EP 12: Instant gratification vs Friction: why doing hard sh*t makes you more confident

• how instant gratification culture is impacting our confidence levels 
• the science behind feeling much more confident after doing hard things 
• increasing your capacity to hold and handle more difficult situations through daily micro-challenges 

Studies I mentioned:

- Usher, Ellen L., Pajares, Frank, Sources of academic and self-regulatory efficacy beliefs of entering middle school students: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0361476X05000196?

- Street, Kes, Stylianides, GJ, Malmberg, L-E, Differential relationships between mathematics self-efficacy and national test performance according to perceived task difficulty: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3Afaa7d515-6665-4a9e-8a46-4ee4714aab32?

- Messersmith, Emily E, Schulenberg, John E, Goal Attainment, Goal Striving, and Well-Being During the Transition to Adulthood: A Ten-Year U.S. National Longitudinal Study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4551495/?

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IG: https://www.instagram.com/ziza.natur/

Website: https://www.zizanatur.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Zizified! I'm Zizified. I'm Zizified. So Zizified. I am Zizified. I am Zizified. I've been Zizified. Zizified. I'm Zizified.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to the Get Zizified Podcast. The place where art, creativity, entrepreneurship, and delusion conspire to build your most courageous, free, and unhinged self. So you can do whatever the heck you want in life, achieve your wildest dreams, and have the time of your life while building it. My name is Come on, Ziza. And I'm here to show you that obstacles do not exist. Are you ready? Zizafied. Hello, gorgeous one, and welcome to episode number 12 of the Get Zizified podcast. Welcome back if you're a recurring listener, and welcome, welcome if this is the first episode that you're experiencing in my space. I hope you have a great, great time here. And do make sure that you check out the previous episodes, as I always remind you. And if you are enjoying this podcast, if you're a recurring listener, or if this is your first time here and you're enjoying it, please take some time to leave a five-star review. Leave me your feedback, whether you're listening on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you're listening. It means the world to me. It only takes less one minute, less than one minute, and it helps me tremendously. Thank you so much. I've been getting DMs from you guys. I've been getting messages telling me that you're listening to the podcast, that you're enjoying it. I am so so grateful. Make it public as well. It's gonna help me a lot. Thank you in advance. Last week, if you remember, we talked about letting go of controlling the outcome in the creative process, in our mindset, understanding where it comes from. And we concluded that it's super hard. It's such a hard thing to do. Oh my god. This is by far, I think, one of the things that I'll probably battle my entire life to be able to fully do. Maybe not so much in the creative process. I started to kind of get a hang of it, but in life in general, but it is becoming easier and easier to do the more I do it, and I'm becoming more confident about it. And this is what we're talking about today: the power of doing hard shit to improve your confidence. It is by far the key to becoming a confident person, to becoming someone who fully trusts themselves. Because in the end, this is a whole key to achieving everything that you want in life. The foundation of it is self-trust. Fully believing and fully trusting in yourself that you can handle that thing, no matter what that thing is. Because when your self-trust is at a proper, healthy level, you will be able to move forward through any kind of situation. No matter what that looks like, you're gonna find a solution for it. I feel really heartbroken about the level of insecurity and lack of confidence that I see in people around me on a daily basis. It feels like we're living this massive epidemic of insecurities, of extremely low capacity to handle difficult situations, a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear, and I know it's a lot of awful things happening around us, but we have the power to control how we respond to it. Because if we look back in history, there has never been a time where things were always beautiful, always blooming, there was always some shit show happening. I really believe that this big, big epidemic of insecurities and this big epidemic of people being soft, but soft in the sense of they just can't handle shit and they get scared about everything, and they have these high levels of fear, I really believe it comes from not experiencing friction on a daily basis and from living in this world of instant gratification. I know, technology is useful because it's supposed to make our lives easier. But on the flip side, if we don't know how to find a balance when we use it, and we're constantly receiving everything instantly, we're not building up that resilience and that self-trust from going through friction and from doing the hard shit. And there are studies on this, and I'm gonna give you the stats so you understand what I'm talking about. But the biggest example I can give you in this situation, and don't come at my throat for this because it's stats, it's proven, and every single person who does this, they agree with me. It's dating apps. If you have a look at a lot of the people who rely on dating apps, many of them confess experiencing great difficulties with social skills. I remember I would have colleagues way younger than me using dating apps and telling me, well, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to interact with people face to face? Do I just go and talk to them? So this part where an algorithm controls who you're talking to and who does the job for you so that you don't have to go through that fear and discomfort of developing the oh, how do I talk to this person? What do I tell them? And doing the hard thing and feeling confident that, hey, I talked to them. Even if they said no, I built up the courage to talk to them. That app does the thing for you. So you're not doing the hard shit anymore. And even if right now it's comfortable, it's very easy. Holy shit, my insecurity level is sky high. I'm not satisfied with the people that I'm meeting there because guess what? It's an algorithm. I was not supposed to meet these people in the first place, most probably. I know there's gonna be people saying, Yeah, but I met my partner over there. Okay, you guys got lucky. Look at the proportion of the people who don't find a partner over there because in the end, these apps are not designed for you to leave them. It is what it is. That's the truth. It's the same with social media, is the same with AI, with Chat GPT finding answers for you in three seconds. The more you receive things instantly, and the more you experience instant gratification and you don't work for what you have, not a single bit, you might be living in comfort. But your level of confidence is below sea level. Because confidence comes from doing hard shit. And if you don't believe me, I'm gonna give you some stats. I'm gonna give you some studies so you understand that this isn't just me, some millennial coming from Eastern Europe and praising doing hard things all the time. This is real data. There's a pretty strong body of research behind this idea that confidence is often an outcome of doing difficult things successfully, not a prerequisite for doing them. There's a scientific term for this, it's called self-efficacy, and it's the belief that I can handle it, I can figure it out, I can make this happen. And of course, this means confidence, right? Mastery experiences are the strongest source of self-efficacy. Mastery experience, what is that? It's successfully doing something yourself, but something hard. Albert Bandura developed a theory around this and identified these mastery experiences, which basically means, as I said, successfully doing something yourself as the most powerful source of self-efficacy. Because basically your brain gets the evidence and sees proof that you can do something that you initially thought you cannot do. So you think, oh wow, I didn't even think I could do that. But I did it, which means maybe I can handle the next thing too. And what do you know is just like a muscle, every single time you're gonna end up thinking that you can do even harder and harder and harder stuff. I I realize this all the time whenever I look back at the stuff that I did in in the past and I think, oh wow, how did I even do it? I never even thought that I could do it. And the truth is that whenever I did do it, I just went for it. I just went for it, even though it felt impossible. I said, I'm gonna figure it out one step at a time, as I was talking about in the previous episode. And even though it's hard, I can figure it out. They did a study in 2006 of almost 300 middle school students, and they examined four sources of self-efficacy, and that they found these mastery experiences, so those situations where you do something that's hard and you don't think you can do it initially, those were the strongest predictor of academic and self-regulatory self-efficacy, which basically means the confidence does not come just from, hey, I succeeded, I did this. It comes from, hey, I succeeded, I did something I wasn't sure I could do. That's where the confidence comes from. And that difficulty, that level of difficulty can actually make the mastery experience even more powerful, which is really interesting. They did another study on almost 100 Norwegian students, grades 8 to 9 or something like that. And they measured all of these self-efficacy situations for easy, medium, and hard. It was math, it doesn't matter. It was what was measured was how they relate to these situations and level of confidence based on how difficult the task is. And they found that previous performance predicted later self-efficacy, particularly for the medium and the hard tasks. And that relationship was not that significant for the easy ones. And what the researchers noticed was that mastery experience may they may happen more easily with easy tasks, but they matter more when the task is difficult. So it's is that difference between I did something I'm good at and honestly I don't give a shit about it. Or you do, but it's no big deal. And I did something I genuinely wasn't sure I could do. And the second one is gonna give you much more, much stronger evidence about your capacity. It's literally like the things that you're being told and you notice in life. You value the things that you work hard for. If you do something very easily or if you get it very easily, you don't care about it so much. You don't give a shit. And it's it's you know it's the advice that you get as a woman. Don't sell yourself cheap. Make the guys work for you. Why? Because they're gonna value you more. And it's the same thing in life. The things that you work hard for, they get valued more. It's exactly the same thing with your self-confidence. So when it comes to accomplishing major goals, and especially the ones that require a larger degree of effort that have a larger degree of difficulty, accomplishing them is gonna predict a higher level of set of self-efficacy in the future. And there are studies on this one again, I'm activating the geek brain for you guys to understand. Uh, they did a 10-year national study in the US, and they looked at goal completion, at goal striving, well-being, and self-efficacy during the transition into adulthood. So basically, what happened with kids, teenagers, as they became adults, people who eventually achieved their goals, they showed higher trajectories of global self-efficacy later on than people who didn't achieve them. So basically, it's not just you accomplish things if you're confident, but if you accomplish meaningful things, the things that you really work your ass off for, you have a much stronger belief in your own capacity, which means on a long term, you will be able to handle more. You will be able to achieve bigger and bigger goals because you believe that you have the capacity to do it. And I think there's a really important distinction to make between confidence and self-efficacy, because confidence is pretty broad. So you say I'm a confident person, but self-efficacy basically means I can figure it out. I'm confident that I can figure it out. So difficult accomplishments are gonna build this second one. So obviously, the more you see evidence of I can figure this shit out, I can do it, I can do it, this creates a much broader sense of confidence. And this is why you don't need to do something easily, you don't need to succeed at something easily for your confidence to build up. Actually, overcoming that resistance and overcoming those difficulties can actually make it much more valuable. Because if something that you did was hard, your brain is gonna think, hey, I thought I couldn't do it, but I did it. And this is only gonna strengthen the evidence that you have much more capacity and much more capability than you think. And this is why you're gonna see so much capacity and resilience and strength in people who survive difficult things in their lives, is the difference between I survived something difficult and I was naturally good at something. And you can see situations like these, for example, when you see people who've built their wealth from nothing, they have much more resilience, they're much more creative in the ways that they can find money and make back the money when they lose it, and they just won't let anything stop them compared to people who maybe were born in these wealthy families. You're gonna notice, and there have been studies made, the first category is gonna be much more creative in their problem solving because they have survived difficult situations and they have much more confidence that they can find solutions every single time. Their brains have developed that capacity. This is why, I mean, I know this is why they say that those of us who come from the East, for example, from Eastern Europe, that we're tough and that we're confident and that we are not scared of anything. Well, that's because we had to go through a lot of difficult situations and to overcome them. So now at this point, this is how I am, there isn't really anything that can happen that I feel I won't be able to handle. Is it gonna be hard? Yes. Do I fully believe I can handle it? Yes. And that's the only thing that matters. I have the self-trust that I can handle it no matter what. And this is the most important part. Because confidence never comes before the hard thing. And this is a massive, massive mistake that people make. They wait for the confidence to come before they do the thing. When in fact, confidence comes from doing those things that we're scared of. Doing that thing that fe seems hard and discovering that you can actually handle it. And you know what's funny? Very often the really hard stuff is smaller than we think. Because I don't know, maybe a lot of people move to a different country or make massive changes in their career, or maybe not that many. But the things that we seem to procrastinate on and that feel so overwhelming are really small. Talking to a stranger, working on a new hobby with zero skills, or feeling like a complete newbie, especially if you're a perfectionist, putting out an imperfect artwork, letting go of control in certain situations, not buying everything to numb ourselves, so learning to develop that self-control and to ask ourselves, hey, why am I even buying this one right now? Is it because I feel uncomfortable or because I really want to buy this? So these things seem small, but they oftentimes they feel so overwhelming. But the more we do these things on a daily basis and the more we can overcome these small situations. Talking to a stranger when you're super freaking shy, this is me. And nobody believes me when I tell them I am so freaking shy. People can tell because I strive and I push myself to overcome that every day. Am I scared? Yes. Does that mean it's gonna stop me from doing the thing? No. I'm still gonna talk to people, I'm still gonna say hello. Sometimes it's gonna be easier, sometimes it's gonna be harder. Letting go of control, letting go of the outcome of what's coming up. Is that hard? It's freaking hard for me. Do I strive to do it every day? Yes. This is why I have this level of confidence where I believe I can handle anything. Because I have taken a lot of leaps of faith in my life. There were situations where I tried to control the outcome and it did not go well. And I had been forced literally by God to sit in the void and in the unknown and to take it one step at a time so I can finally learn the frickin' lesson. And so for me, that was the hard shit. Letting go of things. Other things that were really hard for me, and sometimes I still have difficulties right now managing them, failing in public. Because I always had that thing of, oh, people must not see me making mistakes. It was that perfectionism. It was that level of I don't trust myself to show people that I'm still good and worthy and valuable even if I make mistakes. So what did it happen? Reflections Art Fest was a massive failure in public. But what did that do to me? I became unstoppable because I was able to clean it up and fix it on the spot in front of people. I was able to handle it. The level of confidence after that, absolutely unstoppable. Even if I felt like shit for three weeks after. That was hard to do as well to process that failure. Other difficult things, asking for help. I have had difficulties with that for my entire life. Sometimes I struggle with that even right now because I know I'm the independent woman, blah blah. That's because oftentimes I either have received help from a conditional place, or maybe I felt that I was forced to give something in return that I didn't really want to return. So I've had difficulties with that, but now I'm learning to ask for help. And it was very hard in the first few situations, first few moments when I did it, because I felt like holy shit. I sound and I seem so incapable. And then it becomes easier and easier up to the point where you're like, show me the way. Yes, I am so open. I'm gonna let you do the whole thing. I'm not gonna touch anything. I'm going back and forth right now asking for help, booking all sorts of consulting sessions to open up a business here in France and Paris, and the paperwork is so complicated. So from the first second I said, you know what, I'm gonna book consulting sessions, I'm gonna get as much help as I can. There are so many organizations that are gonna give you support for that. And I said, guys, I don't want to think, I don't give a shit. Just tell me what I need to do, and I'm gonna do it, help me out. And it's been great, and now it became really natural. Talking to strangers, as I said, it was always a big problem. Sometimes I still struggle with that, but I'm working on it. Doing less, this is right right now, resting and doing less are my biggest difficulties. And especially as someone as a manifesting generator, where you do things and you're super passionate about the things that you do, and you realize that you have overworked yourself only when you've hit the point of burnout. So learning to manage these things and learning to balance it out and learning to rest and learning that there are moments when you don't do anything, and that's fine. That was very hard for me in the beginning. Even now, I'm I have moments where I feel uncomfortable if it's too much silence, you know? And accepting that the hard shit, that the ugly moments are gone. They are done. I have built a lot, have been working my ass off since I was 19. It is done. The era of struggle is done, the era of overworking is done. So I still have some moments where it's a little bit like, oh, I'm still processing it. I have to accept that. It's hard, holy shit, it's hard. Okay. So these are the hard things that I'm working on right now. Because in the beginning, confidence was developed through doing hard, difficult things, a lot of work, a lot of pushing, a lot of discomfort. Now the discomfort comes from softening up after you've built so much. So every person is gonna have their own definition of hard, but building small things micro hard every day, micro challenges every day is what's gonna add up and build your confidence like nothing else. And again, I'm gonna quote Rafi on this one, Rafi Mendoza. And you might want to listen to the episode, I think it's episode number five, where I interviewed her. She talks about this as well. People can take away everything from you. Your money, your time, your energy, but your self-trust, it's what's gonna stay with you forever. And that is one thing that you always want to cultivate. That is something that you never want to lose. And this is why I want you to challenge yourself to do a little challenge every day. A mini hard thing every day adds up, adds up, adds up, a little droplet. Every little challenge adds up into that big bucket. And next thing you know, one month later, hey, I feel so much more confident about myself. This is why you feel so good after you procrastinate on something for two months, six months, and then you do it, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, why did I procrastinate on this for so long? I feel so good, is because your self-trust has increased. So go ahead and do that hard thing. Do not chase the instant gratification. I know temptation is is huge. I know that we're receiving a lot of tools to create excessive comfort, but try to introduce a little bit of friction in your life and see how things are gonna change for the better. Next week it's a celebratory episode. It's my birthday, so I'm gonna be sharing. I'm not sure what I'm gonna be sharing yet, but it's most probably gonna be lessons and a ton of things that I have discovered throughout maybe the past year or maybe a couple of years, so I'm not sure yet where in which direction the episode is gonna go, but it's definitely gonna have an air of celebration, and is a celebration coming from the courage of doing hard shit. Because as I always tell you guys, everything that we do in this life is a self-portrait. I'll see you in the next one. Okay, buddy.