"Small Deposits Made Repeatedly, Builds a Fortune" (w/Dr. Nate Zinsser)

Almost everything we've learned about confidence is wrong. Which is why it's incredibly awesome that Brendan got to speak with Dr. Nate Zinsser, mental health performance coach, and author of the fantastic book, The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance.

The two dissect all things confidence and dive into:

*Debunking some of the biggest myths about confidence including that some people naturally have more than others.
*Two easy techniques to build your confidence RIGHT NOW. 
*The secret genius of Lloyd Christmas in Dumber and Dumber.
*Why having butterflies is actually a good thing.
*Why confidence is your mental bank account.
*And whether or not Coscto needs more Cheez-Its.

RESOURCES
Dr. Nate Zinsser
The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance.
Dr. Z Talking Confidence
Costco's Craziest Items

Transcript

You know, I love Costco, and I think Costco makes you ask questions. that you never thought you would ask in your life. Questions like, Do I need a bunker full of Cheez Its? Do I need a dunk tank in my house, but that dunk tank is just a huge bucket of moisturizer? Should I have kids so I can hit them at Costco?

Oh, am I holding a case of dynamite? No, that's just butter. Let's face it, America likes things bigger. We just always have, we always will. But if we're gonna have Costco, can we have a grocery store where we can just order one of something? Hi, yes, can I please have one small [00:01:00] almond to go put it in a big bag?

What's your favorite grocery store? Trader Joe's makes me feel like i'm a really fun guy at a party Whole foods makes me feel like i'm taking care of myself and I should have a child in a backyard with a grill And Ralph's makes me feel like i'm a convicted felon. So choose wisely y'all. It says a lot about who you are Welcome everybody to a brand new episode of spiritual asshole I am so excited you're here.

With me, as always, is Willoughby T, the man, Fitzgibbons, and Please follow me on Instagram at the underscore Brennan Fitzgibbons on Instagram. We are picking up steam internationally I just want to say the word of the spiritual asshole is spreading and thank you all for being here and joining this podcast This community.

You're part of a community. Tell everyone you're part of something If I sound sick, it's because I am, but you are a part of something. You are part of a community. And it's funny, when I started this podcast, a lot of people told me not to call it spiritual asshole because it sends like some kind of negative message.[00:02:00] 

But anybody who listens to podcasts knows that's not true. And in fact, It has actually turned away some people from doing this podcast, including Pope Francis. He said, no, thank you. no, it, it's very rare, but it's cool because I also think it's gotten me people that it normally wouldn't. So how about that?

Y'all spoiler alert. Just be yourself. It Okay, so today's guest is incredible. I'm going to keep this intro pretty short because your boy is fighting a cold. I'm going to talk about a couple things, namely death. It's fine. Is Dr. Nate Zinser. This is a really cool story.

I was at a coffee shop in Marina del Rey. I was going to go write. I'm working on my book proposal and I'm in this coffee shop and I look over and I see two books. Because it always is. And I see The Confident Mind by Dr. Nate Zinzer and I immediately thought I have to read this book.

Something inside of me said Bro, read this book. I got the book and I reached out to him and he got back to me right away and I love this book. And I really wanted to have Dr. Nate on because I feel like a lot of what I talk about and [00:03:00] espouse is coming from spiritual, quote, spiritual people, people who believe in like the quantum field and some people got them Reiki.

Everybody cares about their Zodiac sign, new moon in portal, lion's main gate. I always want to mix it up and make sure I have people who come at it from a much more scientific practical side to show you, basically we're all kind of saying the same thing. And Dr. Nate. His approach to this is so practical, yet it's so, there's so much overlap with so many of the people we've had on who would call it maybe something different or would say that they're much more quote woo woo, which I don't, I'm kind of over that term, man.

Um, can we move on? Woo woo sounds like something you say after you win a jump rope competition in West Hollywood. But I just feel like. I'm so glad he's on because yeah, I, I, I basically pointed this out in a podcast, but.

Some people think that this stuff is a little out there, but they love professional athletes, \ or they believe [00:04:00] in sciences, right? Well, or psychologists, and people who are, quote, practical, well, guess what? Those same people are doing the exact same thing. So, very, very cool. Okay, so I have some amazing updates I would like to share with y'all, because I love you guys.

And some it's gonna get heavy, but it's gonna be positive. Okay, so this weekend, I got sick because I finished shooting my television show, Death is Normal, and it was incredible. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I felt like at times I was having an out of body experience and I entered into a better life.

So last minute we were able to get as part of the cast, Christo Fernandez who is Danny Rojas in Ted Lasso. He plays my best friend. He is amazing. Working with him was a dream. He's fantastic and we're friends now and that means a lot to me. And he was perfect. And it was just so surreal, guys. I wrote this TV [00:05:00] show three years ago, and I've sat with it for three years.

And so like, when you write something, and this kind of is a great metaphor for your lives, like, and I think Dr. Nate would even agree. When you write a scene, and you want to shoot it, and then it becomes reality, it's very much not that different than when you have a dream that you write down, and then you find yourself, As the chief doctor at a hospital.

And he wrote down that dream three years ago. Really, when you write down a script, you're writing down a dream. You're writing down something that hasn't happened yet, that you know will. And so, like, as I'm doing these lines, and I look over, and I'm like, Danny Ross is touching me right now and telling me everything's okay.

This is insane. that's, what's really cool about writing a script. It's like you're literally, and people always say like, you are the lead actor of the movie of your own life. So there's really not that much difference. And so it was so cool. We had great actors like Arturo Castro as well. My old writing partner, buddy, who's killing it.

He did fantastic in this party scene. He had an amazing speech. We had Matthew Moy [00:06:00] from two broke girls is in it. And Cassandra Blair from jury duty, who I absolutely love. Dreamcast, um, director Melissa Bolton Klinger did a great job. Amy Kirsten. Thank you so much. The producer extraordinaire. She carried this production on her back.

She probably won't see her for five months because she's tunneling because she had to deal with so much shit. She did incredible. Uh, Dave Gorn, amazing DP. I cannot wait for you guys to see this show. Like, everything we talk about in this show is on full display. It's a comedy. It's a dramedy. It's deep.

It's time for this discussion, which segues very nicely into What I want to talk about. I have found myself very surrounded by death recently. So I shoot death as normal. I have this amazing weekend. I'm completely cashed out. I wake up on Monday morning after we'd done shooting till 2 a. m. To the news that Dikembe Mutombo died.

Dikembe Mutombo was one of my favorite players growing up. I was, I think, the [00:07:00] only white boy in all of the northwest suburbs who had a Dikembe Mutombo jersey. Like, all of us were wearing Jordan shit, and I'm wearing the jersey of a 7'3 African man. Fast forward to 2022, two years ago. I somehow get involved with Takemiya Matambo, and I start, through the magic of the universe, which it absolutely was, this is like one of my best manifestations ever, I start working on a project 

I can't talk about the project, but, um, I start working on something with him. I got to know him a little bit and I did a crazy, crazy deep dive on Dikembe Mutombo. I think I've watched, I can confidently say, I think I have watched almost every single Dikembe Mutombo video on YouTube. I've spent hours, guys.

I'm talking like 500 videos on this guy. And every single time I watched a video, it just got better. You know when people are like, don't meet your heroes? [00:08:00] It's the opposite with the Kamen Matambo. The more that I learned about him, and I got to talk to him a little bit, and hear more personal stories about him, the more I was like, This dude is the literal greatest.

I post about it on Instagram, I won't get into it too much, but basically that guy, in addition to being a complete NBA legend, like, undisputed legend, absolutely, I think, top 100 greatest players of all time, his charity work is unmatched. I think he belongs in the conversation with Muhammad Ali as the most impactful athletes to affect the world.

Yeah, I would say easily. So he dies, I found out he died, he had brain cancer, we knew this a year ago, and I thought somehow he could beat it, and maybe some people can't, I don't know enough about brain cancer, but I'm at this place now because like I had a death in the family I told you guys about two weeks ago where all this it's getting thrown in my face a lot And it's all it's really been doing recently is just making me realize [00:09:00] how every second you are alive is precious And this is crazy enough the entire Premise of my television show and it goes even farther beyond that, you know I remember when Lee Van Helm died, and Glenn Hanser, one of my favorite singers, did this like 10 minute sort of song eulogy about him, and he's like, he doesn't go anywhere.

we just become stronger. And so what I'll say about Dikembe Cuz I feel for his family, of course, this is sad I'm not saying it's not sad But I just feel like all that love that he had and I say this to everybody who's lost somebody Bleacher song check it out great song that love does not disappear.

It just gets transferred out transferred redirected and actually sometimes expressed even more. And on another level, to me, when somebody liked to come in with tumbo dies, I look at him and I just go, dude, you live the [00:10:00] best life possible. Period. A way sadder thing to me is the number of human beings that didn't live a life like that, that instead lived in the prison of their own mind and their own restrictions lived in so much fear.

That they weren't able to express themselves fully because they were held back so much by fear, by society, by internal pain. And some people spend their whole lives in front of television. And by the way, guys, I'm not saying that anything's wrong with that because I even caught myself as one of those people sometimes for sure.

And I just think the greatest thing that you can do. Is live a full life and live the fullest expression of yourself. And nobody did that better than the Dikembe Mutombo. Nobody lived a better life. And there are so few people who can say that. So my challenge to you and to everybody. is to look at [00:11:00] yourself, myself included, and just be like, how can I be a little bit more me today?

How can I be a little bit, a fuller expression of me to help the world a little bit more, to be kinder, to be funnier, to express my authentic self, and to not let my mind and my thoughts trick me into thinking I'm this thing that I'm not. Because all you are is love, and all you are is, So, so much love to Dikembe Mutombo.

So much love to everybody who lost somebody. And just know that they are now looking out for you. They're now backing us up even harder. That they just return into the infinite love and quantum field. of endless love. Hehehe That's where they all live now and you can tap into it and use it. Use it to free yourself.

Use it to know that take every second you have now as precious. You don't have to YOLO shit. I'm not here saying go outside and go to Vegas. Although if you wanna go, call me. I'll see you there. I'm just [00:12:00] saying like, now is the time. Whatever it is that you've wanted to do. Whatever it is you have put on the shelf, now is the time.

Now. Right now. To do it. To start doing it. And at the very least, you can say, I did it. Whatever that is for you, it does not have to be a big thing at all. It can literally be joining a gym. It can literally be taking a pottery class. Go do it now and watch what happens. And you just have to show yourself that you're capable of that.

Well, what else are you capable of? How far can you go? The answer is infinite. So I'm so hyped for you. I'm going to keep this quick. I'm so excited about this episode. I'm going to say a quick thing afterwards, why I loved it so much. You are truly the best. Here he is, Dr. Zinzer. All right, everybody. Welcome to this brand new, incredible episode of Spiritual Asshole. I'm [00:13:00] so excited to be joined by Dr. Nate Zinzer. He's an expert on human, the psychology of human performance, and the author of The Confident Mind, a battle tested guide to unshakable performance. Dr. Z, how are you? I'm doing fine, Brendan.

Hello to all you fellow spiritual assholes out there. I feel like I found my tribe. So in your book, you talk so much about getting to what you call the first victory, but isn't the first victory putting on pants? Um, I know, I think the first victory is deciding that this is a day worth putting your pants on for, and then you put the pants on and then you get to the kitchen and you get your breakfast and then you get into your workout and your workday.

But that first victory is the decision to go forward. Is that what you see as the first victory? That's what, how you define it? Well, I basically defined the first victory as Your decision to go out and [00:14:00] make something happen. Whether it's in your work day, whether it's in your workout, or if you're a competitor, you are stepping into the arena with the decision to win first, okay?

I took the term first victory from the Art of War, 5th century BC, in which Sun Tzu writes, Victorious warriors win first and then go into battle. Losing warriors go into battle and then hope to win. Yeah, I love that so much. And I can't help but thinking about my favorite warrior, Michael Jordan, and he said that, He, whenever he went to a game, he was always like, I was never nervous.

Cause I already played out the game so much in my mind. And I think this is sort of what you're talking about a little bit, right? Indeed. I have already thought through here's how [00:15:00] I want this battle to go. Here's how I want this meeting to go. Here's how I want this contest to go. I have decided this is the way I want it.

This is what I'm going to strive for. And I'm going to maintain that vision of my success. all the way through, whether I'm dominating from the opening whistle. Or whether I'm struggling all the way through, I'm going to maintain that vision of success, that mindset as best I possibly can. Yeah. And one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is, you know, we've had all kinds of people on this podcast, but sometimes people make fun of spiritual people for their positive affirmations and their vision boards.

But then these are the same people who love professional athletes who use positive affirmation and , vision boards. So, I wanted to know why I like your approach so much, is you're dealing with a lot of practical, rational, accepted people in society, like athletes really come at this from a very practical place.

Is that how you see it as [00:16:00] well? Oh, I see this immensely practical. you know, athletes indeed have to be practical. They are playing on a prescribed arena under particular rules. And there are some consequences to their execution. It gets printed in every newspaper in the world. there are some other quote unquote athletes that I work with.

they're in the difficult and demanding sport of neurosurgery. Um, retinal ophthalmologic surgery, pediatric cardiac surgery, big words. You talk about an arena, you know, an operating room. You talk about a highly developed set of skills and you talk about consequences. so all these practical ideas.

That the best athletes, the best, the Michael Jordans of the world have followed, the best surgeons have followed, and I spent 30 years as a supervisory psychologist at West Point. Wow. Looking at this process [00:17:00] from the very practical point of view of military execution, organization, training. And then, unfortunately, at times you have to actually get deployed to a combat, so that's about as practical as it gets.

Yeah. So, let's back up a little bit. One of, I love how your book starts off sort of debunking the myths about confidence. And I think that's, all those debunks that you do, it's so important. Can we talk a little bit about them? Of course, which one would you like to start with? I really like the idea that you're, well, I don't know if you actually said this, but I do think you kind of alluded to it.

There's sort of a belief that like confidence is almost genetic. It's like, Oh, well, Brad Pitt's just, I'm not him. He's just that good. Like there's sort of just that idea that we've all seen. And like, you really show that it's actually something you can build. So that idea that it's like, Oh, they just naturally have this thing that I don't have.

That is [00:18:00] indeed a misconception. if any of your listeners play the play tennis or follow world class tennis, I'd say go to YouTube and look up the 60 minutes conversation from a couple, a few months back with Novak Djokovic, where he is being introduced and the sportscaster says, Hey, Well, you know, people can talk about muscular strength and agility and stroke mechanics, but your mental strength seems to be your greatest gift.

And Djokovic says, No, wait, stop. I have to correct you. It's not a gift. I work at it. And he proceeds through the course of the interview to describe how he works at maintaining a confident attitude in the cauldron of world class tennis competition. I don't care how much confidence someone has or doesn't have at any given moment.

The good news [00:19:00] is that you can cultivate more confidence is a skill, a quality, a characteristic that you build. It builds with the proper attention and it correspondingly erodes if you neglect it. Yeah. You know, please don't think, well, I'm just not born that way. No, you just haven't done the drills. to build the skill so that you can go out there and work in the real world and pay the bills.

I love that. Another one I think is so good is the idea you said like, Oh, confidence is a blanket thing. Like someone who has confidence, they're confident in everything you do. And you're like, actually, no, you can be extremely confident in your ability to play basketball. And extremely unconfident in your ability to be a singer, which I think is very, very true. 

whether we're talking about the classroom, the, the world of work or the world of, of athletic, of sport performance, we all have different [00:20:00] degrees of comfort and certainty about different areas of our lives. the moral again, is very encouraging. You can develop confidence in any particular aspect of your life that you wish.

You can develop confidence in your golf game overall, just as you might have confidence in your salesmanship or your entrepreneurial ability or your administrative skills, and then even dialing down further within, say, the golf game. You can cultivate confidence in your tea, um, shots, you can cultivate confidence in your wedge play, you can cultivate confidence in your putting, any particular part of your life that you care to put the work into, you can develop greater certainty.

So what do you think is tripping people up the most with confidence, why they think they can't have it? because they get seduced by some false images out there say, Oh yes, that guy or that gal boy, she's really got it. I wish I had what he or she has. Beyonce. [00:21:00] We all wish, we all wish, we all wish. Let's understand that, you know, first of all, Beyonce is a gen genetic freak.

And of all, every image that we see of Beyonce has been carefully. curated. Yes. A whole team of makeup and wardrobe and hairstylists have worked for hours to create the image that we see. And then especially if it's a print image, that image has been photographed by a professional photographer who has spent hours setting up this shot so that the lighting and shading is just right.

And then even after those hours, there's some time additionally spent maybe digitally editing a little bit here, a little bit there. So the image that we end up seeing of Beyonce, for example, is really pretty artificial. So please, ladies and gentlemen, don't buy in. To the stereotype. Don't buy into the images.

so [00:22:00] someday, someday Beyonce is going to come out and say, well, you know, look, during all these years when I was the biggest star in the world, I had my own hangups. Oh, yeah. that. That's why I really like this particular interview by Djokovic, because he's basically saying, look, I'm vulnerable too.

I work on this. I'm not Superman. he's still out there playing world class tennis and he's being honest about his vulnerability. Yeah, that's great. So you also said in the book, confidence has relatively little to do with what happens to you and pretty much everything to do with what you think happened to you.

That is amazing. Can you talk about that? that's basically the gist of the whole book. Yeah. You know, we, we think of our confidence being the result of what has happened to us. No, our confidence is the result of how we have thought about, how we have processed, how we have filtered, how we have [00:23:00] interpreted what has happened to us.

I, I tell several stories in the book about individuals Who on the surface seem to have everything figured out. They're very, very successful, yet in their heart of hearts, they're only looking, they're only taking in, they're only lingering on their relatively few experiences of setback and mistake and disappointment.

Hence, despite the fact that a lot of great things have happened, they don't feel particularly confident. Then you can flip the whole scenario around and say, And there are people who have had considerable setbacks, negativity in their lives, yet they insist upon processing that information differently, and they think about, they linger on all the constructive experiences they have had, and they linger on constructive fantasies of their future.

I am [00:24:00] referring especially to soldiers who have been wounded in battle. And instead of being absolutely miserable over their situation, which let's face it, ladies and gentlemen, that is a miserable situation. They're able to think I'm going to have a great life. I do not need to feel sorry for myself. I'm going to have a great life.

an Olympic competitor who has a very poor warmup prior to the biggest competition of his life. Is able to say, well, it's the warm up. Nobody cares. Nobody's scoring that. And so he walks out there completely confident and blows the judges away with a gold medal performance. It's not what happens to you.

It's how you process it and think about it and what you conclude from it. Yeah, and this brings us to the great point in your book where you talk about somebody who was emotionally wounded, and that was Lloyd Christmas from Dumb and Dumber. And he, he historically said in one of the greatest movies of all time, so you're telling me there's a chance when after she said to him that he has a million and one chance, [00:25:00] but you use this point, it's actually a great analogy.

Because I feel like this is exactly what athletes do. This is Michael Jordan also said, why would I think about shots that I haven't even taken yet to worry about, you know, so like, let's talk about that idea of selective memory. That's so important. Right. uh, our lives have been full of constructive, energizing, optimistic experiences and.

Some disappointments. We're all imperfect human beings. We're living in an imperfect physical universe. We have all experienced things that go wrong. The, the question is which, which of those categories of experience Are we going to spend most of our time lingering in, replaying, and living through, okay?

we all have a great storehouse of memories. How about filtering those memories so [00:26:00] that what is most apparent to you are the memories that fill you with energy and optimism and enthusiasm. I urge people to, you know, put together a list of your top 10 moments in your given profession, or your given field of study, or your given sport or passion.

So the college baseball pitcher is going to make a list of, yeah, I was player of the year in high school, or I had, this was my first outing at college, and this was the best game I had. And you make a list of that and you make it. You print it out, put it in front of you. Yeah. Remind yourself of that.

Those are the things that you want to base your opinion of yourself on rather than basing your opinion of yourself upon the bad games, the disappointments, the setbacks. we've kind of been socialized to really remember and put a lot of emotional energy into our mistakes, our setbacks, our disappointments.

Under the [00:27:00] mistaken impression that that's going to fire us up to go out there and do it better next time. Right. So I want to show everybody, because I have it here. This is from page 64 of your book, the exact, There you go. Yeah, the, uh, this is the top 10 list from the army, Bobby Held, yeah, I think his name is?

Yeah, Bobby Held, and I've got dozens and dozens and dozens of similar top 10 lists. I encourage everybody to do that in their, in their own mind. In their own way. Yeah. So I started making mine. I'm a comedian, actor, entertainer, and what I found to be really interesting was once I started doing this and I love to hear the science or like why this happens, I started thinking of.

More more sir. And then like two hours later, I was like, Oh, there was another one and there are another one. So is that the reticular activating system? Is that the law of attraction? What is that? Well, no, it's not the reticular activating system. I, I see it similar just to sort of unlocking some vault, you know, it's, it's basically you activated a program [00:28:00] that is searching through that hard drive between your ears.

Okay. For anything with a particular label on it, but the people that we're talking about now in this case. Is the label of really positive emotion. Yes. Once you ask yourself, once you said, once you gave your program the direction to find everything associated with a particular level of emotion, that program went to work searching your hard drive and things start popping up and things start popping up and things start popping up and as long as you give that program permission to search the hard drive, it's going to keep finding stuff.

Wow. So is that one of your, you found the most effective techniques with the athletes and people you coach? Obviously this all ties into what you call your mental bank account. Yeah. It works on several different levels. We can look at the sort of the long term memories going back to, you know, throughout your career.

And then we can also look at the shorter term [00:29:00] memories of just today. Just today. Now, they may not be as big, as emotionally charged, as the highlight, as your performance highlights from, you know, throughout your career, but there's probably something that took place today that's worth hanging on to. It's got a little bit of that energy, optimism, enthusiasm charged to it.

It could be the memory of putting in quality effort. here or there at a different point in your day. It can be a small success, just something that you got right throughout during the day. And maybe the realization that heck I'm making progress with something. you can filter your long term memories into that top 10 list.

You can filter your memories of the day into what I refer to as a daily ESP reflection, effort, success, progress. And you can have four or five of those [00:30:00] little tiny memory nuggets every, each and every day. Yeah. And they accumulate over time. They're not huge deposits into the mental bank account. They're small, but they're frequent.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. This just hit me. I think what trips people up and I think what has tripped me up is thinking that the tiny deposits don't matter as much as the big ones are the ones that matter. Like, yeah, okay. I, today I did an audition. I did three voiceover auditions. I got a lot better.

That doesn't matter. I didn't book it. Right. That's, that's how I have thoughts often, but you're saying, which is true. If you think of it like a bank account. A deposit is still a deposit. That's right. That's right. And even a small deposit made repeatedly builds up to a huge fortune. There there, there's a wonderful mathematical, Jedi mind trick to play on people, simple question.

What would you rather have? A million dollars [00:31:00] today, a one shot deposit of a million dollars, or would you rather have the accumulation of one penny today, which doubles in value over the course of a year? And at the end of the year, you get it. What would you rather have? A million bucks right now? Or what ends up in 365 days when that one penny.

Doubles in value every day for 365 days. Yeah. I mean, it's very easy to be like, I'll take the million. Yeah. Some people would say, yeah, I'll take the million bucks now, but if you wait and build it, you end up with like 8 million bucks, just the gradual accumulation and the interest that it earns, you get to be your own bank in this regard.

That's so good. So let's talk about like those small ones that really do matter. Like I had a great workout today. I took a class today, things like that. Right? Yeah. I took a class today and not only did I take a class today, I understood this particular point. Now we're getting down to an even finer level [00:32:00] of memory management.

I can look back on my entire day and say, yep, I did my workout, I got through my to do list. And I got to have a nice cup of coffee with, you know, Billy, okay? You can also look at a, at the same day, almost hour by hour, or activity by activity. And I, and this is especially important for anybody who is in school.

I finish a class. I pick up my gear, I walk out the door. What's the best thing that you learned in this class? What's the one thing that you understood a little bit better now, having been in that class for an hour, than you knew when you came in? Oh yeah, I get this point about constitutional law or, you know, uh, the anatomy of the, of the, of the thorax, right?

I understand this point. a little bit better. That's a deposit. That's just a memory that allows you to be just a tiny bit more certain about [00:33:00] yourself when it comes to that subject. So we're looking at memory management from the lifespan in terms of the top 10. We're looking at it from day by day from the daily ESP.

And then we're looking at it basically hour by hour or activity by activity within a given day. Okay. Yeah. I did the workout. What's the best thing that happened in that workout? I hit a PR on this station or I finally felt comfortable in this pose or executing this technique. Right. That's a tiny little thing.

But again, if you do this repeatedly, if this is the sort of attitude that you decide for yourself. Everything changes. Yeah. What happens? I mean, I think a good example we could talk about is Eli Manning because you worked with him and was one of his limiting beliefs. Why is my brother in every commercial ever? I don't know if he asked himself, why is Peyton in a lot of I think, [00:34:00] okay, well, I'm going to get my chance. My turn is coming. Just the decision to be patient. Yeah. like everybody who is in that kind of media spotlight, oh my God, I know , you know, Eli had to be extremely comfortable in his own skin.

Okay. He's not, he and his older brother, Peyton are not clones. Yeah. They're, they each have their own distinct playing style and their own distinct, strong points, their own distinct advantages. And Eli's never going to be the best version of Eli he can be if he tries to imitate Peyton. He's got to, he's got to trust his throwing motion, his foot movement, his, Way of seeing a defense and reading as a play unfolds and it's becoming comfortable with yourself and more certain about yourself.

 That was the trick. and he really needed, he really needed to learn that. And so does [00:35:00] everybody else who plays. You know, a highly competitive sport and a highly visible arena. So then you basically say to bring it back really at the core of the book, that confidence really then is just the sum total of what's in your mental bank account.

Is that fair to say? Yeah, that is, that is very fair to say your confidence, your sense of certainty is really an outward expression of the momentary running total of everything that you think about yourself. Okay. And again, I use the term running total deliberately because it's constantly changing.

You're constantly experiencing things. You're constantly making decisions and judgments and either strengthening opinions or debunking opinions about yourself. It's always in flux, just like your daily bank account is always in flux, depending on the activity. No, mine's always going up. Um, so, so you break it down.

Very awesome. This is your [00:36:00] definition of confidence. Sense of certainty about your ability, which allows you to bypass conscious thought and execute unconsciously. Right? Right. So how much of that do you think, by the way, but that really is improv comedy. There's a theater called Upright Citizens Brigade.

Their slogan is don't think. Yeah. Because they don't, that's exactly what you're saying, to get that conscious mind out. Is that something we can learn though, to clear out the mind? Absolutely. Okay. You can, you can indeed learn to clear out the over analysis, the judgment, the And the criticism that tends to follow judgment and yes, you can get very good at confining those mental processes to particular moments and aspects of your life.

Okay, I will again use a, I'll use an athletic. I'll use a sports metaphor. Yeah. Okay. [00:37:00] Again, let's just say I'm a tennis player. I will certainly have to do some drills to improve the quality of any given tennis stroke. Okay. When I'm drilling one particular stroke, I'm going to be very analytical about foot placement, racket preparation, contact point, follow through, and my coach will do the same.

Okay. That's where analysis And judgment. Hey, I'm doing this right. Hey, I'm not doing this right. And a little bit of criticism. Come on, man. Get your act together. You know, get it together. A little bit of that is very helpful in order to build up one's skill level. However, if that's the only way that we practice, what we will be doing is strengthening that tendency to analyze, judge and criticize.

Hmm. Now we don't want to do that in a game. We don't wanna do that when we're on the stage. So we better have at least as much time in our [00:38:00] practice, in our preparation where instead of analyzing, we're just observing. Instead of judging, we're just accepting. Instead of criticizing, we're supporting.

We need to practice that observation, that acceptance, that constant support. If that's the way we want to be. If we want to have that lack of analytical, judgmental, critical thinking. On the stage in the match in the game. So the answer to your question is, can you, can you think less? Yes, you can. You can train yourself to think less about what you're doing.

Indulge your, I refer to it as a workhorse mentality, indulge your workhorse mentality in a certain part of your training and practice, but also build up what I refer to as a racehorse. By practicing [00:39:00] in a more relaxed, more excited, basically non-conscious way. Okay. So what would you say to somebody who is doing something like a sport or any kind of performance and all of a sudden something quote bad happens and all those voices start coming in.

What do you, what do you tell people to do in that situation? I tell people to acknowledge that there is a voice. And then I tell people to breathe. You can always be in control of your breath, no matter where you are. Yeah. Except underwater. But even though, you know, scuba divers have to do this too. acknowledge it, breathe, stop the voice.

You can literally tell the boys, shut the hell up, and then deliberately insert something from your mental bank account, deliberately insert in memory. Of effort and success and progress deliberately [00:40:00] insert a thought about what you want. You can indeed talk back to that voice. You can indeed get in the last word so that you are left in a, in a, in an emotional state that allows for progress.

I love it. Yeah. I totally love that. And I think. Keep it that simple. I've heard a confident number one confidence killer or happiness killer, which I was like, please don't say this is rumination. And it does make sense because like, I was thinking about the story that you have of that soldier who was having bombs dropped on him.

Like when that's happening, you don't have time to sit there and go, Oh, why didn't she like my Instagram post? You know? And that's the same with, that's why I love athletes so much is they don't have time. to dwell. And that's one thing that I'm actively working on in my psyche to not have as much the ruminating and the dwelling.

Like what, what do you tell people that who do that? I tell them to limit their [00:41:00] rumination to a particular time, to a particular place, even give it, give it a time limit. That's cool. I like that a lot. I know you're a Michael Jordan fan. Oh yeah. I don't know if, I heard this story secondhand, so I can't vouch for its, veracity, but I did hear that on the occasions where Michael Jordan had played a bad game in his own estimation, he 10 minutes to ruminate on it.

10 minutes, literally stopwatch going, 10 minutes. At the end of that 10 minutes, okay, I'm not thinking about that anymore. I'm thinking about how I want to play in the next game. My next game could be tomorrow night or in two nights. I don't have time. I can't let this thing stick around in me for hours and hours.

I'm going to give myself 10 minutes and then, okay, I thought about it. I'm not going to think about it anymore. Now I'm going to think about how I want to play, how I'm going to be in the next game, how I want to carry the ball, how I want to distribute the [00:42:00] ball, how I want to shoot, how I want to play defense, how I want to rally my teammates.

I'm not ruminating anymore about that happened. I love it. What is some of your favorite success stories that you saw with people you've worked with? it was remarkable to see a young lady by the name of Jill Bakken win the first women's bobsled gold medal. Oh yeah. Okay. In the 2002 Olympic games. Um, she is a.

Quiet, shy individual. And we met in December of 2000 for our first working session. And she just said, I could use a lot more confidence. And so over the next 14 months, we had the chance to interact a little bit. And I gave her some, some, some drills, some ideas. Uh, and she, she made the Olympic team. She was the number two sled driver on the Olympic team.

There was another team highly [00:43:00] publicized gold medal favorites. Um, another American woman, but in the actual competition in Salt Lake City, in the actual Olympic competition, the number one sled drill driven by this other lady just cracked under the, under the pressure and they were never in the running.

And here comes Jill underappreciated, underdog, comes through and wipes the field clean, wins a gold medal. And she stepped out of the sled and the sportscaster sticks the microphone in her face and says, how'd you do it? You weren't supposed to be here. You were the, you weren't the favorite. And Joe Bakken just said, well, we just had confidence and we had to go with that. 

So at some point in those 14 months, you went from a. I could really lose more confidence to, Hey, one of the reasons why we won was because we had confidence. Yeah. Something good happened in those 14 months, Brendan. That's so good. All right. One more question. Then I play a quick [00:44:00] game. So you also have this great section on why being nervous and having butterflies is actually good.

If being nervous is good, why do we pee our pants? Um,

because, because in those motion, in those moments, we are really beset with Is the with the prospect of physical danger. usually, you know, in the case of a comedian or an entertainer going up on stage, it's not life threatening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not going to happen. However, I have heard of bullfighters.

Peeing in their pants. That is a life and death thing. That's why they all wear black pants. Oh, wow. That's crazy. . Anyway. Um, Oh yeah, but the butterflies thing was so cool. You talked about, Michael Johnson. The Michael Johnson was one of America's best track athletes in the decade of the 80s and the 90s in the 96 [00:45:00] Olympic Games.

 From Atlanta, he first won the gold medal in the 400 meter race. And then two days later, he was in the final for the 200 meter and no runner had ever won gold in both of those events at the same Olympiad. well, he turned in another gold medal per performance. and then in a subsequent interview, Bob Costas from NBC sports says, okay, there you were in the box.

Were, was your heart pounding? And Michael Johnson says, yeah. I was nervous, but when I'm nervous, I'm comfortable in my comfort zone. Mike, Michael Johnson, and pretty much every other great athlete comes to the conclusion that My heart speeds up, my muscles tense up, I get those butterflies in my stomach because of a biochemical change that takes place in my body designed to make me stronger, faster, more reactive, [00:46:00] more in tune with my settings.

Okay? And I think we are hardwired as human beings to do that. When we're about to do something that is important to us, whether it's something that we are required to do, but it's important, or whether it's something that we just want to do because we want to do it. If it's important to us, unconsciously our minds send messages to our various endocrine glands, especially your adrenal glands, and some of that adrenaline is going to get pumped into your blood.

And it's going to excite everything. It's going to accelerate your heart. It's going to move blood around. It's going to basically turn the volume up in your nervous system. Yeah. You put it in sensitive, et cetera. You put it in such a good way. You were like, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, your body should be changing.

You're about to perform in front of 50 million people. You're about to do something that is not very [00:47:00] normal. So don't expect your body to feel normal. That's so good. the important thing, and I hope all your listeners can take this to heart. When you get nervous. You have a choice. You can go, Oh, I'm nervous.

I don't like this. Or you can say, Oh, I'm nervous. This is great. I'm getting fired up to be wonderful. Oh, that's so good. Getting fired up to be wonderful, man. I love that. All right. Well, I like to close by playing a game. It's called spiritual or asshole, where I say some things and you tell me if it's spiritual or asshole, are you down?

Um, I'm, I'm down to try the game. Can there be, can there be a neutral category or must I go by? No, you can go neutral. There's loose, loose rules, loose rules. Here we go. Fire away. Spirits are our asshole. The fact that our military force is the greatest in the world, but every branch, including army, Navy, or air force all has a shitty passing game.

that's just, that's just the asshole. That's just the asshole. We could go very [00:48:00] deep into the technicalities of that. Unfortunately, the three service academies, because of the, because of what they do, they produce Officers for their, for their services, those fellas can't go on to the pros. I know the fact that they even win any games is actually incredible in my mind.

. Alright, that's great. Spiritual Arousal.

Having such a thing as too much confidence, like a drunk white girl at karaoke. Hmm. Do you believe in that idea of too much confidence? Especially when we're talking about third party chemical intervention. Absolutely. So I, I would say that girl is an asshole, but she's probably invite invited too much spirit.

You can call it spiritual too. All right, great. Spirits are our asshole. Negative motivation yelling from a coach or a military sergeant as motivation. Do you think that that's spiritual or asshole? That's completely asshole. Wow, really? So because some [00:49:00] people think that they can be motivated. I'm with you.

I hate it. It does not work for me. I think the number of people for whom that actually works is pretty damn small, you know, and sometimes the only reason why it has worked is because it makes the person being screamed at feel I'm going to show you asshole. Uh, you know, it's not like, I'm, I'm responding positively to your criticism, you know.

I'm not trying to please, I'm not gonna change myself to try to please you. I'm changing myself so I can show you what a big jerk you are. Wow. Okay. That makes sense. All right. Spiritual arousal, creating something called a second victory where you achieve your first victory, then go to Denny's. That sounds very spiritual to me.

Okay, great. Spiritual arousal saying I'm working on improving my selective memory. So whenever I see my parents, I just say, I'm [00:50:00] sorry, who are you? 

You're, you're a really good comedian. I like that. Um, I'm going to say that, that, that can be spiritual in terms of sort of protecting yourself, but you know, from a social perspective, you're being a bit of an asshole. All right. Spirits are also getting really excited that you won the gold medal at this summer, summer Olympics, but then having your confidence ruined because you realized you left your cell phone charger in Paris.

 I think you can be spiritual about that one. My, my, minor losses like that don't, don't need to, uh, affect your, uh, your happiness about the big stuff. I love that. All right. Last question I ask everybody. If you could tell people one thing to tell themselves all day long, what would it be? This moment is my opportunity to see how good I can be. 

I don't write that down. Thank you so much. You want to tell everybody where they can find you, where they can get your awesome book? I love it. you can find the hard copy of my book at Barnes and [00:51:00] Nobles or Amazon. com or any, any major book outlet. There is, an audio version available via, Audible.

you, if, if you're in, readers are interested in, you know, some personal coaching and other things like that. nate. zinser. com is the website, and the email. I made it really easy. All right. Well, this was great. Thank you so much. Thank you. And best to all of your listeners. What do you guys think a third victory would be?

Leaving Denny's without food poisoning? I actually like Denny's, I crushed it recently. Give it up for Dr. Zinzer, please buy his book, The Confident Mind, it's incredible. So many good things he said, and I have taken So much to heart the idea that even small compliments and small wins add up to so much.

Think about that, like, I said this in the episode, Dr. Zinser in this episode, you heard him say to me, Wow, you're a [00:52:00] really funny comedian. I've heard that a lot from people on this podcast, to me, either on air or off air, and I usually let it just blow right through my fucking ears, cause I'm like, Okay, well, whatever.

It's like, no dude, take that in. That's a win. Someone thinks you're funny. And this happens to all of us. Someone approaches you and says, Hey, have you lost weight? Hey, you look great today. Don't then immediately go, Well, I don't know about that. And just refute it. Go home and be like, Hey, I think I lost weight.

Or whatever it is for you. Today I did everything on my to do list. This, I am showing myself, I can do this. Like, these small things matter. I just think, and especially in this country, we're so caught up on like, the big three, which is like, Money, relationships, and job success, right?

I would say health, but a lot of us take our health for granted. we only want the big wins, like, okay, well, you have a podcast, is it successful? Okay, well, you have a business, how much money are you making? Dude, let's just start saying that we're winning and, like, [00:53:00] we're doing it. What's the worst that's gonna happen?

And I love when he said, like, we think that criticizing ourself is actually gonna motivate us more. But that's not, that's the literal opposite of what happens. It keeps you trapped. It keeps you stuck. I love this episode and I love you. I believe all your dreams can come true. I believe there's so much love here for you.

I believe that you're going to have the most confident mind ever. Let's just start with small steps. You are the best. Have a great week.