Penny Casselman [00:00:08]:
Welcome to the Pivot with Passion podcast. Hi. I'm Penny Casselman. I believe everyone is deserving of a phenomenal life, and that life starts when you grab a red marker and claim what you truly desire. Regardless of where you came from, where you're at, or where you think you're headed, life is what you make of it. And when you learn to pivot with passion, your world explodes with opportunities. Go grab your favorite beverage, and let's shake things up as we explore how to pivot with passion. Hello, and welcome.
Penny Casselman [00:00:49]:
If you are new to the podcast, I am thrilled that you're here. It is an honor to have you join me. I know you have lots of options, so thank you. And if you've been with me for a while, I am pumped that you are pushing play once again this week to spend some quality time together and explore what it means to grab a red marker and pivot with passion. Welcome back. Before we go any further, I need 2 remind you. If you have been excited to get yourself a free red marker, my friend, the day this episode releases, us. Wednesday, January 31st is the last day that I am extending this offer.
Penny Casselman [00:01:39]:
So don't delay. Go rate the podcast, give it a review, and then let me know that you've done it. All the details can be found in the show notes today from the bottom of my heart, my friend. Thank you for your support. Now let's dive in. Let me give you some clues as to what we're gonna talk about today and see if maybe you can guess it before I get to the end. Here we go. It's something everyone wants.
Penny Casselman [00:02:07]:
Some people seemingly have an overabundance of this. You can't buy it. You're not born with it. And lots of people give up trying to find it in favor of settling for a life of fine. Any guesses? Yes? No? Maybe? My friend, we are talking about confidence today. Yes. It is something everyone wants, and we both know that some people seemingly have an overabundance of this. You cannot buy confidence.
Penny Casselman [00:02:46]:
You are not born with confidence. And don't we know lots of people give up trying to find it because it can be difficult, and so they settle for a life of fine. Now there's 1 thing I know to be true when it comes to confidence, and that is you cannot think your way to becoming more confident. Now you might give me a little pushback here, but, yes. Mastering your thoughts definitely helps in achieving more confidence and building and flexing that muscle. However, you cannot just think and become more confident. You have to do the thing to gain confidence. You have got to take action to start that confidence process.
Penny Casselman [00:03:38]:
So today, I wanna share my thoughts with you on confidence in the hopes that it boosts yours. At the end, I'm also going to share 3 concepts I've used to build my confidence in all different areas of my life. And I hope that by hearing what I've done, you might pick 1, 2, or maybe all 3 and begin to use them immediately to start flexing your confidence muscle in whatever area of life needs it most. It's time for a clarity cocktail. Experience tells you what to do. Confidence allows you to do it. Stan Smith. I chose this quote today for two reasons.
Penny Casselman [00:04:34]:
1, the simplicity. Experience tells you what to do. Confidence allows you to do it. And 2, because it refers to experience, which requires action. It doesn't say thinking tells you what to do. It's experience. So in psychology, there's something called the confidence competence loop. Try saying that 3 times fast or don't.
Penny Casselman [00:05:03]:
It's a little tongue twisty. Dee. So the confidence competence loop actually helps to reduce your level of fear when you're doing something new, when you're going after something that you want but have never had or have never done before. So it goes like this. You start with a goal, then you think about what do you need to practice in order to move towards that goal. Once you practice, you then get feedback. From the feedback, you hone your competence in whatever you are practicing. And we all know competence, meaning the quality of being adequate or possession of a required skill, knowledge, qualification, or capacity.
Penny Casselman [00:05:54]:
Being competent feeds your confidence. And with that, you can make anything happen. And so it's this loop that goes round and round and round until you build your confidence, achieve your goal, and stretch for the next. So what does this look like in true application? It's the old adage, how do you eat a elephant 1 bite at a time? How can you achieve it with practice in small increments. If you are terrified of becoming a public speaker but want to do it, maybe one of the first things you do would be stand on a stage. That's it. Nothing else. Baby steps here.
Penny Casselman [00:06:38]:
And then you get feedback, 1, from your own body. You'll notice how you feel when you're standing there. And if you have a friend with you, they might say, oh, did you notice you're constantly tapping your foot? You now are aware of some things that might be holding you back. And now that you know those things, your confidence kicks up a notch. Because one, you didn't die when you stood on stage, so that fear is brought down a few notches. So that might give you the confidence to think, alright. I wanna be a public speaker. I can actually stand on stage.
Penny Casselman [00:07:17]:
You go around and around. And as you practice, get feedback, your competency at the task increases which fuels your confidence, which helps you achieve any goal you set your mind to. Sometimes I think people give up. Pursuing a goal is because when they first encounter an uncomfortable feeling or a setback or who knows? Let's say you wanna become a PGA golfer and you take a lesson in your 1st swing, you completely miss the ball. Hand raised. Done it many times. But there are some people who would say, woah. Give up.
Penny Casselman [00:07:57]:
That's it. They won't get feedback. Their competent in golfing is 0. They have no confidence. Not gonna pursue the goal. Where if they had just followed that loop, they'd realize you need to practice, get some feedback, and that's where this quote, experience tells you what to do. Confidence allows you to do it because confidence is belief in yourself. And that belief allows you to take on risk or something new or something uncomfortable that you've never done before.
Penny Casselman [00:08:35]:
But by taking that risk, you'll eventually succeed because you're getting feedback. And once you succeed in a small task, it boosts your confidence. I love how it's round and around we go. My friend. Here is what I want you to know and take away from this quote. Everything you want is available to you. You simply need to shoes and take action and keep running through that loop until you find success. An experience will tell you what to do.
Penny Casselman [00:09:10]:
Confidence, my friend, allows you to do it. And now back to the episode. Cheers. Circling back to the idea of increasing confidence by taking action. One of the mistakes I've made, and I've seen this with friends and former colleagues is holding the idea that you've got to be perfect at something before you can outwardly display confidence, thinking that you must stay hidden or your efforts must stay hidden from public view because you don't want criticism, but that leaves me and them feeling frustrated and not building confidence and possibly feeling less than, which leads to giving up on the goal, the activity, the success that they wanted. And my friend, it's no wonder that I thought this, that I've seen others do it, is because in today's society, think fast fashion or social media scrolling or texting. We are trained to quickly move on to the next thing without acknowledging what we've seen, what we've done, what we've accomplished. But the question is, what would be possible in your life if you developed and flexed your confidence muscle.
Penny Casselman [00:10:32]:
So think about it. You'd have less fear in facing any obstacle or unknown, and you would carry with you armfuls of perseverance to see you through the hard times, which in turn ushers in an abundant amount of success. So now I wanna share 3 actions that I've taken over the years to increase my confidence. And perhaps you can adapt and make them work for you. So are you ready? Here we go. 1st, past proof. You, my friend, have done amazing things. And I bet given how fast paced society has become that many of your accomplishments never got celebrated.
Penny Casselman [00:11:20]:
In the past, I've actually written myself a letter reminding me of all the things that I have accomplished in my life. And let me say, after writing that letter and reading it back to myself out loud. It kinda gave me chills because so many of the things that I put in that letter are things that I was taking for granted. Things like graduating from college, landing my 1st job. But, truly, everything that I put in my letter to myself required action. It required effort. And more often than I probably care to admit I faced times where it was really challenging to move forward. I would challenge you with this exercise.
Penny Casselman [00:12:09]:
Set a timer on your phone for 5 minutes, and take that 5 minutes to write down every single accomplishment, achievement, success that you've had in your life. Now you might be wondering, I don't even know where to start, and some of the things I'm thinking are a little silly. Don't worry. I have been there. So if you're looking for places to start, one way to do it is to break up your life into decades and just start from there. 0 to 10 years old. What did you accomplish? I don't know. For me, I learned how to walk.
Penny Casselman [00:12:46]:
I learned how to talk. I learned how to feed myself and get dressed. Do you see where this is going? Those seem like little things, but I guarantee I probably put shoes on the wrong feet and wore a shirt inside out or put my pants on and wondered why I couldn't zip them up because it was in the back. You know? But all of those things, you face setbacks, you face Challenges. But as I mentioned in the Clarity cocktail, that feedback loop, I finally got it right. So, yeah, I'm gonna high find myself that I made it through the age of 10, learning a whole heck of a lot. So you can go through with decades. If that doesn't feel good, start with areas of your life.
Penny Casselman [00:13:30]:
You could say, in the financial area, here are some successes I've had. In the job area. Here are some successes I had in the personal, in spiritual, and just go through those. And I guarantee at the end of 5 minutes, regardless of how ridiculous some of these things might seem, when you start with those little things, they'll trigger bigger things for you. And, yeah, my friend, you've done some major stuff. That took lots of effort. And so you absolutely need to pause and celebrate looking at all of that past proof because that is what fuels confidence to move forward and try new things. The second thing is to play and practice.
Penny Casselman [00:14:25]:
And again, I'll refer back to the clarity cocktail, but that whole confidence competence loop, you have to go through that gobs of times, round and round and round. And because of that, it might start to feel redundant or tiresome or boring or impossible at times. So in addition to practice, try to incorporate some play because we all know it is so difficult when you start trying something new. When I first picked up a volleyball, I know I was a hot mess. I am positive I couldn't get the ball over the net. I'm positive that I could not pass the ball to the person that I had intended. But I'm so far beyond that stage that I forget the difficulty that I went through. And so when we face those difficulties now when we're starting something new as adults, we forget we've already done lots of stuff when we were younger.
Penny Casselman [00:15:26]:
That was uncomfortable and awkward and strange to get us where we are today. So when difficult things arise, when you are practicing as an adult something new, trying to build your confidence, add a little play. Like, for instance, if you're training to run a marathon yeah. First of all, that's never something I have on a vision board. Running might be my nemesis. However, if you, my friend, are training for a marathon, I know that there will be rough days. I know that there will be times you feel like giving up or skipping a workout, so maybe you grab a fun pair of socks, and that's the only time you get to wear them is when you incorporate that piece of play Into Your Practice. It doesn't have to be a thing.
Penny Casselman [00:16:16]:
Right? You don't have to go buy something. It can be a piece of music that you love, that you only listen to when you do that, or a podcast you listen to your favorite. Hey. Wait a minute. Are you am I in your ears while you're running? Okay. Just kidding. K. But you get the idea.
Penny Casselman [00:16:34]:
Try to incorporate some play into the practice as you go through that confidence competence loop. If for no other reason, to keep you sane as you move forward. So the third thing is proclaim your progress. You need to feed the loop. You need to ensure that you continually go around and around and around until you reach the success you're after. Every achievement is so much more memorable when you are sharing it with others. So think of this. If you've ever watched a comedy special on TV, I've watched several.
Penny Casselman [00:17:17]:
Most of the time when I'm sitting there watching, I'm not laughing out loud. I might crack a smile, but it's rare that I'm sitting there with tears running down my face and my side hurting because I'm laughing so hard. But put me in a live setting surrounded by friends even if I'm watching the exact Same show. Hands down, guaranteed. My cheeks will hurt from laughing so hard. My side will hurt. I might have tears rolling down my face because it's so funny. Here's the little rub.
Penny Casselman [00:17:52]:
The joke is the same. The difference between the two is that in 1, I'm in a silo. It's just me and the TV. And the other one is a collective supportive environment, and that heightens your mood. And we are social beings. Even if you're an introvert, I'm an introvert, I still need friends. I still need those moments. They might be less than others, but those times to come together, to laugh, to celebrate, to cheer each other on.
Penny Casselman [00:18:29]:
So even if you cannot share it with someone else, journal about it. Pull out a piece of paper. Write a note to yourself. I'm so proud of you today for accomplishing this. Look how much you've grown, or go stand in front of the mirror. Give yourself a high five and look yourself in the eyes. Just doing that starts to create that collective sharing. Proclaiming your progress, it's a way to help cement your accomplishments in your spiky to help you remember where you've been and now where you are.
Penny Casselman [00:19:06]:
And as you keep going through that loop and increasing your confidence, world watch out because you, my friend, are on fire. So I wanna recap what I shared with you today because as I sit here recording, it kinda seems like a lot, but I want you to walk away with some key ideas to keep you moving forward in building confidence. And the first thing is building confidence requires action. You cannot build your confidence thinking and taking no action. 2, the confidence competency loop is meant to be traveled over and over as it builds your confidence muscle. This is not a once around the track and you're done. It is a constant practice. Get some feedback, make adjustments, feel more competency, which feeds your confidence.
Penny Casselman [00:20:06]:
And finally, here are the 3 things you can begin today to flex your confidence muscle and build it up. The first one is make a list of past proof that, yeah, you, my friend, you've done some pretty amazing things. The second is play and practice. So as you're going through this loop, make sure that there is some element of fun to keep you moving forward when you hit obstacles. The 3rd is proclaim your progress. Share it with somebody. Collectively celebrate how far you've come even if it's a minute shift in what you've accomplished because it leads to progress. Here's my final thought.
Penny Casselman [00:20:55]:
I believe in you, my friend. You can create confidence on demand and stand tall in your success. I want you excited for what the future has in store for you. I'm excited for what the future has in store for you. I want you to pick up your red marker and make this week the week you choose to claim your phenomenal life. My friend. Have a stellar rest of your day, and I cannot wait to see you again next week. Friend, thanks for listening to this episode of Pivot with Passion.
Penny Casselman [00:21:38]:
If you've been feeling Buck. Exhausted or frustrated, this is your permission slip to go grab a red marker and claim the life you desire and deserve. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend, and then hop over to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts because my goal is to put a red marker in everyone's hand, and I need your help to spread the word and make that happen. Until the next episode, go grab a red marker. Get excited for your future and make your 1st move to pivot with passion.
