How to Train Unshakable Self-Belief with Dr. Nate Zinsser

Introduction and confidence as a skill

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00:31Bill Gallagher: Confidence, self-belief, it's important. Maybe you believe in yourself. Maybe you fake it. But how do you have it deep in your bones, the confidence, the self-belief that makes everything possible? We're gonna talk today, a great conversation with a world expert, somebody who worked with all manner of organizations from top athletes in the world to the military and on and on. Confidence, self-belief, that's our conversation today.

01:04Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the Scaling Up podcast. Our show comes to you every week with guests like this one, great authors, gurus, experts, CEOs talking about how they grew their business or how they helped others grow. And there's more than 620 shows now at scalingcoach.com or wherever you get this now. And we do monthly workshops and all the things to get your company going right. Today's a conversation really about leadership and influence and the ability to perform against all manner of circumstances. So if you wanna know about the workshops, coaching, that kind of thing, go to scalingcoach.com. Like and subscribe wherever you are right now, or stay tuned and we will get right into our conversation.

01:52Bill Gallagher: Alright. I'm joined now, already on screen, is Nate Zinsser. Nate is a decades-long program director at West Point. He's got a book, The Confident Mind: Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance. He's worked with major athletes like Eli Manning and a whole range of business, sports, and military leaders on what it takes to be confident in the face of whatever it is. I'm really delighted to have him on the show. Nate, welcome.

02:23Dr. Nate Zinsser: Thank you, Bill Gallagher. It's a delight to be here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

02:30Bill Gallagher: Before we get into it, coaching, and being coachable and engaging. You've worked with all kinds of folks from the very young to the very old. You've worked with athletes, military, business leaders, and I think even some kids. Who's the hardest and who's the easiest to coach and why?

Who is hardest and easiest to coach

02:49Dr. Nate Zinsser: The hardest and the easiest. I would be careful about making any kind of sweeping generalizations. I've met some 12-year-old kids who are sponges. They just want anything from anywhere at any time. Oh, this can help. Oh, I'm really curious about this. I've met some other 12-year-old kids who for whatever reason, they're kind of diffident about the whole thing. Oh, I got it figured out. Maybe they're rebelling against their parents who have connected the two of us. But it's really, I think, much more personal. And at the same level, I have been in contact with high-level professional athletes in the National Football League, in the National Hockey League, and some of them are equally spongy. They're wide open. Okay, what can help me? I'm always looking for ways to get better. And there's some athletes on the very same team in the very same locker room undergoing the very same travel and training and game performance stresses as, nah, I'm good. I got it figured out. And so they give me the stiff arm when I make an overture that I am available as a resource. So I wish I could tell you that it was one or the other, but it's really a mixture of it all, Bill.

04:30Bill Gallagher: It sounds like openness can occur or not occur at any age.

04:35Dr. Nate Zinsser: And that is precisely true. Yeah. People ask me routinely, well, what are the most important characteristics or quality of a high-performing individual? And the first thing that I say is not, oh, it's motivation, oh, it's drive, oh, it's whatever. My first response is curiosity. Curiosity. Oh yeah, what might be out there? And once they're curious, they'll latch onto something, and then they'll be very disciplined to apply that something, and very patient in their disciplined application to the point where it really starts working for them.

05:21Bill Gallagher: Well, we're gonna get into lots of things. We're gonna talk about Eli Manning, as I mentioned before. We're gonna talk about what you noticed when you met Kyle Carpenter. We're gonna talk about Olympic competitors, a big range of things. Before we get into that, what led you to this lifetime, this career of performance psychology?

How wrestling and martial arts shaped his career

05:44Dr. Nate Zinsser: I engaged in this career largely as a result of my own personal strivings to be a great performer, particularly in competitive sports as a middle schooler and a high schooler. I noticed quite early that it wasn't all about physical talent. It wasn't all about work ethic. Although, yeah, let's face it, those things are really important. But there is an attitudinal component to success that became very apparent to me at an early age, and it was something that very few people ever talked about. So as I progressed through my high school years and I began training in the various traditional martial arts, I noticed that there was a systematic mental component to a lot of these other disciplines, and that made it even more fascinating for me. And so I decided that, heck yeah, I need to understand the nuts and bolts of this so that I can be a sports psychologist or performance psychology expert. So it really blossomed, Bill, from my own personal convictions.

07:09Bill Gallagher: So you started in, was martial arts your main sports thing growing up?

07:16Dr. Nate Zinsser: Well, I started judo training at 12, and then I was a very serious high school wrestler. And I had to overcome a sort of institutional bias against the wrestling program at my little high school becoming good. The team had been a doormat for a decade. I asserted myself as saying, hey, we can be really good, amidst people in my own class saying, nah, you'll never be any good. Guys at the school don't wrestle well. You know, we got a good soccer program, but guys at the school don't wrestle. You should give it up. And I was really struck by that. I was like, do you have a crystal ball, fella? Can you really, you know?

08:00Dr. Nate Zinsser: So I resisted that self-fulfilling prophecy, created my own. As the team leader, I tried to get as many of the teammates bought into it. And I'm proud to say that in my junior year, we had the first winning season in a long, long time. And in my senior year, we had another winning season.

08:23Bill Gallagher: It wasn't a coach who said, come on, we're gonna be the top team. It was some guy who's like tired of it, and you actually started coaching and pulling your other teammates up to be a winning team.

08:37Dr. Nate Zinsser: That's a very fair statement. I think my coach had a fair amount of belief in me because I was a reasonably talented young kid, and I was willing to do the work. And believe me, wrestling is a grind. But as you point out, the coach was not the leader to share a vision of success. I had to kinda do that by myself. And then afterwards, finishing high school, going on to college, being very serious about a career, if you will, in mountain climbing and martial arts, it just became so apparent to me that there is a certain psychology that the great performers embrace and essentially work on. And again, we're talking about the mid-1970s, and the term sports psychology didn't even exist then. So I wrote a senior thesis about the inner game in mountaineering and other applications.

09:50Dr. Nate Zinsser: The term sports psychology didn't exist. So it was some years later where I, after teaching in high school and coaching wrestling and lacrosse myself, I decided that I'm going to find the right program with somebody who really knows about this stuff. And I did that at the University of Virginia, and I have never looked back at all.

10:01Bill Gallagher: What leads you to working at West Point, and what was that like?

10:08Dr. Nate Zinsser: In late 1980s, a visionary colonel at West Point who had a psychology PhD, who taught in the Department of Behavioral Science and Leadership, he had this crazy idea that maybe we should systematically be teaching our cadets, and especially our high visibility cadet athletes who are on national television occasionally—which is perhaps the biggest window that the American public has into West Point—we should be teaching those young men and women about how to be confident, how to be focused, how to be composed. We shouldn't just assume that it's going to happen because they run enough laps and lift enough weights and do enough reps in the training environment.

Becoming the performance psychology director at West Point

11:21Dr. Nate Zinsser: He came across the seminal book, The Inner Game of Tennis, and it really lit a fire. And so he came up with a skeletal outline that he was able to excite our football coach at the time, and he was able to excite our superintendent, the three-star general who is in charge of the military academy. And they both said, this is a really good idea. So we started a very small sort of test cell. It was called the Performance Enhancement Center. And it started with just the football team, and then it grew to include other varsity teams at West Point.

12:07Dr. Nate Zinsser: And then they decided that they needed a real subject matter expert in this field to lend some long-term continuity to the faculty profile and to make sure that they were up to date on all the research, etcetera. And so West Point issued a national search for a civilian sports psychology PhD. I threw my hat into that ring, and they ended up with me. That started in July 1992, and again, I have never looked back from that.

12:45Bill Gallagher: And so you were working primarily with the athletes on the psychology around the sports there, yes?

12:52Dr. Nate Zinsser: I would say primarily, but certainly not exclusively. Every cadet at West Point is indeed an athlete. Mandatory fitness testing, mandatory competition in something, whether you're an NCAA Division I athlete or a highly competitive club sport athlete—boxing, judo, several other competitive clubs in a lot of Olympic sports. And then there are intramural competitions at West Point. So you are always, as a cadet, engaged in something competitive. And you have to be confident, focused, and composed in those crucibles.

13:46Dr. Nate Zinsser: And you can also look at the overall cadet experience as being a real test of one's mental fortitude. Academic program is challenging. The military training that goes along right at the same time really forces you to be focused on what's important here and now. So every cadet is indeed an athlete, even if he or she only participates in, say, the intramural wrestling team and is primarily focused on academics so that they can go on to med school and become a doctor in the army.

14:31Bill Gallagher: I actually had a recent client who was a West Point grad, and he had a great deal of confidence and personal presence, and he was able to manage his attitude and mindset even in the face of significant breakdowns in business and still pull ahead and so on. He had other areas that we worked on in scaling the business, but he had a great deal of that. It was pretty self-evident. And I think the academies, all of them, have a pretty high standard applicant pool to begin with, and then they compete at a pretty high level. And then they go on to serving at a high level, and they often have a little bit of a fast track in their military careers. And lately, they've seen a lot of real conflict.

15:22Dr. Nate Zinsser: Yes, indeed. Not a quiet period in the world. Not a quiet period at all. And it's the ability to look back on your academy experiences and really internalize and own the lessons that you have learned. And it's that process that turns into the long-term, engaging confidence that's important.

15:46Bill Gallagher: Let's talk about some of the stories from your past and from the book and so on, and we'll loop back around on all of it. I'd love to hear—I don't know, we've been talking about sports and so on—I don't know, would you rather start with your Olympic bobsled team or Eli Manning, or where should we begin?

Jill Bakken's Olympic gold and the confidence she built

16:05Dr. Nate Zinsser: Let's start with bobsled because there's a very important lesson regarding confidence that's embedded in this story. I've heard lots of people say, 'I'm just not a very confident person.' They have this opinion about themselves that their confidence is something that they were either blessed with or denied at birth, that it's a genetic disposition that you can't do too much about. Well, I'd like to throw that belief out the window and substitute the truth, which is that confidence is a quality, a skill if you will, that either builds up with practice or it erodes with neglect.

17:02Dr. Nate Zinsser: And the story concerns a young woman who was being recruited by the U.S. bobsled team to compete eventually for a place on the U.S. Olympic team for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. This was the first year that women's bobsled was an Olympic event. It had been on the World Cup circuit for a while, and the Army had identified a couple physically talented folks and had created an Army World Class Athlete Program to support soldiers and officers with significant talent to train and compete and hopefully win a berth on the Olympic team.

17:53Dr. Nate Zinsser: So I was recruited out of West Point through my various connections to meet with and offer what I could to some of these winter sport athletes—bobsled and biathlon. Biathlon's the sport where you have to cross-country ski and then unsling a .22 caliber rifle and shoot dead on. I met a young lady by the name of Jill Bakken in December 2000 out in Park City, Utah, where the Utah Olympic Park was being built and where the 2002 Winter Games were going to be staged.

18:35Dr. Nate Zinsser: And I met her in a hotel lobby. We found a nice comfortable place to talk, and I said, 'Okay, Jill, you've heard me give my overture about where I come from and what I do and how I might be able to help. What would you like to talk about?' And Jill Bakken, who is a generally soft-spoken, very quiet individual, looked me dead in the face and said, 'I could use a lot more confidence.' I said, 'Okay, fine.'

19:05Dr. Nate Zinsser: So we spent hours and hours talking about confidence and outlining a plan, etcetera, etcetera. The meeting ends. I touch base with Jill several times over the next ten months, during which time she makes the Olympic team, despite plenty of injuries, despite not a huge degree of success on the World Cup circuit in the 2001 season, and despite being completely overlooked because all the attention had been on another women's bobsled team that had all kinds of corporate support, and they were the medal favorites. Jill Bakken and her push athlete, Vonetta Flowers, were an afterthought.

20:00Dr. Nate Zinsser: And so they made the Olympic team. Here's the competition. I'm watching this on TV. I had been out there for a few days, and I had to come back. And so I'm watching the race live, and Jill Bakken completely kicks ass, blows away the field. The heavily favored other U.S.

20:24Dr. Nate Zinsser: Team folded like a napkin under the pressure. Jill Bakken guides her sled through the finish line. The hometown USA crowd is going crazy, waving flags. The sled comes to a stop. Jill gets out. Vonetta gets out. People wrap flags around them, getting hugs by their coaches and their husbands and everything. And Mary Carillo from CBS Sports walks over to Jill Bakken and says, this is amazing. You weren't supposed to be here. How did you do it? And Jill Bakken just says, well, we just had confidence. And I heard that, and I said, okay, like, I guess that kind of proves something. Fourteen months ago, she said she needed more. Fourteen months later, in the biggest moment of her athletic career, she's saying, well, we had a lot. I guess that means you can develop it. So anybody who wants to sort of take the perspective of, I'm not really a confident person. I have to say, okay, well, maybe you're not now, but would you like to be? And if you would like to be, there are certain things that you can do so as to become a more confident person. And by the way, in the process of becoming a much more confident person, you will not become any less likable. You will not become any less modest, any less humble, any less respectful, because gaining confidence does not mean you become this outspoken blowhard.

21:53Bill Gallagher: Conceited braggart type of a person. Well, tell us about what was the advice and the plan that you worked out with her? What did you—what were your steps and things like that? What do you think she actually did?

22:04Dr. Nate Zinsser: One of the prescriptive steps that I was giving out then and that I give out to this day is to make notations, basically journal entries, day by day or at a minimum week by week. Look at your small improvements. Please acknowledge the steps or the improvements that you've made, even if they're tiny. Keep your eyes on what you're doing a little better. Keep your eyes on the areas of your work or your sport or your life that you're making progress in, and allow yourself to emotionally benefit from those. Okay? You do indeed have what I refer to for years as a mental filter. You have free will as a human being. You can latch onto and internalize and define yourself through all of your negative experiences, through your setbacks, or you can internalize and define yourself by these small victories, small successes, small improvements. And that was a key to all of this process. That was a key for Jill Bakken, and that was a key for so many other athletes that I've spent time training.

23:43Bill Gallagher: Yeah. I totally hear that. And I think that that's a frequent thing that we talk with the teams that we coach on, is make sure that in every meeting, weekly, daily, whatever, that you open first with where are you making progress? What's the good news of the day? There's always a little focus on something because otherwise, it just feels like you have problems and things suck.

24:06Dr. Nate Zinsser: Yeah. Exactly. Hey, what's the problem of today? Okay, what fire do we have to fight right now? One of my clients in the business world, CEO of a consumer products company, when I shared the same process—look for the episodes of quality effort in your day, look for the episodes of small successes, look for the areas in which you've made a little bit of improvement—he started doing that, and he found it to be an absolute paradigm destroyer. It completely changed his outlook on his life and his work and the world. You know, he had been through law school. He had been a CEO for a long time, and he had gone home at the end of every day thinking, alright, where did I goof up? What do I got to get better? What are we not getting right? And just the idea of looking for the best in himself and internalizing that was a complete shift, for the better in his life.

25:15Bill Gallagher: For me, when I think about being confident, I think about one, like creating a plan and follow my plan, first of all. Like, okay, so to undertake a thing, I'm going to do my best job planning and then I'm going to follow my plan. And then plans, of course, always go different than expected. But at the end of it, I would ask myself or as the moment where confidence is needed, action is required, then I ask myself, well, did I do my best to follow the plan? Have I prepared sufficiently? Is there anything I need to do or deal with where I cut corners or whatever like that? So like an inspection of my preparation, that's one thing. And then what are my fears? Like, what am I afraid of or concerned about and that kind of thing. And then with regard to the fears and the confidence, I would say that largely there's two acts that help me, like, set those aside, and one of them is, like, bracketing them. Like, just simply saying, okay. That's a fear. There's other things as well, like, just okay. It's a real fear. I'll just set it aside. And the other one is noticing the sort of the value or the noble intention behind the fear. Like, you know, I'm worried about that because I really care about doing a good job here. Because in that, that brings an element of, I don't know—

26:40Dr. Nate Zinsser: Urgency perhaps?

26:41Bill Gallagher: Also. Yeah. The importance of it. Right? The importance of the task, the thing that I particularly value, whatever that might be. Right? And then I'm left in a place like, okay, I'm ready. You know? And I'm a human being. Like, I may screw something up.

26:57Dr. Nate Zinsser: Yes. Indeed.

26:59Bill Gallagher: Yeah. Talk about Eli Manning then.

Eli Manning's transformation into a clutch Super Bowl MVP

27:02Dr. Nate Zinsser: Yes. Let's talk about Eli Manning. Eli is basically deified here in the New York area. He has a wonderful occasional YouTube show. He has really sort of maintained an influential presence even though he's retired from the game for five, six years now. Yeah. I was connected to Eli Manning through one of the New York Giants assistant coaches who had previously been an assistant football coach at West Point. While he was an assistant football coach at West Point, he and I had collaborated for the purpose of aiding the West Point football team, and then he moved on to the college ranks. And as assistant coaches in the college coaching world are prone to do, he moved from school to school, and he eventually found his way into the pro ranks. And so here he was as an assistant coach with the New York Giants. And the New York Giants had drafted Eli Manning number one. He's our guy. He's our savior. And Eli's first three years with the program were pretty good, but they had fallen short of expectations. I think always the expectations in that sport, at that level of that sport, are always unrealistic, but that doesn't keep them from happening. So, at the end of Eli's third season, I was contacted by this fellow, Mike Sullivan, who is now an assistant coach with the Pittsburgh Steelers organisation. And he said, you know, doc, I think you might be able to help Eli out a little bit. Can we talk about it? So I drive down to the stadium complex, and I meet head coach Tom Coughlin. And he says, yeah. We just like—we just like to feel a little more swagger, a little greater degree of belief in himself. We'd like to have that to match his meticulous preparation because this boy, this boy works, you know? Can you help us? And I said, I don't know. I'll give it a shot. So I was put in contact with Eli. We set up a time to meet. I drove down to the stadium again.

30:00Dr. Nate Zinsser: Met in the quarterback meeting room, and we just started talking about what he loves about football and what it is like to play great. What's your state of mind when you are, quote unquote, in the zone? And how do we sort of set the stage for those moments of almost eerie clarity where you seem like you have all the time in the world to find your receivers and deliver the ball? And so we talked about that, and then we started getting busy on building, on addressing particular mental skills. The skill of building and maintaining confidence, the skill of directing your attention to what is important, the skill of recovering energy between plays, between series, between games, between seasons.

31:01Dr. Nate Zinsser: That training process began in March 2007. Eleven months later, in February 2008, Eli Manning made the jump from being one of the biggest question marks in the National Football League to being the Super Bowl MVP. So I guess it kind of worked for him too.

31:29Dr. Nate Zinsser: I am never going to thrust my chest out and say I made Eli the great quarterback that he is. He was a great quarterback before he ever met me. He will be known as a great quarterback long after I'm forgotten. Tom Coughlin and offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride all had a role in his success. But, in the course of our initial training and certainly as we debriefed that first year, I mean, he was very clear. Everybody talks about the importance of having a great attitude, but nobody ever breaks it down and turns it into, this is how you create a great attitude. You've got to be strong. Okay, well, you do this exercise and do this exercise and this exercise. Yeah, and you've got to understand offensive terminology. Well, here are the drills that you go through. You want to have a great attitude for success in the highly demanding, really difficult realm of professional football. Here's a process that you can follow.

32:39Dr. Nate Zinsser: And on the verge of that first year's success, that turned into a twelve year relationship with Eli that continued right up until his retirement. I was always in his back pocket. I was always ready, available. We would meet pretty much every week during the season, and we would meet pretty much every two weeks or every month in the off season. We did systematic goal setting for the off season, we did systematic goal setting for in season. We worked very hard in making sure that he was the most confident quarterback in the league.

33:19Bill Gallagher: So you're doing goal setting and any particular exercises or things like that, noting progress like you did with the other? What kinds of methods or techniques would you say that he would have applied regularly?

33:34Dr. Nate Zinsser: Well, he did apply the idea of taking something good away from every practice. Deliberately looking for something at the end of every practice. Okay, what went right here? He also got very good at having a short memory for things that went wrong. So he could throw two interceptions in the course of the game and then come right back into the game and say, okay boys, we're going. Let's go. Here's the call. Let's rock. To the point where his teammates referred to him as Easy E. Nothing rattled him. He brought an equanimity to the huddle, even in clutch moments, tough moments like, okay, we only got a minute and a half, we've got to score.

34:21Dr. Nate Zinsser: He became known as, when you look at his Super Bowl performances, he was remarkable in the last parts of the fourth quarter. He engineered comeback wins in both of those Super Bowls, completing multiple passes under very difficult circumstances. And that's what he is deservedly recognized for, as being a great clutch performer, because he was able to sort of mentally discount anything that had happened before and basically still think at any point about, well, I've done it right here. I've done it right there. I've done it right this other place. I can do it right here.

35:12Bill Gallagher: Yeah. It's interesting. You also met a marine, a famous marine, Kyle Carpenter, who's very famous for saving his team. Why don't you talk about that meeting and what struck you in that? I understand you didn't coach him, but what was the learning or the experience with that?

Kyle Carpenter and the lesson of you are worth it

35:31Dr. Nate Zinsser: For any of your listeners who have not read Kyle Carpenter's book, You Are Worth It, I think it's worth reading that book. Kyle was a marine. He dove onto a grenade in Afghanistan to save his buddies. His body armor disintegrated. His left upper body was severely injured. His left eye was destroyed. Usually, you don't survive diving on a hand grenade. Don't think there are too many examples of that. And for this act of heroism, Kyle received the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for military valor.

36:19Dr. Nate Zinsser: But as he came back and went through the painful recovery from his combat wounds, Kyle went through some dark emotional times. What does this mean for my life? Am I ever going to find love and purpose? Can I be happy? Am I worth it? Am I worth being happy? Am I worth loving myself? Am I worth having a close circle of friends, a wife, a family? Am I worth it? And I think it was his mom who basically said, son, you are worth it. And Kyle goes on in the book to describe, and I heard him speak about this, anytime he gets in a taxi and the driver or the Uber driver starts talking, oh, who are you? Where you been? And Kyle says, well, yeah, I just came out of the Marine Corps. The driver typically says, well, thank you for your service.

37:23Dr. Nate Zinsser: And at a certain point, Kyle was sort of put off by that. Oh yeah, they're thanking me for my service. I don't really know what it means. But as he made this breakthrough for himself, now whenever somebody says thank you for your service, Kyle Carpenter says, you are worth it. And it was putting his own pain and difficulty in a much broader, more philanthropic context that changed his life. I think that is a beautiful example of the best of the human spirit. Thank you for your service. Yeah. You're worth it. I'm worth it. We're all worth a life of significance. And so Kyle Carpenter is rather secure in that he is living a life of significance. Again, I recommend the book.

38:28Bill Gallagher: You know, it's interesting that, like, taking stock of who you are and what you are and who the people are around you. You hear these days, thank you for your service reflexively. If somebody finds out that I'm a veteran, they'll say thank you for your service. And most people don't know and don't think about it. You see somebody getting on a plane in uniform, and they'll say thank you for your service. There's a lot of that kind of, and it's just sort of like, it's there. It's nice that it's actually there because there's definitely been times in our history where it wasn't, a respect for it, certainly after the Vietnam conflict that you and I remember. But there are times when when it didn't have that. Or even when I served some years ago, there wasn't like that thank you for your service. But I don't think everybody always thinks about it, nor when receiving it, we think about what went into that. Whether you were in harm's way or not, whether you were far from the front lines or right on the front lines, like giving up a part in the time of your life. Like, when you're in the military, you surrender something. And in certain jobs and pursuits, like, surrender something of yourself.

39:42Bill Gallagher: In service of something else. And there's something that is beautiful and noble about that, whether you're always conscious of it or not. It's useful. And I think today I have several friends whose sons are serving now and in conflict, and I have friends who are reservists who are serving. And there's a real risk to them all the time. And even those that aren't at such a direct risk, there's also an impact on the rest of their life, their business, their family, that it takes time and energy away from.

40:21Dr. Nate Zinsser: You just used an interesting term, phrase: maintaining a consciousness of your service. When I think about confidence in the broadest sense, it's really maintaining a consciousness of your abilities. You can have a heck of a lot of actual ability, but unless you maintain a consciousness of it, a lot of times that ability doesn't show up. If you're the student—you're the law student and you're going into exam in your torts class—and you walk into that exam thinking, oh my god, this is a hard course, this test is gonna kick my ass, I've gotta do well on this course, I think that mitigates the value of whatever study you may have put in. Well, I sure as hell hope you put in the study. But how about maintaining a consciousness of your study? I understand this, I understand that, I've been participatory in class. I'm gonna walk into this exam and I'm gonna be telling myself, let's see how good I can do on this, because I have a consciousness of my competence or my ability. It's one thing to actually have the competence. It's another thing altogether to have the consciousness thereof, and that is the deciding factor, at least in my experience, Bill.

42:09Bill Gallagher: You know, it's interesting. I have a particular business challenge I'm dealing with right now, and I woke up feeling a little stressed about it and that kind of thing. And I shared with my wife the thoughts and stuff that I had in my sleep. And instead of going, oh my god, I'm so sick of this one, and you've had this before, and why are we talking about this again, and how does this affect me and us, she was just like, yeah, that's real. But she's like, you're such an ideator. Is it maybe a time for you to ideate and come up with some new approaches? Maybe just don't keep slogging away doing it the same way. And I'm like, oh yeah, that's a really good idea. She's like, do a little brainstorming for yourself, maybe use a little AI. Let's try something new this time. And I was like, oh, it was such a beautiful thing to say to call me and suggest—call on me to use one of my strengths. Instead of being annoyed, the act of that was a beautiful moment about, for me, that started to lift me into today and the work.

43:28Dr. Nate Zinsser: What you just shared triggered an important story. Your wife basically urged you to change your mind. Changed your mind about, changed the way you were using your thoughts regarding your life. Well, I stepped onto a bus long ago in the city of New Orleans. I stepped onto this bus and the bus driver looked at me and said, good morning, how you doing, great to see you, as if I was some long lost brother of his. I said, okay, dude, fine. And I sat down and I'm taking the bus to my destination, and the bus stops another block and a couple other people get on. And he goes, good morning, how are you doing, great to see you. And I figured, man, this guy's gotta switch to decaf or something. And he does this several times, and then the bus pulls out onto a bigger street, and the bus driver looks up into the rearview mirror and he says to the entire crowd on the bus, he says, good morning, everybody. It's a beautiful day in New Orleans. I hope you're gonna have a great day. I hope you're having a good day. If you're having a bad day, change your mind. Have a good day. That bus driver understood what we're talking about in terms of maintaining the right consciousness. I'm pretty sure he didn't go to a PhD program in the psychology of elite performance, but he sure as heck understood something pretty darn important. And that was a lesson that meant just as much to me as anything I had heard in a class or anything that I had read in some scholarly journal.

The bus driver who said change your mind

45:24Bill Gallagher: Well, look, some of our listeners, viewers may be having a bad day, a bad week right now. And it's not to negate it. It's not to put a pretense on top of it. There's another way to look at it, another place to approach it. Something else—my wife essentially just gave me a reframing of a thing that I could look at from a different place. So instead of continuing to suffer and slog with a problem that wasn't making a lot of headway, try a new approach. Change your mind, change your way, have a good day. Okay. Well, what is there to do to embrace? The bad, whatever it is, is real. It's a stress. But it's beautiful.

46:07Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. NateZinsser.com is the web address. The Confident Mind is the book, but NateZinsser.com is where you can go get him and The Confident Mind. You can probably find it wherever you get books. These days, it's less and less in a physical store and more on Amazon, Kindle, et cetera. So go find that out. Thanks again, everyone, for watching, for listening. Hopefully it's helpful for you. Nate, thanks for joining us on the show and sharing some of your great stories and experience with us. Thanks to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, who created the whole Scaling Up framework. That's the core of our work. The folks at StoryOn who get our show produced in and out the door every week. If you wanna know more, if you wanna talk to us about our coaching and business side of things—not the psychology of confidence, but about growing your business—that's ScalingCoach.com. We do a workshop every month or more where you can begin to get started with some of that stuff. So all that and more at ScalingCoach.com. Thanks again, everyone, for watching, for listening. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling.

47:15Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at BusyIsBroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.