218: The Science-Based Paths to Massive Self-Confidence with Louisa Jewell

Pete Mockaitis
Louisa, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Louisa Jewell
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.  I’m really excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re excited to have you.  And speaking of excitement, I am also a dancing enthusiast.  I learned in reading about you that’s one of your passions.  Tell me what kind of dancing are you doing and where are you doing it, and how does that unfold?

Louisa Jewell
I just love to go out with my girlfriends and dance.  And it’s interesting because we’ll even have parties at home and the next thing you know, the music is going, the 70s disco is up and we’re all dancing.  So, I just love to move my body and be free, and have a good time.  I think it’s a great way to just unplug and feel free.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great.  And so, I’m curious – when I think about the phrase, “Dance like nobody’s watching”, and we’re talking about confidence here – do you see a connection between the two?

Louisa Jewell
Well, I think that when I’m dancing it’s about unplugging, and I think it’s so important to unplug.  Like on the weekends I don’t read email if I don’t have to, unless there’s something really critical going on after the weekend.  But I like to just unplug and get away from it all, and I think that is so important to be able to re-energize yourself.  And when you have that energy, that positive mental energy, and also when you’re moving your body and feeling really good in your body, it does contribute to happiness.  So I think they go hand-in-hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, and I buy that, certainly, in terms of when I’m dancing and feeling the fun and the rejuvenation and cutting loose.  So, totally connect to that.  And I want to hear all about your new book here, Wire Your Brain for Confidence.  That is such a cool title; I mean, I think we all want some more confidence, and wiring the brain is cool.  So tell me, what’s the big idea inside your book, and why now?  Why is this important?

Louisa Jewell
Well, Pete, when I was young I had a lot of confidence.  I worked hard in high school and universities, that I could get a good job, and I always had a desire to be a strong, independent woman.  I always wanted to know that no matter what I could take care of myself or my family, whenever I needed to.
But then when I would go home at night, I was plagued with self-doubt, which manifested in just constant questioning.  I questioned everything that happened that day.  If something bad happened or if there was even a small adversity, I would ruminate about it, and that is when something happens and then you think about it over and over and over again.
And so here I was – I had confidence, but self-doubt was robbing me of my happiness.  And self-doubt was always stopping me from going after my big goals and dreams.  So while I was overall confident, I questioned why am I stopping myself from going and doing that thing over there that I really want to do, that is something that is a dream and a bigger goal that I have?  And so I was curious about self-doubt and how it was stopping me from going after my big goals and dreams, and I realized that I had to learn and develop a different kind of confidence.
And when I went back to school and did my Master of Applied Positive Psychology degree at the University of Pennsylvania, I discovered that there’s different kinds of confidence, and I discovered a much more action-oriented kind of confidence and more situation-specific confidence, and it’s known as “self-efficacy” in the science.  And once I learned the formula for that, I really started going after everything I wanted without the questioning, without the anxiety, without the stress.  I had learned how to have this calm, peaceful, powerful confidence as I went about accomplishing.
And that’s when I realized that really confidence goes hand-in-hand with happiness.  You see, when we’re not afraid to professionally stand up for ourselves, or to confidently say, “No, I don’t want to do that” or, “Yes, I want to do that, even though I’m scared out of my mind to go do it” – when you have the confidence to do those things, you fashion a life for yourself where you can show up in the world as your true authentic self and you can create the life that you authentically want to live, and that is what I felt was true happiness.  And when I discovered that formula, I knew that I had to write about it and share it with the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood, thank you.  And so, that sounds like some great stuff – calm, peaceful, powerful confidence.  And you talk about different types of confidence and self-efficacy, and I’ve read a little bit from Dr. Albert Bandura and the research on self-efficacy, and it’s cool stuff.  So, could you maybe orient us a little bit in terms of the distinction you made there, in terms of different types of confidence, and what conference is and isn’t, just to frame it all up?

Louisa Jewell
Exactly, yes.  So, general confidence is just a feeling that we feel that we are capable and that we have the abilities and skills to be able to do what we need to do in general in our lives, we can confidently cope with what’s going on in our lives.  Now, self-efficacy is a little bit different, because self-efficacy is really our beliefs that we can be successful in any given situation.

So for example, I might feel very confident overall myself, but when it comes to dating now, in this new age of online things, I don’t have the self-efficacy, I don’t have the confidence in that particular thing.  So self-efficacy is very domain-specific – it’s, “Do you feel and do you believe that you can be successful in that particular domain?”  And that’s the difference between kind of just generally feeling confident, and then going after something that you really want and feeling, “Do I really believe that I can be successful in that area?”  And your beliefs about that really change all of your behaviors around that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, interesting.

Louisa Jewell
So, I specifically focus in on self-efficacy in my book.  And so, I really refer to it as more situation-specific confidence, more action-oriented kind of confidence, and I really go through the entire formula.  A lot of it is bringing to light Albert Bandura’s incredible research on this topic.  And again, I know for me once I figured out the formula and started to apply it in my life, it changed everything, and so I really wanted to just bring that formula to a more general audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, intriguing.  So now, I want to hear this formula in great detail, but maybe before we jump in, can we sort of diagnose maybe the opposite – when it comes to self-doubt, what’s that about?  Where does it come from, does everybody have it?  Can we maybe diagnose the challenge first?

Louisa Jewell
Sure, sure.  So first of all I want to say that self-doubt is not necessarily a bad thing, right?  A little bit of self-doubt is that voice in your head that says, “Wait, are you sure you’ve practiced enough for this?  Are you sure you’ve studied enough?  Have you worked hard enough?”  A little bit of self-doubt actually propels us to work harder and perform better, so it’s okay to have a little bit of self-doubt.

Now, what you don’t want is you don’t want to have chronic self-doubt, and that’s when you’re questioning everything, and that’s when you are more focused on kind of creating your whole life around not failing.  So you have a greater focus on not failing, rather than joyfully engaging in tasks, and performing and accomplishing.  And so that’s the difference – you want to have a little bit of self-doubt; you just don’t want it to be a chronic part of your life.

And so, originally researchers thought that self-doubt was an inside job, right?  It depended on how you were raised, how you were born, that some of us maybe were more prone to experiencing self-doubt as a result, and that is true to a certain extent.  But what researchers are really starting to discover now is that self-doubt is very socially-constructed.  And what that means is that we as human beings, we have a very deep personal human need to belong.  So feeling socially connected is really, really critical to our well-being.  It’s not a “nice to have”; it’s a critical thing for us in order for us to feel happy and have those higher levels of well-being.

So if you’re about to embark on something that you think will garner disdain from your colleagues or put your abilities into question, or possibly allow you to fail in front of others – that’s very scary for us and it makes us question if we’re capable, and it puts us into a feeling of self-doubt.  And the reason why we, and this is what researchers are also discovering, is that so many people are plagued with self-doubt because things are constantly changing.  I’ll give you an example.

In the ‘90s we were real pioneers and we were trying to get more women into the field of technology.  And I was at a technology event and I was one of the organizers, and there was a sponsor who was there who said, “Louisa, we really have to meet and talk more about sponsorship.”  And I was, “Great”, I thought, “This is wonderful.”  And I pull out my paper-based agenda, and he looks at me and he says, “Really?  I mean, where is your PalmPilot?”  He put myself into question, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, here I am.  I’m not good enough now because I don’t have a PalmPilot.”  That was kind of the electronic tool of choice at the time, in the ‘90s.  And suddenly I felt I wasn’t good enough, I was questioning.  And so, it was all new.

And we find that the world is constantly changing, so it constantly puts into question, “Are we good enough?  Are we meeting the standards?  Do I need to know something else?  Do I need to be something else?”  And so when we have all of that happening, it’s natural for us to have these feelings of self-doubt on a regular basis.  So, it’s not about whether you’re ever going to eliminate self-doubt; it’s about really learning, “How do we manage it so that we don’t have stress and anxiety over it?  What are the tools that I can practice on a daily basis, so I can keep it in check?”

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  Well then, let’s hear – what is the sort of step-by-step program to getting more self-efficacy going?

Louisa Jewell
Well, so I talk about the entire formula in the book, but one of the best sources of self-efficacy for us is to actually go… So say for example you have very low confidence in tennis playing.  I have very low self-efficacy in tennis playing.  Now, what is important to understand is that there are some things that are more important to our self-esteem than others.  My self-esteem is not invested in tennis.  If I play a poor tennis game, doesn’t bother me.  I don’t think badly of myself.

Whereas if you tell me that I didn’t do a good job in one of my speaking gigs, that might really hurt me.  That might affect my self-esteem if I get some really bad criticism around that.  So, there are some things that we’re more highly invested in than others, and so different things that happen to us will affect us more or less, depending on how invested we are in it.

But say you want to go and you want to try, say you want to be better at tennis ‘cause it’s really important for you and you really feel strongly that you want to get better at tennis.  Then the first thing is to really go and try and do it.  Tennis might be a bad example, but say for example you’re stopping yourself from going and trying tennis because you think, “My gosh, I’m going to get to the club, I’m so horrible, I’ve never done it before.  My mother always told me I was uncoordinated, so I’m really going to look like an idiot out there on the court.  There’s no possible way I could even fit myself into that little white suit, so forget it, I’m just not even going to go and try it.”

And so, that can stop us when we’re just thinking about going after and doing something.  Just thinking about all the things that could go wrong can stop us, but the best way to build your self-efficacy is to go and do it anyway.  And people say to me, “Well, thanks Louisa, that’s great, because if I had the confidence, I’d be going and doing it.  So, please tell me something different.”

So really the strategy is to take a baby step.  So maybe getting out there in the club and starting lessons, is maybe too big of a jump for you because you don’t want to be embarrassed.  Maybe your first baby step is sitting at your garage door or in front of a brick wall, hidden away somewhere where no one can see you, and you just start hitting the ball, right?  And so, that’s a baby step – nobody’s watching, nobody has to see you.

You can start watching some videos.  So we also know that role-modeling can be very important for us when we’re trying to build our self-efficacy.  If I could see a woman who’s my age just learning how to do tennis, if I can find some YouTube videos around that – I can say, “Well, if she can do it, I can do it.”  That builds my self-efficacy when I see others just like me being successful at something.  But if I can take a baby step towards learning something new or towards moving towards a certain goal…

For example, I always wanted to write a book my whole life, and it was kind of scary for me to think about it.  And so, what did I do?  Well, I had someone who encouraged me to write an article for Positive Psychology News Daily, and that was a baby step for me, to put something out there online.  And I learned a lot about how to write an article, how to respond to Internet criticism, how to respond to people who had commentary and opinions about what I wrote about.  It’s kind of baptism by fire, but it was a great baby step for me.  And I just kept writing more articles, and then I started writing chapters of books – both academic books and non-academic books.  And that was helpful; that sort of took myself to the next level.

So, it’s about taking baby steps, feeling good about it, learning from each step and then saying, “What’s the next baby step that I can take that will teach me something new?”  Because once you start to learn something new and build on that, and then you learn something new and build on it, the next thing you know – those 10 baby steps have propelled you a big leap forward in feeling confident about what you’re doing, ‘cause you’re feeling competent about what you’re doing, and that kind of competence can really fuel your confidence.

Pete Mockaitis
What I like about the baby step example is that you can experience a win, a victory.  I did that – I hit the tennis ball against the brick wall.  And that was what I set out to do, and I did it, and therefore I succeeded.  And so I think that feels good.  I remember one time a friend of mine – shout out to Ronnie – persuaded me to do some hot yoga one day.  I was like, “I’m not very flexible and I’m also not very good at dealing with being hot.  This sounds like something that really wouldn’t be super enjoyable.”  He was like, “But it just feels so amazing, you should check it out.”  So it was like, “Okay, because we’re buds and I want to see what your life is like, and I’ll do this.”

And what I loved about the instructor was he said, “Oh, this is your first time?  Okay, well, your goal today is to remain in the room for the hour-long session.”  And I said, “That’s awesome.”  Then I see everyone doing all these crazy bends that I don’t feel capable of doing, but it’s like, “Hey, all I have to do is stay in the room.  The guy in charge said so, so it’s all good.”

Louisa Jewell
See, the instructor knew about self-efficacy, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, absolutely.  And then I did feel more capable to go do a couple of yoga classes when my brother invited me.  It was like, “You know what?  Sure, it can be just fine.”  And I’m still no master yogi, and I’ve only done a few ever, but it’s sort of not like a spooky thing for me, having had a bit of that experience.

And I was really intrigued by your point about there’s some things we’re more invested in than others.  It’s like we’ve attached our self-esteem to that.  And we had Tom Bilyeu of Quest Nutrition, and a huge believer in Carol Dweck’s mindset thinking, talk about some of the similar principles when it comes to self-esteem and what you build it upon.  And as you’re talking, what’s connecting for me is that I think sometimes maybe we don’t like what we see, in terms of what our self-esteem is built upon.

And I guess what I’m thinking for example – I’ve noticed I have a weird tendency to not be great at returning products that don’t quite work, they don’t quite fit, they’re defective or didn’t do what I was hoping they would do.  And as we chat, it seems like for me it’s linked to… I guess I have some self-esteem attached to, “Hey, I’m capable of being really creative and doing great research and discovering things and solving problems and making that be optimal, given all of the time, money, space, resource type constraints.”

And so when I buy a product to solve a problem and then it doesn’t work, it really does kind of feel like a failure, like, “Ah, I got beat.  I lost this one.”  And so, with the returns, part of it is ‘cause it’s just a hassle to try to find a box and do all of that, but part of it is because it kind of hurts a little bit, just like I have to look at that failure again, when I kind of want to just shove it aside and move along in a hurry ‘cause it’s a little bit more emotionally plus.  And this isn’t racking me with tremendous distress, but it’s there.  I can feel it.

Louisa Jewell
It’s something you’ve noted, yeah.  Okay, I’ve got a great tool for you.  You want to hear it?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it.  Yes, please.

Louisa Jewell
Okay, okay.  So, you pride yourself in researching and saying, “I think this tool is it.”  And so, you take a certain amount of pride in that; that’s part of your self-esteem, it’s part of your identity to say, “I’m good at this.  I’m good at researching products and I know what to order.”  And so, when it backfires on you, of course it’s natural for you to feel like, “Wow, I thought I was good at this, and here I am.  This tool really didn’t work.”  And what you’re doing there is you’re making your self-esteem contingent on your accomplishing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Louisa Jewell
So you say, “If I do a good job at researching and the product is good, then I feel good about myself.  And if I do research and the product comes back and it’s bad, I feel bad about myself.”  You see, you’re allowing your self-esteem to be contingent on how well you do.  So if you can make your self-esteem non-contingent on your accomplishments, then you can say, “I feel like I’m pretty good at this, and I feel pretty competent at this.  I just don’t always get it right, but that doesn’t mean I’m not good at this 85, 90, 95% of the time.  It’s just sometimes the marketing materials don’t always match how the thing works, and I’m okay with that.  And I’m not always going to get it right; there’s stuff that’s kind of beyond my control.  But I still feel good about myself, whether it goes well and whether it goes poorly.”

So the more we can separate ourselves whenever we’re performing anything… So think about a new comedian for example.  New comedians have a hugely difficult job – at first they’re terrible, right?  I mean, you start off – you’re not very funny probably, if you’re brand new.  But how do you learn?  You can only learn by going and seeing what people laugh at.  So, you kind of have to be out trying it, but the more you can just book a gig after gig after gig and just keep learning without feeling bad about yourself, you are just going to be so much farther ahead than someone who just feels deflated and horrible after every performance.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.  That sounds like a dream, and I know many listeners here, when they’re honest in some conversations we’ve had, it’s like there’s a bit more self-esteem is wrapped up into, particularly job, career, work performance than we’d like at times.  So, it sounds like you were sort of giving yourself a nice little chat about what things mean.  What are some of your other favorite tools and tactics for attempting to make your self-esteem non-contingent?

Louisa Jewell
Well, I think what is really so critical to bouncing back, especially after a failure or a disappointment, is what you say to yourself.  And unfortunately, most of us treat ourselves horribly after a failure or a disappointment.  Something happens at work and what are we saying?  I was talking on the phone earlier with someone today and they were saying, “Oh my gosh, I’m such a loser, this happened.”  And to call yourself names like that, which again, all of us do it – all of us just beat ourselves up and say things to ourselves that are very unproductive.  And that can bring you down a rabbit hole, bring you into a downward spiral into negative emotions, when you’re just beating yourself up.

So I always say to people, “Remove that dialogue from what you say to yourself after a disappointment, and instead replace it with something constructive.”  So it doesn’t mean that you have to be nice to yourself and only say nice things, which I think is also very important – I think self-compassion is critical to bouncing back quickly – but to just say to yourself, “Okay, you know what?”… I’ll say sometimes – something will happen and I’ll think, “Okay Louisa, did not go as planned.  Nice try, but that didn’t go well.  So, what are you going to do next time?”, instead of saying, “You’re an idiot, how embarrassing”, etcetera.

I don’t do that.  Instead I say, “Alright, what are you going to do next time?  Where did this go wrong?  What are you going to fix?  And what did you do well?  How can you do more of that?  And what are you going to do next time?  Who do you need to talk to you?  I think you need help on this; maybe you should speak to Joan over there, she would have some good ideas around this.”  And see if there are ways that I can just be very constructive with my own criticism, and that helps me stay in the right energy to get right back up, get back in the ring again and just keep persevering.  The more we just sit in that negative spiral, the worse it is.  Pete, do you find you feel like doing anything when you’re in a really bad mood and you’re saying horrible things to yourself?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no.  I think it happens more so when there’s just maybe exhaustion, in terms of, it’s just been non-stop, go, go, go, go, go.  And I need a rest.

Louisa Jewell
Yeah, and that’s very true.  And I think a lot of people don’t think about the physical side of being resilient, it’s very true.  If you’re not eating well, you’re not sleeping, you’re not moving your body, you’re not exercising, you’re absolutely right – we don’t have any physical energy to help us be resilient and bounce back, you’re absolutely right.  So I think the more we can stay in that good energy physically and mentally, the easier it is for us to just get back up and keep going and trying again and persevering.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  Now Louisa, these are so, so good.  So watching what your self-esteem is affixed to, hitting the internal dialogue and keeping it sort of focused on being constructive – what can we do, where can we go, taking baby steps, role-modeling.  Can you share with us, are there any other sort of top tips or tools you’d really recommend for boosting self-efficacy?

Louisa Jewell
Yes, another thing that’s really important is visioning.  So, people talk about that, how sit and do a mental rehearsal.  So, if I’m about to embark on something, I can sit quietly and I can mentally rehearse it, and I mentally rehearse myself having a successful performance.  That boost self-efficacy, because often times our brain is kind of tricked into believing if I believe I’ve already done it before, then that’s just like as if I’ve tried it before, and that is going to boost my confidence.  I can kind of trick my brain to say, “You know what?  You’ve done this before, so you can do it again.”
So, it’s not as powerful as actually going out and doing it and having a successful experience, but it is very powerful in terms of propelling that kind of self-efficacy that you need to move forward.  And I find that when I can get myself into a rut, if I’m feeling like things are not going as planned, every morning I engage in that visioning to keep myself, and that completely changes my physiology and it puts me in a new state of mind, that then I engage in the behaviors necessary to make stuff happen.
So visioning can be very powerful.  And the research shows not just visioning the end result – a lot of people will say, “Just focus on the end result” – but in fact research shows that also envisioning the process of how you got there.  So imagining the process that you would go through, even though you’ve never tried it before – just imagining the process that you would go through actually is more effective than just envisioning the outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you.  Well now, tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Louisa Jewell
You mention the work of Dr. Carol Dweck, and I think that is really important.  So she talks about this idea of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset.  And a fixed mindset is really believing that you’re kind of just born a certain way, and if you were born with it – then you’re lucky and you’ve got it, and if you weren’t born with it – well, too bad – you can’t really get it.
And when I was young and I read Carol Dweck’s work, I realized, “My gosh, I have a fixed mindset.”  I really believed you’re kind of born a certain way, and yeah, you could kind of get better at stuff, but not really.  And until I started to learn about her research around the growth mindset, and that actually if we have a different belief that we can get better at things, that we can work on things and become smarter at things, then that’s when my whole life started to change.  And I found that very, very enlightening.  So I think her work is very important.
And I did an interview with Carol Dweck a couple of years ago and I said, “Carol, your work really resounds with the self-efficacy research, Albert Bandura’s research.”  And she said, “Well Louisa, we were colleagues at Stanford for years, so of course his work influenced my work and vice versa.”  And so the self-efficacy research really goes hand-in-hand with Carol Dweck’s work on the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect, thank you.  Well now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Louisa Jewell
Yes, so one of my favorite quotes that I discovered when I was very young, is this one: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.  Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.”  And I love that quote, and that’s by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  And I’ve just always loved that quote, that I think that when you have an idea and you have the confidence – go for it, and persevere, and be committed to it, because once you do that it’s amazing how so many things can come together for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, thank you.  And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Louisa Jewell
Oh my gosh, I have a million studies that I just find so intriguing.  But I really think one of my favorite studies of all time was conducted by Robert Rosenthal in the late ‘60s – we call them the Pygmalion studies.  And what he did was he really wanted to test how beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies.
And so what he did was he went into a school, 18 classes, and he told the teachers that he was giving all of the kids a kind of basic, what they call, a “Fast Start test”.  And depending on who did well on this little test, this would determine whether they would grow the most and learn and expand their IQ more than the other kids in the class.  And so he told the teachers this and he administered the test to every student in the school.  And then he told the teachers who the top 10 kids were in the class, and he told the teachers, “You can’t tell them that they’ve been identified as the Fast Start students.”
And so then the year goes by and they test the kids again and indeed, those kids actually did better than the other kids in every single class.  And what he didn’t tell the teachers is that he had actually chosen those kids completely at random.  And so what was very interesting is the teachers, having a certain expectation now of these children – they were the ones who responded differently to the kids.  This was the learning from it, that they responded differently with certain expectations, and then the kids ended up meeting those expectations.  So, it was a very, very interesting set of studies, and it has been replicated many, many times over the decades, of what we believe, and even what others believe of you, can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.  And how about a favorite book?

Louisa Jewell
Well, the favorite book that I’m reading right now is a book called Behave by Robert Sapolsky.  So Robert Sapolsky is, I guess, a neuro-biologist – I’m sure that’s not exactly right, but that’s how I see all of the work he does.  He wrote an incredible book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers many years ago that really, really, really enlightened me about how destructive stress can be in our lives and what to do about it.  And now he’s written a book called Behave, and it’s so interesting to understand the biological foundations of our behavior.  Really, really fascinating stuff.  I’ve always loved Robert Sapolsky’s work, so I just find it very fascinating, the whole thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.  And how about a favorite tool?

Louisa Jewell
Well, as I mentioned earlier my favorite tool is daily visioning.  So I sit down every single morning and I envision my short-term goals, if I have something big coming up.  I envision my short-term goals, and I also daily envision my long-term goals.  And I’ve been doing that for years and I find that a hugely powerful tool.  And as a result, I always achieve my annual goals; it’s just something that I’ve just always been doing for a number of years now.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.  And that sounds like a habit as well, or is there another one you’d mention?

Louisa Jewell
I think another habit that I have engaged in is I exercise every day.  So funny you talk about hot yoga – I did hot yoga for a year and a half every single day.  And I love the hot yoga, and now I do hot yoga and I do CrossFit as well.  Exercise I think is so critical to confidence and to feeling good and to optimal performance.  I just think it’s a very important thing for everything – for well-being and happiness too.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  And when you do your interactions with clients or you have reactions to your writings, is there a particular piece that you share that really tends to resonate with folks and you hear them reference it again and again?

Louisa Jewell
Well, I think it’s really this understanding that confidence is not about your talents, skills and good looks.  Confidence is really about your beliefs about your talents, skills and good looks.  So it’s really about your beliefs.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great.  Thank you.  And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Louisa Jewell
Well, I think the best way to get in touch with me is to go to my website at LouisaJewell.com.  And if they want to email me, I’m Louisa@LouisaJewell.com.  You can sign up for my weekly… I have a very short, short weekly podcast called Your Weekly Juice, and it’s just tips and tools on how to conquer self-doubt and be more confident in your life.  And that’s the best way to keep in touch with me.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Louisa Jewell
Yes. I want people to think about, when they think about their job, what is the next big goal for you?  What is the next big thing that you have?  Or when you envision yourself 5 years or 10 years down the road, what do you want for your life when it comes to your career, whether you’re working for someone else or whether you’re working for yourself?  And ask yourself, if you’re hesitating or you’re stopping yourself from going after that big goal, then ask yourself what is one small tiny baby step you can take today towards that goal?  And commit to doing that in the next two weeks.  And when you do it, celebrate the fact that you’ve done it, and then think about your next baby step.  So that’s the challenge that I put out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Louisa, thank you so much for that and all the pieces you shared.  I think it’s going to make a real impact, in terms of folks who are struggling with this self-doubt or beating themselves up finding some liberation and a path to good stuff.  So, really appreciate you taking the time to share.

Louisa Jewell
Well, thank you so much for having me.  It’s been such a pleasure talking to you.