Hmm I wonder if it's working this time, did I hear you say something Rosie but can
you hear me? Hello... We've got a few of you come back thank you guys, I've no idea
what's going on, I'm trying a different internet connection hoping this will
work it should be, this is the slower one.. 'Working so far yes' Ahh guys thanks, thank
you Mr Taplin, a few of you said it's working better
'Perfect, okay now', oh brilliant thanks guys
Isn't that peculiar I was connected to the faster of the two connections
that we tested this morning and we're now on the slower of the two, but it
seems to be getting better. Everyone says it's better 'Good, brilliant'. I'll just
give it a moment and let a few guys come back so I apologize we are late starting
Well we've got a few of you. Wow look at you all flying in thank you very much guys I
apologize for that, I'm just relieved that this is working because one of my
own areas of self-confidence, as I'm sure you know, is these technical things
isn't it weird how when we're really scared of something - it happens, you know,
I thought I hope it just works, I hope nothing technical happens and guess what
it happened... we really are self-fulfilling prophecies
us human beings, it's peculiar how we attract things like that. Okay so I think
anyone who's coming back is probably back now, I think a few of you are
probably showing up I'm watching the number count go up, we've got a hundred
of you back I think we're up to a couple of hundred just now thanks and see
people are still arriving so please bear with me guys, please be patient. So what I
am just gonna say is give you a little idea
where I want to go with this so, first of all I just want to tell you
that although you all think I'm super confident I'm crapping myself! Although
the worst that I thought could have has already happened so is there
anything to worry about now? Probably not!
So I've got some notes here which I will be referring to because I don't want to
go off onto a tangent and go in the wrong direction, so I probably will be
referring to my notes when you see me looking down there I'm not ignoring you, I'm
looking at my notes. Also I'm using the webcam on my laptop which means the
camera is up here but I sometimes will look down here because that's where the
screen is. Okay and I also may ask you questions from
time to time with what I'm talking about you know if you've got an experience or
an idea around this whole confidence issue which you'd like to share, if I can
catch it quick enough and if Melissa is around she can feed it to me
then I may well share it with everyone because I think we all learn
things from each other's experience and I also think it's really important that
we don't feel alone in our own experience of these sorts of things so
that's kind of how I think it's going to work
right then let's have a little look where are we going
So, confidence. All of us have got areas how - you see the
lights change now so I'm going to need to sit close, if I sit
back I'm going to go into silouette because the camera seeing all that brightness up here - okay
forgive me if on being a space invader. We all have areas in which we're
confident and areas in whcih we're not confident, I've done a lot of training in this over
the years, during the 1990s a huge amount of
personal development training and I trained to be an introduction leader to
quite a large company that does this sort of thing. I've always been
fascinated in this sort of thing, I've had many comments over the years from
people saying about how I use Applied Psychology within my photography
in teaching which is completely true, yes I do because I truly believe that
everything we have out here in the world is a print out what we got going on in
here and in here in our hearts. I just believe that stuff and I noticed that
for myself it seems to be true. So we all have areas where we're confident and
areas where we're not confident. For myself for example I'm very
confident in my ability to take photos and I'm now very confident in my
abilities to pass on my photography knowledge to other people. It wasn't
always that way and you will find out more about that in a minute. I'm very
confident as a motorcyclist. I'm very confident in my ability to use machinery
but then there's other areas where I'm not confident at all, and I know some of
you may be thinking, but you're the most confident person I've ever seen you're
live on YouTube right now in front of 213 people, well, true but the areas I'm
not confident with are tech - high tech stuff, I always seem to cock it up and
it's probably because as I just said I've become my own self fulfilling
prophecy around that. I'm very bad at remembering things which is why I end up
with these lists of notes, I have no confidence my ability to remember what I
have to say. Officialdom scares the bejesus out of me, legal letters, lawsuits
VAT returns, tax stuff, I find it really, really scary dealing with that. Personal
relationships? Hmm yeah I don't know I find the whole thing a bit butterfly but
then maybe we all do find that one a bit nervous because we have a big emotional
investment in those... Reading and writing is something which I'm not at all
confident about, eight or nine years ago I was told I was dyslexic
and I had no idea I just thought I was a bit slow and a bit thick - and that's
gonna come up again in a minute and I discovered I was dyslexic. I hate reading
and writing things, scanning for information, if I have to answer five
emails it'll probably take me the entire morning - it drives me nuts
I never text, well I very rarely text or respond to messages because it just
takes me forever. It's just - phone me if you want to talk to me.. I'm
very, very lacking in confidence in those areas. Numbers - I'm not very good at and
weirdly, for someone who does what I do, I'm not very confident that
people will understand me. Isn't that weird when I have constant affirmations
every day about how I've managed to teach people things which they have no
idea they'd be able to do
When I first started out in photography as a professional I wasn't confident
enough to say I'm a photographer, so when somebody would come up to me and say
'So what do you do?' I'd say... I mess around with cameras a bit, I snap a
few pictures now and then, you know? As opposed to just look them in the eye and
go yeah I'm a photographer do you want anything doing? I couldn't do that. Back
then being a professional photographer was a dream that was bigger than me. I
couldn't ever imagine applying that label to myself but hey
look things happen, we move into the unknown and we go on journeys and now
I'm talking to 250 odd people live around the world and I think that's a
total miracle. So what is a lack of confidence? Well I'm going to suggest
that it is fear of the unknown and the unknown is a scary place for human
beings because we're programmed to look out for bad stuff, it's in our
evolutionary history. Once upon a time we had to look out for the tiger that was
going to get us, or the lion that was going to eat us, or the mammoth that was
going to trample us, or the scary guys in the cave in the next valley who were
going to come and club us and take all our gazelle meat and all that kind of
stuff. It's what kept us alive as a species, we are programmed to look out
for little signs that something is going to go wrong but it's a lot less relevant
these days to how it was many, many years ago back in that evolutionary
past but nonetheless it's still fed to us in a daily diet. If you look at the
news - the news isn't news anymore, the news is no longer unbiased news, they
know that human beings are programmed to look out for bad stuff so the news isn't
always bad because it's not about selling unbiased news now it's about
selling ad space around the number of viewers who come to watch the news. Why
is it we are bombarded with all these programs about the world's
scariest killers, top 10 worst murderers, you know all these fail type things? It's
because we're programmed to take notice of things when they go wrong,to try and
protect ourselves but unfortunately just like me with
my fear of tech in this broadcast we start to become a self-fulfilling
prophecy, we start to engender that things going wrong for us and then
that's going to have an impact on our self-confidence and it's gonna go down
So fear of the unknown - it's a crazy thing because we don't know
what we don't know. We don't know what the unknown is and yet we're afraid of
something we don't know what it is. How mad is that? And that then stops us in
our tracks from doing things. When I did that little broadcast video yesterday
yeah, I'm walking down the street with my selfie stick, I've got a little
flutter going on in the stomach I'm feeling a little bit nervous but that's
probably a good thing. So where have we got to on my list here? The other
thing which were afraid of which has a big impact on our confidence is
our own self-image and I would assert this is something we make up for
ourselves when we were very, very young indeed. I know for myself I grew up out
in a rural country area, I grew up mostly in the company of adults. I could have a
brilliantly intellectual conversation with the neighbours and the gardener and
all this kind of stuff and then I hit five years old and I was thrown into
school and suddenly it's chaos and bedlam and nothing made any logical sense and
nothing was intellectual at all, it was just the chaos of kids who
very quickly informed me that I was the fattest kid in the school!
Now I didn't necessarily mind being the fattest kid in the school but I didn't
I've been teased for it, I didn't like being the last one picked for the
football team, I didn't want to be the one that nobody wanted
in their gang and so it made me start to withdraw from the others around
the school, I started to hide in the corner. It was a big knock to my
self-confidence. Pre- school, I would go and walk up to any stranger, anywhere and just have an
hour long conversation with them, once I got into school I thought there's
something wrong with me here. I decided that I was fat and stupid
I always thought I was fat and stupid and then
that was reinforced when a teacher that I kind of respected at school one day
hollered across the classroom 'Browne you're a useless hulking great whale!'
Well that one went in kind of deep and so that one kind of really did have an
impact on my self-confidence I couldn't wait to leave school. I must confess
for many years I kind of lived into that, I didn't try and do things because I
decided that I was a useless hulking great whale and all these people who
were telling me this were obviously cleverer than me and right
so I didn't really try and do things but you know this is the whole thing we have
to move forward we have to grow our confidence but how do you grow
confidence? If anybody wants to throw up an idea there? How would you suggest we
could grow our confidence, I'm watching the chat thing just here throw out some
ideas, anybody throw up some ideas come on 'learn to love yourself' - nice one
Caitlyn, anybody else want to throw up something? Give me some ideas how you
might just bloody go for it?
'Fake it till you make it' - I love that Michelle! That's a rock and
roll one, 'Try things out despite the fear and then you can see you can be good at
them', 'To grow your confidence you have to keep going with what you're not
confident at now'. Right I think you've just nailed that one Adam, I think this
is amazing. Now these these comments will be saved along with this video
when it's archived so guys please come back and have a look through because
look there's lots of people with lots of great ideas and also if any of you have
got anything you'd like to add from your own experiences. I've shared some
stuff from my past but if any of you more confident guys want to share
something from your own please do that in the comments because then people can
come back and have a look. It is important that people realize they're
not alone in this journey it's something that is ongoing. So how do we grow our
confidence? Well it's kind of like what Adam just said - and there are more
comments flooding in which is awesome thank you - but it's kind of like
what Adam just said, we've got to go and do stuff that we don't want to do
We have to steer into it, if you kind of look at something and
thing I don't feel confident enough to do that
Guess what? Good news - that's a little ding ling ling ling a ling a ling alarm
bell going if you want to grow your confidence you need to go take a look,
take a closer look at that, you need to go and give it a go. Now I'm not
suggesting that if you're someone who is deeply shy and you're really afraid of
photographing in a public place that you plunge right into the middle of a
festival in central London and start taking crazy street shots. that's not
gonna work. That's gonna crush your self-confidence but what is to stop you
from just kind of moving forward a little bit at a time what's going to
stop you from just trying something in the street, just trying taking a photo in
public. Now the fact that it feels uncomfortable that's the good news
because that means that it's something you need to do in order to grow your
confidence. I'm going to say a bit more about those things in a minute
but first things I want to share a couple more little stories about how our
brains are hard-wired to manage this just as we were hardwired to
notice danger and to have a lack of confidence and to be fearful of the
unknown. We are also hardwired to be able to change the way we think and who we
are. I know a lot of people say ' Mike. you know, you're super confident I
could never be like you, I'm not a confident person like you.' Well as
you just heard I wasn't a confident person like me either, it was a journey
it took some constant pressure from within and it also took some changing
external environment let me give you a couple of examples. So a few weeks ago, a
few months ago, you may have seen me do a live PR shoot with the ocean brothers
the guys who rode unsupported across the Atlantic Ocean when they were greeted
back into their hometown. On the end of that video - VIDEO BREAKS UP HERE