Episode 129: Self-Confidence, Pt. 3: If You Think You Can or Think You Can't, You're Right!

We know that assuming that people have fixed characteristics that will affect their performance is stereotyping and can limit their opportunities, and yet we do this to ourselves. We label ourselves in ways that can limit our own growth and affect our self-confidence. In this episode we'll be exploring the impact this can have and how we can work with our own self-limiting beliefs to gain more confidence.

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Transcript

(Transcript is autogenerated and may contain minor errors.)

Welcome back. We are in part three of our series on self confidence and its role in living a priority centered life. And today we're going to be talking about the role of our thoughts and specifically We're going to be looking at labels, the labels that we put on ourselves and others.  And, uh, the reason we do that and what we can do about it.  

The mind is predisposed to do this, to make quick decisions about people and to label them. And a reason for this is because it does give an advantage if you think in terms of evolution, if you are able to make a quick decision and not pause and kind of consider all the different bits of information before making that decision, it's going to help you to be able to escape danger. It's just that now in our modern world, we don't have to make as many life or death quick decisions as we did earlier. And so now we find ourselves kind of saddled by these labels and particularly when we're talking about labeling ourselves.   But first of all, let's take a look at when we're labeling others. 

Obviously, when you put a label on somebody else, uh, when you make a quick decision about them, then you are running the risk of stereotyping. This is where we get into ageism, racism, sexism, and the reason that we try to steer clear of doing that is because of the limiting effects that it can have on people and their opportunities.

If you decide, for example, that you're an employer and you say, well, you know, we should hire this person because they are this gender or this race or this age. , and you're deciding that they are going to be a better employee because of that particular unchangeable characteristic without really taking into consideration other information, then that's really limiting their opportunities, and so that's why we try to avoid stereotyping. 

None of us wants to think that we do this, but we all do this. Our minds are, again, they are wired to do this. And so the best we can do is to try to be aware, catch ourselves, and try to think more flexibly. 

I think that, in my opinion, we are more careful about this in our interactions with other people, trying not to put labels on other people, more so than we are with ourselves. With ourselves, we may not pay as much attention, and we might do this without even really giving it a second thought,  saying things like if somebody says, hey,   would you like to help us on this project, , and we say, oh, well, I'm not really good at carpentry, or I'm not really good at math or whatever it is, , then we are limiting our own opportunities potentially.

And so It's important to really try to think more flexibly before we put a label on ourselves. And I can speak from experience that for years I have labeled myself as someone who is bad at names and just automatically snaps into my head because the more that you practice this self perception, this label, the easier it is to label yourself as such. 

“Oh, I'm just lousy in names.”  And I realized one day that this is really putting myself in a little box here. If I just tell myself, “I am bad at names”, then it's kind of a self protective thing. I get myself off the hook. I don't have to worry about it. If I mess up somebody's name, it's like, “Oh, well, you know, I knew that was going to happen because I'm bad at names”. So it's a self protective thing. Just like if somebody said, “Oh, I'm not very good at sports”, then they might protect themselves from being embarrassed if they  decided just to participate in kind of a fun pickup basketball game or something and they didn't do very well. Then they could say, “well, yeah, you know, because I'm bad at sports” and that therefore they might say “I'm not going to do that in the future”, but of course you're missing out on life when you do that. 

So going back to calling myself someone who is bad at names.  I decided, “you know, this is not really being fair to myself. I work with people every day of the week. And if I keep telling myself I'm bad at names, I'm not going to try to learn names and I'm going to fall into that trap”. So I started trying to catch myself when I would think, “Oh, I'm bad at names”, I would say, “let's just set that aside and see what happens instead of automatically jumping to that conclusion”.

And in fact, I did work harder at learning names and I started to realize, “wow, I've started to remember people's names”.  So just an example. It's something to think about because when you label yourself In a particular way, you're limiting your own opportunities. You're limiting your ability to experience potentially some success. Even if you're not successful, you're expanding your horizons by trying things that you might have otherwise not tried because of the label you put on yourself.  And this can really have profound effects. 

 There's been some interesting research on this looking at students and what their views are of intelligence. There are some students who believe That intelligence is something that you're born with. You're born with a high IQ. You're born with an average IQ. You're born with a low IQ. And you're born with certain abilities: you're born with being naturally good at languages, for example. Whereas with other students, they have more of a mastery mindset. They believe that intelligence is not fixed. It's something that's malleable. It's something that can change with practice and learning.  And these two groups of students tend to perform very differently in an academic environment, as you might imagine.

If a student has a belief that intelligence is fixed, they're probably going to have a less favorable view, for one thing, of tests. They are going to be more likely to respond to not doing well in a helpless way, in a way where they're giving up. They're not going to pursue additional activities in that area if they can avoid them. Whereas students who have more of a belief that intelligence is not fixed, more of a mastery mindset, are more likely to respond to, for example, not doing well on a project,  by looking at “what are some ways that I can improve for next time”. They're more likely to set goals and to practice and to work toward those goals,  thereby ensuring that they are more likely to succeed than someone who throws their hands up and says, “yeah, I'm just not good at this”. 

So this is something to really think carefully about, because it can have a profound effect on not just academics, but goals in general.  That if we are invested in protecting ourselves from disappointment by saying “this is who I am”, by putting a label on ourselves, then we are not going to potentially experience some of the growth that we could experience otherwise. 

 Okay, so what do we do if we find ourselves labeling ourselves? And I think this is something that we all do to varying extents. The first thing is to really think about “what are the ways that I label myself? What are the ways that I might be calling myself something? Like I am not good at this, I am this whatever, and limiting my own opportunities, limiting my own prospects for moving toward a goal?”  Think about what are those labels that you're putting on yourself.

Second thing is to be committed to just watching for when that happens. You're probably going to miss that happening a lot if you're somebody who has done this a lot, for years. Okay. But anytime you catch yourself, that's a success in that you're getting more aware. And when you do catch yourself doing that, then just recognizing, “Oh, okay. There it is. There's that label”. One way to do this is you can think about, “okay, so if I'm putting a label on myself as kind of a self-protective measure, it's kind of like I've got an internal overprotective parent that is saying, “oh, you don't want to do that.  This is a math class. You may not do well in a math class. You know you're not good at math.” If we catch ourselves doing that with that label, we can just recognize, “oh, there's that overprotective parent part of me” and just be like, “yeah, whatever. Okay, whatever.”  And just, you know, turn our back on it. Just be like, “I'm just gonna try it.” 

Another approach can be if you imagine that this chatter, this self-limiting chatter is like a radio station playing in your head -  the “I'm not good at” radio station, for example. “Here's that’ I'm not good at radio station humming along in the background in my head’.    If you recognize that you're doing that to yourself, saying, “I'm not good at this”,  then you'd say, “oh, there's that radio station, 24/7, I'm not good at this radio”. And we can decide,  are we going to crank up the radio with this obnoxious stuff that we don't like, um, and give it more attention? Or are we going to just let it play in the background, because you're probably not going to be very successful at turning it off completely. 

So we can just say, “alright, I'm just going to let that play in the background. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing.”  And with practice, you may get better and better at that. Just like when you go to a coffee shop, and they're playing music that you dislike, but you're like, “well,  I brought my laptop, I'm here to get work done, you know, and they're probably not going to change the music on my account.” You know, you get into your work and then it starts just being in the background. You're not noticing as much. Maybe once in a while you're like, “yeah, I don't like this kind of music”, but you just get right back to your work. So same thing with our thoughts. It's much easier to just let them play in the background and not turn our attention to them by turning the volume up. Much easier to do that than to try to turn them off or get into an internal battle with ourselves, saying, “oh, I shouldn't be thinking that thought. Oh, that's self limiting.” “Oh, but you know, but I am, I'm really not good at math”. “Yeah, but it's self limiting”. I mean, just don't feed that energy. Just let it play in the background. And then just keep doing what's important to you.  

All right. So I hope this gives you some food for thought about the role of your thoughts in your self confidence and in your likelihood of being able to focus on your priorities and grow. Next time, in our last installment on this series on confidence, we're going to be talking about taking action. What is the role of the kinds of behaviors, the kinds of habits that we do, and the action steps that we set up for ourselves? How do these play a role with our confidence?  I'll see you next time.