053: Creating CONFIDENCE to not care what people think • Passion Design Project

Do any of you work jobs that have a lot of rules? I haven’t been involved in the corporate life too much, and a lot of my work has been very loosely regulated. However, last night I was at work and there was an auditor there.

Prior to the shift, our supervisor gave a little pep talk, telling us tips on how to succeed and what we need to watch out for particularly for what she’s going to be looking at. I don’t know much about auditors, I feel like they’re sorta like watch birds who make sure that you follow the rules and don’t have quite as much fun and freedom as you’d like.

The shift began and the funniest thing started to happen. Everyone was messing up. Super obvious mistakes, basically nothing could go right.

Now, this auditor is just a little old lady with a raincoat on standing outside in the rain watching us work, taking some photos with her little digi cam. Harmless. And yet we can’t do a darn thing on point. Everything was taking twice the amount of time it usually takes and the simple teamwork that usually happens completely fell apart.

It wasn’t until we finished up and I was walking back inside that I just started laughing to myself realizing what just happened. It was so funny to me that things that we usually do so simply became huge stumbling blocks when we overthought about them.

Immediately I started to relating this to the entrepreneurial world and thought about how often we try to please people and do the right thing when really that ends up backfiring.

Answer these questions:

Are you a people pleaser? Do you do certain things so that your parents are proud of you or so that you look good to your friends? Do you find yourself often wondering what people are thinking about what you’re doing before you start? If you answered yes to any of these, which I’m guessing you did because most people will, it could be your downfall.

I know that sounds drastic, but I’m serious!

Listen, going back to the night I just described, like I said, on regular evenings everyone’s able to function like a well-oiled machine; nobody thinks twice about what they’re doing, everyone’s really confident in their abilities and what they’re doing, and things pretty much go off without a hitch. However, when one person comes in whose opinion we care about, everyone’s confidence drops almost 100% they suddenly and unreasonably become unsure of themselves and their own skills and begin to make mistakes.

How crazy is this! Now I’m not saying that an auditor’s opinion doesn’t matter in this occasion, instead, what I’m saying is that, if we had kept our confidence and done what we knew we could, everything would have gone off perfectly like usual.

Let’s put this in perspective for a second and realize that there are two ways we can go about everything.

Since I’m an artist I’ll compare this to the art world, but please put yourself in whatever world is yours.

So say you’re an aspiring artist but you went to school for something else. You’re ready to put out some art into the world, but when you tell your parents they ask you how your job search is coming. You get that hindered feeling in the back of your mind wondering if you should be focusing on something else besides art right now. And then you think back to college; a few of your professors didn’t think you were very creative and weren’t afraid to let you know that. If they didn’t even think you were that great, that probably speaks for the rest of the world, right? And then you realize that if you post your art, your friends will all see it and might take easy jabs at you. All of your excitement for the art piece you were about to show begins to go down the drain. Your confidence drops and you begin rethinking everything. What a downer.

Now, imagine you’ve just created something and are ready to put it out to the world, but this time think about if you didn’t care what one person thought about your art. You think about the times in the past when people have praised you for your work, you remember all the sales you’ve made, and you know that no matter if some of your friends of people who see it on social media don’t like it, there will be that niche that will absolutely love it. You think about that day when your parents will ask you for an art piece, and you’ll say sorry I’m too busy (haha totally kidding), and you realize that you don’t necessarily want to be like those professors that didn’t appreciate your creativity.

Now you really want to put your stuff out into the world right? It’s because of your confidence! It’s a million times easier to express yourself when you aren’t wasting the entire time worrying what everyone is thinking about you do. And people naturally gravitate towards confident people. They just do.

I hope you can clearly see how much of a potential negative impact letting what others think can have on our success. Can you believe that we can literally let other people’s thoughts, which in reality might not even be their actual thoughts, determine what we do with our lives?

I truly don’t think we’re scared of failing as much as were scared of what people are going to think about us if we don’t succeed at what we say were going to do.

And how sad is that that we would let someone else decide our future?

Today I want to push you so hard to know that you can have the confidence in yourself all by yourself and you don’t need the validation of others to do what you want to do. I want you to care about others but I don’t want you to care about what they think about what you’re doing. It’s time to stop thinking about if people will like what you’re doing and it’s time to go give the world the best you got, mmk?

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