Ep 80 Emotional intelligence: How to find and restore your confidence

In this empowering episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates explores the elusive nature of confidence—how it’s often faked, easily lost, and frequently undermined by imposter syndrome, especially in the creative field. Confidence is essential for creativity, leadership, and personal happiness, so understanding what erodes it and how to restore it is crucial. Stephen breaks down the common fears that sabotage confidence and shares 5 powerful strategies to help you find or rebuild your inner strength. Tune in to discover practical techniques for boosting confidence and thriving in both your career and personal life.

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Stephen Gates : 0:00

What's going on everybody, and welcome into the 18th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and everything else that helps to empower creative people. Now, be sure to subscribe to the show. So you get the latest episodes whenever those come out on your favorite podcast platform. And as always, you can listen to the shows, get the show notes and everything else, just head over to the crazy one.com that's the words of the crazy and the number one calm. Now here we are at Episode 80. And I always think that whenever that first number changes, like a decade or something like that, it always feels like I don't know why maybe a bit more of a milestone than the average show. And somebody's thinking about this show for a while, and I've been kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do and had a lot of conversations lately I've been doing a lot of thinking lately on a lot of different things. And I think what I want to do is I'm gonna do this show on confidence. I'm gonna do it for a couple different reasons. I think the biggest one is that you know what Confidence is a funny thing. Because I think for all of us, myself included, it's often faked, it's frustratingly transient. And yet it is such a critical part of creativity, leadership, and even happiness. And you know what, before we get to the content of the show, it feels like I just want to take a short detour for a minute for why I feel like this show in this topic is so important. Because the interesting thing is like, normally, whenever working these shows, it happens in one of two ways. One is that you know what, it's a subject I have a lot of experience in. I've taught it, I understand it. And so all that I really need to do is just sort of sit down and write the show. It's like doing a public talk or anything else like that, right? It's just how do you want to craft the story? How do you want to talk to the audience about it? And you know, that's sort of one way of doing it. The other one is where I know that there is a topic that I'm interested in, there's a topic that I feel like we need to talk about. And you know, in that one, though, I tend to have a framework or maybe I've got some sort of angle or perspective that I want to take on it. But I need to do some research, I need to think about, you know, what, how am I going to bring that to life? And the interesting thing about that, and it's about this show, is that it let me look, it's meant to share insights that I think are gonna help people out. But if I'm being really honest, there's also you know, what is probably a decently selfish component to this. Because a lot of the times what I'm doing is I'm also trying to work through my own problems. I'm trying to work through experiences that I'm having through struggles just like anybody else, I think, you know, but the problem is, that whenever you do these shows, I think whenever you do any public speak, and he public talk, whenever you do a podcast, anything like this, there's a decision. You do what everyone does and just sort of put on a mask and fake your way through what's going on. portraying everything to the audience, like you're you're an expert on the subject. And I think that that's why This show is important for me because I think one of the things I haven't done is I haven't talked about a whole lot about myself. I haven't talked about my work. And I think to a few too many people it comes across, like, I've got all the answers or something like that. And it's just not the case. Right? Because and I think that's the other decision is you can sort of show up, you can wear the mask, you can say everything's great. And we all do that every day. We do it at work. And it's something I've increasingly talked about pleated about, about how we need real honesty that this is where sort of my thought around how I would love it. If this year for Halloween, everybody went as who they pretended to be on social media, right? Because I think that there's the other option that you tell the truth that you're doing this episode, because it's something that you're struggling with. And the vast majority of the time, like I said, I think we choose the first option, right? We smile and we tell everybody that it's fine and we just sort of fake our way through it. But you know what, for me, I think the truth is important. Even when It's hard or when it's uncomfortable. And the long detour brings me back to this episode, which I think comes in an interesting and you know, I think candidly, for me a really difficult time that I've been working on this for a while I've been writing and researching it. And the funny thing here is that, you know, is when the few shows in the past, I find myself in need of the answers that I'm trying to share. And when these moments happen, and you're working on a show, I think, you know, you find yourself needing the answers as much as the audience. And the challenge for me, and I guess that's what I wanted to share, is it in those moments? It's hard not to feel like a hypocrite, right? Because I think this show is, it's easy. I get to talk about stuff in theory, I get to talk about it in sort of academic terms, free of real life, free of execution, free of a lot of the things like that, that grounded into reality because anything in theory is simple. But it also feels like being a bit of a hypocrite because whenever you share the answers and yet it is something that you are so squarely in the middle of trying to figure out It kind of feels odd to kind of portray yourself as an expert for something you're trying to figure out. And so I think, you know, the subject of confidence has been on my mind a bunch. And that's why I said, I know I don't, I don't I always had this sort of opinion that talking about myself or my work is more like giving somebody yesterday's winning lottery numbers, because somebody who you aren't who is doing something that you're not did something that worked or did not work. And I always sort of questioned whether or not that was going to be applicable for everybody else. And I think that in some ways, I've been wrong about that. Because, like I said, I think it's projected a little bit too much of a false front a little bit too much of kind of like, well, since I'm doing this, I've got it all worked out. I don't and and i think you know, their reality and this sort of subject of confidence has come crashing into my life, you know, this week and this year. I mean, this week, who This week's been tough. I just got back from a trip to Europe was a great trip saw a lot of people. The story behind that though, was while I was going, my old dog, he went blind. She's had diabetes for a while. And the doctor never told me that she could get cataracts and go blind, let alone that it could have happened in a week. And so I left a dog who was so healthy and so confident, and every bit my companion and everything I do. And I came home to see her just shattered and so scared to live in our own home. And it's obvious that it is something that has just destroyed me this week. And I don't know Do I don't know how to help her. I don't know what to do from this. And the amount of guilt that I feel for being gone is staggering. But then there's also been this year. And I think that you know, what, this year has been amazing. It's been amazing in a lot of ways. But a lot of ways this year has also been I don't know what one of the most interesting, I guess, in my career, because I think, you know, for the first time, I'm not an active designer, I'm not a head of design. And so for me, it's been a struggle to figure out my identity to find my confidence to figure out how are people still going to take me seriously right, like, the further I get away from my work, how are people still going to take me seriously and I think that's been compounded by, you know, whenever I went into envision, I was part of a sales team. That's since changed, but But during that time, man, that has been such a totally different way of working a totally different way of approaching People a totally different way of approaching business what I've done before, that sort of put a big crack in my confidence. And then I think, you know, kind of the cherry on that Sunday was for the first time in my career, I was not able to successfully lead a team. And I think you know, for those of you who've been a little bit more adept and watch LinkedIn, you you've seen that there's been a change in sort of my position. The details of that don't matter for a public setting, right. Like why it happened is not for this forum. I think I was at fault there. There was a lot that went into it, right, but I think it didn't work. And that was for the first time in my career that I've had that where it didn't work. And it's been, I don't know, between those two things, the one obviously still so fresh and so raw. And the other just kind of my journey for this year, is sort of how we're here. I don't share any of this because I want a pity party. I don't want you to think you Because of the way you see me on stage, the way you hear me on this show that I've got all the answers are the things are always great, because they're not. And that's why I said I think they're in some ways I'm feeding into the monster a little bit more than than I want to. Because here again, I think when we compare our insides everybody else's outsides, it's a big reason why we lose confidence. So I guess I just wanted to kind of share that because I mean, as we talked about in the set off into this episode, I know that I suffer from the same problems that you do. The only difference is I'm trying to share what I learned and put out the problems differently in the hopes that it helps in the hopes that it shares that and I think sometimes like I said, Maybe I've done it, I don't know what a little bit too perfectly a little bit too polished, you know what the stage presence stuff like that isn't necessarily the right way to do it. But just like all of you, I'm figuring this out as I go, I don't have a book for doing this or anything else but but that's that's why I think this episode on confidence is in important because it's a journey I've been going through, it's a journey I've gone through my whole career, it's a journey, I know a lot of you are going through too. So what I want to look at is I want to look at, I look at some of the fears, I think commonly undermine what we do. And I want to talk about some of the things and some of the ways that I've found to maybe start to work on it, or to rebuild it, and to start to look at a few of those sorts of things. So let's start with fears, right, because I think fears play a big part, in creativity and in confidence, right. I mean, I recently read a really good article by Tom and David Kelly from were the founders of IDEO that I thought sort of captured this look at fears really well. Because when it comes to creativity, you know, creativity is something you practice. It's not just necessarily a talent that you're born with. Because all of our creative processes are different. The way we go about things are different, who we are as people changes and evolves inside of our teams, right? Like all this stuff we've talked about before. So there's a lot of different sort of parts about it in play. And you know, what are Confidence takes hits. And you know, is I think in many cases undermined by some pretty basic fears that I think we all share. And this is in my same vein of wanting to talk about things like cognitive bias and design imposter syndrome. I think that the fear is probably our the way that design imposter syndrome manifests itself. So if that, you know, the design imposter is sort of the the engine that's driving this, the fears are sort of the output. And I think, you know, David did a really nice job of sort of summing up, four of them that I think probably are the four biggest ones that we all suffer from. The first one is that sort of fear of the messy unknown. Because I think like whenever you create something, you have to deal with uncertainty. You may find things that you weren't expecting, you may not know what's going to happen. You may have to deal with irrational people or clients or product, people who say things that you don't want to hear. It's messy. It's hard. It's something thing that people aren't necessarily sure what to do with. And so I think that whenever that happens, for a lot of us that uncertainty can become really difficult. How do I deal with this? How do I kind of take control that mess and for some sort of structure into this? I think this is why you see the rise in design operations in a lot of teams and a lot of those different disciplines, trying to infer order into what's really been a mess. I think the other one is, and we've talked about this a lot. I think there's that fear of being judged. Because the fear of being judged I think, is often very constraining, to our lives in our careers. I think this is why I try to encourage people to embrace their crazy, right like this is where a lot of this came from. Because we self edit, we suppress we kill potentially really good ideas, because we're afraid our bosses or peers will make fun of us or judges for it or they're gonna see us fail. So instead we stick to the safe solution. And we suggest that others take the risk, right? Like well support somebody else running up the hill. But it's so rare that that will we are willing to do it ourselves. And that's obviously a big problem. Because what we're doing is personal what we're putting out there is a part of this process. But for many of us again, we like the certainty and we like the comfort. Another one, and I think this is a big one for a lot of the people that I coach, a lot of people that I talk to is this fear of the first step. Because even when we want to embrace our ideas, acting on them is a real challenge, right? Because creative efforts, they're always the hardest at the beginning, right? We've got that blank page, that blank screen, that big problem that we need to set off and start to work on. This is why so often and even on this show of employed people to just start, just start even if you aren't sure what it is you're doing, even if you aren't sure what that is, just take that first step and start to figure it out because so often the fear of the x is always worse than the act itself. And then I think that the last fear that we always have is that fear of losing control. Because especially as we're talking about confidence, right, because confidence doesn't simply mean, believing that your ideas are good, right? Because that's that sort of self confidence. But confidence also comes from sort of like having that humility, to let go of ideas that aren't working, and also have the confidence of accepting ideas from other people, right. This is the concept of teamwork. And this sort of interplay between us and other people between us and our clients, us and our teammates, those sort of things. That fear becomes something that I think you know, and that loss of control is something that we really, really struggle with. So, if we those are the sort of manifestations of those are those sorts of things and I'm guessing that as I talked about, that they were probably instances maybe times in your life, maybe things you're going through right now that you've identified with, of that messy, unknown of being judged. Not taking that first step or being afraid to lose control, right? These are common things that we all i, we all go through. And so I tried to sit down and to think through where do we start? Right? How do we how do we start to take this on? And so I think there are five sort of areas that I think we can start to look at it, we can start to think about where we might be able to make some progress here. So as I sat down to start to think about this, I think confidence is a little bit like happiness and some of the other things that we've talked about on this show. We're not talking about something that maintains a constant state. We're not maintaining this kind of level of confidence all the time, right? Because when things are going well, we feel very confident whenever we feel like we are loved and accepted and supported and things like that. Right. Whenever there is there's a consistent sense of normal, we have a lot of confidence. But the interesting part is that since it is transience since it does change. It can take a hit, and something can go wrong and your confidence can take a dive. And when we then have to sort of talk about how do you restore your confidence? One of the things that I see a lot of people do, they overcompensate the bullshit, right? They just go and everything's fine. I'm fine, I'm happy, everything's good. Everything's fine. Nothing to see here, keep moving. That sort of thing, right? It's not honest. It's not real. And I think in many cases, what we try to do then is we looked at try and figure out how do we rebuild our confidence in private, on our own right, like in those kind of individual moments. And the thing is that we don't take the time and we don't spend the energy to honestly tend to our wounds. To it should be obvious, right by the intro and a lot of this other stuff. I'm still in the process of working through a lot of issues and a lot of different ways, some more successfully than others. Some, you know, I don't know. We'll figure out how it is. We're gonna get through it. But my experience, real confidence isn't about suppressing pain, or pretending that failure didn't hurt. Because that's the part right? I can go back and edit out the part, talking about it where I clearly fall apart, right? I can go back, I can do a better edit. I can make it sound like it's just a story and it doesn't matter and it's not emotional. And it's not something I'm not going through right now. Right? I can go through and try to suppress that and pretend like it didn't hurt. It does. I mean, I've cried so much in the last four days, I'm surprised I'm not fucking dehydrated, right? Like, it's, it hurts. But I think for too many of us, we do that. And I think that whenever we do it, right, we hold on to the problem. And we don't deal with that problem, and that it undermines our confidence even more because we feel isolated. We feel frustrated. We feel defeated and ashamed. Right, because instead of coming out and saying, look, I failed as a leader. I failed is whatever this is, instead of sort of like embracing that, and seeing it as a reality, we hold on to it and it just becomes this compounding spiral that makes stuff worse. That's about how do we find a way to talk about and accept that bloat or ego, allowing ourself to acknowledge those associated feelings good or bad. But the important part is to find a way forward. Because I think as hard as it may be, you don't want to dwell on what happened for too long and you don't want to give it more importance than it should get right because dwelling can become a full time job if you're not careful. I've certainly fallen victim to this multiple times in my career, right where there are times when I really was angry about something I really was heard about something. And I just wanted to focus on the pain. I wanted somebody to pay. I wanted my pound of flesh, so that it felt like the scales were balanced. And that then suddenly becomes your full time job. Not What you should be doing not and then all of a sudden, that one thing poisons the entire well, and the problem that you had with one person, suddenly you now have a problem with a lot of other people, because you're letting that sort of infect everything else. So I think you need to acknowledge it in order to move forward. Because the one thing that I've come to understand the one thing that I continue to try to talk about continue to try to make clear for me, right, is that for me, vulnerability is the most profound form of strength. And every company you work for is going to make you feel different, every team you're gonna be a part of, is probably gonna make you feel different. Because that's been true in my career. Whenever you show up and say, I'm struggling, I am hurt, I failed, I don't know whatever that is, right. Those are things that are deemed against you that is put against your performance report you are thought of as less people sort of ostracize you or don't know what to say, right? It's like the times are been laid off. They treat you like you've got a terminal disease. You know, you got a have that sort of like, tilt their head to the side, like, are you okay? Or it's just sort of like a lot of just happy Bs, and we're gonna pretend like the problem wasn't there. But that vulnerability, and the ability to just let it hurt and acknowledge it, I think is the first step to be able to sort of find your way back to find that confidence. Because whenever you do that, problems, failures blow to your confidence they're going to happen. So the question is, how do you think about them when they happen? And I've talked before about that sort of difference between failure and learning. And that's the thing, right is that if you see what happens is failure. It is debilitating. It is soul crushing, and it feels like it is the end of something because this is why I don't like the word failure, because it feels a finite resolution to something. And that's not true. I think the other thing that you can do is if you reframe it as learning you understand that This is going to be a part of your process for forever. You learn from it, you see it as making you stronger instead of tearing you down. The best people I know, the most creative people I know the strongest people I know, have scars, they have scars on their soul, right? They've been through things that they've learned from and the confidence they have is because they've come out the other side of it better, right? That doesn't mean it's not going to hurt. It just means that your failure isn't the full story. That for you, the rest of the story is how you choose to learn from it. And doing that by seeing that situation differently, right? Because that's that problem is falling down and taking the blow. And losing confidence is going to be inevitable. If you want to grow if you want to progress if you want to do anything new, this is going to be a part of the process. Because if not, and if you're not falling down, you're not trying new things. You're not going to grow your works not going to get better. You're not going to get more creative. And this is the push and pull this is the agony and the ecstasy of being great Uh, because that's that issue. Nobody wants to go out and say, Hey, you know, stick my hand in the air and say, Hey, I'm gonna go do something that's gonna make me feel like shit. Or I'm gonna go, you know, fall down and feel bad about myself for a while. But it's the strange drive we have, because that's the part of this process that's going to be a part of doing something new. But that key reframing isn't just a sit around and hope things are going to be different. Hope is not a plan. Right? You've heard that so many people say that hope is not a plan. You need to create actionable steps to figure out how are you going to make a change? And out of that, I think, right, because most of us think of confidence as this sort of all or nothing proposition, right? We think of it as somebody is either confident or they're not. But we never say that someone is sort of nurturing or working on it kind of piecing together their confidence. We never think about it as a work in progress. Again, we never think about it as a sort of fluid thing. I can go back to there's a time in my life when I had zero I had less than zero confidence being on stage i less than zero confidence talking in front of people, less than zero confidence in terms of, you know, leading and a lot of those other things. And again, that's abdun flowed. But it is something for me that I've been nurturing and sort of piecing together over a long period of time. So when you talk to somebody about the problem, they always say that they are building or restoring their confidence, right, which I think that is a mistake. And in many cases, I'll talk about how I think it is important to think about the words that we use, because whenever we think about restoring confidence, there's an implication that there is just a lack of it. We have this flawed thinking, then when it comes to a number of these things, like I don't know why attractiveness or health or success. We think people either have confidence or they don't. It's a sort of binary thing like wow, he's good looking. He must really be confident. It's amazing whenever you start to hang out with models or with other people like that, how they tend to be some of the most insecure least confident people because of you know, they have this sort of thing that they're dealing with, but that's the thing is don't don't think about confidence like it's a switch, it's more of something, you need to build a brick at a time. And those bricks come in the form of small wins. Because much like anything at work in your creative process or things like that, trying to take those down as this one big massive problem, pretty much never works. You need to take the time and tend to your wounds, you need to figure out how to reframe the problem. And then you take your problem and break it down into manageable pieces. Because small wins, build confidence. And that's the way that we do it. And it's the ability to go out and do something new to try to rebuild to try to go back and do something not again, not just sitting around and not just hitting your wounds too much not wallowing in that too much. But put a plan together and say okay, this is where I'm going to start and we're going to build this wall one brick at a time because so easy to look at all that big pile of bricks and look at how big that wall is and go Holy shit. I don't know how I'm gonna do this. I don't know how I'm gonna get there. I don't know how I'm gonna get over it. I don't know what I'm going to do. But again, You look at the brick, not the wall. Because when you think about it that way, it gives you some place to start. And I think that sort of leads into this next part, right? Like when you're frustrated and things are difficult. There are a few things that I think can be more gratifying than quitting. Right? When you quit a difficult project, you avoided difficult problem, you get this sense of relief, and you get this sort of temporary refuge. From the stress and anxiety and frustration that comes from what is honestly confronting one of your limitations, one of your problems because that's what those stresses really are. You're need to push yourself to come up with a new idea. You need to push yourself to be a different leader. You need to push yourself to be a different teammate, and you need to go into territory you haven't been before. And stress, anxiety and frustration follow suit, because that growth can be quite difficult. But the thing that I like to think about whenever I've sat down and thought about this is that champion relief has long term consequences that I think in the end, sort of far outweigh that short term award. The consequences come because you haven't removed that long term need to grow, to become more creative to become a better leader to become a better teammate, right? Like the limitation is still there. And over time, you can put all the coping mechanisms you want around it over time, you can do all those sorts of different things to be able to deal with it. But you've only postpone that discomfort that is going to come with growth. And that's a real issue because it's still going to be there, you're still going to want to become better, you're still going to want to have to face that. At some point. You just feel good because that point is now and i think is like as weird as it sounds. You need that discomfort because you know what? growth it doesn't come from avoiding blows. Your confidence, but from taking on those opportunities that challenge it, right? One solution that I think is really simple but as effective is to create some sort of an accountability system that discourages you from quitting. Because you're going to be accountable to other people. And you're going to let them down. Because whenever you think about it, if the only person you're accountable to is yourself, man, we are all star at rationalizing our failures. We are all star at figuring out why whatever we did, why the excuse me, we made the thing that we backed off the thing that we shorted didn't deliver fucked up, whatever that was, was fine. We can rationalize it. But whenever you make a commitment to your partner, right you make a commitment on a deadline on deliverable on an achievement. You create accountability that is going to force you to push through. So here again, the vulnerability to go to somebody to say look, I am working on something I am struggling with. Something and because of that, I need you to help me hold accountable to doing this, I need you to be able to make sure that if this doesn't happen that you let me know that I've let you down. Because I think that becomes a really important part of this is whenever there is somebody beyond just you because then the rationalization doesn't come quite so easily. And there's a site that I found in sort of researching this that I think actually can help with some of this stuff. So it's called stick Comm. It's STI ckk.com. I'll post the link in the show notes the same as with the article on David Kelly on fears, I'll post all that there. But it's really good because you can go in and actually sign up for what are you going to do and you get other people to hold you accountable for it. And I think it works really well. And it's a really nice way of being able to do something because then again, you're creating this accountability. But the last thing I think is sort of an extension of where we started right because we started about tending to your wounds. I think that there's another part of this that I think is I look at so many creatives that I work with, and coach and talk to, is tending to their past. Right, because I think your level of confidence often is set in part by how you've dealt with your past. I see so many people who are insecure because of where they went to school or where they grew up, or the the size of clients that they've worked with, or the part of the country that they live in, or whatever, like there's a million sort of reasons why where you've come from and what you've done are things that are gonna lead you to be in the secure. But the thing that I've discovered with all of that is that the again, the reason why for me about this concept of embracing your crazy becomes so important, is because those things aren't going to change. And I think, you know, in many cases, what's going to happen is you're going to feel like, well, I don't see other people who are like me, I don't see other people who are going out and are, you know, who have come from where I come from or have done what I've done. So as a result, I must be different and different usually means wrong and wrong usually then means that I'm not very confident about what I'm doing. Well, if you think about it, think about a little bit differently, right? Because I think that, you know, nobody, nobody has the same story. And you know, whenever you think about it, whenever you think about the person you idolize the musician, the artist, whatever it was, they did something different. They came from someplace different they did, but what they did was they embraced it. And so instead of seeing those things as their weakness, they saw it as their strength. Because in many cases that past creates those fears. And learn. You learn from that struggle, right? I think you make it part of you. And I think that you if you can find a way to move forward in a way that you really can believe that you are credible, you are smart and that you are worthy of success that your story and where you've come from is your strength because it is what makes you different and different is not a bit Word different in this case is what leads to confidence different is what leads to success. And in many cases, I think because whenever you think about it, when you talk to your friends and your co workers about them being different, and then struggling with that, right, we tend to be really good at showing compassion to those people, to comforting them to letting them see the uniqueness in them. But rarely Can we show that same compassion to ourselves? I mean, I know this is something for me, I am. I am an all star at finding ways of just kind of emotionally destroying myself over my failures. Right? It's so easy to for me to build other people up. It's so easy for me to share and to see the strength of them. And to see that but whenever that high power perception gets turned on me, feels like something different. So there's something that I've started to do to try to help with this. And it's it's making two lists. I think the one list is to make a list of your strengths. What do you think you're good at? What do you think? really sets you apart and really makes you strong. And the other one is to make a list of your accomplishments. What are you proud of? What are the things that you feel you've done really well that whenever somebody says, Hey, tell me about yourself, these are the things that you tend to go to. Because as creatives these are the two areas that I think we rarely spend time on, we rarely ever give ourselves credit for, is to think about our strength is to think about what we've actually achieved to take a minute, just a minute, and turn around and look back down that mountain and to see how far we've come. Yeah, there's still a long way to go. There's still a big hill in front of us, there's still a lot that we need to work on. But that's the problem is if all you're ever doing is looking forward and looking at what's again, we still up that hill, you feel very insecure and don't have a ton of confidence around that. And you know, whenever you do that, find a supportive friend or a relative who can help you with that list. Because whenever you have that sort of self esteem or that lack of confidence, Like, it's usually the your ability to get somebody who is objective to help that really, really helps out, right. And then whenever you've got that list, you know, keep it in a safe place, keep it at home, keep it on your phone, do something with it. But I want you to do is every couple days, every week, whatever it is, stop and actually read it. Remember why you are different. Remember why you're strong. Remember what you have to be confident in. Because the world is so good at tearing that down, right? Like that's the one thing I think that's been so fascinating to me is that as I've gone through this, as I start to do more public speaking, as I've started to do more of this, the thing that I've learned is that so many times the biggest supporters that I have the people who build me up the most are total strangers. Yet throughout my career. Whenever I think about it, the people who have turned me down the most were people who knew my name, who sat in offices down the hall for me, who sat in meetings with me every day and look me in the face and Smile, right? And that those people whenever we're surrounded by them, because all of a sudden they have agendas that like a lot of other this, this sort of bullshit comes into play, right? But to think about that, because if you've lost your confidence, know that recovering it is not going to be instantaneous. A personal professional, creative setback, right? It's going to take time to really go through and figure out what is the new normal, it's gonna take time to get over that setback. But I think you've got to stay in the game, right? Because I think those wounds are going to morph into something more profound. And a reminder that I look like confidence is a muscle and like any muscle it only grows when you use it when you challenge it. And I think for me for a moment, to not sort of wallow in my sadness for too much. I mean for me, ogee is over the last three days has been staggering example to me of why this is so important. I mean, this is a dog who in a week, went blind. And I think anybody, anybody could see why she should have been depressed. She should have just sat in a corner and cried and just been so overwhelmed by the problem. But part of the reason why she and I have this amazing bond is because that's not what she did. I'm falling into pieces. I am shattered and heartbroken and cry my eyes out because she doesn't deserve this. But she is unencumbered of my bullshit. She's unencumbered of my problems. And she just accepts it at face value. And yeah, she is terrified. And she doesn't know how to get around her own house. But every single day, she just gets to work figuring it out of excellence. what the problem is not wallowing in it not and it's like, yeah, she's scared that even as I'm sitting here recording the show, she's walking around my office, mapping it out, bumping into things, not unsure what to do scared to step on different textures or things like that. But she's fucking figuring it out. And while I sit on the sidelines shattered, I'm sure of what to do, I'm sure of how to help her. She's just moving on. And for me, I think that's the big lesson in all of this is that sometimes we do get too caught up in all of our own bullshit sometimes, you know, our biggest threat to our own confidence is us. And instead of just simply saying that this is what the challenges This is what the problems are, because that that's the difference here. I'm sitting around mourning the loss of normal that what was won't ever be again. And that is heartbreaking to me. Right? That that is my issue here. She's Not going through that she's just simply accepting what it is, and moving forward. And I think that from that is where Yeah, I think she is gonna get her confidence back. I think she is going to get through this. Is it going to be what it was? No. But is it going to be something different? Yes, it's gonna be better, who knows. But she just simply accepted it and moved on whenever I sat on the sidelines, weak and broken, trying to mourn what was not ever going to be again. But that's that thing, right? Stay in the game. And understand, like I said, that confidence is that muscle that only grows when you challenge it. Whenever you make yourself uncomfortable whenever you try to go out and bump your head and, and do those sorts of things. And like I said, know that we're all going through this. And no, don't I mean, look, don't go on social media and suddenly put your problems out there to the world but, but find those people that can help find those people that matter and that you can share it remind yourself of why you're good at what you do. Because I think that's the other problem is that there are so many people who I meet where their self worth is dictated by other people, understandably so. Right? We have parents, we have friends, we have all these other things who render opinions on us that we take. And especially if you want to do something different, you know, do something creative in many cases, we're walking down roads that people don't understand we're taking angles that they don't see. And we have to walk those alone far enough until it starts to realize when you start to find some success, and all of a sudden they can see it and then isn't it interesting how whatever they can see it then we were genius all along, right. So many times genius and things like that only happened in hindsight that while we're going through it that that seeds on our confidence is staggering. But like I said, I think this you know, I think that I'm not gonna lie man, this has been a really hard it's been a hard show for me to do. I think It's been a hard thing for me to share. I think trying to be more open about this and be more honest is what I think that we all owe each other. To be able to do right is to be able to kind of be more honest and to share more of what actually goes on not this kind of curated, bullshit version of this. So as always, hopefully this helped. I think, you know, if it does, like I said, just subscribe to the show. So whenever things come out, right, like reach out on social media, if I can help you with whatever this is when no matter what the problem is, no matter how big no matter, no matter how small, reach out to me reach out to somebody share it with somebody because that's the one thing that I found, and was reminded I was very, very clearly this past week. You never know who needs to hear that you made it through something that they are going through. You never know who you can help. But you've got to put it out there you got to reach out. So I think you know, like I said, you can find the show notes. You can find the articles that I've talked about a bunch of other stuff. Just head over to my site. It's the crazy one, the crazy number one.com follow me on all the social media, leave a review, subscribe, all the usual stuff. I think everybody down illegal always wants me to remind you that the views here are always my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employees. These are just all my own opinions. And I say it every time because I mean it every time. But thanks for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury any of us have was incredibly humbled, you want to spend any of it with me. So it's okay and I set off to try to figure out what the new normal is going to be. As she continues to show me the way and in many cases, I think we all aspire to be more like, more like our pets and the way that they show us so for me in a dog stay crazy.