The Power of Self-Confidence

Brian Tracy: Actually, many years ago I sat down and looked at why people are more successful than others and the turning point in my life was when I learned the role of self-esteem, and self-esteem is defined as how much you like yourself, how much you respect yourself and the more you like yourself, the more you like other people, the more you like yourself, the bigger goals you set, the more you persist, the more you like yourself, the more positive you are. So your self-esteem is really like the reactor core of your personality and I learned later that your self-esteem is the foundation of self-confidence, and self-confidence is the indispensable ingredient for success. If you have enough self-confidence you can literally overcome every adversity and accomplish extraordinary things. But if you lack self-confidence, you can be one of the most intelligent, talented people in the world and surrounded by opportunities and it will do you no good at all. So, the development of self-confidence is like developing physical fitness, the more self-confident you become, the more things you will try, the more you'll learn, the better you'll get, the faster you'll bounce back. And so I produced a program many years ago called the "Science of Self Confidence," where I laid out and explained the process of developing self-confidence, going from low levels of self-confidence, which most of us have to start off with, to high levels of basically unshakeable self-confidence. And last year John Wiley, one of the biggest publishers in the world, called me up out of the blue and said, "we've decided there's a big demand for self-confidence, would you be interested in writing a book on the subject?" and I said, "would I be interested? You bet! This is my subject," so I sat down and I wrote the book that you have in your hand.

Rachel Salaman: And it is full of lots of really useful tips. In the introduction you talk about the principle of causality, which you call the "great law." Can you explain that for people who may not have come across it?

Brian Tracy: This is so important, it's called the "iron law of the universe." Sometimes they call it the "granddaddy law." It's the umbrella law under which all other laws go, and what it basically is, is the law of cause and effect. In the Bible it's called the "law of sowing and reaping," which says, "whatsoever you sow also shall you reap." Sir Isaac Newton called it the "law of action and reaction," for every action there is an equal and an opposite reaction. And the law of cause and effects says that if you can be clear about an effect that you want, then you can trace it back to someone who at one time did not have that effect and then did certain things and got it, and if you do the same thing that other successful people have done you eventually get the same result, and it's not a miracle and it's not luck, it's a matter of law. And so the starting point is exactly "what effects do you want?" And so, in my seminars, I say, "well let's start off, here's a good effect, let's set a goal for today to double our income, so that's a good effect." Everybody agrees that's a good effect, alright so then you say, "well how do you double your income?" Well, you find somebody in your field who is earning twice as much as you who at one time was earning half as much as you, and now they're earning twice as much, and you find out how they did it. And we say success leaves tracks, if you install the same cause or causes that they did, you get the same effects eventually, and there's no miracle to it, and people literally walk out of my courses and go out and double their income. I just got a letter this morning Rachel, it's early here, it's ten after eight and I got up at five, here is a letter from a salesman and he says his goal at one time was to save $100,000, and then he read my book and he said I'm going to set up a bigger goal, so I told him set a goal of ten times in the book, and so he set a goal to achieve a net worth of $1m, and he just got to $1.2m which he never believed in his life that he would ever get to $100,000, and when he started thinking about $1m, suddenly things started to fall together, he started to learn new things, opportunities opened up for him and today he's got a net worth of $1.2m and he's just walking around dazed at how this stuff works, and it's cause and effect. Do the things that other successful people do and you'll soon get the same result.

Rachel Salaman: So to link that back to self-confidence it's about believing that if you set those goals you can achieve them and that will help you build your self-confidence.

Brian Tracy: There's a wonderful line that says, "happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal." And one of the most important things of all is that self-confidence is incremental, go from no self-confidence to superb self-confidence. It's very much like losing weight, just say you are overweight and you decide to lose weight and you go and weigh yourself and you don't like the look of it but you begin your diet and your exercise program, and then you go back and you weigh yourself and you find that you've lost a pound or maybe two, and you think, "hey this works!" and so you keep working at it and it takes a long time and you go and check and you've lost another pound or two. Now is it fast? Is it easy? No, but if you keep doing this eventually you'll weigh your perfect weight and each time you notice that you're making progress your self-confidence goes up, "hey, I can do this." You know the most powerful words of all are, "I can do this, I can do it, I can do it," and I always told my children, they're all grown up now but when they were little kids I knew this stuff so I would say, "you can do it, you can do anything you put your mind to," I told them that all their lives and all four of them are absolutely unshakeably self-confident, they had been programmed deliberately by dear old dad to grow up and absolutely believe there is nothing that they can't accomplish. And you couldn't convince them, it doesn't mean that they won't have all kinds of problems and ups and downs and everything else, so that's why I say to people, "say to yourself ‘I can do it, I can do it, I can do anything I put my mind to,' and then tell other people," because the rule is you become what you teach, so if you tell people, "you can do it" you encourage other people as well, and it has a boomerang effect and actually builds your own self confidence and you build the self-confidence of others.

Rachel Salaman: I thought it was interesting that one of the first lessons you teach in the book is the importance of personal values. Why did you start with that point and how does it relate to self-confidence?

Brian Tracy: Great question, I told you that my first program, it was a 60,000 word 12-part six-cassette album called the "Science of Self Confidence," and I studied the subject exhaustively, I'm a voracious student, and one of the things that I found is that all problems in human life can be resolved by a return to values. It's that when your values are clear, your self confidence is high, in other words, when you know what you believe and what you feel is right and true and good, and you live consistent with that, then you feel wonderful about yourself. But if you veer off, if your values on the inside and your activities on the outside become what they call "incongruent," they clash, they get out of alignment, then you start to feel uncomfortable and stressed and uneasy and tense, you feel guilty and you feel inferior. So the starting point of high performance is high performing people are very clear about their values, they're very clear about what they believe to be right and good and true, and they don't compromise, and, as a result, they have tremendous self-confidence. Average people, unfortunately, are unclear about their values and they compromise whatever values they have and they always feel uncomfortable, insecure and inferior. So the starting point is what do you believe to be true and a very simple value is honesty. I believe in being honest with myself and with others, now this sounds like a simple thing but that means that you live in truth, you live in truth with yourself, you tell the truth to yourself, this is a mark of the highest performing men and women going back to Abraham Maslow and his studies of self-actualization, that the highest performers are very honest and objective with themselves, they recognize their strengths and weaknesses, they recognize where they're good and where they're not, they recognize where they need work and they're very open. Average people unfortunately have blinders on, they have what is called, "scatomas," which is they have blind spots, they don't want to deal with the fact that they may be weak or lacking in some areas that they consider to be important. Just like people who are overweight don't look at themselves in full length mirrors, they prefer to look at themselves in mirrors that only show their head and shoulders, so they pretend that they're not overweight. So you find that by taking the value of honesty that says, "I always tell the truth to myself and others, I live in truth with others, I don't do anything that is dishonest or inconsistent, incongruent with truth." Just making that decision causes people's self-confidence to surge, just making the decision I'm not going to compromise, I'm going to tell the truth and I'm going to live in truth, and people start to feel wonderful about themselves and it starts to glow, it starts to affect their relationships, it starts to affect their attitude and it dramatically raises their self-confidence.

Rachel Salaman: Now you mentioned that average people find it hard to know what their values are, in the book you offer a few tips for people who might want to figure out what values they really believe in, can you talk a little bit about that?

Brian Tracy: It's very simple, human beings are choosing organisms, we choose continually between A and B, between this behavior and that behavior, and every action that we take is an expression of our values, so you can always tell what your values are today by looking at how you've behaved in the past, and, here's the key, under pressure. Under pressure your true values emerge, under pressure you are forced to choose between this and that and whichever one you choose is the true expression of who you really are inside. One last thing that I would pass on, because this is such an important thing, everything in life is lived from the inside out Rachel, it's almost like your values are the axel around which your whole life turns, if those values are fuzzy or unclear or compromised, then your whole life is a mess, it's just as simple as that. So here's something you could ask, if you were to interview people around you who know you well and ask them what are his or her values, what would your friends say, what would your family say, what would the people who know you really well say are your values based on their experience of you? That's a real eye opener, but then what you do is say, "OK, if my life was perfect, if I was an excellent person, these would be the values that I would live by and these would be the behaviors that I would practice, that are in harmony with those values," and then you just make a decision as Aristotle said, "excellence is not a goal, excellence is a behavior," it is something that you consistently do, so if you believe in integrity, that whenever honesty is required you always behave with the highest integrity until it becomes an automatic part of your thinking. So eventually you reach the point where you never compromise your values and you end up feeling wonderful about yourself, if you're happy you feel confident, you feel secure, you feel strong and you start to be far more effective with everybody you deal with.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you also talk about the importance of goals and goal setting to building self-confidence, could you explain how goals help you develop self-confidence?

Brian Tracy: Yes, it's really important, because sometimes I'll ask my audience, I'll say, "to be honest, everybody wants to feel like a winner," everybody likes to feel like a winner from the time you're a child and you play games, because people love to win, because when you win your self-esteem goes up, your self-confidence goes up and you just feel happy about yourself, and anybody who suggests that there shouldn't be competition and everybody should be happy at the same level is just preaching nonsense because human beings love to win. So I say, "how do you get the feeling of winning? How do you get the winning feeling?" and I wait for the audience to respond, and finally someone says, "you win." And I say, "you're right, you get the winning feeling by winning." So how do you win, well if you set and achieve a big goal you get an incredible rush of endorphins, you feel fantastic about yourself and you feel elated, it gives you energy, but if you set a plan to achieve a long term goal and each step you take towards the goal gives you a feeling of being a little winner, and it builds your self-esteem and it builds your self-confidence. So therefore if you have clear goals and plans, and you work towards them each day and you can feel yourself moving step by step towards the achievement of something that's important to you, each step of the way makes you feel happy. Going back to what I said, success or happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal, it's the step by step forward movement towards something that's important to you, and that's why people with goals tend to be far more positive, they have more energy, they're seldom sick, they wake up in the morning and they're happy, and I encourage people in my time management book to get started on your most important goal, do something first thing every morning, get started, get moving, because the very step of taking an action towards your goal is instant feedback and causes you to feel like a little winner. And each time you do it, your self-confidence goes up and as your self-confidence goes up, your motivation to do even more things goes up and you get onto an upwards spiral of life. I have worked with countless people who never knew any of this and have just started to practice these things, in other words, you don't think yourself into feeling positive and self-confident, you act yourself into it, and the actions are under your control and the actions indirectly will influence your emotions, and soon you'll have the same emotions that are in harmony with the actions that you're taking, so you have complete control over your future destiny, you can literally sculpt your self-confidence and build yourself up to the point where you become unstoppable and I used to tell my audiences, your goal in life is to become unstoppable and I've heard them all say I am unstoppable. Whenever you feel like quitting, whenever you feel like slowing down, whenever you feel tired or discouraged, which you will a thousand times, just say, "hey, wait a minute, I'm unstoppable," "hey, wait a minute, I'm unstoppable," and that's one of the most important qualities a person can have for success and happiness in life, it's to know deep down inside, "I never give up," you just tell yourself that over and over again and they say the most powerful words in your world are the words you say to yourself and believe. So when you start to talk to yourself like that over and over again, eventually you start to believe it.

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Rachel Salaman: I really like the story that you included in the book about the man whose business was in trouble, who was given a check for half a million dollars by a stranger, could you briefly tell us that story and how we can apply the lessons?

Brian Tracy: Basically it's a story about how your self-confidence can be manufactured by yourself or by an outside event, even if it's not true. So this is a gentleman and he has a business and his business is in serious trouble and he's afraid he's going to go broke and he's in despair, so he goes for a walk in New York's Central Park after work in the evening and he's standing there on a bridge and he's looking down at the water and this old man comes along and he stops and they start talking and he says, "how's everything going?" and he says, "well, my business is in real trouble, I don't know if it's going to be able to survive and I'm afraid I'm going to go broke." The man says, "well, you seem like a nice person," and he said, "look I'll help you out, I'm very wealthy," and he took out a check book and he leaned on the bridge and he wrote him a check for $500,000 and he signed it "John D. Rockefeller," the richest man in the world at that time. He took this check and he said, "take this money and turn your business around, come back one year from today and return the check to me," and he said, "wow, OK," and then the man said, "good luck" and he walked away. So he took this check back to his office and he sat there and looked at this $500,000 and that was enough to solve all of his problems, and his first thought was to cash the check, and he thought, "well, I don't need to cash the check, I've got it, I'll put it in my safe and if ever I need it I can cash it." Meanwhile with that renewed self-confidence he went back and he called on more customers, he sold more of his product, he delivered it and collected accounts receivable and he turned his business around, and, at the end of the year, he never even cashed the check, and 12 months passed and he went back to the park with that check still uncashed. It transformed his life and he waited on the bridge and after he'd been there for a while, it was eight o'clock at night and they were supposed to meet, and this old man comes up and says, "how are you," and he said, "I'm fine," and he said, "I've got to tell you what happened to me," and he told him the story, and he said, "here's the check, I never used your check, but thank you very much because you transformed my life," and he said, "well you're more than welcome." Then a nurse comes winging out of the park and said, "there you are," and she took him by the arm and said, "now you come back here, you're not supposed to have left the home," and she turned to the business man and said, "he's a patient in our senior citizen's home and he's got dementia and every so often he gets away and he wanders through the park telling people he's John D. Rockefeller and writing them checks." She said, "I'm sorry if he bothered you," and she took him away and disappeared back into the dark. He stood there and he'd had a bogus check from a bogus John D. Rockefeller for a year, but the experience had given him so much self-confidence, he'd gone back and built up a successful business. And there are all kinds of ways that you can apply that, but that was the story and the thing is, I was speaking to somebody the other day who was in a real funk and his grandfather said to him, "Bill, I believe in you and I know you're going to be a great success no matter what happens, just stick in there," and he said he walked away with that and he was in the pit of despair with his grandfather's blessing and he went back and he just became an animal for his success, he worked hard, he overcame discouragement, and he said, "whenever I felt discouraged, I remembered that moment where my grandfather put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I know you're going to be a big success,'" and that one influence, one time, one person, one grandfather, eventually made him a big success in his business. So I'd say to other people, you never know when just a word from you can make all the difference in the world, a word of encouragement where you'll look them in the eye and you'll say, "you can do it, you're going to be a big success in this business," and people say, "really?" and sometimes they walk away and that locks in and they're never the same.

Rachel Salaman: The book is full of lots of interesting ideas and tips, to just highlight a couple of other ones, there's an idea called "inverse paranoia" that you talk about, how does that work?

Brian Tracy: A paranoid is a person who is convinced that the world is out to get them, that everything that happens is part of a conspiracy, and an inverse paranoid is a person who is convinced that the world is out to help them succeed, and that everything that happens is part of a plot and the plot is to help you to be successful. Every setback is part of a plot that's been manipulated by some great power, every failure that you have is part of a plot to teach you something you need to learn to be successful, so if you have that attitude you look at everything in your life, and sometimes people say, "I had a really hard childhood," and many people are held back, if not for years, their whole life because they had a difficult childhood. So I will say, "did anybody here have a difficult childhood, problems with your parents, father, son, brother, sister, grew up and had people that lied to you, cheated you, betrayed you, relationships that didn't work out, businesses situations where you lost all your money, jobs where your boss…" and I just keep saying these things and eventually everybody in the room has got their hand up. So I said, "well, get over it, if you had a hard childhood, you should get up every morning and say thank you god for my hard childhood because it made me stronger, it made me better, it gave me better determination and greater persistence." People that grow up with easy childhoods become weak and molly coddled when they grow up, people with difficult childhoods and you have to overcome adversity and struggle and get to the person you are today, those are the people that succeed greatly, and sometimes the whole audience looks at me you-know-what-faced, and they go, "oh, I never thought of that, here I've been whining and complaining about my mother and my father, and for years I never realized that that was the greatest thing I could ever have had, to have a difficult childhood." Because, with a difficult childhood you grow up straight and strong, you grow up with tenacity and persistence, you grow up with the qualities needed to overcome that negative childhood, and people literally transform. They didn't realize that by looking at it differently, just simply turning the vase around and seeing the picture on the other side, that their difficult childhood and all their difficult experiences were blessings that taught them priceless lessons that they can use to dramatically improve the quality of their life for the rest of their lives, and, if you have that attitude that everything that happens to you is a blessing, even the worst setbacks, you'll find in retrospect that sometimes the most difficult setbacks or periods of your life turned out to be the foundations or the stepping stones that led to your great success later on, and you look back and you say, "thank heavens that happened, because if that hadn't happened, which was very painful at the time, then this wouldn't have happened and I wouldn't have done this," and you start to shake your head and say, "oh my god," to complain about that negative thing that happened, that was the greatest blessing that ever took place in my life. And that kind of an attitude causes you to look into it for something good and when you look into it for something good you'll always find something good, and you'll feel better about yourself and your self-confidence will go up and you'll be a happier person.

Rachel Salaman: And linked to that is this idea of the importance of taking responsibility which comes over really strongly in your book. Could you link for us how taking responsibility has an impact on self-confidence?

Brian Tracy: Yes it is so important, in fact it's the turning point in life, it's almost like you go down a road in life, you go from being a child and when you're a child your parents are responsible and sometimes parents are very negative, and so parents blame all their problems on external circumstances and other people, so you can grow up believing that someone else is responsible for your problems. So at a certain point in life you come to a crossroads and one way at the crossroads is maturity and adulthood, and the other road leads to perpetual childhood, it's only when you say, "I am responsible for my own life, I am where I am and what I am because of myself, and everything that happens to me is up to me, I cannot control what happened in the past but I can control how I think and feel and act from this point forward." When you step across that line you step into full maturity. As long as you are making the excuses or blaming anything in your life on anyone else you remain a child, you remain a little child whining and crying about mummy and daddy, so what I have found, and I've studied psychology for many years, is that the root source of all negativity is blame, the root source of all unhappiness is blaming someone, usually someone, sometimes it's something, for something in your life that you're not happy about, and the turning point in your life is when you accept responsibility because you can't accept responsibility and blame others, you can't accept responsibility and make excuses, you can't accept responsibility and complain and criticize, when you accept responsibility it all stops and you become totally positive, and there's a direct relationship between acceptance of responsibility and a feeling of control over your life, and it's a direct relationship between a feeling of control and a feeling of happiness and self-confidence and you feel fabulous. Then I teach people, "now you've accepted responsibility, responsibility for what, goals, what are you going to do, what are you going to be, what are you going to have with your life, no excuses, write it down, make a plan, work on it every day and don't blame your problems on anyone else." What about the economy? Well a beautiful line from Herodotus, the philosopher, who said, "remember in times like these, there's always been times like these," so get your head out of wherever it's stuck and realize there have always been problems, success has never been easy, you're always going to have setbacks and difficulties, but you're responsible and you're responsible for learning from every experience, for turning it to your advantage, for bouncing back and if you do that then your self-confidence soars and you feel fabulous about yourself.

Rachel Salaman: So in your wide experience of helping professionals find self-confidence and success, what are the stand out tips from everything we've talked about that really make the key difference?

Brian Tracy: There are four things that I suggest. Number one, think and talk about your goals all the time, just think about your goals, the very act of thinking about where you want to be in the future and your goals and what you can do to achieve it automatically makes you happy and raises your self-confidence and self-esteem. Where does that happiness come from, thinking negative thoughts, what are negative thoughts, what went wrong, who's to blame, all the problems and aches and pains and so on, and people are whining about their lives, so think about your goals and automatically, it's like turning up your dimmer switch, you feel bright and happy. Second of all, feed your mind continually with positive material like this, feed your mind with ideas, feed your mind with good books and good audio programs and go to seminars that are taught by people that give you great ideas that you can use to improve your life. If I said to you, "if you eat really healthy food you'll have more energy and you'll be fitter and sleep better and everything else," and you'd say, "of course, everybody knows that." Well, feed your mind with excellent mental food and excellent mental food makes you feel happy and positive most of the time. Now the third thing is to look for the good in every situation, if you look for something good and this takes discipline, you have to take control of your mind, so even if something is going wrong say well there's something good in everything, I wonder what it could be, and then you look for something good and automatically your mind turns from negative from positive. And the final principle, and this principle was discovered by Napoleon Hill in his interviews of more than 500 extremely wealthy people as a foundation principle of practice by all top people worldwide, is whenever something happens look for the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty, and the wonderful thing is if you look for a lesson in even the biggest problem that you have today, you'll find that there's one or more valuable lessons that you can take advantage of to improve your life in the future, but if you're busy whining and complaining and blaming your problems on someone else you miss the good things and you completely ignore the lessons, but if you look for the lessons you'll always find a valuable lesson and that lesson can be vastly more valuable and important to you than all the cost of the problem which contains the lesson. Those are the key things, think and talk about your goals, feed your mind continually, look for something good in everything that happens and seek the valuable lesson in every setback. If you do that as a regular habit, you're going to be positive and confident and happy and incredibly successful.

Rachel Salaman: Just before you go Brian, I understand you have a free offer that you'd like to tell our listeners about if they want to learn a little bit more about self-confidence.

Brian Tracy: Yes, as a matter of fact we have a free video series online that is part of what we call the "Power of Self Confidence" system, and it's at www.briantracy.com/confidencepower, and what we do is we have three beautiful videos, one is called the "Power of Self Confidence," and the "Foundation of Self Esteem," and the "Six Mental Laws to Self-Acceptance," and they are one program after another and they are completely free, and they are beautiful programs that are condensations of these ideas which I deliver in a teaching style in a professional film studio. So if you'd like to watch these three videos, and by the way many companies will play them on their television sets for their staff and their sales staff or you can download them, you can even watch them on your smartphone. Just go to www.briantracy.com/confidencepower and download them and watch them and listen to them and you'll really enjoy them. They are literally life changing, and you can get them for your kids and get them for your family and get them for your staff, so www.briantracy.com/confidencepower.

Rachel Salaman: Brian Tracy, thanks very much for joining us.

Brian Tracy: It's a pleasure Rachel, thank you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Brian's book again is the "Power of Self Confidence: Become Unstoppable, Irresistible and Unafraid in Every Area of Your Life." You can find out more about his work at www.briantracy.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.