back to books

The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance

By:
Dr. Nate Zinsser
Rating:

Personal Thoughts

Summary Notes

You can be very confident on the inside and very polite, respectful, and humble on the outside.

  • Real confidence, then, is the absence of all that mental chatter and discursive analytical thought.
  • Confidence is that feeling that you can do something so well you don’t have to think about how you do it when you’re doing it. Tying your shoes, brushing your teeth
  • Confidence has relatively little to do with what actually happens to you, and pretty much everything to do with how you think about what happens to you.

Misconceptions about Confidence:

  • Misconception #2: Confidence is all-encompassing, so you’re either confident across the board in all aspects of your life or you’re not confident at all. You can develop confidence in any specific aspect of your life that you care for.
  • Misconception #3: Once you become confident you’ll stay that way forever.  The process of achieving one first victory never ends.
  • Misconception #4: Once you’ve achieved some success and once you’ve gotten some positive feedback your confidence is guaranteed to grow. Success in and of itself is not a confidence booster. It’s what you do with your success-related thoughts and memories that determines whether you feel confident
  • Misconception #5: Mistakes, failures, and negative feedback inevitably destroy, erode, or weaken your confidence. “Failures” even ones that come at very inopportune times are not necessarily confidence destroyers. They only do so when you linger on them, review them, and replay them.

Four realities of human performance that you cannot change:

  • The mind-body connection.
  • Human imperfection.
  • The action of the autonomic nervous system.
  • The delayed returns of continued practice.

How do I stop all my negative thoughts?

  • Step one: Acknowledge It
  • Step two: Silence it 
  • Step three: Replace it

The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance

By:
Dr. Nate Zinsser
Rating:
Back to notes

Did You Enjoy This?

Then consider signing up for my Monday Medley newsletter. It's a collection of fascinating finds from my week, usually about psychology, technology, health, philosophy, and whatever else catches my interest. I also include new articles, book notes, and podcast episodes.

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.