#108 - Dr. Nate Zinsser - How To Build Unshakable Confidence Under Pressure

Dr. Nate Zinsser reveals that confidence is not about becoming more, but about recognizing, reinforcing, and trusting what is already there. He breaks down how your thoughts shape your physiology, why nerves are a performance asset, and how imagination wires future success. From elite athletes to everyday performers, this conversation explores the hidden systems behind belief, resilience, and showing up at your best when it matters most.

Timestamps:
00:00 Is Dr. Zinsser The Most Confident Guy In The Room?
01:12 The Big Misconception On Confidence
03:01 Unlocking What's Already Within
04:30 Synthesizing Information So People Can Apply It
09:12 Not Attaching Confidence To Others
12:40 The Relationship Between Arrogance, Confidence, & Humility
17:17 Mind-Body-Performance Connection
25:53 Improving Your Nervous System & The Importance Of Plateaus
31:24 Upgrading Your Mental Filtering
38:51 Why You Need To Be Envisioning 
46:01 Relationship Between Confidence & Delusion
50:22 Externalizing Failure Instead Of Internalizing It
52:22 A Lack Of Confidence Is Conformity
55:34 Connect With Dr. Nate Zinsser 

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Transcript

Dr. Nate Zinsser reveals that confidence is not about becoming more, but about recognizing, reinforcing, and trusting what is already there. He breaks down how your thoughts shape your physiology, why nerves are a performance asset, and how imagination wires future success. From elite athletes to everyday performers, this conversation explores the hidden systems behind belief, resilience, and showing up at your best when it matters most.

Tim Doyle (00:02.059)

Dr. Zinzer, welcome to the show.

Nate Zinsser (00:04.088)

Hello, Tim, great to be on with you. Thanks for the invite.

Tim Doyle (00:08.055)

Does your work mean you're always supposed to be the most confident guy in the room?

Nate Zinsser (00:13.722)

you

Maybe not the most confident guy in the room, but a confident enough guy in the room. I find it useless to compare, you know, these kinds of things. If you're enough, you're enough.

Tim Doyle (00:33.536)

Mm, yeah, I love that. And that's something that I've learned through your work with confidence. It's not about being more or striving to be more, but it's more so of what do already have within me and how do I alchemize that or how do I manifest that into confidence? Why do we think that confidence is something we simply have or do not have?

Nate Zinsser (00:58.138)

I wish I knew the origin of that misconception. I can't say that I do. All I can tell you is that it is extraordinarily widespread and in a way destructive. Perhaps we have a couple early experiences where we don't feel like we are enough. We don't feel like we are sufficient to the moment. And then we make the categorical

assumption, well, I just am not that way. And that's unfortunate. The good news is that confidence is fluid and fundable, if you will. I can build it, just like you build a bank account, which is the analogy that I use in my work. And it is very, very clear in my experience that

people who started out or came to me, gosh, I just have no confidence at this level or I have no confidence that I can succeed here in this situation. Six months later, it's like I can rock with the best. I know I've got it and I can come down the bobsled track at the Olympics, win a gold medal and say, yeah, we had confidence when...

14 months prior to that, that same athlete was looking at me and saying, I could use a lot more confidence, doc. That's the good news. You can grow it. You just gotta do the work.

Tim Doyle (02:37.966)

Through that work, how have you shown that it's more of a method of unlocking what already lies within you rather than needing to really look externally or acquire things that are outside of yourself?

Nate Zinsser (02:56.014)

Well, you have to look inside and ask yourself serious questions.

Where indeed have I shown potential? Where indeed have I maybe taken baby steps toward a desired outcome? Looking carefully at yourself, the work that you put in, the very small victories and successes that you've experienced through putting in that effort, through putting in that work, these experiences give you reasons to believe in yourself more

and more and more. And then you can get this wonderful imagination of yours going. Well, you know, if I did accomplish X and Y and Z, and I did make progress from level A to level D, hmm, maybe there's an opportunity for me to accomplish all of these other things or take my skill level a little higher. If I give myself some recognition of what I've done,

then I can more easily entertain the possibilities of, you know, hitting new horizons.

Tim Doyle (04:09.954)

You've done a lot of great writing when it comes to confidence. Your book that people know you most for, The Confident Mind, great read. What I find interesting is that the initial spark for your literary work didn't necessarily come from you, but it came from a mentor of yours, Dr. Linda Bunker at the University of Virginia. She asked you to help write and edit

Nate Zinsser (04:34.296)

Yes.

Tim Doyle (04:39.918)

a textbook chapter. What was the content in that chapter about cognitive techniques for building confidence and enhancing performance?

Nate Zinsser (04:48.729)

This was the second edition of a widely used graduate level sports psychology textbook and we're talking back in 1989, 1990 when she asked me for my assistance with this. And I was, you know.

maybe just a little bit surprised. said, why me, Dr. Bunker? And she said, well, I like the way you think. And I took that as a great compliment. And then I just started to be as logical as I could about the...

the process, the reality of confidence, the methods of building it. And it turned out as a fairly instructive textbook chapter. One of many chapters covering a wide range of topics in sports psychology. Or I looked, okay, let's look at possible definitions. Let's look at possible methods of building this and let's look at possible methods

of applying this in competitive context. That work was limited to the sport context, but it was very clear as I studied sports psychology at the University of Virginia with Dr. Bunker and with Dr. Bob Rotella that the applications of this process went way beyond competitive sport. Certainly important applications there, but performing arts, business,

entrepreneurship, legal, medical, all these different situations where a human being has to sort of step into an arena and deliver. All of those contacts benefit from the same performance, from the same understanding of confidence.

Tim Doyle (06:47.34)

Yeah, what's that process been like over the course of your career going from student to teacher and coach and that sense of synthesizing process where, okay, you learn all this information for yourself, but then, okay, now I need to step into the role of actually teaching this and making it applicable.

Nate Zinsser (07:09.867)

Hmm. Yeah. I was very fortunate in that my training at the university of Virginia really prepared me to be a researcher and professor in the field. And I embraced that role for a number of years. And then the United States Military Academy issued a nationwide search for a civilian sports psychology expert with considerable applied experience.

Nate Zinsser (07:42.616)

Gosh, they ended up hiring me. Go figure. At that point, I became a full-time teacher, coach to hundreds of young men and women, cadets at West Point, who were seeking their own edge to fulfill the very demanding requirements of cadet life, becoming an officer. Many, many, of those were division one intercollegiate athletes.

who's a very important part of their identity was their identity as a football player, soccer player, wrestler, you name it. West Point has the full array of Division I sports. So I went from being a student to being a junior professor to being a full-time lecturer at West Point and through that process I began to travel all over the country.

Lewis Washington, Fort Carson Colorado, Fort Benning, Georgia, instructing various groups of officers and soldiers in the same curriculum.

Tim Doyle (08:53.72)

That's obviously a very important job and important shoes to fill. mean, you've also worked with a lot of other elite athletes and organizations, whether it's Eli Manning or the Philadelphia Flyers. So, I mean, your work or your performance, so to speak, to a degree is having an impact on other people's performance. How have you gone about

not tying your confidence to the way that other people perform and sort of the way that they're either seeing success on the field or within their given arena.

Nate Zinsser (09:36.986)

That's a really important question. And that is a question that I think every coach, every teacher, every advisor faces. Not everyone you teach is going to be an A student. And so you get to look at yourself and say, okay, this person's sort of got it and made the grade. This other person, I thought I was teaching pretty much the same way, but that person...

didn't make progress, didn't make the grade. I think you have to have a certain degree of humility about the process. I'm not a miracle worker. I don't just instantly create fabulous results out of whatever raw material I might be provided with.

I think maybe to answer your question, is to say, dang, I have been lucky because I happen to have interacted with a bunch of people who have been gifted in a lot of ways, willing, really willing to look honestly at themselves and their cognitive habits and make some adjustments.

I'm sure that in many cases I was in the right place at the right time. But I don't kid myself to think that, everybody I touch is going to be a world beater. That simply is not the case. I'm...

I'm loving that, you know, one of my clients is a top collegiate baseball pitcher and another client of mine is a world-class ophthalmologic surgeon. Um, but I'm sure if I look back through my stable, uh, there's some folks who have struggled, struggled in our continuing to struggle and haven't quite yet made it yet. Um, is that my fault? Maybe just a little, but there are a whole lot of things in the world of the human performance that I can't control. And I don't pretend that I'm bigger than.

Nate Zinsser (11:41.979)

of that.

Tim Doyle (11:43.929)

Yeah, like that you brought humility into it. And I think that works within two different avenues. If somebody succeeds or the one who like you can give people ingredients, but they have to be the ones that put it together. Like they have, yeah, they have to be the ones that put it together. So when somebody succeeds, you know, that's where the humility can come in and be like, Hey, like you're the one that did it. I gave you the tools, but that can also lead to

Nate Zinsser (12:00.525)

But they have to do the work. They have to do the work.

Nate Zinsser (12:10.071)

Yeah.

Tim Doyle (12:13.208)

kind of like a feeling of surrender if somebody isn't able to put it together. It's like, hey, you know, I controlled what I could control. And I think when we talk about confidence, you brought humility into it. think I see confidence like as a spectrum where on one end we have arrogance, we have confidence, and then we have humility. What do you see is like the relationship between those three things?

Nate Zinsser (12:38.637)

Well, to me, confidence has always been an internal state. Confidence is, as I defined in the book, basically the total, the running total, the ongoing running total of everything that you think about yourself and your work and the things that happen in your work or your sport or your art. Confidence is internal. Arrogant is what comes out of your mouth is external. And

The people that I respect most in the world are the ones who are outwardly rather modest, rather humble, very pleasant to be around. On the inside, however, they're the cockiest buggers on the planet because they really think, yeah, if I bring myself to this tennis tournament, golf tournament, operating room,

business negotiation. If I bring myself, I know how good I am, if I bring myself to that moment, I'm gonna have a great outcome. I really believe in myself. But I keep that on the inside. I keep that on the inside. I don't mouth it off.

Because if you mouth it off, you're going to be perceived as an arrogant you-know-what. And who needs that? So there's this very important distinction between how you feel on the inside about yourself and how you communicate that to the outside world. Really important. And unfortunately, there are so many people who are afraid of being perceived as an arrogant you-know-what.

that they refuse to do the inner work of looking for the best in themselves and building up that sense of certainty, they're afraid that it's going to spill over and turn them into an obnoxious jerk. That really doesn't happen very much. Anymore so that the naturally obnoxious jerk turns into the most humble and modest individual on the planet.

Nate Zinsser (14:52.833)

doesn't really cross those boundaries much.

Tim Doyle (14:56.206)

That's interesting. When I was thinking about that and reflecting on my own type of confidence and I try to be a humble person or I resonate with that a lot that you say kind of on the surface kind of a blank page, but internally, kind of loud to a degree and like intense and internally confident. When it gets into humility, I feel like I actually struggle with that where

Nate Zinsser (15:18.381)

Mm-hmm.

Tim Doyle (15:26.754)

Humility for me kind of like teeters on the edge of downplaying myself or downplaying my abilities and I think that's that that Yeah

Nate Zinsser (15:33.461)

Absolutely. And you have to be careful about that. If you downplay your own abilities, if you talk yourself down, if you are, I would guess, inappropriately humble, you're going to have a hard time stepping into your respective arena and feeling comfortable, you know, whether it's the tennis court or the boardroom.

That is not to say that there is a certain value as you maybe debrief.

a performance or look back on a important meeting and you say, yeah, I made this point. Well, I made this point. Well, I goofed on this point. I didn't answer that question. Well, I need to become more knowledgeable about this particular area or I need to improve my second serve. Darn it, because I lost a lot of points on it. OK, that's just being honest with yourself, but you do not have to turn it into

A beat down. I'm such a loser. I'm so stupid. I should have known better. I've wasted my time, energy, etc. None of that serves us.

Tim Doyle (16:57.655)

The term the mind body connection is something that's grown with popularity and I think has become more normalized very, very recently. But you bring another interesting pillar into the equation. Talk to me more about the mind body performance connection.

Nate Zinsser (17:15.449)

Sure. Well first of all, we don't really understand from a scientific point where the brain ends and the mind begins. We're still kind of, there are a lot of people trying to tease that out. But what's pretty much inescapable, what...

science has been able to articulate over the past, I'd say 50 years really, is that mental processes translate into physical changes, muscle tension, heart rate, blood pressure, you name it. And those physical changes have, of course, a remarkable effect on our performance as human beings.

This is not limited to physical athletic performance. Yes, it's very obvious if you're in a boxing match, but it's also pretty, it's just as appropriate when you are typing a report, when you are in a meeting, everything we human beings do, we do in this physical body.

So if our mental processes are affecting our physiology adversely, that's going to translate into a decrement in performance, which we then reflect upon mentally, and it turns into a loop. And that loop can be either constructive or it can hold you back. If you can train yourself to think in a way

that contributes to personal energy and optimism and a feeling of enthusiasm, well, that's going to affect the body. That's going to relax certain muscles. That's going to open up blood flow. That's going to open up the pupils. And that's going to make you more effective, whether you're on the soccer field or whether you're in the operating room or whether you're in a sales negotiation. And hopefully that...

Nate Zinsser (19:26.294)

those mental processes which contribute to a better physical state, which contribute to a better performance outcome, then they get reflected upon and you are in that much more productive cycle. So take your pick folks, you're gonna be in one or the other.

It's just a matter of how much time you're in a destructive cycle, how much time you're in a productive cycle, and most importantly, when it's time for you to step into your respective arena. Whether you're a school teacher or a brain surgeon or a pro football player, which of those cycles do you want? This is something to pay attention to.

Tim Doyle (20:06.997)

Yeah, I feel like we only understand or believe that confidence is something that lives within the mind and within our thoughts and we completely disregard the sensory.

Nate Zinsser (20:17.692)

Yeah, your sense of certainty about yourself is literally going to influence the way your perceptual apparatus takes in information from the outside world. It's further going to influence how your brain goes through your collective experience and sends back to you an appropriate response. And that sense of certainty is going to

influence how well that selected appropriate response gets translated to your hands or to your mouth or to your body or to your feet. So it's very much a mind-body connection. They're intertwined so intimately that you've got to consider the role of the mind in each and everything that you do.

Tim Doyle (21:10.251)

And how do we commonly misinterpret those physical sensations?

Nate Zinsser (21:14.808)

Sometimes we interpret physical sensations as a signal that we're unprepared, as opposed to a signal that, my body is getting energized in order to help me do something.

that I know I want to do or that I know I need to do. You know, yeah, I really want to win this game. I really need to get a good grade on my calculus exam. Any time the human animal is engaged in something that's important, well, there's going to be a little biochemical surge that takes place on a lot of levels. And sometimes the side effects of that biochemical surge is that familiar butterflies in the stomach,

a little acceleration of the heartbeat and we tend to think, I'm in trouble, I'm not feeling normal. Okay, well, of course you're not feeling normal. You're about to do something important. Why the heck would you expect to feel normal? What has happened or what frequently happens is that as youngsters, as kids, as adolescents, and even as young adults,

We experience this biochemical shift, this energizing of the body, but we don't necessarily have a whole lot of skill or appropriately cultivated knowledge in the thing that we're doing. Henceforth, we don't do too well.

and we attribute our lack of success, with these nervous feeling sensations. And so we create an association. If I feel these sensations, I'm not going to do well. Uh-uh, uh-uh, No. The reason why you didn't do well has nothing to do with the fact of your body's acceleration. The fact that you didn't do well was maybe you weren't very good at that moment.

Nate Zinsser (23:15.276)

No harm, no foul, not everybody's graded everything from the get-go. So we've got to break that misunderstanding and build our competence, build our knowledge, and then allow our biochemical surge to help us express what we've built.

Tim Doyle (23:34.644)

Yeah, it's like the stimulus response gap where it's like, okay, this is a neutral stimulus and then how are we going to respond to this? And we just believe that nervousness has a negative connotation, but I like that you bring neutrality to it where you describe being nervous as simply means your nervous system is more active.

Nate Zinsser (23:40.833)

Mm-hmm.

Nate Zinsser (23:55.275)

Exactly, exactly. And that's a very legitimate definition of the word nervous. It unfortunately, in common parlance, it has that connotation of apprehensive. Okay, I'm uncomfortable. I'm nervous. Yeah, you're nervous, all right. Your brain is sparkling. You're nervous. Your spinal cord is sparkling. There are nerve endings that are firing and getting you twitchy and ready to go. Okay.

That's just the nervous system doing what it's designed to do. Please don't think of it as a problem or an obstacle to be overcome. No, it's a resource to take advantage of.

Tim Doyle (24:36.16)

Yeah, and would say, and on the other side of that reacclimation is the doorway to more confidence.

Nate Zinsser (24:43.016)

Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

Tim Doyle (24:46.762)

Another key term that I think goes with confidence is patience. And we're not going to see external results, you know, manifest every single day within our given craft or our given work. But what I find interesting in diving deeper into our understanding of the nervous system and how it relates to confidence, when we do continue to work and

improve, why is it that our nervous system continues to level up on a very consistent basis?

Nate Zinsser (25:23.32)

I think that's just the biological nature of the beast. Skill at anything, whether it's hitting a tennis ball or making a sales argument, is the result of a whole series of neural pathways from the brain to the spinal cord to the mouth to the hands to whatever. Those neural pathways have to be smooth enough, fast enough, facile enough.

and every time we rehearse something, we stimulate that neural pathway.

And every time we stimulate that pathway, there's the opportunity for it to become a little bit more streamlined. There is a phospholipid called myelin that seems to accumulate each time a nerve impulse passes through a nerve cell. And once we rehearse a skill often enough and hence build up that myelin, suddenly there is a kind of boom, a surge.

in effectiveness. It's almost like, okay, we completed the expansion of the one-lane dirt road. and now it's a two-lane asphalt road and things move really faster on it. And with sufficient continued practice, it turns into a six-lane superhighway. And that skill that eluded us for so long just suddenly falls into place.

I hope every one of your listeners can recall that moment where they got on that two-wheeled bicycle and after a week or a month of scraping, falling down and scraping their knees, was boom! They took off. That, you know, that was a software upgrade, if you will, that took a while, that took a while, that took a while, that took a while, and once it is locked in, wham! It's one of the greatest feelings in the world.

Tim Doyle (27:24.972)

I think that can be such an unlock for people because we get so fixated on obviously being able to see the results, you know, what is manifesting from this or what can I see externally from this? But that gets more so again into the sensory and feeling it like what feels different about this. And I feel like you can feel the change on a much more ongoing basis.

Nate Zinsser (27:43.149)

Mm.

Nate Zinsser (27:47.705)

Yeah. Um, I will never forget my own daughter's frustration with riding a bike. Oh, I'm never going to get this. Oh, it's so hard. You know, a couple of weeks later, they're setting up slalom courses in the driveway with bottles and they're doing S curves and popping wheelies and they're suddenly experts. You know, it's just remarkable how

plastic, how neuroplastic we are as human beings. And we have to give ourselves the opportunity to allow that neuroplasticity to work.

Tim Doyle (28:24.169)

And because of that, wire plateau is important.

Nate Zinsser (28:27.126)

Because plateaus, what we perceive as plateaus, are really the intervals of time where that revision, that accumulation of myelin, the phospholipid that insulates and makes the nerve impulse travel faster, those are the moments where that stuff is being built up. It's being built up. That's the construction crew laying down the bedding and the asphalt and the weather ceiling on the road. And once that's all done,

ZIP! The impulse travels faster. So we have to be patient enough to allow this process to occur. And in a world of instant gratification that we are presently engaged in, sometimes that patience is difficult to come by, you know? Yeah, you gotta hang in there, kid.

You got to work that second serve. You got to do those calculus problems. You've got to dissect more cadavers in the lab as a med student until you really develop the skill with your eyes and your hands and your instruments. You'll get it if you hang in there.

but you won't get it if you just give it up because it didn't happen quickly or because it didn't happen for you as fast as it happened for the next person, somebody in your class. And you start considering yourself as somehow inferior or less than another individual who just happened to get it quicker.

Tim Doyle (30:07.445)

Another one of my key takeaways from your work is that it's not about what happens, but it's about how our minds filter what happened. How do we go about upgrading our filtering?

Nate Zinsser (30:16.94)

Mm-hmm.

Nate Zinsser (30:21.248)

Yeah. How do we go about upgrading our filter? The first thing about that is that you've got to realize that you do indeed have a filter. You have something called free will. You can think about whatever you want, you know, and you can choose to look at a situation, an occurrence, an event.

and say, this is a great event, or, this is a terrible event. You've got tremendous latitude, tremendous freedom of choice. I talk about freedom of thought to many, many, audiences. know, your team loses a game. You are free to think, wow, there's something really wrong with us. But you are also free to well,

We made a couple mistakes at this part of the game. We made a couple mistakes there. We were really good in this part of the game.

And I think because we were really good in this part and if we were just clean up these other two parts, okay, we could still win the conference. You I mean, you have that freedom of thought. You think about a football team in the locker room at halftime. Okay, so they're down by a touchdown or two. What are they thinking? we're in trouble? we can't come back? Or, okay.

Next time we get the ball, we're going to do this. Next time we're on defense, we're going to do that. If we think in these very rational kinds of ways, using our freedom of thought, we put ourselves in a position to win. So it's not what happens in the world. It's how you think about what happens in the world. And the literature of human experience...

Nate Zinsser (32:23.426)

shows us so many incredible examples of human beings who were in pretty uncomfortable circumstances, downright awful, inhumane, barbaric circumstances, but they maintained a sense of personal integrity and a sense of optimism about their future. What we also have, unfortunately, is plenty of people who have been just fine.

because

Tim Doyle (32:53.237)

How have you impressed upon the people that you work with within their given craft event, whether it's in the sports arena or in the business world, that after a given performance, whether it's a game or a meeting or whatever that main craft is, how have you impressed upon them that the reflection process still needs to be seen as part of fulfilling the full performance?

Nate Zinsser (33:20.64)

Yeah, the game isn't over until you've learned what there is to learn from the game. The meeting isn't over, the work week isn't over until you've distilled from it the important lessons. Okay. If you accept the fact that your confidence has relatively little to do with what actually happens and has almost everything to do with how you think about what happens.

then you take it upon yourself to say, okay, how am I going to think about this experience? Where was I successful? Where did I put in grow good effort? Where did I make little progress? Okay. What are these highlights of these experience? I'll be equally honest about, okay, where did I not perform well? I will give myself credit.

for the things that I did well. I will look at the things that I didn't do well and I will decide, well, I'm gonna fix this and I'm gonna address this. And because I'm doing that, I'm making that commitment, I can feel even better about myself, even though I'm identifying some shortcomings.

I'm going to identify a shortcoming, commit to making an improvement, and boy, if I make those improvements and I combine that with the things that I'm already doing well, whew, I have a pretty big upside. And it's being willing to have that kind of perspective. I'm going to accept what I did well. I'm going to accept what I didn't do well.

But I'm only going to see those negatives as very temporary and very limited. And I'm not going to interpret them as being the definitive statement about myself. I'm going to think about those as being very fixable and very changeable. Yeah, they happen, but they don't tell the truth. And they're not necessarily going to recur and recur and recur because I'm going to do something different about them.

Tim Doyle (35:15.582)

How much time do you recommend between performance happening and reflecting back on it?

Nate Zinsser (35:24.991)

I think that depends on when your next performance is. I heard a story once, I don't know if this is true, but I heard the story that the great Michael Jordan would allow himself 10 minutes of disappointment and personal frustration if his team had lost or if he had played a bad game. 10 minutes.

He would give himself that 10 minutes and then he would start thinking about, okay, we've got the next game, we're going to do this, da da da da da da da da. He only gave himself 10 minutes because in a lot of cases he's playing again in less than 24 hours. You know, 48 hours. He doesn't have a whole lot of time. So he's got to get it out of the system quick, relatively quickly. A pro football player who plays on Sundays once a week.

for 17 weeks, okay? I play, I can just sort of let it wash over me. On Monday, I'm studying to film. Unfortunately, what they do in NFL locker rooms is they rub your nose in every little...

imperfection that your position grew committed. But by Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, now we're just getting more and more excited about the next game. So I'm doing all my reflection on Monday into Tuesday and then I can build it towards being very, very confident for the upcoming Sunday. If you've got that kind of time, great, you can take that kind of time to reflect.

If you're going right back into it soon, well then your reflection better take place quickly because you can't afford not to learned the lessons of game X before you step onto the field for game Y.

Nate Zinsser (37:31.331)

You gotta have the right kind of memory and the right kind of imagination to get yourself in the best possible mental and emotional position for your next performance.

Tim Doyle (37:45.842)

Yeah, continuing in that direction of moving forward. How does envisioning play an integral role within confidence?

Nate Zinsser (37:54.54)

Well, I see envisioning or the use of the imagination as one of the three main components of our human life. We think about our past, our memories. We think about how we are in the moment. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And then we have this imagination. And in this imagination, we can think about what we want.

We can also use the imagination to scare the snot out of ourselves and worry about what could go wrong. So that component of thought, that ability to think about a future...

That has huge implications for our actual execution. Every time I imagine the proper execution of a skill, I'm firing off a string of those neural pathways. Every time I think about something going wrong, I'm firing off another string of neural pathways. And it's a question of which one I'm going to strengthen. It's a question of which...

characteristic of myself, which future do I really want to feed?

So it can be a very powerful experience if you will give yourself the luxury of taking the time and really putting yourself in an environment mentally, see what you're going to see, hear what you're going to hear, feel what you're going to feel, the uniform, the feet on the turf, the air temperature in the auditorium or the operating room or the conference room. Where is the scoreboard?

Nate Zinsser (39:44.558)

a tray of surgical instruments, who's in there with me? I'm going to see this procedure, this performance exactly the way I want it to turn out. Now, is it going to turn out that way? Maybe, maybe not, but at least I have engaged in the neurology of what I want. Okay. And as one of my clients who's also a coach, you know,

We came up with this pretty succinct comment. Your body does what your brain is full of. Fill your brain with what you want your body to do. If you fill your brain with memories of what you failed at, worries that it's not going to turn out that well in the future, you're just kind of encouraging your body to execute accordingly. Think about what you

Think about what you want, you know? I think the seven most powerful words in the English language might be, what if it all turns out great? It's not very profound or scientific, but it's powerful and it's all right.

Tim Doyle (41:04.138)

What I do think is profound and what doesn't get spoken about enough is that I think when we think about our potential or our future, we just focus on that vision. Like, oh, I can see it. I can see what the future will look like. But this again gets into the sensory and actually experiencing it and feeling it. And when we talk about potential, we think,

Nate Zinsser (41:29.281)

Mmm.

Tim Doyle (41:33.822)

you know, think big. But I feel like what I've found through your work is that, okay, by actually fulfilling that potential, it's also about thinking small and being able to feel and experience all those nitty gritty little details.

Nate Zinsser (41:46.706)

all those nitty gritty details and the more detailed your envisioning is the more neurology you engage and

hence the more likely it will come to pass. I don't use the term visualization very much as it tends to limit one to, I can see an outcome. No, let's envision it. What's it going to sound like? What's it going to feel like from a kinesthetic level, from a proprioceptive level, from an emotional level? You really get into that.

That getting into those, as you say, nitty-gritty details is what can make your imagination a very powerful performance enhancer.

Tim Doyle (42:38.537)

Do you think ambition lives within that same family as envisioning or what are your thoughts there?

Nate Zinsser (42:43.777)

Bye.

Nate Zinsser (42:48.245)

That's a wonderful question, I think you're onto something. think ambition, this eagerness to achieve something, is tied in with the human capacity to sort of see and sense something that has not yet existed. I am ambitious about...

making an Olympic team. I'm ambitious about graduating from business school. I'm ambitious about completing my dissertation and getting the teaching job. I want it. I have a sense of it. I'm thinking about how cool it will be. My late great friend, Dr. Ken Reviza, who worked in Major League Baseball for years.

One of the topics he was continuously reinforcing with people is think how good it's gonna feel. Think how good it's gonna feel when we win the conference title, when we qualify for the College World Series, when we...

when we win the freaking World Series as a major league team. Think how good that's gonna feel. Think how good that's gonna feel. I think that sense of how great it's gonna be kind of feeds the energy, builds up the energy that is necessary to do the things that's gonna put you in a position to win the freaking World Series. So it all connects like that.

Tim Doyle (44:27.485)

That's something that I think I'm going to work into my meditation practice, I feel like, because I think most people going back to that, just focusing on vision, I think when we think of our future, it feels like we're kind of a spectator in the stands rather than actually like feeling it. And so it's still.

Nate Zinsser (44:45.311)

No, you're not. Yeah, you're not a spectator. You are a participant. You are the man or the woman in the arena. Put yourself in the arena.

Tim Doyle (44:56.561)

How much of confidence is about delusion and tricking your mind to a degree?

Nate Zinsser (45:04.949)

I get that question a lot. I know some people are very comfortable with the term functional delusion. I'm thinking about something that hasn't happened. I'm thinking about myself doing something I've never done before. I think about a reality. I'm constructing a facsimile of a reality that isn't real yet.

I think that can be very, very functional. the great inventors, the Thomas Edison's of the world. Okay. I'm coming up with something that doesn't exist. Yeah. I am I delusional to think that, yes, this thing that has never existed can indeed exist. Is he crazy? Maybe. Is it functional? Absolutely. Yeah.

Tiger Woods, who recently has found himself in a big hunk of trouble. Back in his dominant days, he was able to say, I've got a 55 in me. And I may be 10 strokes behind the leader at the end of the third day of a four day PGA tournament. He's delusional enough to think, if I...

If I can bring that 55 out tomorrow, I can still win this thing. I'm sure the mathematical odds are way against him. But that doesn't mean it's inappropriate for him to think that way. I believe in a certain level of delusion.

as long as it energizes you to take appropriate action. It energized Thomas Edison to keep going and going and going the tens of the thousands of trials necessary to produce batteries and light bulbs and all the things that we take for granted today. He was energized by this delusion that something could happen. So it can be very functional in that regard.

Tim Doyle (47:21.107)

I guess asking it in a similar way, but also just shining light on it, because I do think it's an important point. mean, to that degree, how can logical thinking actually hold us back?

Nate Zinsser (47:33.249)

Well, if logical thinking only takes you into the past where negative things happened, then it's kind of useless. know, scientific, and this is very interesting to try to speak from a scientific point of view, because a scientist will tell you the best predictor of present and future behavior is past behavior. Okay.

Well, that's about as logical as it gets. If this happened once, twice, three times, we can pretty much expect it to happen again on the fourth time. All right? You got to be really careful of that level of logic holding you back from taking action that's appropriate. Okay, I'm going to get down on the floor and I'm going to do 20 push-ups.

Am I instantly going to be stronger at the end of 20 push-ups? I may have to do 20 push-ups three times a day for six months. Is that illogical? Okay. At what point am I actually going to feel stronger? Be careful. There is a time and a place for logic, but there's also a time and a place for creativity and imagination.

Use them both, folks!

Tim Doyle (49:07.304)

in that phase of, I don't know if you would call it imagination or creativity, but when we're reflecting back and using that filtering process as well, how do we go about?

Tim Doyle (49:24.06)

leaning more so on the side of externalizing failure rather than internalizing it.

Nate Zinsser (49:29.516)

Hmm.

I think we have to make the conscious decision that I'm only going to think about my failures in ways that give me an opportunity to move past them or move through them or improve upon them. Okay? If I see a failure and I interpret a failure as a permanent, never to change experience, well, I'm in trouble. Okay? I better acknowledge that it happened. It happened that time.

Maybe it happened two three times. I make the example in the book of a college lacrosse goalie who gets scored upon seven times every game. That is the lowest level of scoring in the entire country.

Seven times in a game that goalie is going to get scored upon and she's got to reach back into the goal, grab the ball, hand it to the referee while the opposing team that just scored is whooping and hollering, celebrating. That athlete, and it's a pretty good analogy for a lot of things that happen to us, that athlete has to say, okay, it happened, but it was just that one. Even though it could have been the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, it was just that one.

I leave it in the past where it belongs and that allows me to actually see the next play rather than thinking about, a lot of things have gone wrong. Maybe there's maybe there maybe more things are going to go on. Maybe it's going to happen all over again. No, I, if you really want to be, if you want to, if you want to give yourself the best chance of performing, well, you got to leave those failures.

Nate Zinsser (51:16.298)

back in the past where they actually occurred rather than carrying them forward emotionally.

Tim Doyle (51:25.394)

think there's a seesaw relationship between two terms, confidence being on one end and conformity being on the other. And you hear the phrase all along, just fit in or try to fit in. And I think the price of entry.

to fit in or the price of entry to conforming is to give up a piece of that authenticity to ourselves. And what I think authenticity is, that that's just our deepest, most innate type of confidence. How do we go about unlearning that type of programming?

Nate Zinsser (51:54.986)

Wow.

Nate Zinsser (52:01.024)

Yes.

Nate Zinsser (52:08.726)

That's a really important question and I really liked the way you made that distinction, Tim.

How do we unlearn that?

I think it starts with the realization that it holds us back. If you want to be successful at something, you've got to be a little different from most of the other people who are engaged in the same something, whatever it is. You've got to be different. And it's okay to be a little different. And it's okay to see yourself as

Kind of special, borderline wonderful. And unfortunately, so much of our schooling and socialization is everybody sit down, everybody shut up, everybody listen to me. Don't speak up, don't act out of turn, be patient.

I don't care who you are, I don't care what's special about you, you need all to fall into line. Now that's appropriate.

Nate Zinsser (53:29.376)

just in terms of survival. anything beyond that is just soul crushing obedience. And we gotta be really careful about how we teach our kids about that.

you know, to fit into a social environment. That's the definition of socialization. And yeah, we all have to fit in a little bit, but at the same time, you've got to realize that we are all individual, unique, special, wonderful, and we have an obligation to the universe to express that uniqueness.

So look for your uniqueness and enjoy the heck out of it and share it with the world. You can think of yourself as weird, strange, or you can think of yourself as special and wonderful. I hope you picked a ladder.

Tim Doyle (54:39.431)

Dr. Zinzer, think that's a beautiful place to stop. Where can people go to learn more about you, anything else you'd like to share?

Nate Zinsser (54:47.814)

yeah, my book, The Confident Mind is available pretty much wherever you find books. I do have a-

very small, not particularly broad website through which people can contact me. It's just natesensor.com. And I have been blessed by having listeners to various podcasts and folks who have come across the book and they contact me from the National Symphony Orchestra of Estonia. I'm not making that up.

Tim Doyle (55:24.583)

Confidence lies in all places.

Nate Zinsser (55:26.706)

in all places, airline pilots in Africa, classical musicians in Europe, financial services professionals in New York and San Francisco and Denver. I would love to hear from some of your listeners. And if people would like to engage in mentoring dialogues such as these, I do those continuously.

Tim Doyle (55:55.557)

Awesome, well, great talking with you today and definitely people are gonna grow their confidence from this type of conversation.

Nate Zinsser (56:03.211)

Thank you. I will have considered our time very well spent if that's the case. Thank you for the opportunity to be with your listeners today.