744: Mastering the Skill of Confidence with Nate Zinsser

Pete Mockaitis
Nate, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Nate Zinsser
Pete, thanks for the invite. Wonderful to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat with you. One of my best friends went to West Point, and you’re the director of Performance Psychology, and I love performance psychology, and you’ve got a really cool background and resume with being a wrestling champion, a mountaineer, a karate black belt, working with elite athletes like Eli Manning. Could you share with us maybe one fun story that cues this up in terms of a transformation and what’s possible when we get a handle on some of this mental stuff?

Nate Zinsser
Okay. Well, here’s one fun little story about how I actually ended up at West Point.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
I had been prepared for a fairly traditional academic career in the field of sports psychology, although I was very interested in doing applied work, and I had gone to a graduate program, a PhD program at the University of Virginia that was very much emphasized on applied work, actually dealing with athletes and helping them rather than just being in an Ivy intellectual tower.

And I found out that there was a job opening at West Point, and I found out that on Thursday but I also found out that I had to get the credentials in and the application materials done by Monday. So, I had to believe in myself enough that I could assemble everything, and this was not your standard application. This was a very complicated federal employee application process, so I had to believe in myself to get all that stuff done rather quickly, get it in the mail, and then be patient while the system works through.

As the system worked through, I was not originally selected as one of the finalists for the job. And when I found out about that, I took the bull by the horns, I called up the United States Military Academy, I eventually got through to the gentleman who I would eventually be working for, and I said, “Colonel, you have got to look at my resume because I am the guy for this job.” And the rest, ladies and gentlemen, as they say, is history.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, I love it. It’s so bold and, in some way, I’m just putting myself in the colonel’s shoes there in terms of it’s sort of like you’re taken aback, like, “Well, this doesn’t really ever happen. I’m intrigued and curious. Okay, Nate, why? I’m all ears. You have my attention.”

Nate Zinsser
Yeah. Well, I explained to him that I was the guy for the job and I had everything that he was looking for, and he was open enough and relaxed enough about the process, not being able to go by the rules, play by the rules, but interpret them a little bit here and there, and the rest is history. I’ve been there for almost 30 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. You know, it’s funny, I think I did that technique way back in college when I wasn’t interviewed. I did not get an interview. I think it might’ve been for Walgreens for an internship, and I thought, “Well, I can see some of the people who did get interviews, and not to be totally arrogant, but I’m smarter than them, just like from grades or extracurricular achievements or whatever.”

And I thought, “If you’re interviewing them, you’d be interviewing me.” And so, I said that. I think I found a more diplomatic way to say that so they don’t say, “Who is this arrogant jerk?” And they said, “Oh, okay. Sure. We got a slot open here.” I was like, “Oh, cool.” And so, it worked. It worked for you, it worked for me. I guess I didn’t get it after the interview but it’s fine. Things worked out just fine in the summer.

Okay, cool. So, that’s some confidence and your book is called The Confident Mind, so it seems like you’re walking the talk here.

Nate Zinsser
I do, indeed, try to practice what I preach, and it was indeed a process of believing, having a sense of certainty about myself that I was indeed the right guy for the job, so I was not hesitant or nervous or afraid to put myself forward.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, so then tell us, what is the big idea behind your book, The Confident Mind, the thesis, if you will?

Nate Zinsser
The big idea is that confidence is a skill that you build and you apply the same way you would build and apply any other skill. You work on your backhand or your second serve if you’re a tennis player. You work on your understanding of organic chemistry and gross anatomy if you’re a medical student. You work on understanding your product and your audience if you’re in the sales business. You work on that stuff. It takes practice. Confidence is the same thing. It’s not a mysterious quality that magically descends upon you. It is a quality that you develop through the practice of specific thinking skills.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say I want that confidence, what’s my practice look like? What is my gym exercise equivalent for building the confidence muscle?

Nate Zinsser
Okay. In broad strokes, the exercise regime consists of being very careful in the management of your memories, both long term, short term, and immediate memories that accumulate over the course of a day. That’s one component. Another component is being careful about how you think about yourself, the stories you tell yourself, the way you think of yourself and your various capabilities in the present. How do you think about yourself? There are guidelines and techniques to manage that.

And then there are also guidelines to help you think about your future. What are the pictures? What are the short video clips that your imagination produces when you think about things that have not yet happened? By combining all of those effective thinking skills about your past, about your present, about your future, you can build the psychological equivalent of a bank account – a whole lot of constructive useful thoughts.

And when you have that, it contributes to a sense of certainty which allows you to step into an arena, a game, a contest, a negotiation, a presentation, and be rather automatic, rather instinctive, rather natural in your execution.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds really good. I’d like all of that. And so, that’s an interesting word you’re using, management of memories and managing the way you think about yourself and the way you think about the future. So, management implies proactive, assertive, the will, as opposed to just, “Hey, man, thoughts come up and that just happens, man. Thoughts are thoughts.” So, you say it’s a little bit different than that.

Nate Zinsser
Well, thoughts are indeed thoughts. They do come up, but you have to manage them. You have to manage the weeds that grow in your garden. You have to get rid of things that aren’t helpful and you’ve got to nurture the plants that are helpful. That’s management but you have to manage your own cognitions. And a lot of people, unfortunately, are the victim of their cognitive habits rather than the master of their cognitive habits.

And those cognitive habits either create or contribute to that sense of certainty or they erode it. And it’s a simple matter of exercising your free will to use your mind effectively. I say it’s simple. I didn’t say it was easy all the time. There’s a difference, but it is the matter of taking control, intentional control, of how you think about yourself in the past, in the present, and in the future. When you do that, the certainty builds.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is this certainty or confidence more like a universal, like I can do anything, or is it more of a specific, like, “I excel at tennis”?

Nate Zinsser
Well, it is entirely situation-specific.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, entirely.

Nate Zinsser
One of the misconceptions is that confidence is this all-encompassing quality and once you have it, it applies everywhere in your life, and if you don’t have it, it applies nowhere. That’s not really accurate. Confidence is highly situation-specific. You can be very confident about your tennis game, and you can be very worried and insecure about your knowledge in your mandatory statistics scores for your business major.

Interestingly, even within your tennis game, you can have varying degrees of confidence about forehand, backhand, volleying, serving, etc. But the good news is that you can develop confidence in any area of your life that you choose to by following the guidelines, by managing your thoughts, by creating a mental bank account that is specific to a particular skill or particular set of skills that you wish to have.

Pete Mockaitis
Particular set of skills always makes me think of Liam Neeson in “Taken” so thank you for that. Let’s develop some of those in a different context for a different purpose. So, I want to dig into some details of the management of thoughts in the past, present, and future, and how precisely that is done. But, first, if there’s any skeptics thinking, “Oh, that sounds kind of woo-woo and I don’t know,” could you give us a story of a client or a cadet or someone who really saw a pretty cool transformation from not so confident and not performing well to super confident and super performing well, and/or, for stacking the evidence, some excellent research or studies underscoring this?

Nate Zinsser
Well, to give you an idea of a case study, just this very afternoon, I was contacted by a West Point graduate who was the captain of our women’s tennis team back in the early 2000s, and she is now a very successful entrepreneur. She has served with distinction in her combat deployments before she retired from the Army. And she recounted to me how clearly her experience working with me changed her ability to believe in herself, and that belief led to greater execution.

She came in as a relatively low-level recruit to our women’s tennis team, but she graduated playing number one in her junior and senior year, and graduating as captain. And it was not a matter so much of her having to redefine herself physically and technically, although, let’s face it, she did a heck of a lot of work on that stuff too, but she was very clear that so much of her development had to do with her ability to manage her thoughts, to get through those tough matches, to handle criticism, to handle setbacks, and that is all just an internal process of being in control of your own mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Well, let’s do it. So, how do I go about managing my memories, in the past side of things?

Nate Zinsser
Well, let’s first take a long look back. When you consider your experience in your profession of choice, or in your sport of choice, let’s go back and let’s take a look at the memory, the moment where you’ve discovered that, “Hey, this is pretty cool. I kind of like this, and maybe I’m pretty good at it.” What’s the feeling that that moment creates for you as you think back upon it? And then, as we move forward in our memory from that moment, let’s notate, record, write out the memories of a few other powerful moments that create a similar kind of feeling.

I refer to this as the top ten exercise. What are your top ten moments as a tennis player, as a medical student, as a sales manager, as a white-collar athlete, as I like to put it in any other sport? What are the major contributions you’ve made to your organization? What are the projects that you’ve completed? What are the recognitions or awards that you have accumulated in the course of your professional development?

In a way, it’s like writing a resume but you’re writing your accomplishments, you’re writing your top ten fulfilling memorable moments. That list of top ten things, those are your original deposits into your mental bank account. That’s taking ten checks down to the local savings and loan, and say, “I’m opening an account. Here’s my money.” And so, that’s how we take a look at our long-term memories.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I like that notion of it’s like a resume but it’s a bit different in that the audience is just you, and you pick what’s meaningful as opposed to what you’re thinking someone else might find impressive, and you’re prioritizing based upon the emotional juice, as oppose to someone else’s perceived valuation of that thing.

Nate Zinsser
Exactly. This is a very personal exercise. And so, once we’ve established our bank account with those top ten moments, then it becomes a matter of managing our memories day by day by day. What did you accomplish today as you look back on the day? What did you accomplish in terms of effort? Where did you give quality effort? What moments in your day were characterized by maybe pushing through something that you knew you had to do but really didn’t want to do? Where did you overcome a little procrastination, which plagues us all, let’s face it?

So, record an episode of effort, and then look at the day, and ask yourself, “What did I get right? What little successes did I have?” Record some episodes of success, be they ever so small and ever so humble. And, third, think about your day, think about maybe some of the previous days, and record an episode of progress, “What am I getting better at? What do I seem to be improving?” And so, you have a daily ESP reflection. E for effort, S for success, P for progress. And that is an exercise that you conduct at the end of every day some time before retiring. And those are some deposits that you make daily into your mental bank account.

And we can take it one step further. Looking at how you manage your memories in the course of a day, “I finished a meeting. I have five minutes before the next one. I can take 30 seconds of that minute, of that five minutes, and say, ‘Hmm, what was the best moment for me in that meeting? Where did I hear properly? Where did I respond properly? What did I understand?’” And just that little tiny memory, of a little very small highlight, with a very small H, that’s a deposit.

And so, you can make many small deposits throughout the day, some bigger ones at the end of the day, and they are complemented by your top ten, and so you’re in this process of daily and, indeed, hourly building up a sense of certainty about yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And, again, all these are within a particular context.

Nate Zinsser
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, what’s your advice on this one, Nate? How many domains can we tackle concurrently? Because I love the notion of focus, but if it’s sort of like, “Oh, boy, I need more confidence in my professional life, and as a parent, and as a spouse, etc.”

Nate Zinsser
You can do it for as many different performance arenas or performance situations as you care to. I would start out with the one that’s most important to you in the long term to get that started. But you could, indeed, conduct a daily ESP for your physical training if you’re working on your fitness training for a 5K or a 10K or a marathon. You can do a daily ESP for your professional work. You could do a daily ESP for your relationships that are key. And, again, this daily ESP is about a three-minute exercise, ladies and gentlemen. And we all got that kind of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So we covered the past nicely, and it seems we did the present as well in terms of the super recent past. Or is there more that you’d like to add about the present in terms of the way you think about yourself right now?

Nate Zinsser
Yes, the way you think about yourself right now revolves around the stories that you keep in yourself about yourself. We all have opinions about how smart we are, how good we are at this, how bad we are at that. So, telling yourself stories that contribute to a sense of optimism and energy is really important.

The key skill here is to think about a particular skill you’d like to have, a particular quality you’d like to have, a particular accomplishment that you would care to achieve, and phrase your desire for those things in the present tense, “My crosscourt backhand goes deep and scores points.”

That’s a skill I want to have so I am affirming it, I am saying yes to it, and I’m very specific about what I want, the story I want to tell myself about myself, “My backhand is…” “I listen carefully to each of my subordinates,” “I easily stay in the moment to solve problems as they come up.” Telling yourself these stories are further deposits into your bank account, and they kickstart effort and action that is consistent with what you are affirming.

If we continue, if you tell yourself, “I’m really not good at that particular technological application. I really struggle with some of the remote platforms,” if you tell yourself that, if that’s a story you tell yourself, you will be less likely to work at that enthusiastically and with an open mind so it’ll be really hard for you to get that technology down.

If, on the other hand, you change the way you think about yourself in the present, “I easily learn new skills,” “I easily learn new applications.” If you’re a student taking a graduate course, “I easily retain the origin, insertion, function, and intervention of each skeletal muscle.” If you’re talking to yourself that way about yourself in the present, first person, present tense, very detailed, you initiate a very functional constructive self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m curious then, and there’s been some really cool studies on affirmations. I’ve dug into them in terms of, sure enough, like salespeople getting superior results and so very quantifiable and such. I’m thinking about how we had a great conversation with Hal Elrod about the six morning habits of high performers. And he said, when it comes to affirmations, we got to be careful that they’re truthful enough such that you don’t respond internally with, “No, I don’t, and that’s bull crap.”

Nate Zinsser
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I don’t easily remember these bones, or new software programs, what’s my gameplan here? But I want to.

Nate Zinsser
I want to remember so I would phrase your affirmations, at first, for things that are just a little bit out of your reach or just a little bit different from the way you’ve been thinking about yourself in terms of something that you do. One of the stories that I cite in the book comes out of Harvard where hotel workers, the folks who make the beds, vacuum the floors, scrub out the bathrooms every day, hour after hour after hour, they were taught to think of their daily work as good exercise, so the thought, “I’m getting good exercise every day.”

A group of workers were given that instruction and taught how to talk to themselves and think about their work, their daily work, as good exercise, and the control group received a placebo treatment. Well, the group that changed the way they thought about their daily exercise lost a significant amount of weight, lowered their blood pressure over a period of time while not doing any more work, while not doing their work any faster or harder, but simply as a function of changing the way they thought about themselves. That actually changed their physiology.

And there are plenty of other studies along that line, really looking at the effect of just this element of mindset on not just our mood but our actual cardiovascular, endocrine, and neurobiological systems. It’s interesting stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely, it is. That is a really cool study. And so then, I’m curious, in terms of like the specific phrasing of the affirmation. So, if I am having trouble with a software but I want to be learning it easily, if I say to myself, “I learn the software easily,” my mind will say, “No, you don’t. That’s bull crap. You’ve been struggling mightily with this while your colleagues seem to be getting it just fine.”

Nate Zinsser
Ramp it back a little bit and think, “I’m getting one piece of this down every day.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s true. I love it. That is not a lie and you can look back, and say, “Sure enough, that happened yesterday and the day before.” Boom! Cool. All right. So, then that’s the present. How about the future?

Nate Zinsser
How about the future? The question is, “What kind of future do you want? And what kind of future are you allowing your wonderful imagination to create?” We have this fantastic audio and video production studio in our imagination. We can dream up all kinds of things. And the things that we dream up have direct, again, physiological effects.

Every one of your listeners could deeply imagine holding a nice ripe juicy lemon in their hand, and smelling the lemony smell, and feeling the waxy texture, and they could imagine cutting open, cutting that lemon in half, and bringing it up and really smelling the fresh juice, and then taking a small careful lick of it, then maybe a bigger lick, and then maybe even biting into it.

And everybody will experience their mouths watering while they do that because just the thought, when you combine the picture of it with the sensation of smell, with the sensation of taste, with the sensation of texture, that literally fools the taste buds which sends messages back to your brain, and the messages come from your brain back to your salivary glands, you’re actually fooling your nervous system into creating the experience that you want.

And this is why athletes and other performers will very carefully mentally rehearse in as much real time as possible, with as much realistic detail as possible, the game-winning field goal, or the closing argument in a legal case, or that great homerun point of the sales pitch, and they’ll feel themselves in the room giving that pitch, they’ll hear the tone of their voice, they’ll see the respective faces of the audience and create a multisensory representation of that experience that they wish to have.

And when they do so, they’re actually manipulating, working their nervous system so that when they get to that moment, they’ll have a sense of familiarity about it, “I’ve been here. It’s an important moment but I have seen it happen, I felt it happen, I’ve envisioned it carefully, and my nervous system believes that I’ve already done it.” So, the experience, when you get there, while still having some excitement and some emotion, for sure, but there’ll be an element of comfort in that experience that you might not have had you not done this kind of mental preparation.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. All right. So, past, present, future, the mental management we do in order to have that confidence going. I’m curious, when we hit rough patches in terms of maybe it’s a number of failures or just, “Hey, I’m tired, I’m stressed, I’m overwhelmed, I’m de-motivated, I don’t give a hoot anymore right now,” is there any sort of acute or emergency stuff you recommend we do in our brains in those moments?

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, welcome to the real world that we all live in. We are going to make mistakes. We are going to experience setbacks. This is one of the important points about confidence, in general, is that it’s not a one-time thing that you do. Confidence is fragile. You have to rebuild it. There is no decisive victory that one can win over fear, doubt, worry, insecurity, etc. It is a relatively ongoing war of attrition, as one of my cadet advisees understood it as. There’s no decisive victory. I can’t just get it and expect to have it all the time because the world is going to kick back.

We have a saying in the military, “The enemy gets a vote,” and we all got to be aware of setbacks, difficult things that happen around us that can negatively affect our confidence, and then there are the things that we say to ourselves internally that also negatively affect our confidence. So, a few safeguards in this context, Pete, is how you look at those inevitable failures and how you respond to your own inevitable simple human imperfection.

You have to look at those moments and acknowledge that they happen, but one way to think about them is that they’re temporary, “It happened that one time. It happened that one time. It happened. It happened that one time.” As opposed to having something go wrong and you sort of unconsciously assume that it’ll continue, and you fall into the, “Oh, here I go again. Same stuff all over again.”

You’ve got to protect yourself from that trap by keeping it in the time that it occurred, “It happened that one time. It’s temporary.” And you may have to do that four or five times, “It happened this time. It happened that time, but it’s just those times.” You keep it in that context.

The second rule about this is to look at those imperfections, those mistakes, those setbacks as limited in where they occurred, “It happened in that situation,” “It happened in that game,” “It happened in that moment of my day, and that moment is just a moment by itself, that situation. And I don’t know why something that happened in one situation, in one setting, to sort of ooze out and affect my feeling about what’s going to happen in other situations.

I don’t allow a mistake in one part of my game to make me think, “Uh-oh, my whole game is in trouble today.” No, no, that one part of my game. “Okay, my second serve isn’t getting in very well. That’s just my second serve. My first serve can still be a bomber. My forehand, my backhand, the rest of my game can be fine. I got to keep my mistakes and my thoughts about my mistakes limited in where they occur.”

And then, finally, and this might be the biggest one for most of us, when the setback occurs, when I experienced some of my own imperfection, I got to be able to say to myself, “Look, that moment, that mistake is not representative of who I am as a player, as a performer, as a professional, as a person. It doesn’t tell the truth about me,” even to the point where you can say, “Okay, yeah, that happened. I did blow that but that’s sort of a fluke. That’s really not me.” So, to keep your mistakes temporary, limited, and non-representative are ways of protecting this bank account that you’ve built up through the other methods that we’ve been describing.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. And now, as I think about just before the moment of performance, the big game, the big speech, or even just an afternoon in which you’ve got to be productive and you’re not feeling it, what are your top perspectives on how to get into the right state, mood, emotion, the mindset place to rock and roll and perform well the thing you want to perform well at even if you’re not feeling it in the moment?

Nate Zinsser
This is the million-dollar question that we all face many times in the day. The answer is, as you’re about to enter that performance, if you’re about to get down to the workload at 3:00 o’clock or 4:00 o’clock, and you got to get it done before you can leave, that’s when you have to look at yourself, and say, “Okay, I’m an athlete, I’m contending for this prize of winning this moment right now, and I have to be willing to think back, maybe access my mental bank account, look how far I’ve come. I did this. I’ve done this. I’ve done this. I’ve done that.”

And then you take a few breaths, and I give some advice on breathing in the book. I’m not an expert but I’m pretty knowledgeable about it. And then it’s getting out of your mind and just getting into your senses, “What’s the one thing I have to pay attention to now? I have to pay attention to that column in these spreadsheets to get through this task. I have to pay attention to this comment from these people in my work team in order to get through this day.”

I kind of have to limit my mind to something that is important so I cue up some confidence, I breathe, and I attach my attention, attach my awareness to what’s important. And I may have to do that several times over the course of the task but I will continue with that, I will continue with that, I will continue with that. In many ways, it comes down to a matter of willpower but willpower, in and of itself, doesn’t work great unless you have some tools. And these mental-focusing tools, combined with your will, can make a big difference in your day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, since you mentioned breathing, I’m intrigued. Is there a particular formula, timing, counting, approach that makes a difference?

Nate Zinsser
Well, breathing, in general, is another rather misunderstood process for most of us. When we take a deep breath, we tend to lift our chests up and sort of breathe up, up, up high, when a really effective breath is a breath that expands your midsection, it goes down and out using the downward action of the very important diaphragm muscle.

So, I encourage people, if you want to take control of your breath, first, exhale, and have the feeling that there might be a python squeezing you around your waist, and that’s squeezing you in and it’s squeezing air out, squeezing you in, and that air is escaping upward and out your mouth, and then that python relaxes, and now have the feeling of breathing down and out, almost like you’re inflating an inner tube around your waist.

And then you can squeeze it to put it out, and then you can open it up, down and out to get maximum oxygen into your lungs because you really want to get the lower part of your lungs where the most effective oxygen-carbon dioxide transfer takes place. You really want to activate that lower part of your lungs. Do that a couple of times, you will feel a change in your mood.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
And that’s when you open your eyes, and say, “Okay, this is what’s important. I’m just going to focus there and I almost allow myself to get into that highly focused zone-like state. I can make myself very friendly to the zone when I do that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Nate, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Nate Zinsser
I would just reinforce for people, it’s a skill, it takes work, but the work is well within your capabilities, and it is a constant thing. And, very importantly, if you develop the quiet internal sense of certainty I’m describing, you can remain, indeed, a very polite, modest, respectful, pleasant person to be around. One of the misconceptions is that confidence equals outspoken, chest-beating arrogance. No, no, no, no, no.

We occasionally see, and unfortunately the media likes to highlight these loud, brash, outspoken individuals, but what the media doesn’t often help us understand is how many quiet, introverted, yet very confident people there are out there. And so, for all you quiet introverts, plenty of hope for you, folks. It’s about how you think. It’s not necessarily about how you open your mouth and portray yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nate Zinsser
A favorite quote that I find inspiring is from the great folk rock poet of the ‘60s, Bob Dylan, and the phrase reads, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” It’s from a song “It’s Alright, Ma.” And I’ve always liked that quote because you are either in a process of developing, expanding in one way or another, or you’re in a process of shrinking and stagnating.

If we look at developmental psychology, this is, indeed, a theme that takes place throughout each stage of development right through our most senior years. Are you generating things even in your 70s and 80s? Or are you stagnating? “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Nate Zinsser
Okay, here’s one. And I included this in the book because I think it’s really important. We’ve been talking about the way you talk to yourself, the stories you tell yourself, and we’ve been talking about how you get rid of the internally generated negativity. A study that took place in the University of South Africa took trained cyclists, highly trained athletes, and they were all tested on a time-to-exhaustion test, meaning, “You’re going to go as fast as you freaking can until you just can’t.” So, we get a baseline of what they’re absolute maximum output is.

Half of those trained cyclists were taken through a course in what you would call motivational self-talk, learning to talk to yourself in the moment while you are working very hard, “Keep this going. You can handle this.” Essentially, talking back to that voice of worry and doubt and fatigue that every middle-distance athlete knows it’s that fear of not being able to maintain the pace, “I can’t hold this during my mile run, or my two-mile run.” “I can’t maintain this for the duration of my swim workout.”

But these athletes were trained to start and continue and finish with a very powerful group of affirmational statements, “Get this down. You’re fine. Keep the hammer going,” etc. And then the other group were given a placebo treatment. Three weeks later, everybody was retested. On the average, the group who had learned to talk back to their voice of negativity lasted 18% longer than the non-trained subjects. They showed an 18% improvement over their previous baseline and they had a lower sense of perceived exertion while doing so.

Eighteen percent improvement? Who wouldn’t want that in their batting average, shooting percentage, sales figure growth? Who wouldn’t want an 18% improvement? That’s a pretty powerful study. And it all had everything to do with how you talk to yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, that’s really compelling study, Nate. Do you happen to know the principal investigators or have a citation?

Nate Zinsser
Yes, I’ve got that. Samuele Marcora, University of Kent.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome.

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, you want to look at the book Alex Hutchinson’s Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. That’s a William Morrow 2018 reference, page 260.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you.

Nate Zinsser
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Nate Zinsser
I make sure that I practice 15 minutes of very careful but very energizing breathing every morning. I make sure that I am working that diaphragm muscle, I’m working those abdominal muscles, I am massaging the liver, which is what happens when you breathe properly, and it’s a very relaxing experience but, at the same time, it’s somewhat exhilarating.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have like music or an app or a track that guides you?

Nate Zinsser
Nope, I do this simply seated on a small cushion. I don’t need any guidance. I have been practicing meditation since 1971 where I learned the technique that involved the repetition of a sound, the repetition of a mantra that you do over and over again with sub-vocally. But these days, it’s all breath training.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Nate Zinsser
And, by the way, I keep my own ESP daily journal as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Nate Zinsser
I’m still practicing Japanese karate, and so every day, I’m looking at my physical practice and making notes about this movement, this feeling, this interpretation. It’s an ongoing iterative process.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you’re known for or people quote you on often?

Nate Zinsser
Doc Z says, “A little bit of delusion is the origin of every major important change in your life.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
A little bit of delusion, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Nate Zinsser
I have a website, DrNateZinsser.com. You can reach me there. And the book The Confident Mind has a lot of good nuggets in it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, here’s the call to action. Is the quality of your thinking consistent with the quality of life that you want to lead and the quality of the performances that you want to experience?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Nate, it’s been a treat. I wish you much luck with your book The Confident Mind and all you’re up to.

Nate Zinsser
Well, thank you, Pete. This has been a wonderful interview. My best wishes and best luck for all your listeners. Let’s have a great 2022.