Episode #9 - The Equation of Confidence

Hello and welcome to the Sequoia Project podcast. Episode 9 now and we're going to be talking about a little bit about confidence and whatnot around business and defining some of your terms for you.

Dale: What we're gonna dive in today is the confidence side of that because naturally everyone has good ideas. And the biggest thing that holds people back from actually taking action on those things is they don't have the confidence to do it or to get started. So I want to start a business, I want to get into the actual foundation of starting a business, tie that up nicely with what we gave you last week into this week with how to get confidence, what it is, and basically once you get it, how to lose as little of it as possible so that you can keep moving with your ideas going forward.

Dale: My definition for confidence is having a list of things that you know work and a list of things that you don't know don't work. And then you do the things that you know work. You have evidence to suggest that, hey, when I do this, I get this result. Then you start to feel a certain way where you go, I'm going to do an action and I'm going to get this result. I'm very confident I'm going to get this result.

Coby: Confidence to me is kind of like, it's your ability to trust that you can do something more than your fear of failure. Which I think is the big thing there. The fear of failure is something that holds so many people back from confidence. I think even failure is something that destroys a lot of people's confidence. And it's the ability to take those — like obviously failing at something and not doing well at something is a learning lesson rather than just giving up on it.

Dale: So I am so boring that I have an equation for confidence. And it goes simply put like this. Confidence is what we want. How do we get confidence? We go, we make a decision. And if you make a decision and you have a positive outcome, the result of that equals — how do I do this thing again? If I did something and I got confidence, I do it again, what should I get? More confidence. And we have to go to the other side of the equation, because in mathematics, everything you do on the top, you have to do on the bottom. So if I have an action and I get a negative result, what that equals is — what would I change about it that would logically get me a better result? Try again. So it's always — even if you get a negative result, you're on your way to achieving a positive result. And that's how I like to look at it because then you kind of get this thing in your head — even failure puts you in the right direction.

Coby: Before going to talk to anyone, I'd sit in the car, put on some music that I really enjoyed that was going to calm me down, that was going to hype me up, that was going to just really get me ready to do it. And then I went, all right, I have whatever, three minutes and twenty seconds, the moment this song finishes, I'm going out of the car and I'm walking in there. The moment that song ended I'd turn off the car, walk out and I'd go straight in. I wouldn't give myself that time after that song to go, holy shit, I'm about to do this thing.

Dale: Something that I used to balance myself out — when I first started signing big customers and big deals and that kind of stuff, I used to feel this adrenaline rush or I get like this feeling in the pit of my stomach, feeling like I was gonna vomit. And I just be like, isn't that the kind of life you want though? Like, isn't that the kind of excitement you want? Like, don't you want to feel feelings like this? Our bodies are literally hardwired to send chemicals to the different parts of our body to be like, hey, you're in a state now of you're alive. I just got to this point where I would just close my eyes and I take a huge breath and I would just go, I fucking love this. And I would just drill that into my head.