filtered through the booze. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a good one. I never put that together until just now. It's an interesting, I never knew why that was, but that actually the self-efficacy loop explains that. Really what Bandura is showing and what we're trying to say is you have to base it on evidence and that evidence has to be grounded in some sort of reality. Right. SB, high quality evidence. Can't be bullshit evidence. There's one little caveat I want to bring up here, though. There was a little bit of a monkey wrench that got thrown into this. All right. There was a couple of researchers back in the 80s, Taylor and Brown, and they actually found that mentally healthy people kind of fudge this a little bit, maybe. Like they actually tend to overestimate just a little bit on their evidence. Okay. So they see the evidence out there and they embellish it maybe just a little bit. They see it and they're like, oh yeah, look, I did that thing. Maybe it was due a little bit to luck or circumstance or whatever it was. It's like, that was me. There's three positive illusions that they hold. Okay. One was an unrealistically favorable view of themselves. An exaggerated sense of control. So we talked about that locus of control and they're like, oh no, I control this. I definitely control this. Where again, it might've been due to outside circumstances or luck. And then there's a tad bit of unrealistic optimism around it too. Okay. So people who are like mentally healthier and stable over time kind of have a little bit of a bias. They're a little bit unrealistic in these things. So we've been arguing again, based this evidence in the reality of the situation and not based on trumped up thoughts about yourself, right? Which that is true. At the same time too, a little bit of positive self-delusion seems to go a long ways. A couple of caveats to this though. So they found that people who are actually like more depressed though or even anxious actually tended to have a more accurate view of themselves, unfortunately, right? So there is a little bit of truth to that saying like, oh, smart people are depressed, right? Because it's like, they kind of do see themselves more accurately. You know what drives me crazy? Is it like every time somebody's really pessimistic and you tell them, stop being pessimistic. They're like, I'm not pessimistic. I'm realistic. Like that is always a pessimist default defense. Just being realistic, yeah. And I ******* hate that the data shows that they're correct. Well, I mean, so what if you're right? You're miserable. Exactly. Right? Like believe what's useful, not true type of thing, right? Like we've talked about that a lot. There's a kernel of appeal in there, almost, that you could say, right? Like you could be a little bit delusional about yourself. And we've already said that, yeah, if you can kind of trick yourself for a little bit. Another though important caveat to this too though was the kind of durability of that stability, I guess, comes from actual evidence already being there to begin with. Like you kind of have to be someone with a healthy self-esteem and evidence to be able to benefit from that delusional, slight delusional positivity that you have about yourself. Okay. So like, let's say a brain surgeon or something like that, who just thinks they're awesome, you know, and they're super smart and all of this. Well, there's a little bit of truth to that already. They might be a little bit inflated in that, but there's already something underneath that. It goes back to like, this doesn't help the people who are already in just a horrible place. You can't delude yourself from a horrible place. So there does still have to be kind of like that baseline of realistic evidence underneath all of this before this actually holds. Before the delusion actually benefits you. Actually benefits you in a healthy way. Okay. That's so ironic. Isn't that weird? It's like the people who don't need to be delusional are the ones who benefit from it. Yeah. And the ones who could kind of use the delusion, it just makes them feel worse. So it's a cruel fact of life, I guess. The rich get richer. Yeah. As usual. I mean, this reminds me a lot of Daniel Gilbert's research. He found a very similar thing around happiness, which is that happy people tend to be slightly delusional and that depressed people tend to be pretty accurate in how they see the world and how they see themselves. He called it the psychological immune system. We kind of need to be moderately delusional on the positive side to keep ourselves motivated and functional. And I guess taking risks that day-to-day life requires, taking the social risks, the physical risks, the financial risks that life requires. I mean, we're all a little bit narcissistic, right? Absolutely. We kind of have to be. Absolutely. If you did just look around and see reality for what it was at every single second of every single day, that would be tough. It would be rough, yeah. But it is important to note that there is a sweet spot here, right? The optimal amount of delusion is more than zero, but it is still a small amount. You don't want to be full-fledged delusional thinking you're the queen of England and that you're going to cure cancer with a bottle of snake oil. Basically what we've covered here, we've covered Bandura's research, right? Confidence starts in a specific domain and then once you achieve it in that domain, you accumulate the evidence in that domain. It then kind of bleeds out into other areas of your life and it makes it more achievable in other areas. But that accumulation of evidence within that single domain, it really has to happen in a particular way. The most important method to do it is through actual action and experience, but you can also accumulate it through watching other people do it, through being told and persuaded by people you admire that you can do it. But most importantly, that evidence cannot be bullshitted. You cannot fake the evidence. You cannot put it on easy mode and convince yourself that you're an expert. Like you actually have to genuinely challenge yourself, put yourself in situations that have real stakes, and then also pursue confidence in something that you have control over, that you actually affect the outcome in a significant way. And so these are the fundamental principles of building confidence. If that wasn't already complicated enough, as you just covered, there's a whole attribution process to this, which is that you could do something amazing, but if you don't believe you're responsible for doing it, or if you think you just got lucky, or if you think that it doesn't really matter, you're not going to benefit from that evidence. You're not going to get that confidence boost. And so attribution is a big part of this. And what we're going to find is that we make attribution errors all the time. And that's what we're going to get into in chapter three, the ways that we all misattribute the effects of our actions. And this is going to get into everybody's favorite topics. We're going to talk about narcissism. We're going to talk about imposter syndrome. We're going to talk about overestimating yourself, underestimating yourself, like completely missing the clues to your own abilities. Things that all of us have experienced, and it turns out that it's actually very difficult, I think, to be realistic about your own skills and your own competence around a lot of things. And we're going to kick it off with maybe my favorite story we've ever done on Solved. I can't believe this is a true story. I'm so excited to tell it. It's utterly incredible. Stay tuned. Hey, everybody. Thank you for watching. This chapter is part of a much larger episode. You can get that entire episode right now on Spotify. Check it out there. And if you want to consume it chapter by chapter here on YouTube, we release them every few days. And if you want to get a full PDF guide with all of our citations, resources, and full summary of the entire episode, you can go to solvepodcast.com slash confidence and get it there. Check it out. I'll see you again soon.