My formula for “doing epic stuff”

1. do epic stuff

2. feel better about yourself

3. build confidence

4. do more epic stuff. 

And this is what the whole concept around becoming the coolest person you know is. Once you start progressing towards the things that you want to do in life and you see yourself progressing towards these things, it helps you to build confidence in areas that will seep into all the different parts of your human experience. 

If you’re trying to build your confidence, if you’re trying to overcome fear, you can do all of the internal work and that is absolutely going to get you started, but you’re never truly going to prove to yourself how capable you are until you take action. 

An analogy for this or an example of this that I like to use is that if you had the desire to go skydiving, I mean, you could meditate on overcoming your fear of skydiving every single day for a year but it’s not truly until you jump out of the plane and prove to yourself that it’s not as bad as you thought it was going to be that the fear will truly dissipate. 

Action is the thing that is actually going to lead to you feeling more confident, having a better relationship with yourself, and becoming the coolest person you know. 

1) COME UP WITH A BLUEPRINT

The first thing that you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to come up with a blueprint. Because it’s really easy to have the excuse of like, “I don’t know what I need to do to change my life,” or “I don’t know what I need to do to feel cooler.” 

In [Pt. 2] How to get Inspired to Upgrade Your Life, we spoke all about getting inspired. Actually digging into your inner child, and going in through your own personal inspirations to pull out all of the hobbies and characteristics that you could start pursuing to actually build your own confidence and a better relationship with yourself.

Now what you’re gonna want to do then is come up with a blueprint from that inspiration. Actually sit down with your Pinterest board, if you did do one, or your journaling, and start to assess what are the specific things that I can actually take action on. 

And then what you’re doing is generating a list of things that you can actually start working towards to build your confidence. Now don’t try to change every single area of your life all at once, because you’re going to feel overwhelmed, and most likely fail at all of them. So look at this list and start thinking about the building blocks. Is there something that you can action straight away? 

What you want to do is come up with a blueprint that is almost like a domino effect, one thing is going to help you to build the confidence to pursue another thing. 

2) OVERCOME THE FEAR OF JUDGMENT

The second thing that you need to do, and this is a big one is, of course, overcome the fear of judgment, sit there and think about all of the things that you want to do in life, all of the things that you’ve been inspired by, why aren’t you doing them? Why aren’t you taking action on them? 

Yes, you may have excuses around not having enough time or not having enough resources, but 99% of the time, it’s because we have fear. And quite often that fear is the fear of judgment. 

You honestly just need to get over the idea that everybody is thinking about you. What you’re doing, when you’re thinking that everybody is constantly focused on you is you’re giving your power away, you’re literally allowing other people or your perception of what other people are thinking to control your entire life. 

A little exercise that I have for you to allow yourself to start overcoming the fear of judgment is a really traditional coaching exercise that you can do with yourself. You obviously just need to slow down and assess when you’re allowing the fear of judgment to get in the way of you doing the things that you want to do. But really what you’ve got to start with asking yourself is “What is the worst that can happen if somebody judges me?” 

Do this as a journaling, exercise voice, record yourself, whatever you need to do, but write the answers down to that. I’ll feel shame. I’ll feel embarrassed. Maybe they won’t like me, I’ll feel lonely. I’ll feel ostracized… Write all of the things, then you want to ask yourself, is this true? 

Most of the things you’ve written down wouldn’t even be true. Being really honest with yourself is a really great way to dissipate that fear, and then continue the questioning process. Even if it is true, what’s the worst that can happen? 

You know, you’ve really got to start digging into these fears that you’re allowing to control your life because quite often the things that you’re fearing you’re over-catastrophizing what they’re going to lead to. And I want to remind you that most of the time, you’re actually making an assumption. 

When it comes to working on yourself you know whether it is that you want to start new hobbies that you want to start a new creative pursuit that you want to start to develop your characteristics, or whatever it is that you were inspired by, and is within your blueprints, something that you have to slow down and start to recognize is when you start to make excuses. Most of the time our excuses are where we hide our fears. And when you allow yourself to constantly come up with excuses, you just push yourself further and further away from progressing in the thing that you desire to do, and therefore building your confidence and becoming the coolest person.

Here’s the thing, yes, life is busy, and we all feel overwhelmed and stressed at times. And there quite often is a legitimate reason for you not to be able to do the things that you want to do. 

But here’s a very clear distinction:

When you start to recognize that you’re making excuses. One of the most common ones is I don’t have time, say you did want to start a hobby, maybe you wanted to start working out and going to the gym. And you constantly found yourself saying, “I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough time.” Pause in that moment. And then ask yourself, I’m telling myself that I don’t have enough time to go to the gym today. Do I feel relieved or disappointed? 

Be really honest with yourself here, if you feel any sensation of relief, that you don’t have enough time to go to the gym, it is probably because you have succumbed to your fear. And your fear is feeling relieved because you don’t have to do the thing that maybe you’re a little afraid or embarrassed to do. But if you feel sheer disappointment, it may just be very well that today, you just don’t have time. 

So when you’re coming up with excuses not to do the things that
you want to do, make sure you’re assessing whether you are making that decision from fear, or whether you legitimately just have an excuse for not being able to do the thing. 

3) EMBRACE YOUR OWN PACE

Step number three and this is one of my favourite things of all time. This is something that I speak about all over the internet because it honestly is my philosophy on getting to success in whatever arena you’d like to get to success in. And that is learn to embrace your own pace.

I think one of the reasons why so many of us aren’t progressing in what we want to do is because we have these unrealistic expectations of our development. And then because our expectations are not meeting the reality, we feel so disappointed, then we start to compare ourselves to other people. And then we give up. 

We live in a society with social media glorifying overnight success. Most people are just showing us the outcome. And very few people are actually showing us the result. You just need to embrace your own pace. 

Maybe you literally don’t have as much time as someone else to dedicate to your business or your hobbies or your personal development. And that’s okay. But like the book, The Slight Edge talks about even making the progress 1% every single day is absolutely better than nothing. And remember, the goal of actually taking action and things that are going to build your confidence is seeing yourself grow. When you can see yourself progressing towards something, even if it is slow it’s still going to feel better than the feeling of stagnation and procrastination. 

So embracing your own pace, if you are literally taking baby steps every single day, that absolutely is going to achieve what you’re trying to achieve here. Rather than getting overwhelmed because it’s not happening fast enough and stopping altogether. That’s going to put you in reverse, that’s going to make you feel like a failure, it’s going to make you feel like you quit on yourself and then it’s just reinforcing the self-doubt and the lack of confidence that you had in the beginning. 

4) REFLECT REGULARLY

And the final thing that you need to be doing is you need to be reflecting regularly. The whole point of you pursuing hobbies and personal development. And whatever it is that you’re inspired to take action on, is so that you can build out the construct of your personality. So that you can feel proud of yourself, we as human beings still have what’s called a negativity bias. This means we generally are measuring ourselves by our inadequacies or how far we have to go and not looking at the progress that we’re actually making or the things that we’ve already mastered or have skills in. 

When it comes to you actually starting to pursue this blueprint, these inspirations that are going to help you feel like the coolest person you know, you have to have a practice for actually documenting and reflecting on how far you’ve actually come. Something that you could do is you can take videos of yourself so you can reflect back on your progression. 

Something that you could do if you’re going for more personal development or mindset shifts is that you could journal every single night, just reflect on your day, you know, were you able to manage a trigger better? Were you able to think more positively about a situation? 

And the most important part of all of this, this is honestly like the juice. When you are in a moment of fear, or self-doubt, or worried about what other people are thinking, you’ve got to use your progression in the other areas of life as the reminder of how cool you actually are. 

Now I know that seems like an outdated concept. But let me explain it with an example. Take stock of all the reasons why you ARE cool.