The most POWERFUL list you should write TODAY

In this video, I talk about a very powerful list you can write down TODAY and which can help you achieve your toughest goals and overcome challenges.

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

Morning everyone. I want to talk about a concept in psychology called the Confidence Competence Loop. Now, what is that? The concept around this is very simple: when we are competent at doing something, then we feel more confident. And when we’re more confident, we’re willing to try new things and we become competent at these new things, which gives us more confidence, and we try new things again, and we become more competent and more confident and so on and so forth.

That’s why it’s called the Confidence Competence Loop, because it helps us become more confident, more competent and then the circle keeps going and we grow as a human being in terms of confidence, and in terms of capability and competence.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I was having a conversation last week with a client of mine on the coaching side. She’s based in the UK and she’s an entrepreneur who started a company some eighteen years ago, and grew this company from virtually nothing to a company that’s worth over £100m today. And she was having a crisis that had nothing to do with her work. She was having a crisis because she was facing some severe personal issues that had nothing to do with her career. And they were not issues relating to relationships at home, but about bigger things relating to her life. And, what I was discussing with her was, the first thing I asked her to do was to tell me the three biggest challenges she has ever faced in her life. Not in her career, not in her personal life, doesn’t matter. The three biggest challenges she has faced in her life going back to her teenage years. And, she allowed me to speak about this, so one of the things she has overcome, and she is quite public about this, one of the things she overcame when she was in her teens was a problem with anorexia. So she, on her own, decided to get herself out of that problem of anorexia and have a better life. And she did that on her own.

So, when I dug a bit deeper with her on that concept, what is it that allowed you to accomplish that success, of getting out of that anorexia problem? Initially she didn’t know, she just said that one day I woke up and decided I don’t want to live that life anymore so I did it. But as we dug a little deeper we found certain traits in her character, a certain strength of character and some determination and some willpower that allowed her to get herself out of that quicksand that was anorexia in her teens. That strength of character was already very strong in her in her teenage years, and it only grew stronger over time. But all of us human beings, over time, we tend to forget that what we are competent at. We tend to forget the things that make us special and make us succeed. We tend to forget the things that have allowed us to overcome major challenges in our lives, maybe five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago. And when we forget these things, we lose the competences associated with these things. 

But when we remind ourselves that we have achieved all of these major things, that gives us the confidence to address whatever it is that we’re facing today. So going back to the title of this video, ‘the most important list’, this is a list that I ask everyone to put together, and I have it myself on my fridge, I will read it every time I face a challenge: the biggest challenges I faced in my life and how did I overcome these challenges.

So if some of you don’t know my story, seven or eight years ago I was close to one hundred kilos, so I was really overweight. And a while after that I was working for Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt in the biggest bankruptcy in history. So I’ve faced challenges and I’ve found things in myself that allowed me to recover from these problems and actually get a better life. And, by reminding myself that I’ve actually faced these challenges, that I was broke at one point in my life, that I’ve actually overcome these obstacles, the characters, or let’s call them the qualities of my character that allow me to do this, will allow me to overcome other challenges.

But that won’t happen if I don’t have the confidence to tackle these challenges, and the confidence will come from having reminded myself that I have overcome challenges in the past.

So, this is my tip for you today. Build your greatest hits. Build a list of your greatest hits. Go back five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, it doesn’t matter. Go back as far as you can and think of the hardest challenges you’ve ever faced in your life and how you overcame these challenges. That’s the greatest hits, and the greatest hits you’re going to keep in your back pocket, you’re going to keep it on your fridge, you’re going to keep it on your bathroom mirror to remind you that you have the strength, that you have the skills, you have the qualities that have allowed you to overcome these challenges in the past, and those are the things that are going to allow you to develop more competence about things in the future, and as you develop more competence, you are going to become more confident.

So that’s it, that’s my tip for the day. As always, if you like this video then please share it, with your friends, with your family, the more people I can reach, the more people I can help. I appreciate you taking the time to watch this. Thank you and have a fantastic week.