312: How Confidence Is The Key and How You Can Get It, Build It and Keep It
Release Date: 08/07/2025
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Thank you for listening to our Finding Brave show, ranked in the Top 100 Apple Career Podcasts! “Whether you’re on an athletic team, a sales force, or a symphony orchestra, you better be honest about what you think about yourself. What you think about yourself and what you think about all the things that happen day by day, that’s what constitutes your confidence.” – Dr. Nate Zinsser Confidence is a character trait that has relatively little to do with what happens to you, but rather it’s a function of how you think. Today’s Finding Brave guest reveals how you can change your...
info_outlineThank you for listening to our Finding Brave show, ranked in the Top 100 Apple Career Podcasts!
“Whether you’re on an athletic team, a sales force, or a symphony orchestra, you better be honest about what you think about yourself. What you think about yourself and what you think about all the things that happen day by day, that’s what constitutes your confidence.” – Dr. Nate Zinsser
Confidence is a character trait that has relatively little to do with what happens to you, but rather it’s a function of how you think. Today’s Finding Brave guest reveals how you can change your level of confidence, but first you must be aware of certain things. You absolutely can develop confidence for any situation that you care to, and our guest shares the ways that confident performers think differently from the average person in order to do this.
Dr. Nate Zinsser is an expert in the psychology of human performance who consults for individuals and organizations seeking a competitive edge. Nate’s book, The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide for Unshakable Performance, hit shelves January 2022, and has been endorsed by two-time Super Bowl Champion and MVP Eli Manning, bestselling authors Jon Krakauer and Steven Pressfield, and US Olympic Bobsled Head Coach Mike Kohn.
Nate was a regular consultant to the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Giants for twelve seasons and has been a keynote speaker for General Electric, Facebook, McDonald’s, Staples, UBS, Major League Baseball, the NBA, and many more, as well as a consultant for the FBI Academy, the U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program, (mentoring four Olympic medalists), the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, and the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit.
Since 1992, he has directed a cutting-edge applied sport psychology program at the United States Military Academy’s Center for Enhanced Performance, personally conducting over seventeen thousand individual training sessions and seven hundred team training sessions for cadets seeking the mental edge for athletic, academic, and military performance.
He also helped launch the highly successful magazine Sports Illustrated for Kids and was presented with an American Library Association award for his 1991 children’s book Dear Dr. Psych: A Kid’s Guide to Handling Sports Problems.
I’m beyond excited to bring you the first installment of this special two-part mini-series with Nate on the subject of confidence, and I’ve loved learning from a master on this topic as it’s something that I teach about often in my courses and in my career and leadership coaching. This is an excellent opportunity to learn, grow, and stretch our understanding of confidence, and I’ll see you back here next week for the conclusion of this riveting conversation!
Highlights from this Episode:
- How Nate entered this field of work and the way that a school sports team from his youth helped him understand the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies [6:00]
- The impact that your thoughts will play on the overall level of confidence that you have in yourself [10:26]
- What Nate had to do at an early age to develop a strong belief in himself [13:22]
- The key factors that influence our own systems of beliefs and approach to growth, success and progress [14:23]
- The 7 deadly sins and limiting beliefs that hold us back and lower our confidence [16:50]
- Why being socialized to the norms of society is often a formula to be mediocre [20:35]
For More Information:
Nate’s Latest Book, The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide for Unshakable Performance
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nate-zinsser-35349010/
https://twitter.com/DocZinsser
https://www.facebook.com/nathaniel.zinsser
Dr. Zinsser interviewed in Kathy’s Forbes.com blog “Career Bliss, discussing Developing a Confident Mind: Key Strategies for Experiencing Unshakable Success
Resources Mentioned:
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Kathy’s Power Gaps Survey, Support To Build Your LinkedIn Profile To Great Success & Other Free Resources
Kathy’s TEDx Talk, Time To Brave Up & Free Career Path Self-Assessment
Kathy’s Amazing Career Project video training course & 6 Dominant Action Styles Quiz
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QUOTES FROM TODAY’S SHOW:
“At the conclusion of my junior year, our wrestling team had our first winning season in a long time, and in my senior year it had another winning season. I don’t think it was so much because we were all that physically gifted, but it was just as much a function of the fact that we did not buy into that negative self-fulfilling prophecy.” [9:20]
“I don’t recall moments in my earlier childhood where I received a series of messages that really encouraged me to believe in myself. I had to work at that.” [13:22]
“We’ve got to be honest about which [limiting belief] is hanging us up, and be willing to let it go to cultivate an alternative belief.” [21:40]
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