The Daily Stoic - Dr. Nate Zinsser on Restraining Ego and Building Confidence

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks to performance psychologist Dr. Nate Zinsser about his new book The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance, the difference between confidence and evidence, how to think about the moments in your life selectively to cultivate confidence, looking for the positive aspects of your life while maintaining objective awareness, and more.Dr. Nate Zinsser is the director of West Point’s Performance Psychology Program. He has been the lead performance psychologist at West Point since 1992. Dr. Zinsser is the author of Dear Dr Psych, the first sport psychology guidebook for youth sport participants, six textbook chapters on building confidence, and an advice column to Sports Illustrated for Kids which ran for 5 years. Originally from New Jersey, Dr. Zinsser lives in Fishkill, NY with his wife of 35 years.Shopify has the tools and resources that make it easy for any business to succeed from down the street to around the globe. Go to shopify.com/stoic for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features.DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.New Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you’d normally buy separately, so engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place. Get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100GB of data free, forever – no credit card required! Sign up at NewRelic.com/stoic.Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Make your mental health more than just another New Year’s resolution, with Talkspace. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailySto ic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics. Something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan, welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. It wasn't until my books came up specifically. The obstacles the way that I started to hear from performance coaches, which of course I understood. There was a mental skills coach. I understood that was a thing, but I just, I don't know, I guess never, I never thought of a sports team having one. You know, I never thought of a Wall Street hedge fund having one. I never thought of, certainly never thought of the military having one. I don't know why I didn't, but I just didn't.

And of course, they've had them for a really long time. My guest today, Dr. Nate Zinser, has actually been the performance psychologist at West Point since 1992, which is, in one sense embarrassing that I didn't really know this is a thing until a few years ago, but it's also reassuring. I mean, where else would you want to be getting the utmost performance out of the best talent in the world than at West Point, where the margin for error is the smallest and the most lives depend on it.

Of course, Dr. Nate Zinser is also a performance coach who's worked with everyone from Eli Manning to Olympic teams and all sorts of elite performers in all different fields. And he's the author of a new book which I really enjoyed. You can tell from this interview we got into a bunch of specifics on it. His new book, The Confident Mind, A Battle Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance. I enjoyed it. It's got a blurb from Eli Manning as it happens on the cover. Eli Manning said that he helped him study his confidence brought into the next level in his football career. He says people talk all the time about how a confident attitude is what makes people succeed in pressure situations.

Rarely does anyone actually think about doing something about it. That's why he recommends this book. I had a great time in this conversation when we talk about all sorts of important stuff, and that's why I'm excited to bring you Dr. Zincers insights. I've had different sports psychologists on the podcast before, which you should listen to if you have it. My interview with Dr. Michaelincer's insights, I've had different sports psychologists on the podcast before, which you should listen to if you have it. My interview with Dr. Michael Jervé, I had a Dr. Jonathan Fader on, had a number of great experts in this field on.

But this was one of my favorite conversations, and I think you'll enjoy it. I've got the book here. It was very good. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Thank you. I'm excited. I'll give you an expression I have said several times and tell me if you agree, disagree, or how it jives with the ideas in the book. But I've come to say, I don't believe in myself.

I have evidence. I really like that. It jives beautifully with what I'm saying in the book. I have evidence because I've looked for it. I haven't left my attitude, my confidence up to chance. I have deliberately sought out that evidence as I carefully filter the memories from my past and as I carefully filter the way that I talk to myself. So all that evidence builds up what I referred to as a mental bank account and that helps me walk into a game,

a class, a test, a performance of any sort, with a pretty good sense of certainty that I'm going to do it right. Yeah, because to me, confidence is not this sort of... Confidence is not just, oh, I believe in myself. Confidence, to me, is a knowledge of what one is capable of doing. And that is different to me than just faith, which one might take without evidence. Confidence to me means like, I know, because as you said, I did the inner work,

but I've also seen the demonstrable evidence of what I'm capable of. Yes, I think it involves a little bit of both of those things. Faith, if you look at it as evidence of things unseen, I maybe haven't seen all the actual possibilities, but I've sure seen enough of them. I really like the idea of looking for evidence rather than as you put, as you put it, you know, sort of self-belief in a vacuum. Because your mother said you're special.

Yes, yeah, mom said I'm special henceforth, it must be true. Boy, if that was the case, I wouldn't have a job because just about everybody's mom, you know, in certain, you know, I suppose there's some rare exceptions, unfortunately, pretty much everybody's mom, you know, in certain, you know, I suppose there's some rare exceptions, unfortunately, pretty much everybody's mom said, Hey, kid, you're damn special, you know, you're, you're, you're great. Right. Unfortunately, that in and of itself is very insufficient to the demands

and situations of the real world that we're living in. Right, there's attention. And the other thing I like to say is, if you don't believe you can do something, chances are you won't be able to do it. But just because you believe you can do something, doesn't mean you're going to be able to do it. So, where I think confidence and belief is tricky is like, how do you believe or know have confidence you can do something

that you've never done before. You talk about Eli Manning. Once Eli Manning has won a Super Bowl, then it's pretty easy to be confident that hey, I could win another Super Bowl, but the tricky thing is how do you know that you've got what it takes to be an NFL quarterback? How do you know that you've got what it takes

to be a Super Bowl champion? Or I think about this when I left my job in my life to to write my first book how did I how did I have confidence I could do a thing that I've never done before and that is really really hard and a lot of people can't do. Well you want to answer that question yourself how did you write that very first book? I mean to me where that is, and I think this is what you're talking about in the book, the confidence is in the discreet or the component parts of that task. So, you know, do you know that you're a hard worker? Do you know that you don't quit? Do you know that you've done the work? You know, you don't know that you could do the ultimate thing.

You don't know you can run a marathon until you've finished the 26th mile. But if you have run the smaller distances up until then and you know you'd rather be carted off in a stretcher before you quit, then you can be confident you're gonna come across that finish line. Absolutely.

There is an element, a small element of delusion in this process. I've got this idea that I can do something that I've never done before. I am going to look for all kinds of evidence that I can indeed do it. And that's really the internal search that I set all of my clients and all of my mentees to execute. But there's always that little bit of unknown. Well, I've never written a book. I've never made a division one athletic team. I've never passed a college Ivy League level physics course.

Okay. Are you you gonna look for evidence that suggests you can do it? And are you going to entertain just a little bit of self-delusion possibility that I can do it? Hey, I think you did this once upon a time kid, when you got on that bicycle with the two wheels and dad shoved your, or mom shoved you down the street and you probably didn't get it right.

You might have crashed into a telephone pole or sprawled out on the sidewalk. So indeed you had evidence that you couldn't do it, but yet you had some idea that it was possible. Yeah, so other kids, maybe as, you know, mom and dad probably did say yeah you can do this. You can do this. You have to entertain a little bit of self-delusion that even though I've never done it, it can be done. But then again building on those small incremental episodes of

experience. Yeah, I got three pedals. Yeah, I got five pedals. Yeah, okay. Hey now. Oh my bicycle writing sub routine has now been rewritten to the point where I have that wonderful aha moment and I'm speeding down the driveway or circle in the block and I'm doing it all by myself and isn't that freaking wonderful. When I was writing my book courage is calling, I read this sort of operations manual, a handbook for the US Army that I think George Marshall wrote, it was published in 1944. I'm going to read you this quote because it strikes me as what you were just talking about the idea of how do I know what I have what it takes. When you're talking to men and women that are going to go out into combat potentially, that's the big doubt. Do I know what I have what it takes? But let me know what you think of this quote.

This is from the Army Life Handbook, 1944. It says, fear. Before you're actually in battle is a normal reaction. It's the last step of preparation, the not knowing. This is where you'll prove you're a good soldier. That first fight, that fight with yourself will have gone, and then you will be ready to fight the enemy. In your book, you call this the first victory.

Absolutely. I think Marshall had probably read the Art of War by Sunsah, and he may have seen that same chapter that jumped right out at me. The idea that if you're going to win, you win the inner battle against self-doubt, et cetera. First, before you go into that initial engagement, if victorious warriors win first and then go into battle, wrote Sunsah, while losing warriors, go into battle and just hope to win. So it's that initial decision. I know what to do. I've got the right equipment.

I've got the right teammates. We've got the right plan. We're going to commit to it. Even if we've never done it before, but we're going to commit to this plan because we've got the tools, because we've got the guys to the left and to the right, we've got the right folks. Here we go. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans,

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I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night,

you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. The gap you're talking about, that little bit of delusion, I think I've done the training, I believe in myself or I've confidence in myself, I think I've got this. Obviously, let's say going into battle or writing a book or whatever it is, there is that not knowing. So there, you have to, there's a little bit of a stretch, which I think we can say is part of confidence, but it strikes me there's a fine line there between

the confidence of I got this and the ego of I'm invincible, I'm perfect, I can do anything. How do you distinguish that? I'm sure you see a lot of quiet, confident young men and women, and also perhaps a slightly more boisterous, you get sistical brand of young men and women, and how do you make that distinguish between those two things? I think the difference is very obvious, and I don't have to make, I don't have to distinguish it. I see it and they see it very clearly.

Most of the folks who end up at West Point are not the boisterous chest beating. I'm the greatest thing that ever walked down the pike type of individual. They're much more the, I guess you could say, a little more cautious, type of person, you know, they're very determined, but they know that they're getting to something big and it can be a little bit intimidating. So they're more careful about their confidence and I have to help their confidence keep up with the competence that they develop through

their 47-month experience to the point where they are competent to be platoon leaders, and they are also confident in their competence to be platoon leaders. Yeah, I think it's interesting. We've seen this, we'll leave the person nameless, but I think it's easy for people who are not familiar to mistake confidence and ego, but to someone who knows, it is very obvious the difference between a confident leader and an egotistical leader.

It's very, very true. Very, very true. Very, very true. One of the most difficult, and I shouldn't say difficult, but one of the most common misconceptions is that confidence equals outspoken arrogance about oneself. Yes. That is not the case, ladies and gentlemen. Confident individuals come in all volumes. They are very quiet people. They are moderately quiet people. And then they're really loud people.

All of all three of those groups are populated by individuals with a heck of a lot of confidence. We tend to only see and the media only tends to highlight the loud, boisterous, outspoken people. The Conomer Greggers, back in my day as a kid, it was Muhammad Ali, Joe Namus. Those folks were crucified in the media for being outspoken individuals. That's just their natural style. They happen to be loud individuals. But on the other end of the spectrum, you've got

serena Williams, you've got the manning brothers, you've got Drew Grease and just dozens, dozens more of very quiet but very inwardly confident individuals. That the media doesn't say a whole lot about. So let's get past those false images and let's everybody understand that you can be a very confident individual, have a very strong sense of certainty about your skills and still be quiet, polite, respectful and hence the kind of person that your mom probably wanted you to be. Well, yeah, and I guess in the military circles, it's sort of the image of the patent style leader versus the martial or the Eisenhower. You might even argue that there's actually a

greater confidence in those latter two because they don't need the credit. They don't need to be in the spotlight as much. They're willing to actually seed the spotlight or the room to the louder, more boisterous types and they're sort of quietly plotting along doing their work. What a great distinction. Again, people with a whole lot of confidence don't necessarily have a great big ego. They don't need it. They're certain about who they are, what they can do, and they don't have to impress anybody with it, because they've already justified it to themselves on the inside. That's right. I think ego ultimately gets you in trouble.

You look at it, you can trust a MacArthur with a Marshall. The longer you are in the spotlight, the more things you can't stop yourself from saying, the more likely you are to say something that perhaps you shouldn't say or make an enemy that you don't need to make. And that so often leads to our downfall. Indeed, indeed, it does. Great point. So as you cultivate confidence in the young people that you work with, I'm thinking about this, I have two young children. How do you think about someone developing confidence? If someone's like, I'm not a confident person

or I often feel a lot of doubt. How does one go about cultivating this confident mind that you're talking about? Three ways you can think about it. I've got to start looking for memories from my past I've got to start looking for memories from my past of quality effort, little tiny successes here and there, and some indicators of progress. I've got to start being somewhat more selective about how I think about my past, both long-term and short-term in terms of yesterday, and maybe I need to be very

selective in terms of how I think about basically the last hour of my life. When I was in physical geography class just now, and I walked out of the class, what point did I get right? What did I do right in that class? I want to take that memory with me into the future. So the first real class of activities in terms of cultivating confidence is to be very selective and very careful about bringing in constructive memories from your past, long-term, short-term, and immediate.

The second class of activities is being really careful about the stories that you tell yourself about yourself in the present. What are the sort of underlying and up to this point, maybe not even acknowledged stories that you tell yourself, oh, I'm good at this, oh, I'm not good at that, oh, I hate doing this, oh, I love doing that. Understand, ladies and gentlemen, every one of those expressions is basically a belief about yourself. And if we know anything about human behavior, it's those beliefs that

structure our actions, the actions tend to structure our results. So that the results that we experience are often just pale, sometimes not so pale reflections of the beliefs that we started out. You know, the kid who says, Oh, I'm not good at math. Okay, well, maybe up to this point, that could be true. Your belief is a result of your experience, but going forward from this moment, as long as you maintain that belief, I'm not good at math, that belief is now a causal factor in your future experience. And one of the things that we have to do is come to grips with the various self-fulfilling prophecies that we're all laboring under.

So that's about how we think about ourselves in the present. The third class of activities is, of course, how do you think about yourself in the future? What are the still photos of various futures that your imagination is feeding you? What are the video clips of various future scenarios that that sophisticated video production studio in your imagination is feeding you? Why don't we become the director of those short movies. And why don't we cultivate scenes of progress towards our goals,

attainment of said goals? Why not get ourselves to be the script writer, the star, the director, the special effects coordinator of a whole bunch of scenarios that filled us with a sense of energy and optimism and enthusiasm. Once we start working on our minds in all three of those levels, we are developing, as I put it in the book, a mental bank account, a storehouse, a repository of conscious constructive thoughts, which leads to that sense of certainty that we want. To me, that's really the benefit of what Carol's Wack calls the growth mindset, where, where, like, as a parent, so your kid does something, you're not saying, hey, you're smart, look at you, you're saying, you did this as a result of the work you put in. You're essentially trying to reframe and set a narrative for them in their life

about the agency that they have, the ability they have to create their own future and you're deciding what parts of that narrative to emphasize, not their natural inbred abilities, but those associated with effort or their mental state. So that's kind of what you're doing. I guess there is restating and reframing a way of looking at an objective, an event that subjectively makes them better on a going forward basis. Absolutely. Learning to interpret your successes as a function of your own agency, interpreting those good moments as something that can happen over and over and over again,

interpreting those moments of success as indicative of successes that you can have, perhaps in other settings. That's how we want our kids to look at their successes. We want them to think of those successes as relatively enduring, relatively permanent. We want them to think of those successes as relatively pervasive in that they indicate the our ability to do equally good things in other situations. And very importantly, as you point out, we want our kids to have a sense that the successes which they experience were a result of their own agency, their own effort, their own ability, rather,

oh, I just got lucky. A cause and effect, your establishing cause and effect. Yeah, I can say, yeah, I did it. It can affect lots of other things in my life, and it's likely to happen all over again, or I can say, well, it just happened in that one place so it doesn't matter it just happened that one time so it's really not all that big a deal and it really just happens because it was an easy test and anybody could have gotten it right.

That's where coaching comes in. Well and I suspect what you're doing as a parent with this stuff is you're trying to early on coach them in such a way that they develop an inner voice that then coaches themselves. So like when you're working with someone like Eli Manning, you're talking off the field, but ultimately if he's dependent on you for that affirmation, for that explanation, after everything, that's no good. He has to be able to do that down in the fourth quarter, having his own consecutive

interceptions and be able to go, no, the game isn't over. I have the ability to change this. I'm confident in my ability to pull this out. I think about this as a parent. It's like, I'm trying to give my children an inner voice that will serve them when I'm not around. Yes, indeed. Get the kids to understand that they're in control of their own thoughts. Not the world around them, not their immediate past experience. They have control of their own thoughts. Let's get good at that. You mentioned DLI Manning in the fourth quarter. Okay, well, let's

go back to the 2012 Super Bowl. And there he is, taking the snap from his 10 yard line, three minutes to go on the clock, they're down by five points, they got a score, and not only do they got a score, they got to make sure that once they do score, the opponent, the New England Patriots, led by none other than Tom Brady himself, doesn't have a chance to come back and then tie the game. So they got a score, touch down. a chance to come back and then tie the game. So they got a score, a touchdown. And so Manning takes the snap into fourth quarter, throws this beautiful 40 yard rain bow right into his receiver's hands, a perfectly thrown ball that either his receiver was going to catch or it was going to fall harmlessly out of bounds. Despite the fact that that receiver was covered pretty darn well by two Patriot defenders.

And that play of the game set up the Giants winning touchdown. Two days later, Manning is on a nationally syndicated radio show. And the commentator says, do you ever think about the ramifications of failure at moments like that? And very politely, Eli Manning says, no, that's exactly what you don't do. You think about all the times you got it right. You think about your comeback victories against this team and that team. And that's the feeling that you keep. You can, you can misremember, you use this term wonderfully, you can misremember the times when you didn't have

success coming back from a deficit, but you're hanging on to the memories of your successes. And he was pretty good at doing that in the fourth quarter when the chips are down. And that's part of his legacy as an NFL quarterback. Yeah, you think about Tom Brady on the other side of that. I don't think any quarterback has lost more super balls than Tom Brady, right?

So how do you get to a place where you don't think about that? You have to cultivate the ability to shake off those losses, which were your fault in the sense that you were the quarterback. When you threw the interception or you didn't complete the catch or you took too long to drop the ball or to get rid of the ball. You have to do, you have to have that selective memory that you're talking about and focus on your ability to pull it out because the second you stop believing you can do it, you've lost. That's right.

The second you start contemplating mistakes, setbacks, difficulties, you actually start tightening up the musculature and reducing the blood flow and probably closing off your peripheral vision. Those thoughts aren't just abstract things that are out there in some ether. Those thoughts are inside you, an organic human being, and they change you physically. If there was something I'd really hope that your listeners can grasp on to, is that every thought you think kind of affects every cell in your body. The effect can be sometimes subtle. The effect can be sometimes very significant, but there's always an effect.

And everything we do as human beings, we do with our physical body. Well, I like what the Stokes say, the idea that we are died by the color of our thoughts. Right? Like, what do we think about it? It doesn't, it's not necessarily predictive or deterministic, but it is unquestionable. It's shaped and colored by it. It's influential. Yes. Right.

Again, not a guarantee, but we live in an uncertain enough world as it is. Let's reduce a little bit of that uncertainty. Let's give ourselves the best possible chance. As we say in the military, let's put all the ammo that we can into the weapon and let's bring all the supplies that we need in our Rucksack in that pack that we carry around with us. Let's put it in our Rucks. Let's have the ammo. Does it guarantee your success will outcome? No. Sure helps though.

Let's do that. Well, so let me ask you because this is something I was thinking about both educationally and then obviously with my children and then just sort of like reflecting on the advantages that I've had in life. We're sort of having a reckoning in our society about all the various sort of subtle forces that exist, right, whether we're talking about the way that different prejudices intersect or the different histories or the different sort of forces of adversity that exist in the world.

It strikes me that it's important that we're thinking about that and we're talking about that and that we're taking steps to rectify that. And yet, you can kind of hear in the way that people talk, particularly I would say activists or people who are particularly concerned with social justice issues, almost, I don't want to say defeatism because it sounds judgmental, but it's this sort of this sense of like that because the game is rigged or because the game is unfair that individuals do not have agency. Right? How does one reckon this sort of understanding of how difficult something is, how unfair certain things might be, and then nevertheless retain a belief, which is I think ultimately an optimistic

belief in their own agency. Do you understand what I mean? Well, is that not indeed fundamental to stoic philosophy? Is that not indeed an example of the classic stock del paradise? You have to be ridiculously aware and realistic about the situation that you're in Good, bad or ugly yes and yet at the same time you are maintaining an optimism about the future Even if the game is kind of rigged. Okay, you've got to be willing to think well It's rigged now, but it's not going to be rigged forever. And when it starts to unrig a little bit,

I'm going to be right there with my agency. And I'm going to make a difference. One of the stories I tell in the book, kind of apropos, because we're looking at the Winter Olympics in Beijing right now, is a story about one of our Olympic Bob's lead teams back in 2020 years ago years ago, when the Winter Games were played in Salt Lake City. Now, historically, there had not been a

medal won by men's Bob Slid in 46 years. So in a way, there was a understanding that the games kind of rigged against us. We don't have the resources, we don't have the popularity here in the US for Bob Slid that you see in Russia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland. But that team was very good at looking for their slightest opportunity. Even though we're kind of under-resourced, which is another way of saying the game is kind of rigged against us. Sure. Even though we're under-resourced, if we get the slightest break, the littlest bit of luck, we're actually going to metal.

And it took a little bit of work. Sorry, did you admire those guys to have that kind of optimism that was only partially supported by evidence. That's an evidence. They made the damn Olympic team. They had some good runs in the previous World Cup year. They had never met the driver of that team, Brian Shimer, was in his fourth Olympics. You know, he had lost out on a medal in the 1998 Noggin Olympics by 2-100s of a second.

You can't blink your eyes that fast, but that's the kind of margin of error we're talking about. that fast. But that's the kind of margin of error we're talking about. That team in 2002, 20 years ago, was able to have the conviction, if we get the slightest break, the little bit of, little spittle luck, we're going to metal, and they did. No, and that strikes me as related to the first chapter of your book, which is I think the ultimate stoic idea. Epictetus is literally the first stoic idea, which is you have to accept what is not in your control. You have to accept the facts on the ground as they are. The 300 Spartans don't go to Thermopoli complaining about what a statistical disadvantage they are at, right? They're focused on what are they going to do about it and they're focused on

What are they willing to give what are they willing to put to that problem and That that's what made the difference. That's what allowed them to do what they did And they had they've been focused on how unfair and how unlikely and how certain their defeat was well, they wouldn't have gone No question about that. Who would volunteer for that kind of suicide mission? Except somebody who is ridiculously mentally tough to think not about what's going to happen in two weeks, but what are we going to do right now?

How are we going to organize ourselves? How are we going to think? How are we going to deal with this moment? What control do we have right now. How are we going to organize ourselves? How are we going to think? How are we going to deal with this moment? What control do we have right now? We have control over how we deploy and what kind of effort we bring to the fight today. I think Zenefin said, you know, like a bad leader, stuff happens to a bad leader. A good leader is someone who happens to stuff, right? Like, what are you, are you the passive reactor or are you the impetus in some way? And I think I don't think that's inconsistent

with the idea that a lot of what happens in life is out of our control, but in the domain of what is in our control, you want to be the active participant. Yes, and you will not discover the full extent, the full range of things that are indeed in your control until you exercise that control. And you may think, well, there's not much I can do about this. Well, do everything that you can. And you might find that the boundary between the controllables and the uncontrollables is shifting a little bit.

Sure. If you don't look for that boundary, and indeed push that boundary, you'll never really know where it is. So what's the relationship with these clients you work with with these teams and these athletes between confidence and humility? I think the relationship is very simple. You have to be careful and honest with yourself

about the skills that you have and the skills that you don't have. Well, that's humility 101. Sure. Okay. I lack a certain understanding of, you know, these principles of thermodynamics. I lack a certain ability to place the lacrosse ball in the upper right hand corner of the goal when dodging from this particular part of the field. Okay, I don't have that skill yet. That's humility. Okay. So you go to work on your skills, you study.

And when it's time to step into the game or take the test, now it's time to go from being humble and modest to being confident and certain. So I'm going to believe that whatever amount of studying I've done for that thermodynamics exam is sufficient. And I'm going to decide that whatever practice I've done placing that lacrosse ball has been sufficient. And I'm going to maintain that belief throughout the test. Whether I get the first five questions right or wrong, whether I feel great about how the test starts,

whether or whether my first two shots, three shots, five shots on goal go in, I'm going to maintain that. I'm going to be perhaps arrogant enough to think that I have everything I need throughout the duration of the actual test, the actual game, and then I'm going to go back and become a lot more humble, a lot more careful, and look at what I need to do in order to get it right or get it better the next time. That makes sense. I think that I see those two things as complementing one another, not as separate and mutually exclusive. No, one of the examples I think a lot about is that Portland Trailblazer series against

Oklahoma City where Damien Lovler hits like a 40 foot three to in the series. And people are like, you know, how did you have the confidence to do that? Because he just sort of waits, he steps back and he just drills his three. And I think after the game, he said something like, I hit that shot 47% of the time, right? He knew the exact percentage point of his accuracy in that moment. So there's still the reach. I mean, he wasn't like 99.9% of the time I hit it. But to me, humility was, okay, six out of 10 times,

I'm gonna miss this shot. But four out of 10 times, I'm gonna hit it. And that four out of 10 times is our best chance to win this game. That's all I need to know. I just need to treat this like an ordinary shot in practice. Let me step up and take it. Exactly. I, you know, I wish I'd been there to interview him or maybe the day after that. And I'd have to look very carefully at the game tape. Did he make his

previous three pointer or did he not? If he, if he did make his previous three pointer, he's likely to be in the conditional, okay, I'm on a roll. I'm making this one. Yeah. If he missed his previous three pointer, where maybe his previous two or three three pointers, he's probably saying to himself, well, I'm due to get one in my time. My time is now. I've missed it, but that miss only means I'm getting better and more precise with my aim and my release. This is the way the great shooters think. Right. Yeah, it's funny how we can mess with statistics to tell ourselves certain stories, right? Like statistically, the hot hand does not exist. But of course, anyone who's ever done anything in the world knows that it does exist, right? Of course.

Of course. If you believe you have a hot hand, that changes how you are going to be able to do the thing just as if you have a slump, you know, the slump can become its own self-fulfilling prophecy, because you think you've lost it. Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm not good at the moment. Okay, well, there's a wonderful self-fulfilling prophecy that you just told yourself. Right.

As opposed to, yeah, my stats are down, but I know that just means my next game is going to be a breakout. There's a time and a place to be realistic, a time and a place to look at those stats, but it's not in the middle of a game. It's not in the middle of the test. That's what you do in the off season. That's what you do in the two or three days studying for the test. But on test day, you wake up in the morning, you put your feet on the floor and you say, Oh, test

day, I'm kicking ass today. Right. And then you take the test as best you can with the full amount of confidence, you wait a day or three, you get the test back, and then you look rather dispassionately about what you got right, what you got wrong, you analyze the quality of your preparation where there are other things you might have done, other ways you might have prepared, what kind of questions did you get right, what kind of questions did you get wrong, what does this tell you about yourself. And so for that little episode, yeah, you got to be realistic. Yeah, you got to be logical. But on test day, in two weeks, in that same course, you want to throw logic out the window and say, yeah, I'm ready to take this darn thing and I'm going to be great

at it. That gives you the best chance of having your accumulated study express itself in the context of the actual test. So how do you think about the relationship between what we might call sort of physical confidence or courage and moral confidence and courage, right? amazed that people who could hurl themselves on a grenade or into the heat of the fire. But then when it comes to, I don't know, speaking an uncomfortable truth or risking their profession or, you know, I guess what I'm talking about is let's say a military leader who's brave in battle, then they get elected to public office, and this has been a truth for 2000 years, then they get elected to public office, and suddenly, there's so much more timid, there's so much less courageous, or they out and out lose their moral compass. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. Boy, if I had an answer to that one, Ryan, I would be much happier, much more... I'd be much happier individual. I'll put it that way. I can't answer What happens to these folks as they transition from that small unit on the ground performance context to bigger and bigger and bigger pictures where indeed they seem to lose their moral compass. Again, if I had an answer to that question, I'd be a much different location than I am today, probably. I do know this. I have actually met a young man who threw himself on a grenade.

His name's Kyle Carpenter. His book, You Are Worth It, is Worth Everybody's Time. I follow him on Instagram, He's a wonderful guy. Wonderful guy. I had the pleasure of meeting him during his book tour. We were both keynote speakers at a conference out at the Facebook headquarters. I think it's November of 19 before the COVID reality shut a lot of things down. Kyle Carpenter literally through himself on a grenade, it turned his body armor into dust, caused considerable damage.

It's a miracle that he survived, and he is a very humble but very encouraging young man to this day. The title of his book, You Are Worth It, was arrived upon when he was finally got tired of hearing people say, oh, thank you for your service. And it occurred to him, well, my service is worth something. The people I'm serving are worth it. So he started to respond to all the thank yous. Oh, thank you for your service. Thank you for your service. Well, you're worth it. Thank you. Oh, thank you for your service. Thank you for your service. Well, you're worth it. I like to think that that fellow is going to maintain his moral compass throughout the years.

As for those folks who don't, those leaders who become sort of full of, full of themselves, and literally protect their own behinds as they get promoted through the ranks, etc. etc. I think history will speak to them. I think they will leave a legacy of incomplete leadership. And I hope we learn those lessons. Yeah, I think about this in the aftermath of the insurrection on January 6th, you have a number of military leaders turn politicians, as well as just military leaders in general, who would and have risked their life on a second's notice to preserve and protect the Constitution, to preserve and protect the ideals that America stands for. And yet there is also something within them.

Now, a month out from it, a year out from it, who won't repudiate an obvious lie because it would be bad for their political career or bad for their fundraising efforts. And I'm always stunned, I guess I'm not stunned because it's stunned implies a judgment. I'm perplexed because it seems like the other confidence, the other danger, is so much more real and scarier and they had no problem there and then here they come

up short. Yeah, fascinating observation. Why they come up short in terms of the right moral judgment, why they entertain and maintain, you know, the various lies. I am equally perplexed by that. And I ask a lot of my mentees, what are you learning from this? What are you taking away from this? Someday you might be in that same position. Right. What decision will you be making at that time? Yeah, you know what's an interesting one. So I interviewed Alexander Vindman, I guess Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who you could disagree, I guess, with his interpretation

of that phone call. I happen not to disagree. I think he did not just his job, but I think it was a heroic, courageous decision that he made. But I've been amazed that the number of military people who emailed me after that interview to condemn him personally, right? Like for speaking out that basically they've they've decided to view what he did through a lens of professional jealousy or For you know that it was a disruptive decision that he's making too much of the spectacle of himself etc etc But I will I always would I've replied to those I go

You challenge the most powerful man in the world and then come back and tell me What you think of his decision, right? But it's always interesting how I think we lionize that sort of physical courage or that physical boldness on the battlefield. And then these moral stands were so much more ambiguous about in the moment. You know, in, in, with the distance of history, we admire a Muhammad Ali. But at the time, his stand against the Vietnam War

was, was not just controversial. I mean, he almost went to jail, right? Like, but in the moment, it seems like we really struggle to just respect a moral stand like that. And I hope we can learn from the fact that we have overlooked that kind of moral courage and decide to do more of it ourselves. Here at West Point, we have a whole character education process and speaking truth to power, choosing the difficult right thing over the easy wrong thing. That's part of the education.

And I like to think that our young men and women who are going to graduate and take on leadership positions in the Army have learned that lesson and will take pride in doing the right thing even if it perhaps does compromise their promotion potential 10 years, 20 years down the line. Well, I think about that because there's been moments in my life where, you know, I sort of knew what the right thing was, and then I thought, but I could lose my job for it, right? And what I think about in retrospect is,

why did I want to keep a job that you could lose for doing the right thing? What a wonderful way to reframe your ambiguity. I compliment you. Well, no, it's funny because I was talking to reframe your ambiguity. I compliment you. Well, no, it's funny because I was talking to a Republican politician that I know that was sort of going back and forth about impeachment. And I remember him saying, well, I won't get reelected.

And I said, yeah, but you hate being a congressman. So it's not like you. It's not like this is the greatest job you've ever had. And like you, it's not like you, this is the greatest job you've ever had. And all you can do is tell me how wonderful it is. You, you dislike it. And yet we, I think, I think it deep down we're afraid of uncertainty, right? We're afraid of the unknown. We're afraid that we don't have what it takes to navigate Whatever the consequences of that moral stand might be in retrospect. It's obvious I would have just got another job like it's not like I would have ended up under a bridge But I was so scared about losing the paycheck that I did something that in retrospect I can't justify

Hmm, so you're making a really interesting point perhaps that decision reflects or is a product of a certain degree of personal insecurity about one's agency to operate in this world. I've got to sort of stay with the relatively safe and secure, even though it violates an ethical principle or three, rather than be true to myself and put myself in a less certain, but perhaps more ethically viable position. Yes. You know, we are all seduced a little bit by safety and security as opposed to the discovery of who we really are, what we can really accomplish, and indeed how

we ideally want to be remembered, you know, we're going to be remembered for something. Sure. Okay. How do you want to be be remembered? You wanna be remembered as the guy who did the safe and secure thing and made enough money to have a house and you know, watch reruns of I love Lucy on television every night, or do you want to do something? Perhaps a little more interesting, perhaps a little more challenging that will put humans in a position to leave

a much different, much more exciting legacy. That's right, that's right. No, I was, you know, I was, I did this morning show this morning and the guest before me, this is remote, but the guest before me was Steve Scalise, the Republican Congressman. And it was so uncomfortable. They asked him, you know, is, they said, did Biden win the election, right? And he's dancing around, he won't say it. And I just remember sitting there thinking, this is the number two Republican Congressman

in the United States. This guy survived a shooting that nearly killed him. And here he is afraid to say something against the guy who's not president anymore, right? He's afraid to do it. And I think to me, what confidence, the way I think about confidence is like, what good is it to be that if you're then afraid,

to like, you have power, you have considerable power. And yet you're so, it's almost like a kind of imposter syndrome. Like you don't deserve it. Like you didn't earn it. Like you couldn't get it back. That you're afraid to take even the smallest stand that might involve you having to go cross some of that back. Yeah, what a fascinating question.

Ryan, I have no idea that our discussion would range quite this far. It's great. I have totally loved this opportunity to dialogue with you. I hope we can do it again. But here at West Point, my schedule is such that I've got to jump to my next commitment. No problem. Thank you again so much for this privilege and my best to all of your listeners

and I really hope that as their days go by that commitment to maintain the moral compass and develop the sense of security and sense of certainty about themselves that will allow them to continue to make those right decisions. I hope that remains forever. I do too. It was an honor. I loved the book, the confident mind, and everyone should check it out. Thanks again. Have a great day. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa. The Stoa, Poquila, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place, because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people, and we couldn't fit in one space.

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