I’m often asked, “Lucas, what’s the best way to start building your confidence?“
There are many ways to do so.
But today, I want to focus on one of the biggest things people do that hold themselves back. And it’s something you might be able to relate to.
Especially if you’re someone who’s constantly pushing yourself to do more and be more.
It’s what I like to call ‘until-itis’.
What ‘Until-itis’ Is And Why You Need To Be Aware Of It
In a nutshell, what people do is they hesitate. And they hold back on giving themselves credit until they’ve accomplished ‘the big thing’.
In the case of many of my public speaking clients, they don’t give themselves credit until they really start sharing their message on stage in the absence of feeling fear.
They do the presentation. They do the keynote. But what happens is they’re just constantly going and going. Much like water slowly eroding away at a rock in a stream, they’re slowly working towards their goals of feeling confident.
But they’re not making progress as quickly as they could because they don’t take the big leap that skyrockets their confidence. Instead, they’re waiting for it to happen — it’s like waiting for lightning to strike the rock and split it in half, instead of grabbing a sledgehammer and hammering away.
So what happens is they’re delaying themselves for these big wins.
As a result, they miss opportunities, simply because they believe themselves to ‘not be ready yet’.
And it doesn’t help that in addition to negative self-talk, marketing and social media is constantly telling us and reinforcing that we’re not good enough.
So there’s a lot of factors that are conspiring to hold you back from experiencing confidence.
And it can get overwhelming pretty fast.
The Fastest Way To Build Confidence
The fastest and most effective way that I’ve found helps build my clients’ confidence up is a concept called stacking wins.
Basically, it’s cultivating a habit of giving yourself credit and taking full ownership of the small day-to-day victories you achieve.
It sounds simple enough, but often times we get so caught up in the attainment of our grand visions of life that we overlook our little successes. We take them for granted, and as a result we remain disappointed in ourselves.
Instead of going “I’m getting better and better every day.”, we’re constantly thinking “I’ll give myself credit when do the big talk or when I have this amazing video.”
And what happens is we’re sabotaging ourselves on our path.
Without consciously being aware of it, we’re actually lowering our chances of making ‘the big thing’ happen because we’re blinded to the opportunities around us.
The fastest way to:
- get these big wins
- do presentations in front of large audiences
- get encouragement from others
- make sales
- do anything you fear doing
is to start giving yourself credit for what you do every day, no matter how small the win.
Because stacking these small wins every single day is what’s going to build you up.
How You Can Start Stacking Your Wins
I have a worksheet I hand out to my clients that transforms a lot of their lives.
I call it the 30-day personal success journal.
Essentially, for 30 days you write down what 3 wins you had every day.
It’s a simple concept, but one that many find hard to stick to.
There’s 4 main reasons for this:
1. You’re too caught up in your daily routine
Often times, we wake up and immediately we start going through our day – we quickly grab some breakfast, start knocking down goals, go to bed, then wake up the next day.
We get caught up in this routine of needing to get stuff done all the time.
I’ve found this to be especially true for entrepreneurs.
But once you take time to actually sit back at the end of the day and ask yourself “What wins did I have today?”, you’ll quickly start to change the way you perceive yourself.
In other words, you change your self-image.
And as Dr. Maxwell Maltz, former plastic surgeon and author of the internationally best-selling Psycho-Cybernetics would say, “Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.”
2. You don’t celebrate successes on your ‘off’ days
On some days, it’s easy to celebrate your successes.
You know what I’m talking about – it’s as if the heavens parted the clouds for you. The traffic lights turn green at the right moment, there’s no traffic on the road, you’re knocking goals off like dominoes and everything seems to be in flow.
But on other days, it can be confronting.
Where it’s hard to think about what you actually did well. Perhaps there were some negative experiences that happened earlier that have clouded and affected your ability to perceive things positively for the rest of the day.
It’s much easier to list everything that you didn’t like about the day. Everything that went sideways, the mistakes you made, and what you should’ve done differently.
But to force yourself to go “Ok, let’s see what I did well. What are 3 wins I had today?” almost seems like internal torture.
My clients take on this activity, and it’s the ones that make a decision to commit to this daily practice that find themselves having a dramatic transformation in a short period of time.
3. You think 30 days is too long
We have 365 days a year.
In 10 years’ time, that’s 3,650 days.
In comparison, 30 days is nothing. Yet, it’s enough to kickstart your entire life of:
- being a more confident, outgoing version of yourself
- adding more value to the world
- making more money
- experiencing more happiness overall
What’s 30 days to significantly supercharge your confidence?
4. You think it’s too basic to make any real impact on your life
Now you might be sitting there going “Yeah that sounds interesting, but can it REALLY do that much for my self-confidence Lucas?”.
Here’s my answer to you – it’s called daily practice for a reason.
Much like going to the gym and working out, you wouldn’t work out for 30 days and expect to keep an athletic figure forever. And much like taking a bath, you wouldn’t do it every day for 30 days then expect to be squeaky clean forever either.
It takes daily practice and maintenance.
You might be yawning at the thought of that, but here’s something you might find exciting – the effect compounds and multiplies.
And just like any other skill you’ve developed, you’ll find it much, much easier.
Expect Resistance
I’m gonna offer you something.
In the links below, I’m gonna offer you an opportunity to download a copy of my 30-day success journal.
And when you look at it, you’ll find it’s very plain. It’s very basic. But it’s highly effective.
In exchange for this, I want you to do something for me.
I want you to commit to taking the action you need to take every day.
And I want you to expect resistance – resistance in the form of your hindbrain giving you any reason NOT to do the daily practice.
It usually sounds something like this:
- “I don’t want to do that”
- “Don’t do it!”
- “This is a waste of time”
- “It’s not going to work”
Here’s what your brain’s actually doing – it’s trying to keep you ‘safe’.
And it’s trying to keep you safe by having you do what you’ve done up until now – because everything you’ve done up until now hasn’t cost you your life.
Even if your past behaviors leading up until now have been unhealthy. Even if you’re missing opportunities and you haven’t been experiencing joy, confidence, and success.
Your hindbrain sees all of those behaviors as being responsible for keeping you alive up until this point.
It also sees everything else as a threat, including the new confident version of yourself that knows there’s a destiny you’re here to achieve.
And it’ll do anything to keep you from attaining your dreams. To the extent where it influences you to self-sabotage every time you seek self-improvement.
And all you have to do is see it for what it is, acknowledge that your brain simply wants to keep you safe by doing what you’re familiar with and continue stacking your wins.
My 30-Day Personal Success Worksheet
Observe your fears and thoughts without judgment, and keep moving forward.
Can you promise me you’ll do all that?
I can’t see you, but I’m going to assume you just nodded enthusiastically. And maybe even put your first down on the table as a sign of unfaltering conviction to commit to your path of stacking wins.
Good.
So here’s your copy of my worksheet:
>> Download your copy of my 30-Day Personal Success Journal here
Make good use of it.
Peace,
Lucas “Stack Wins” Mattiello
Level Up Living
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