Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
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- Big burger! - Good burger. - From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you wanna be, escaping the drift, this is the Weekly Drop with Jon Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now, the drop. Back again for another quick, man, little weekly drop. Just me on my solo pod here. From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you wanna be, and this week we're gonna talk about confidence. Because it is, in my opinion,

The most important thing when it comes to success yesterday I was sitting in my office and my office is adjacent to where my real estate team is and I can hear the people that work for me and they're on the phone and I've got some absolute savages on the phone. I mean, they are just these guys are really really talented at communicating very quickly why the clients that choose to work with us and our team are

will have the best probable aspect or the best outcome they could have in purchasing or buying investment properties or their own property, for that matter, or selling a property. They're very good at articulating that to our clients. And yesterday I was sitting in my office and I was listening to a call, as I tend to, because they're right there so I can kind of hear what's going on. And the call that I heard, quite frankly, was just dreadful.

And what it was lacking, and this is somebody that had been with me for like a year, and what it was lacking 100% was confidence. And the reason it was lacking confidence is this is a person, probably has been struggling a little bit lately, kind of got in the wrong groove, and we're trying to refocus him and get him moving again. But it got me thinking how important confidence is to success, not just in business, but in life and everything that you do.

And if you're somebody out there that is lacking confidence, you're probably going to have a problem. This is something that I have probably been accused in my life of having too much of sometimes. So I probably can speak from a place of expertise on this stuff. So the first thing that I'm going to say is,

That mindset of confidence can be shaken so easily, not just in sales, but in life, in dating, in everything, in every aspect of life. The thing that shakes confidence more than anything else is going to be rejection. It's when you get rejected.

And you look at, you know, there's, there's millions of stories. You can recap. Michael Jordan got cut from his basketball team, you know, his high school basketball team, JK Rowling got turned on by 12 people before she finally published Harry Potter. All of that stuff is great, but the difference becomes in the lesson from all that is learning how to turn those negatives and that rejection into fuel instead of baggage.

And one of the things that I want, that I teach to all salespeople, and I think you could probably apply this to all walks of life of whatever it is, was to value the no. I mean, I don't know how you could do it with dating because I don't know what the no, I don't know what the pot, the yes would be or the value of it. But

If you're in any type of a situation where you have to sell something or make a bunch of calls and you result in the end with a sale and there's a certain number of calls or touches or whatever it is that you have to make before you get a sale.

And the problem is, especially if you're using the phone for that type of sales, is there's a lot of serious negativity. When you call people, they're like, you know, suck it, you know, F you, whatever. And they're hanging up on you and that can start to wear on you. But you've got to do two things. And the first thing I'm going to say is you've got to reframe that in a way where you've got to understand that, especially if you're making calls, they're not hanging up on you. They don't know you. They don't know you're a good parent. They don't know you're a great spouse. They don't know you're a hilarious person to go out with.

You're just somebody that interrupted them with a phone call. So if they're hanging up on you, they're not hanging up on you, they're hanging up on the phone call. So first of all, reframe it that way. But the most important thing to me that you have to do is you have to value the no. And what I mean by that is this. Let's say that you've got to make 100 phone calls before you get a yes to whatever you're selling. So that means you get 99 nos and we'll say you got to make 101 calls.

So you have one call that says yes and 100 that say no. Now let's say that when somebody does say yes, you make $1,000. So that means that every single person that told you no, you made 10 bucks.

So if I told you that your job was to call people and have them curse at you and hang up on you, and every time it happened, you made $10, would that change the way that you looked at that negative rejection? Absolutely it would. So having that mindset, and there's a book actually called Mindset that I like by Carol Dweck that talks about developing a growth mindset by looking for rejection and seeking it out as a challenge rather than as a failure. And I think if you can value the know, you can do that.

You know, the second thing that I see, and I see this a lot in my son, which is the world will give back to you what you give out to the world.

So body language is so crucial, so important in what you do and how you carry yourself. If there is one thing that I would say that we correct or try to help my son with as often as possible, it's his posture. It's always sit up straight, shoulders back, always that, always that. I hate when he hunches because if you walk around all hunched over, dude, the world is going to give you back the energy that you're putting out. And I tell people this all the time. If you want to change physically,

how the world perceives you. Do this one exercise for a week. Do this one thing, which is walk around. Imagine there's an imaginary string tied to the middle of your chest, pulling upward, not forward, but upward. So you have your chest out, your shoulders back, and carry yourself like that for a week and see how much different the world actually perceives you. Now, don't believe me. There's a book called Cuddy's Presence, and it's by a girl named Amy Cuddy.

who had a terrible car crash, a terrible wreck, a terrible early in her 20s. And she was convinced because of that that she was never, you know, it impaired her to a certain amount. She was convinced herself that she was never going to finish college. She was never going to amount to anything. So she just began doing one thing, which was develop this concept of what she called power posing, which is everywhere she was when she would prop herself up in a certain way, she would make herself look as powerful as possible.

And the way that the world reacted to her, because of that, the energy that she was putting out, not only finishing college, but becoming a best-selling author and becoming a TED speaker.

And it was all about how she presented herself to the world. So if you're having a problem with confidence, Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify is there to help you grow. Shopify helps you sell everywhere from their all-in-one e-commerce platform to their in-person POS system. Shopify has got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into bloggers.

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You know, when I think about, my favorite thing I think about is the lobsters, man. If you've ever heard the lobster story, the lobster story is there's actually a hierarchy within lobsters that some of them that carry themselves meeker, if they carry themselves meek, they actually die and get sicker quicker. They've done studies on this, probably funded by the government. So Elon's going to kill any future lobster studies, I'm sure. But they've done studies that the ones that carry themselves meeker,

they actually die faster because because they look meek, they're fearful that they'll constantly be attacked and that stress on their internal systems of the fear of being attacked because they carry themselves in a meager stance. The stronger ones do start to pick on them and they die earlier. So there's evolutionary truth in how you carry yourself. The world absolutely will reply to it. Now,

I love that people talk about a good way to establish confidence. And you hear this all the time. As I say, fake it till you make it. Fake it till you make it. Just fake it. Just act like you have everything. Just act like you're great. Act like this. Listen, I am not a fake it till you make it guy. That's not who I am. I am a...

Replicate, not imitate guy. And what I mean by that is I think if you want to get somewhere in life, if you want to get anything, studying those that have already gotten there before you, studying those that have reached that place or gotten there, I think that just makes sense. I think emulating what they do makes a lot of sense, but you don't want to fake it because people can smell non-authenticity on you. I think authenticity is, I don't know if it's still the buzzword for like five years, I

everything had to be authentic. It was like, that was the buzzword. But I think it's true. People can smell when you're being inauthentic, if you're being fake. However, if you are carrying yourself the way that you, like you see somebody where you want to be and you carry yourself that certain way,

If you are doing certain things that certain way, then there's nothing wrong with that. For example, there's some changes that I've decided to make in what I do for the upcoming year based on some goals that I have. And I've looked at some things that I do and I ask myself, okay, like here are these people that are where I want to go within a certain thing that I want to do, right?

I have the book coming out in the not too distant future. I plan on touring the book. I plan on stages. I plan on all of those things. So my thing is, okay, I need to get back into emulating, not imitating, but emulating the world-class speakers that I know. And I know a bunch of them. And I ask myself, where are they? Where do they go? What rooms are they in? How are they being perceived by everyone around them? And I've got to set myself up to be perceived the same way. If I am...

if i am it's like i guess it's a good way to say it is you can't get on the stage if you're sitting in the audience and if everybody sees you sit in the audience they ain't gonna see you on stage and that's kind of some tough decision making that i've had to make this year or for the coming up here things that i genuinely like to do but i don't think they serve my greater purpose as far as where i'm trying to get and they're damn sure not things that the people that i'm emulating do as well so you got to make that decision

And then going further with that, talking about where I'm trying to go, you know, imposter syndrome is a real thing that creeps in and damages confidence. It really does. I mean, you look at, you know, Tom Hanks has been on record many times as saying that he constantly thinks people are going to figure out that he's not much of an actor. They're constantly going to figure that out.

And I think anybody, if they're being honest, that has any level of confidence has this crisis of confidence. There's days when I wake up and I'm like, okay, so we got this book deal and the book is done.

Who's going to be like, who's going to read this thing, right? Like who's going to buy this thing? Like, is it going to, I hope it sells. And, and then, and then you hear like the beta feedback and you're like, man, that's, that's really good. And I guess that's it. So like looking for ways to get yourself out of imposter syndrome is really focusing on the things that establish your competency rather than focusing on things that potentially take it down. Now, what I mean by like what I just just said is,

If you look at this, when I have a crisis of confidence for my book that's about to come out, I look at, you know, my, my literary people that I'm working with ran it through a beta group. So like they had 50 people read it. And then these are people that just love to read books and then criticize them. The beta feedback was amazing. According to the people I'm working with, I didn't, I sat sugarcoating it. So whenever I'm having a crisis of confidence, I look back at that moment. I go, well, okay, hang on a second.

These are people who are literally being paid to pull this apart. And I got a good, I got a good report card on it from them. So that's what I choose to hang my hat on. So if you're having feeling like, man, I don't belong here. I'm not good enough to be here. I'm not there. Focus on the things that got you in the room and validate you being there. Don't focus on any shortcomings that may have. Everybody has shortcomings. Everybody's always trying to get better. I don't care who you are. I don't care what you do.

but just focus on what got you there in the first place. And the last thing I'm going to finish with is just confidence is very much about what you see in the mirror. It's about believing in the direction you're going. It's about being happy with who you are day in and day out. It's about believing in what you are. You know, my son who works for me,

It's a little challenge because some of his friends have a little bit higher paying jobs than he does. And he's a kid. So don't think I'm slave driving. I'm trying to teach him a lesson by not giving. He's earning everything he gets. And, you know, yesterday I told him, and I think he was really surprised by this. I told him, I said, man, you have the ability because you're a really smart kid. You're a good looking kid. And you're really dedicated to what you do.

If you're not happy here with what you're making, you can change this and do whatever you want to do. The world is not happening to you. You're happening to the world. And I think at its core, that belief that you are happening to the world is where confidence is born. So hopefully each and every one of you can figure out a way to find that belief. We'll see you next week.

What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.

The kind of burgers you get today tells you a lot about yourself. You're either someone who settles for sad, same old, same old burgers, or you're at a Carl's Jr., obsessed with a tangy OG Western bacon cheeseburger, demanding a house-made guacamole loaded guac bacon, fired up for the insanely hot El Diablo, or craving a classic Charm World famous star. Give in to your flavor cravings. Give your mouth to Carl's Jr.,

Get burger.