How to Build Confidence Step-By-Step

In This Issue:

How to Build Confidence Step-By-Step

Sneak up on disbelief, and it will never block you again

Tools and Talismans

• Women Warriors

• How to Have an Adventure

• An all-you-can-eat buffet of self-actualization

How to Build Confidence Step-By-Step

What happens if your beliefs are smaller than your ambition?

How do you achieve an audacious goal that you don't believe is possible?

These aren’t just rhetorical questions. I’ve stunted my own growth plenty of times because I didn’t believe I could do better.

A few salient examples:

• I dreamed about biking the Appian Way in Italy for 7 years without taking a single step to make it happen.

• I secretly crushed on a woman for six months before I asked her out.

• I've stalled on building products, business ideas, writing books, doing things I yearned for because I didn't know whether I could.

How to Change the Wind

One day, you might wake up like I did and realize your biggest obstacle is your own doubt.

Now, you can't force yourself to believe, but you can build up your confidence step-by-step.

Here are a few things to try:

1. First, get around people who have done what you want to do , or something similar.

You don't need to know them in person (although that helps). Follow them on social media. Read their blogs and books.

2. Break your most ambitious goals into specific, doable tasks. Tackle one at a time.

Each time you finish a task, you'll be more confident about the other tasks.

3. Keep a vivid image in your mind and body of what your life will look like and how you will feel when you hit your goal.

Use words, pictures, music, movement...whatever works to reinforce your vision.

4. Review the steps you need to take the same way you review your vision in step three, above. This gets your Reticular Activating System involved in the process.

When I started doing this, I soon found myself on a bicycle, riding from Rome to Brindisi on the Appian Way. I began showing up to networking events, posting content, booking clients and generating revenue.

And my crush? Now she's my wife.

Sneak up on disbelief, and it will never block you again.

Tools and Talismans

An asterisk * means I have a relationship with the resource mentioned, and I may recieve compensation if you click on the link.

Muslim Women’s Kickboxing in the Netherlands. In the spirit of adventure and self-transformation, I want to pass this on to you. It’s an academic article that’s unusually readable, but the real gift is the story: These young women are shattering cultural stereotypes, empowering themselves, while at the same time deepening their connection to their religion and culture. One of the most exciting things I’ve read all week.

How to Have an Adventure. Check out the intro to my new course on setting and achieving audacious goals. Please let me know what you think.

Save $100 on Mindvalley.* Get 30% off a year-long smorgasbord of lessons in meditation, Qi Gong, fitness, personal branding, and even some weird stuff like quantum jumping and lucid dreaming.

That wraps it up for this week.

If you’re enjoying these rants, lessons, tools and talismans I would love to hear from you. If you’re not, I would like to hear from you even more.

Reply to this email and tell me what you think, what you’d like to see in the future, or just to drop me a line about your cat.

I don’t always have the time to reply to your message, but I read every one of them.

Jacob