Hello. Welcome back to another Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 96, we're going to look at the difference between confidence and self-belief. In order for me to do that, I'm going to convey a situation that happened to me to give you a really good indication of the real differences between confidence and self-belief.
Most of you would know me for the work I do with the high-performance athletes and the world I work in most days, which is sport. However, I also spend a lot of my time in the corporate environment too. I'm going to convey a situation that happened to me many, many years ago that really does outline the two differences between confidence and self-belief.
I was contacted by a young entrepreneur in America. He said to me, Dave, I've been watching what you've been doing with your athletes, and I want that exact same mindset in my startup company. So we worked together for the first 12 months, and my role was very much around helping him become the best version of him – not a lot different to what I do with the athletes. We spent some time building skillsets, and he was very comfortable and excited with what we were achieving together.
On one of my trips to the US he said to me, Dave, I want to sit down with you and talk about our future, what we can do together. And he said to me, I want to take on the big boys in town. I think my company is good enough. It's ready. I think we can go out there and really shake up the industry. I said, I think that's a really great idea. What is it you need from me? And he said, Well, what you've been doing working with me is fantastic. However, what I'd also like us to do is to be able to go into those big corporate environments, into those meetings, and you'd be able to read the room, tell me what's going on, and tell me what I need to know. I said, Okay, I think we can do that. So we sat down, he had a cup of coffee, and I had a pot of tea, and we planned, and we planned what we could achieve together.
The next day, I walked into his New York office, and his business partner called me into his office, big corner office overlooking Central Park, beautiful place. And he's said, I hear that you two discussed yesterday our plans as an organisation. We're going to go and take on those big end of town corporations.
I said, Yeah, I think it's really exciting. I think it's something that we can definitely do. We're ready to do that as a team.
He's gone to me, Dave, do you have a Harvard MBA?
And I've said, No, I don't. I don't have one of those. It's not my area of expertise.
He goes, I do.
I said, Okay.
He said, Have you worked with these big end-of-town businesses in the past?
And I've gone, No, no I haven't.
He said, Well, I have. So Dave, you need to stick in your lane and back off. This is not your area of expertise. I don't think you should be involved. Stay doing what you've been doing, working with my partner. But you know what? I don't want you here, and I don't want us to lose lots of money or lots of potential. And then he stood up and he stormed out of his office, which was a little weird because it was his office.
So I stood there for a few minutes waiting to see if he came back, waiting to see if we could talk this through. He didn't come back. So I left, got in the elevator, went down to the ground floor, walked out into Central Park, and I thought, You know what? Maybe he's right. Maybe I should just stay in my lane. I've not done this. I don't have that Harvard MBA that he's talking about. I don't have that experience of being in those big negotiations with these big corporations that he's talking about. You know what? I think he's right. And I think I'm in the wrong place. I don't think I'm good enough to do this. So my imposter syndrome full-flown jumped in. My confidence was shredded. I had no confidence in what I was doing. And as I walked around Central Park, and I convinced myself, the voice in my head was convincing me that what he had told me was 100% true. Exactly what he said, I then believed. And my internal voice was convincing myself that he was right.
By the time I'd finished walking around Central Park, I was thinking about booking my flights back to Australia. I was thinking about how do I communicate this to my client that I am no longer involved. It's not me. I'm not going to do this. And I started walking out of Central Park and I thought, Hey, up. One minute. You know how confidence works. You know what builds confidence and what destroys confidence. However, you know what you're good at. You know exactly what makes you uniquely you. You know what you can achieve. You know what you have achieved. And I thought, why do I do what I do? I do what I do because I have a unique skill set that allows me to read and understand and build strategies for people based on them. Bespoke strategies. That hasn't changed.
So although my self-confidence had been absolutely shredded in that office, my self-belief hadn't changed. I had this belief in what I could achieve. I had this belief in what I could deliver. So I went back to the office. I went back up the elevator. I went into his business partner's office and said, Look, you and I need to talk. And he goes, Okay. I said, What you said is true. I don't have that Harvard MBA that you have. I don't have that existing experience working with these big corporations on negotiations. However, what I do have is a very unique skillset. Something that you don't have, what I bring to our team is unique in what I can deliver.
So when you think about that as an experience, it really does highlight the two differences between confidence and self-belief.
Confidence is something that is externally driven. It's often our people around us, what they think.
It's what we've achieved in the past.
It's even down to results. If we're thinking about this in the sporting context, it's often our results that will dictate how confident we are.
It's situational-dependent. So I could be confident today, but get up tomorrow morning and not be confident.
It's highly emotive. It's emotionally driven.
Now, the good thing about being confident is those emotions can absolutely drive you on. They create momentum, and we can utilise that. The downside of our emotions and our confidence is its quite a fickle and vulnerable place to be. It's very volatile.
So although my confidence was absolutely shredded, my self-belief or my self-efficacy, which is often internally driven, is driven by me.
It's very, very specific and targeted and measurable. So I know, I might not feel it, but I know it.
And it's never something that is emotional. It's very, very low emotion. It's a very mechanical process. So the good thing about that is I can always take control of my self-belief, where my emotions in my confidence, I'm often at the mercy of.
The downside of self-belief is it doesn't gain momentum. It's just factual.
So we need both confidence and self-belief.
I want you to think about your norm, your normal mental thought process. When we put pressure on that, be that a competition, if we're talking athletes, whether that be an unusual situation, like the one I've just described, what that does, it applies pressure to our norm. And what that does is it makes us doubt. It exposes us. It shows us things that we've never done before.
When that pressure is off and we bounce back to our norm, that is mental resilience. And when we've got mental resilience, we know we can be put under pressure and we're going to bounce back.
If we get put under that same pressure and it exposes things that we've never done before and we learn skills that we didn't know we had and we find out strategies that we've now got experience in, what we want that to do is not only bounce back to the norm, but grow us, improve us, show us the things that we can achieve that we've never achieved before.
So that's antifragility. That's the ability to improve after being under pressure.
Another way to think about this is when we think about PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. What's happening is we're being put under pressure, extreme conditions, extreme exposure to certain things. And what our brain does is it tries to lock us off. Our brain is then controlling the situation. It's not an ideal situation, but it controls that situation. So when it controls that situation, we then have this Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
There's another way of looking at that, and that's called post-traumatic growth. And when we get put under that same pressure and we learn these skills that we didn't know we had, or we expose these strategies that we've now experienced, by allowing ourselves to grow from that, going, Okay, what worked? What didn't work? What would I need to do different in the same situation again? That post-traumatic growth allows us to see that pressure in a very, very different way. No longer is it something we're trying to avoid, it becomes something that we embrace. We want to look at that pressure as an opportunity to grow. We want to look at that pressure as an opportunity to learn more about who we are and what we do and how we do what we do. That allows us to have confidence and self-belief.
So when we think about this same strategy, this same ideal in our sporting context, When we go to competitions, when we have trials, when we try new skills, when we are put onto new teams, that's pressure we're being put under. It's exposing us. It makes us feel uncomfortable. It makes us feel not confident because it's impacting our emotions. What it shouldn't change for the negative is our self-belief.
It should add layers to our self-belief. It should add importance to the exposure process. It gives us an opportunity to look at it and grow. Once we've done that, once we've experienced that, we now know more than we did before the experience. And that in itself is a great opportunity and something that I get as many as my clients as possible to embrace.
So you're going to ask, what did we do with that company? Did my involvement in something I'd never done without a Harvard MBA cost them millions? No, it made them millions. We walked into some of the most intimidating business meetings with some of the biggest players on the planet. And we walked away being able to convince them that what we had was unique. And that company is still going today. I still to work with them, and they have made multimillions of dollars.
So what did that do for me? It showed me that my confidence can be impacted by other people. Yet my self-belief allowed me to push through that. I subsequently doubled my fee for corporate gigs, and I've gone on to work with some of the biggest companies on the planet. If I hadn't have seen my skillset as my self-belief or my self-efficacy, then I probably wouldn't have done that.
So I hope you've learned from this podcast that just because you feel that the confidence has taken a knock, you still have another side to that coin. You can still lean into your self-belief. And when there's times where you are really self-confident and things are on a roll, then we can lean into that and create traction and momentum. And both confidence and self-belief are required in order for you to be a holistic performer.
And to embrace the pressure. Embrace the new situations, embrace things that make you feel uncomfortable because what they're doing is they're showing you a whole new skillset, something that if you hadn't have been put under that pressure, you probably wouldn't have experienced.
So I hope you've got a lot from this episode of Brain in the Game. I hope that's changed the way that you see pressure. I hope that's changed the way that you either build in your self-efficacy, your self-belief, or just make sure that your confidence isn't something that is the only thing you rely on.
Until the next episode of Brain in the Game. Train smart, enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle.
