Give me 15 Minutes and I'll Make you Dangerously Confident

What if I told you that confidence has nothing to do with feeling ready and everything to do with doing it scared? I have built multiple businesses. I've led massive teams.

I've been on stages terrified out of my mind. And somehow I'm still standing. So, if you've ever wondered how to stay calm in a situation or how to stop overthinking or how to build real confidence, here's how.

I am here to tell you how to actually build confidence. Most people have it backwards. Confidence is the output, not the input.

A lot of people ask me, Ila, how do I build confidence? And I get it because it's just like everyone's like, "Oh, believe in yourself. You just need to believe in yourself.

" And they think that you need to write these affirmations on the bathroom mirror every morning. And listen, that's what I did when I was in my early 20s. I literally did this.

I had it written on my mirror. It was like, I am beautiful. I am strong.

I am capable. I am confident. And guess what?

Nothing changed. It didn't do anything. Having those things written on my mirror didn't do jack for how I felt the rest of my day.

And the reason for that is because confidence comes from action. And that's why I say so often your mood, follow the plan. Because if you keep the promises that you make to yourself, especially when you don't feel like doing it, that's the input that leads to the output of confidence.

And that's what most people miss. They're so busy chasing the result. It's like, if you think about it, if somebody's like, I really just want to be skinny, right?

And so that all they do is just like thinking about being skinny, wishing they could be skinny, but you're like, just get in the gym. Get in the gym, do the workout, eat the food. You can't just wish for it.

You have to work for it. So, I'll give you an example. At the age of 21, I moved across the country.

I had no job. I had no money. And I had no clue what the hell I was doing.

I certainly had no confidence in myself. And I wasn't confident in my ability to pull it off. And so, what I did is I said, "Okay, I'm at least going to put together a plan.

" So, what I did is I moved to California. I got an apartment and then I looked for every place that I could work, which was a gym because I have my degree in exercise science within walking distance. And I had to do walking distance cuz I was like, I can't afford to pay for too much gas because I don't have money.

And so I ended up getting a job at 24-hour fitness. And when I got the job, what I realized within the first two days was that the job wasn't about fitness. It wasn't about everything I'd learned.

It was actually about marketing and sales. And I was terrified because I was like, I have no idea how to do marketing and sales. And I felt like this complete imposttor syndrome.

I just felt like an out of my body experience because I was like, "How am I supposed to do this? " But at the same time, what I'm seeing is my bank account every single day. I had $5,000 and just down, down, down.

My rent was 1,400 a month, food, gas, everything else, insurance, paying off my student loan debt, all those things. Every single month, I was like, I've got three months. And so I was like, I have to learn how to do this.

And the thing is is that I knew I was like, I don't want to be the person who walks out. I don't want to be the person who quits because I knew that was just going to make me feel worse about myself. And so I put in the reps.

I said, I'm going to read five books on sales. I'm going to be there at 4:00 a. m.

I'm going to leave at 9:00 p. m. I'm going to drill.

I'm going to take every opportunity to meet with somebody who's better than me. I'm going to take all the opportunity possible to learn the skill. I was so nervous the first time I went to make my first sale that I went into the bathroom because I thought I was going to throw up.

I went into the bathroom. I didn't leave. I didn't quit.

And what happened was that I was absolutely terrified for the first 30 days. I remember the moment where I made my first sale and my manager, my team, everybody came, they all crowded around me and they were like, "You did it. " And what was crazy was that none of the celebration mattered.

It wasn't the fact that everyone was congratulating me. It wasn't the fact that I made the money. It was the fact of how I felt about myself.

It was like this vision that I had of my future self just got pulled into reality. And every belief I had about myself was broken. Right?

Then I didn't believe that I could make money. I wasn't confident in my ability to sell or to market until the sale happened. And all of a sudden, it was like more of what's possible came to mind for me.

Like I started to think about other things I could do. I started thinking about other skills I could acquire. I started to think about other things beyond the box that I had built of the vision of myself.

That's absurd to think that if I was just reading affirmations in the mirror that I suddenly would have been good at sales. Like, I put in the reps to get good at sales. And here's the thing, success does not discriminate.

Confidence does not discriminate. It doesn't care where you've come from. It doesn't care about your background.

It doesn't care about your experience. All it cares about is the fact that you put in the work to get it. So, if you see people, right, you see people when you're younger and you're like, "How is that person so confident, right?

like given all their circumstances, maybe what they look like, maybe their job, their career, they've done work that you haven't done. And that's the thing, you have to work for it. You have to put it into existence and you have to make it happen.

Here's the thing. Your brain gathers evidence, and evidence is what builds the identity and confidence over time. So, someone says to me, Ila, you know, I want to go and speak at this event, but I just I'm not confident to speak at that event.

I said, it would be absurd to think that you would be confident when you've never spoken on stage before. Of course, that's not going to happen. Our brains like to predict what's likely to happen.

If you've never done something before, your brain says, "I don't know what could happen, so I'm going to make you scared. And if you're scared, you're going to avoid it. " Which means that you won't die.

Right? Because our brains are wired for survival, not success. And so, it is crazy to think that you would actually have confidence when you haven't done the thing yet.

You will become confident once you've done the thing because your brain does it. It sees you didn't die and it says, "It's okay. You can do it again.

" Now, here's the thing. I wasn't like forever confident now because just like a muscle that you work out gets weak if you don't put it under pressure, so does confidence. Confidence is like a muscle.

So if you don't work out that muscle, it's just going to get weaker and weaker over time. So if you want to build unshakable confidence, then you need a habit that tracks the truth, not your mood. Now, what do I mean by that?

When I was 100 lb overweight and I wanted to lose that 100 lb, I said, you know what? I'm just going to freaking start doing what fit people do. I'm going to eat the way they do.

I'm going to work out the way they do. I'm going to try and even dress the way they do. And I'm gonna hope and pray it actually works, right?

Because I'm sick of being fat. But the most important thing I started doing is I started tracking every single day what I ate when I worked out. It's not that within the day I lost 50 lbs between Monday and Tuesday, right?

But I did notice that even if I felt like I overeat or even if I felt like I was slacking or even if I felt like my workout wasn't perfect because I was on a trip, I still consistently tracked and I still saw progress over time. Now maybe it wasn't between Monday and Tuesday, but I could see it between Monday and Monday or Monday and two Mondays from now. And so I saw that the line wasn't like this, the line was like this.

And over time I did make a lot of progress. And that's when I realized confidence comes from data, not dopamine. And over time, what happens is that evidence that you're feeding your brain helps override the emotional narratives that you tell yourself.

Your brain will follow the evidence. And so tracking things and tracking our progress. The reason why it keeps people on track is because your brain looks at it and it objectively says, "Oh, wow.

This is evidence. This is data. This is important.

And I'm going to believe it. " Before that, all that's happening is that you feel like even when you're making progress. Have you ever felt that way before?

Have you ever felt like you're making progress, but you still feel like good about yourself? Lots of people actually feel that way. And the reason why they feel like is because they don't track their progress because progress doesn't go like this.

So, you remember the days that you feel low, but you don't remember the days that you feel high. But if you look at the progress and you track, you see all the days that were high and then you're like, "Oh, you know what? I actually had five good days this week and really two bad ones.

" But it's just that our brains love to take the negative and make it bigger than it is. And so we have to fight that natural tendency by tracking our wins. Now, here's the thing.

If you're struggling to stay consistent and you're like, I am tracking things, but I still don't feel confident and I don't feel like I'm making progress, then my guess is this. You're trying to go too big. You're taking too big of a leap.

The fastest way to build confidence is to start with something small, so small that you can't lose. Okay? Great example of this is I had a friend who every single time he started with a new client and this is a client who's trying to lose weight.

He did not get them to try and eat less the first week. He didn't get them to try and go to the gym the first week. He didn't even have them measure themselves the first week.

The first seven days of his program, he just asked them to make their bed and take a picture. Isn't that crazy? Now, why is that?

Because he wanted to make it something so easy and so small that he knew that by the end of 7 days, they would feel good about the fact that they had made their bed every day. And so what that did is it created the confidence in that person so that they felt like they could take the next step. And people think, "Oh, it's so small.

I'm not going to feel the reward of it. " That's not the case. That's not how it works.

You will feel good no matter how small the progress was as long as you get the reward. For example, every quarter, every 3 months in my business, I decide what are my goals for that quarter, right? And it's like, okay, I have these three or four big goals that I have for the quarter that I'm going to tackle.

But it's not that I just look at it and say, did I hit it? Yes or no. I take each goal and I break it down as small as possible.

And then every single day I go in and I'm like, what have I accomplished on the way to my goal? If I have 20 steps in each of the goals I have, I get to go in and I get to hit check, check, check. And it's funny because if I look at these goals, it feels very overwhelming until I realize that almost every day I'm checking off at least one piece of one goal.

And that has helped me so much in realizing that if I were to try and tackle all four of those goals in one week, I'm going to stumble. I'm probably going to fail, right? And then I'm going to be really upset at myself.

I'm going to feel bad. I'm going to beat myself up. I'm going have less energy to attack the next thing.

But if I break it down into small steps and I just focus on, can I just accomplish one step a day? Then I realize like I feel a sense of momentum and I feel good about myself. I feel like, wow, I'm making progress.

I'm the kind of person who keeps their word. I'm the kind of person who achieves their goals. Versus the other narrative, which is you try to take on something too big and then you're like, I'm the kind of person who doesn't achieve their goals.

I don't feel good about myself. And then you spend all this time beating yourself up because you set a goal that was too big is unrealistic. The frame I use is tiny tweaks.

What is one tiny tweak I can make today? And then what's one tiny tweak I can make tomorrow? And so on and so forth.

And so like for example, when I'm trying to lose 5 lbs, I'll be like, "Oh gosh, you know what? I had too many bites of that ice cream tonight. What am I going to do tomorrow?

" I'm actually not even going to say that tomorrow I'm going to have zero dessert. I'm going to say tomorrow I'm going to have a Ghirad deli chocolate. Just one.

Another example, I have a lot of people that join my team and they're really scared of public speaking and they want to be a leader in the company. And so they're like, "Oh my gosh, I don't even understand. You told me that we have this full team meetup next year.

How am I going to get on stage and speak to the team? I can't even barely do anything. " And I'm like, "Listen, baby steps, tiny tweaks.

Here's what we're going to do. On the huddle on Monday, I want you to just run this portion. It's 60 seconds.

Then on this meeting on Tuesday, I just want you to give a shout out to one person. And then on the next week, I want you to own this portion. It's 120 seconds.

And then I want you to also give two shout outs to this person. And I've used that methodology over time where I take people from first they couldn't even speak on a meeting. To then they're running a piece of the meeting to then they're running half of the meeting to then they're running the whole meeting to then they say, "Wow, if you can run a meeting, you can do a presentation to the team.

Then they're doing a presentation to their team. And then all of a sudden, if you can do a presentation to your team, you can do a presentation to the whole team. And they're doing a presentation to the whole team.

and eventually they're speaking at our annual event. And I've used this time and time again to take people who were terrified of public speaking and turn them into people who are rock stars on stage. But it starts with something as simple as I don't say, "Let's go get you on stage.

" I say, "Let's have you speak for 60 seconds on a meeting on a Zoom call. " But that confidence that they build in doing that, that's what gets them eventually to the stage. So you now know confidence is an output, not an input.

You need to track your wins to even create that output. And you need to break those tasks down into tiny tiny tweaks to get there. But I know what you're thinking, which is what if I'm too scared to even start the baby steps?

What you need to understand is that emotion follows motion, not the other way around. Here's what I've learned. Choosing to tolerate fear and discomfort rather than trying to eliminate it is how I've been able to transform everything that I have done, everything I've been terrified from, from content creation to public speaking to running a giant company to buying multiple buildings to doing everything.

I was no less scared than you, than you watching this video. I just decided that I was willing to be scared. I decided that I was willing to be uncomfortable.

Here's the thing. Fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. Fear means your brain is working properly.

It's not wrong that you feel scared. The thing that's stopping you is the fact that you feel like there's you must get rid of the fear in order to do the thing. But that's not how your brain has been set up.

I'm sorry to tell you. Your brain is wired for survival, not success. it will continue to feel scared until you do the thing.

The fear will be the strongest before you have the breakthrough. And then what I tell people is this and what I've learned is that once you feel it, right, you step into the situation you're scared of, you step on stage, you're behind a camera, you sign the document, you can't control the fear. And so whether you want the fear to go away or not, it will.

I promise you, because that's how we are physiologically wired. So the moment you step on stage, here's what's going to happen. Say you're terrified of public speaking.

You're going to step on that stage. This happens to me every time. Mouth dry, palms are sweaty, knees weak, whatever it might be, right?

I step on stage, that's how I feel. Then within 15 seconds, my heart rate starts to go from like 190 to like 150. And then within a minute, I start to feel like I've spit in my mouth again.

And then within 2 minutes, I don't feel any of it. It's not because I try to get rid of the fear. It's because I didn't run away from the situation and I didn't try to get rid of the fear.

And so what I learned in doing all these things is that my emotions follow my emotion. That is how you behave your way into confidence. And you build up so much evidence that it would be unreasonable not to be confident.

So here's how I want this to feel for you. I want you to visualize what's the thing that you're so scared of that you wish you had confidence in order to confront it. And now I want you to picture it like this.

This is how you actually confront fear. You say, "Okay, here's this thing that I'm really terrified of, right? Maybe it's a conversation I'm gonna have with my spouse.

Maybe it's I'm going to tell my parents I'm not going to college. Maybe it's I'm going to fire somebody in my company. " Whatever it is, instead of trying to meditate or trying to affirm or trying to manifest the fear away, you are instead going to say, you know what, I'm going to take the fear.

I'm going to put it all in my purse and I'm going to take it with me to wherever I go and whatever I do. So, I'm not going to try and get rid of it. In fact, I'm going to try and take it with me because I'm still going to go do the thing.

I'm going to have the fear with me. It's just like my little friend in my purse. I know it's there.

I feel it. It's like in my stomach. It's like in my body.

I don't like it necessarily, but I'm going to take it with me and I'm going to do the thing anyways. And that is how I approach everything in life. I'm not confident because I don't have fear.

I'm confident because I do things despite the fear. Here's the thing. Building confidence is the first step to getting anything you want in life and learning the formula for how to build confidence that you just learned this video.

But maybe now you want to take that and you want to apply that to some other specific areas of your life.