Why the Ultimate Breakthrough is Believing You Are Capable - Ep 13

Hey, welcome back to another debrief session. These are solo reflections where I talk about the patterns and the lessons that I've learned, ideas, inspiration that have stayed with me from recent conversations and throughout my own journey. Today's debrief session is a part three to piggyback off two prior sessions that I recorded about the gap between potential and proof and then becoming before proof. And the topic of this debrief session is on the topic of how belief shapes performance. So one moment can completely change what you believe about yourself. Closing one sale, giving one speech, one great performance, one breakthrough. And so the question is, what if confidence is really just updated evidence? So the belief really does shape your performance in a kind of backwards kind of way, right? Like good performance makes you believe in yourself, and that belief and confidence helps you perform. But obviously, at the beginning you have to believe in yourself before you perform. But then it just compounds and compounds and compounds. Confidence isn't just having general positivity, but self-efficacy is, I think, a distinction here. That is belief in your ability to figure things out. So when I started Ourhead, I had on a sticky note for the first six months an acronym, FTFO. You know, I was new to entrepreneurship, and to a lot of people, I had no business starting my own company. I didn't have 20 years of experience, but I had the belief in myself that I could do it and I could do anything. And this acronym that helped me out, so FTFO was my mindset for everything because there were going to be, I knew there were going to be so many new things and challenges that I would come across that I had never encountered before. And so FTFO stands for figure it the fuck out. That had to be my mindset. Whatever it was, I knew I would FTFO. So this affects your persistence. It affects your response to stress. It affects your resilience, and it definitely affects your execution under pressure. Because in entrepreneurship, belief is required before certainty. So then confidence as evidence, updating, is an important part of this. So as your confidence grows through accumulated experiences, you know, small flashes of competence, that changes your identity. That changes your perception of yourself and adds to that belief that you had in the beginning before you had any results or flashes of anything. One great putt. But you know that excellence in golf requires more than just one good shot. Because there's 18 holes, and in order to have a great round, you have to execute great shots and great putts consistently throughout every hole over 18 holes. And it's not something you just go zero to one in. So it can start out with one great shot, and then you might go out another day and you'll have one great hole, then you might have a couple of great holes, but it takes time to compound into consistency. But those small flashes of competence, those small flashes of your potential, compound to your confidence in your inner belief. And in business, that can be one successful client call, one successful sales call, one difficult conversation that you handled well. Because confidence is often updated evidence. And it's evidence that you're more capable than you previously believed. So there's this thing called the, and forgive my pronunciation of this, the Pygmillion effect. And it's based around this concept that belief affects effort, it affects persistence, it affects composure, it affects emotional regulation, and that your behavior changes because your identity changes. You know, if you are someone who has your entire life not been a morning person, you will not become a morning person until your identity changes to believe that you are a morning person. Well I went through this. But I knew that I wanted to start my days, and I felt best when I did start my days early with a routine, when it was quiet, and just me and my thoughts. But getting out of bed was the hardest part. So I had to believe that I'm a morning person, and you have to keep believing it until that belief becomes who you are. Another, you know, as a a sports parallel is going to be people who believe because maybe they had an experience where under pressure they crumbled and they choked, and then that became part of their identity, that I choke under pressure. You have to shift your mind and your belief and your identity, even though there's evidence there that maybe you didn't historically perform under pressure, you have to change your identity and the way you see yourself into an identity of I crush under pressure, I perform under pressure, I love pressure. And you have to reframe, you know, in those pressure situations that I'm nervous, reframe that into I'm excited. You have to. Because unless you do, unless you believe you are the type of person that performs under pressure, then your results will not reflect a person that performs under pressure. Now, it's important to clarify that this is not magical thinking. You know, this is belief changing but your behavior because your behavior changes your outcomes. And so, like, maybe there's people out there that think that this is kind of I don't know, woo-woo kind of way of thinking. You're thinking that you can manifest your way to whatever you want magically, right? But this is, you know, this is a very scientific thing, right? This is neuroplasticity and repetition. Because repetition wires your capability into your nervous system, and then your brain develops before consistency stabilizes. So in business, this still happens the same way, right? This is in getting rips, leadership rips, sales rips, decision-making rips, communication rips, rips having hard conversations. It's all about getting rips, right? Your hardest sales call will be your first sales call. You might be nervous, you might stutter, you might vomit, you might do terribly on it. But the more you have reps of doing a thing, the easier it becomes. So there's potential energy and there's kinetic energy. So your capability exists before activation. Unfortunately, I think many founders have dormant capability that is just waiting for pressure, waiting for a challenge, waiting for an opportunity, waiting for a scenario or situation that has urgency. And I think those it's just a lot of people with dormant capability that they haven't fully activated yet. You can't be passive about this. You have to put yourself in a position. You have to put yourself in pressure situations. Welcome challenges, add urgency to things. You know, it's like it's like in in sports, like I like to practice, I always have liked to practice as if I'm playing a high-stakes game, right? Because you're putting yourself mentally in those high pressure, high urgency situations. And in doing that, when you encounter a real high pressure, high urgency situation, it's not a stranger. It is something that is familiar that you've done and you've been there multiple, multiple times, and you've had the reps, right? It's about reps. And I think a question here is like, what like why do some people persist longer than others? You know, because the people who continue and persist longer, they often will win eventually. And it's not because they're more talented, it's because they emotionally survived uncertainty longer than the other person who didn't, who gave up. And I think a lot of these things come at the beginning, you know, and it's the people who quit too early because they couldn't survive the emotional journey and uncertainty of what it takes and what it took to become what they set out in the first place to try and do. So as a founder, you need conviction before your evidence presents itself in reality. If you're a founder with a team, your team, your team is going to borrow belief from you as a leader. As a leader, you have to have certainty and have confidence and believe because your emotional certainty will affect the entire organizational energy. As a leader, you set the tone. So, like as a closing reflection, just know that sometimes the biggest breakthrough isn't external performance. I think it often is not. I think the biggest breakthrough is finally that time, that moment where you finally believe that you are capable.