One thing I’m really happy about my diet is that I don’t read the news.
If something is big enough it’ll eventually make its way to me. I can also research something if I’m curious.
I first did this in 2016, at the time inspired by Tim Ferriss who also doesn’t read the news. At the time I was reading the news, but it was making me upset. There was a lot of unpleasant stuff going on!
Humans weren’t designed to know all the bad things that the other seven billion humans are doing all the time.
Most of the news is not something I can action, and I like to focus on what I can control.
Instead of news, I read books. I like this quote from Cal’s podcast above: “People in a library are not stressed” 📚 😊
History rhymes, so I read a lot of history. You can see the grand arcs that played out throughout history and see where some of them might be playing out again today.
I also like to get out in nature and develop local community. I’ve been doing my monthly rucking series, and I also have coffee meetings or otherwise engage in the physical world and people around me.
If you’re interested in learning more about this, Cal’s book “Digital Minimalism” is good. He describes it as “A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
How is your information diet? Does anyone else not read the news? How is that going for you? Email me about your diet at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz as I’d love to hear about it.
Kevin
A Quote
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Thinking like a defensive pessimist will not only help you prepare, but will also help banish general feelings of anxiety. The next time that you start to feel generally worried about a situation, identify specific problems and, more important, think about what you can do to help alleviate these potential issues.
— Richard Wiseman in "Moonshot"
Three Things
1 - 🔮 Proton Pass - I’m testing out a new way to store and retrieve passwords. I previously used something that was desktop only, which makes certain things difficult (like logging into the pizza website on mobile when you’re leaving a late football game 🍕😁). I trust the Proton brand, and this is working well so far. I’m using the free version.
2 - 📄 How to Thwart Strategy Masquerades - Read this to learn more about the five telltale signs that you’re doing planning, not strategy. It is super common for a group of business people to think they’re doing strategy, when they’re actually planning. It’s an important distinction, because strategy is important for business success. Watch out for the work being inconsequential, fragmented, internal, control obsessed, or extrapolative.
3 - ☕ Ember Mug 2.0 - I just bought a new one of these battery-powered mugs that keep your coffee hot. I received the original one as a gift from my wife maybe 6-7 years ago, and the battery just really didn’t work anymore. I got another black one, because some of the reviews show the mug coating coming off into your coffee - gross. Hopefully that doesn’t happen with this one!
Deep Dive on Cultivating Confidence
What is your relationship with confidence? How does that affect you?
Confidence is hugely impactful in many areas of life, and it’s something I didn’t understand particularly well until the last two years or so.
I’ve always had insecurities and struggles with confidence. As I got older and was running a larger team, I started to see more clearly how those insecurities affected my behavior, those around me, and the outcome I wanted to drive. With the help of my coach, reading, and a LOT of internal work, I’ve been able to cultivate a stronger and deeper sense of confidence than at any other point in my life.
Ironically, this confidence has been able to grow despite, by virtue of age and experience, a longer list of failures!
If you struggle with confidence, don’t understand it, or just want to cultivate more of it, read on!
I previously saw confidence as the certainty that you had it all figured out.
Arrogant people seem confident, so I felt like those two terms were one and the same. I didn’t like arrogance, so I created a similar aversion to confidence.
Later I learned that arrogant confidence is only skin deep. It’s often a façade that someone places on their exterior in order to protect themselves from the insecurity that’s just below the surface.
I also used to see confidence and humility as opposites and binaries. You were either 100% one or the other, and if I had to pick one, I’d pick humility.
I certainly never felt like I had it all figured out, so with that definition of confidence, it wasn’t one that resonated with me.
Being able to figure it out
It turns out that arrogance is not the same as confidence. Humility isn’t the opposite. And they’re not binary.
My new definition of confidence is believing that you’ll be able to figure it out.
That definition makes room for a few things.
One, it separates confidence from arrogance for me. Arrogance is superiority, and it comes from believing you’re better than others. It’s hard to be arrogant when you’re simultaneously dealing with failures and figuring things out!
Two, it makes space for humility to coexist with confidence. You’ll need to remain humble for all of life’s lessons if the goal is figuring things out. You’ll need to be open to learning new things. It’s impossible to be open if you define confidence as meaning you’ve got it all figured out.
Third, I started seeing it as a spectrum as opposed to a binary. “Be confident!” felt like a state I had to be in. It was all or nothing. Now I see that you can make progress towards being more confident. That’s allowed! You don’t have to be 100% of the way there.
I still don’t feel like I’ve got it all figured out, but that’s okay! I can still be confident in my ability to figure things out. This definition resonates with me much more than my prior understanding of confidence.
Why confidence matters
Confidence is important because it has huge implications across a variety of areas. I’ll share just a few of them below.
Lowers Stress Your body brings your sympathetic nerve system online to deal with threats. When you lack confidence, you tend to feel fear. “What if I don’t figure this out?!” Aaaaah!
Before you know it, your adrenals are pumping cortisol to help you deal with this threat. In short bursts this is really helpful, but chronic stress does really unkind things to your body.
Being able to cultivate a strong sense of confidence begins to lower the number of things that trigger this stressful response. Problems arising are expected. You’ve figured them out before, and you’ll figure them out again.
Cultivating confidence lowers stress.
This leader is STRESSED. Possibly because he's somehow melted into the table.
Creates Presence Leaders need followers. Followers want to follow someone confident.
Almost anything you do in life is going to require people. If you want to enroll people in your cause - hiring, creating a new internal team, convincing your boss to go a certain direction - you’ll need confidence. Again, not confidence that you have all the answers, but that you’re the person who’s going to figure it out.
Confidence gives you that a sense of presence, or gravitas. When you’re confident that you’re going to figure it out, other people notice and gravitate toward you.
Cultivating confidence creates presence.
“You will make mistakes. You will suffer the mistakes of others. Accidents completely out of your control will befall you. Each of these represents, however, a monumental opportunity to acquire and exude gravitas: to reach within yourself, at the height of the storm, for that eye of calm, and to speak and act from that place of clarity. Because when you demonstrate that your confidence cannot be shaken, you inspire confidence in others.”
“The truth is, confidence makes leadership believable. If people don’t have a sense that you are confident—even self-confident—they may not have the confidence to follow you. If you don’t believe in yourself, your people will find it difficult to believe in you. If you’re tentative about your direction, your people will certainly be.”
If you’re surrounded by anxious, nervous, low-confidence people, you’ll start to feel that way as well.
As you generate confidence, you’ll start to generate calm (remember lowering stress above). That calm sensation will be felt by your team. “Hey, if the boss isn’t stressed about this, I’m not going to be stressed by this.”
Cultivating confidence spreads calm.
Explosion? Flying forklift? We got this.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy I don’t believe in manifesting - where you think a thought and it somehow comes true, but I do believe in the stoic idea from Marcus Aurelius that “your soul is dyed in the color of your thoughts.” Said another way, you are what you think!
The more you believe you can do something, the more you engage in behaviors that are consistent with that belief, the more likely you are to achieve that thing. Achievement still requires work, but by cultivating confidence you’re creating the conditions where the outcome has a higher likelihood to be achieved.
Cultivating confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“When you raise your opinion of yourself and what you are capable of it has a decided influence on what you do. For instance, you feel more comfortable taking some risk, knowing that you are always able to get back up on your feet if it fails. Taking this risk will then make your energy levels rise—you have to meet the challenge or go under, and you will find untapped reservoirs of creativity within you. People are drawn to those who act boldly, and their attention and faith in you will have the effect of heightening your confidence. Feeling less confined by doubts, you give freer rein to your individuality, which makes everything you do more effective. This movement towards confidence has a self-fulfilling quality that is impossible to deny.”
By now hopefully you’re on board with confidence being important and impactful, but how do we cultivate it?
Do Hard Things The confidence that you’ll be able to figure things out comes from having figured things out in the past.
The more you expose yourself to challenges - and overcome them - the more your mind believes that you’re capable. This is how you generate that deep-seated confidence in yourself.
There is no shortcut here.
The more hard things you do, the more failure you will experience.
This is a critical point: Failure is NOT evidence in your lack of capability. Do not give up. Failure is just the latest round of learning you can incorporate in future attempts.
Remember the word “yet.” A failure just means you haven’t figured it out…yet.
Doing hard things prepares you to do hard things.
Speak Confidently to Yourself Connecting to the idea that “your soul is dyed in the color of your thoughts,” how you speak to yourself is critical.
If you’re constantly broadcasting self doubt into your head, it’s very hard to show up in life and be successful.
Figuring things out is a process. The goal is to keep going, to keep trying. Speak kindly and confidently to yourself as you’re going through life and the process of figuring things out.
“Mastering imposter syndrome, and describing yourself in positive rather than self-deprecating ways, is critical for achieving power and success. If you do not think of yourself as powerful, competent, and deserving, it is likely that, in subtle and possibly not-so-subtle ways, you will communicate this self-assessment to others. Others are not likely to think more favorably of you than you do of yourself.” - Jeffrey Pfeffer in “7 Rules of Power”
Create a Hype File A hype file is a list of all the badass stuff you’ve done and all the accolades and appreciations people have given you.
Trying to remember all of that is an impossible task, and it won’t be there when you need it. If you start writing all of it down in a central place, a record of all the cool stuff you’ve done is available to you on demand.
Start with your memory. Where have you crushed it before? Add it to the hype file. Look at old performance reviews, birthday or work anniversary cards - whatever you have access to. Add positive statements into your hype file.
If you’d like some more, ask your closest connections. Request it in a message. Since they’re your close connections you can be direct: “Hey, I need a pick-me-up today. What do you see as my super power?” You could also share an appreciation for them, and request that they send one back to you. Add all of this to your hype file.
Once you’ve got it set, pay attention to incoming hype the future. When you get a Slack message of appreciation, save it to your hype file. Boss gave you kudos in a meeting? It goes in the hype file.
Last but not least, read it when you need it! Open up your hype file before that big presentation or event. Let all of that hype wash over you. Woot! ❤️🥳
Nothing like smooth jazz, wine, candles, and reading about how much of a badass you are.
Confidence is the belief that you’ll be able to figure it out.
It can coexist with humility and failure.
It’s important because it lowers stress, increases presence, exudes calm, and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re more likely to hit your goals when you cultivate confidence.
You can cultivate it by doing hard things, speaking confidently to yourself, and reading your hype file now and then.
Are you ready to start cultivating confidence this week?
Call to Action
Build 👏 Your 👏 Hype 👏 File 👏
Seriously, start writing down all of your accomplishments. This is for you, not for others, so take credit. How did you show up? What did you achieve? What did you overcome? How much did people love you for it?
After you create yours, email me and let me know how it felt. Did it help you cultivate confidence? Tell me about it at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
