TED TALK 8:

THE SKILL OF SELF CONFIDENCE

The narrator of this talk is Dr.Joseph. He is the Athletic Director and head coach of the Varsity Soccer team at Ryerson University. In this TEDx program, Joseph provides guidance on improving self-confidence in oneself which is very important for every individual.

He opens the talk by explaining his past experience as a soccer coach. He said, once owning the national championship everyone wants to come and play for you free which is not so true. He said only once you pay them $25k a year in scholarship then everybody wants to come and play for you and parents would always come to him and they used to say that my son or my daughter wants to come and play at your university, what is that we have to do? and they always ask him what are you looking for? He said to the audience that being Socratic professor he asked them What do they do really well? and he found very typical answers like they have got great vision, they can see the entire field, and they also mentioned that their children are the best players, there is nobody who can beat them. They also mention that my son or my daughter really can do great in the air and can hit every ball. He then responds back to the parents saying that those are the last and least things he bothered about. The important thing he always considered was the skill “Self-Confidence”. He said without that skill, they are useless as a soccer player because when you lose sight or belief in yourself they cannot be a great player. He used the definition of self-confidence to be the ability or the belief to believe in yourself to accomplish any task no matter the odds, no matter the difficulty, no matter the adversity. The belief that you can accomplish the task it is self-confidence. He said to the audience that some of you are saying yourself that Great, I don't have it, I am so shy or I’ll never do that but he mentioned that Self-confidence as the skill because he believed it can be trained and he said he will show a couple of ways in which one can develop self-confidence.

The ways to Build Self Confidence:

REPETITION:

The easiest way to build self-confidence is through Repetition. The process of recurrence of an action or event is called Repetition. He asked the audience What does Malcolm Gladwell call it, the 10,000-hour rule?

He said there is no magic button. He said he recruited a Goalie from Colombia, South America one year. He said he was a big tall man and he had hands like stone and he thought he was like Flipper. Every time he threw the ball to him, Goalie plays the ball down onto the ground. He thought to himself that we are in trouble but he brings out the simple solution that gets to the wall, kicks a ball against the wall and catches it. His goal was 350 a day for eight months. He came back and he noticed his hands were calloused, the moisture on his hands were gone. He is now playing in Europe. Is there any Magic? No. Repetition, repetition, repetition. The problem is, we expect to be self-confident but we can’t be unless the skill and the task we are doing is not novel, is not new to us. We want to be in a situation where we have so much pressure in that because he said pressure build diamonds, we want to be in a situation where hey, I have done this thousand times. He said about a situation where he practiced his speech in front of mirror and then he went in front of his kids and his wife and he said to himself that he got a little nervous and practiced more and got little more nervous but by the time of addressing 2,500 people he cannot feel single ounce of nervousness now because his ability to practice over, over, and over again. The problem with repetition is How many of us bail after the first bit of failure? How many of us bail after the first bit of adversity? He then explained about the Edison. He said Edison tried 1000 to 10,000 tries to build that light bulb. He next said about the writer named J.K Rowling and she took 12 publishers for her Harry Potter book to be considered. He said we may be confident enough for fewer times but after a certain number, we may lose our self-confidence and accept the failure and opt for some other profession than being an author. If somebody said no for 12 times but practice, practice, practice and do not accept failure. He said maybe it shouldn’t be repetition, maybe answered should be persistence because he said we all may repeat something but very few of us really will persist. J.K Rowling stay still and continued her profession as an author and finally after undergoing many failures she didn’t lose her faith and her book got selected and she becomes famous. This all happened repetition with persistence. So, he said this is one way to Build Self-Confidence.

SELF TALK:

He said we all have a self-talk tape that plays in our head. He gave an example saying that woman when they go for shopping and try wearing pants then they might think to themselves that “damn, I look fat in these pants!.” and if you are a man, it’s the opposite “ Oh god, I got no muscle, I am so flabby!. He said we all have this tape that plays in our head. He said as a student if they ask me the question it was like please professor don’t pick me, I don’t know the answer and I look down. He recalled his experience when he was hired as an Athletics Director, he sat on the architect’s meeting, and he stated himself as dumb as a post when it comes to anything to do with numbers and angles when they ask his opinion What do you think doctor Joseph? He said to them that let me look into that and get back to you. He was in the meeting room like oh god, please don't ask me, please don't ask me. He said we all have this negative self-talk that goes in our head and he continued saying that there are enough people that are telling us we can’t do it that we are not good enough then why do we tell ourselves that? We know for a fact that thoughts influence actions so why do we want to say that negative self-talk to ourselves? we need to get our own self-affirmation. He stated about Muhammad Ali, what was his self-affirmation? I am the greatest! He asked the audience that Who else gonna tell you If we don’t tell it to ourselves? He said there need to be quiet moments in our bedroom, quiet moments when brushing our teeth. That we need to reaffirm: “I am the captain of my ship and my fate” that is my affirmation. He said he came from a school of one thousand people, he lived in a town of one thousand people for fifteen years there’s no reason that I should be in charge of an Athletics department, building maple leaf gardens. But he said I am the captain of my ship and the master of my fate. If I don’t say it, If I don’t believe it, no one else will. How do you build self-confidence? Get away from the people who tear you down. He said Muhammad Ali, I am the greatest! There is no one better than me. He mentioned saying that there is a difference between hubris, and ego, and false pride. It’s just reminding yourself in quiet silent moments. He said he put it down in his list which will be right beside his mirror about all the things that make him who he is because he made enough mistakes, he said newspapers will recognize it, and the people around will recognize it and they will tear him down and definitely pretty soon he will begin to believe it. He said there was a time when his confidence was really low. There was a time when he took this job when he came from Iowa, he was not sure if he could do it. He had to bring out self-confidence later and he wrote a letter to himself when he was feeling good. In that letter, he wrote Ivan, congratulations for getting your Ph.D. before 40, Congratulations on winning a national championship, Good job on raising three good kids and marrying the right woman. He wrote a letter to himself and it was his own brag sheet. His own letter about the things he was proud of because there are moments and we all experience them in our career, in our lives, in our job hunting, in our relationships when we are not feeling good about who, and what, and where we are and he had to bring out that letter and read it time and time again and for a period of two weeks, to weather him through that storm. It was important to stop the self-talk, the negative self-talk. He said If you watch you will see some athletes that have a little bandage or a little band around them. Lance Armstrong is a perfect one. He asked the audience what his self-affirmation? Live strong isn’t a brand, it was to remind him of who he was. Live strong, later it became a brand. He would move that from one arm to the next arm when doubt and fear came into his mind. Live strong, put it on there, let’s go. He said we all have it, we place it.

He continued saying there are two ways to build Self-confidence. He said bout the way one can build self-confidence in others. He mentioned that we are coachers and educators, we are teachers who will create value in the world and in doing that. He said an example saying that I am a coach who should address students saying I want you to score a goal. One of his students didn’t perform well so what as a coach he needs to do, He should say I need to explain the areas that he can improve and help him do a goal.

He said who is the coach? Coach is someone who generally fixes mistakes. When he was fixing that mistake saying “Johnny, this is terrible, you need to bend your knee, you need to do this, this.” He said what I have done to johnny’s self-confidence? Bend your knees, then do this, then do this. Next thing we can notice that Johnny’s crushed. He said Ignore what Johnny does wrong and find Bob or Sally or Freda over here. Great goal Freda, I love how you kept your knee low, you followed through, and you landed like this. Great Job! Johnny will notice the kind of approach towards Freda and he will follow. Here, Johnny will not be demoralized. His confidence isn’t shot, and what he has done is, he has built up Freda’s and he addressed the audience saying image how can we change the way we parented kids. Instead of scolding children for not performing some activity, we could reinforce them to do such activity by changing the way we speak towards certain things. He said It sounds simple but we tend to forget it or as educators or as somebody as a team if we manage to praise the positive behavior that we wanted to reinforce. He said we can apply reinforcement to the business world, we can apply that to the student group works, we can apply that to our management teams easily. Catch them when they are good not when they are bad.

INTERPRET FEEDBACK:

Last and certainly not least Self Confident people interpret feedback the way they choose to because If he asks his son who is a by far a terrible, terrible athlete, How is the game? His son replied saying Oh great! I scored three goals, I got two assists. He was like “I did not see him touch the puck!” But he has his own perception of how he did. He said he loved it. He said he was like him and remembered a situation when he met his wife, it was in the commons. He asked “Paulie, would you like to go to the movies? and she goes “Ah, no.” He asked her again because he thought she just hasn’t seen him in the right light or Maybe, that’s not the wrong shirt on because he was interpreting that the way he wants to interpret it. Finally, he asked her out again. She gave him this one comment through her friend saying she wouldn’t date you unless there was the last person on Earth, hell was freezing over, there was a small chance we had to save the planet Earth. He said some people, it’s like there’s no chance but he was like You’re saying there is a chance still because that is how he interprets it. If he could give you one thing to take from this, it is no one will believe in you unless you do. He asked the audience to listen to the videos like the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round peg in the square holes. He said that we all are supposed to be different when people look at us, believe in yourself.

As one of the viewers, I found this talk as very informative and enlightening because he made me shower some light on how I should develop my self-confidence which can definitely play a vital role in the personal and professional levels. I will definitely start believing in myself and carry a positive outlook wherever I go.

“I am the captain of my ship and my fate”.

Thank You,