Amigos and amigas,

NATIONAL EMERGENCY IN THE UK!

We've had 3 days of consecutive sun 🌞.

Checklist:

Suncream ✅

Shirtless Brits ✅

Hayfever ✅

Everyone still complaining about the weather because no matter what British people love to complain ✅

In other news...

The big 3 newsletter is here!

- 1 mental health tip

- 1 social skills tip

- 1 personal reflection

Let's dive straight into this week's mental health tip...

1.) Confidence

If you're waiting to feel confident before doing something you've never done before, you're going to be waiting until I can speak Mandarin while playing the Mongolian flute and dancing like a 15th century jester 🤡.

In other words: you're gonna be waiting forever.

Why?

Because that's not how confidence works.

To elaborate, take a moment to imagine something you feel unconfident towards...

- Approaching a stranger to spark up a conversation

- Speaking on stage in front of an audience

- Dancing bachata

- Speaking in front of a camera

- Taking a job above your current level of experience

Etc.

Now consider why you don't feel confident towards this thing.

Any ideas?

Here's my guess...

You don't feel confident doing this thing yet because you don't have the evidence of having done it before.

Simple.

Confidence is built with evidence. Not by repeating vague mantras to yourself in the mirror and hoping for the best.

This also means; if you don't have evidence for your capability of doing something yet, you're not going to feel confident UNTIL you do it.

So the mantra becomes...

Action before confidence.

Or...

Embarrassment is the cost of entry.

But I must admit...

So far I haven't been completely honest with you.

Because there is a secret way you can fuel your confidence regardless of whether you have evidence for your ability to do something or not.

Let me illustrate it with an example...

Two days ago I went to a salsa class in London for the first time.

It was one of the best nights of my life.

But beforehand I didn't have confidence in my ability to dance salsa because I'd never danced it before (I had no evidence).

But I did have confidence in my ability to face difficult challenges, nerve-wracking situations and to learn hard skills (for example; I've started my own youtube channel, I've travelled across Europe, started jiu jitsu as a beginner etc.).

So my lack of confidence in my ability to dance salsa was balanced by my confidence in myself to face hard things and learn.

As I was walking to the venue I simply said to myself; "I've faced harder things" and the fear of looking silly disappeared.

So consider this the next time you go to do something but hold yourself back by thinking "oh wait, I don't feel confident yet. Let me wait until I feel confident and then I'll do it."...

1.) If you've never done something before, of course you don't feel confident in your ability to do it yet. But that doesn't mean you can't feel confident in your ability to face hard things.

2.) In order to be confident, you must first be vulnerable.

3.) Whether you believe in yourself or not doesn't matter. What matters is you act and gather a case to argue in favour of you feeling more confident the next time you do this thing.

Finally, you know the saying "get comfortable being uncomfortable?"

It's great, but I'd change it slightly...

"You'll only become confident by doing uncomfortable things, but if you continue to do them, soon they'll no longer be uncomfortable."

Funny isn't it? How most of our problems can be solved by working with the nature of reality isn't of against it. (Lol huge note to self 🫣😭🫠).

So my questions to you are:

- What is something you've been postponing due to a lack of confidence?

- If you now understand you're never going to feel confident in your ability to do this thing before you do it, why not just save yourself some time and do it ASAP?

- Before you do it, how can you remind yourself to embrace the discomfort instead of expecting to feel confident?

Go deeper:

- Check out this clip from Ryan Holiday explaining this idea further.

Now let's cover this week's social skills tip...

2.) Friend & foe signals

Two days ago I spent the whole day in London.

I met up with my 2 friends Saf and Tintin, went to a latino neighbourhood in Elephant and Castle to distribute some Spanish rizz (forgive me I had to say that ☠️) and then went to the salsa class.

But around midday, when I was taking the tube to meet my 2 friends, I had to stop halfway through the station and capture a thought I couldn't stop thinking about since I arrived in London an hour before...

Don't let other people's foe signals intimidate you.

Here's what this means...

London is a big city.

There's millions of people who live there and millions of tourists who come to visit each month.

So there's no shortage of people to speak to.

But the problem is, London is a big city.

Which means everyone is in a rush, it's hard to strike up a conversation with someone unless you're in a shop and most worryingly, hardly anyone is smiling.

They're either on their phones, rushing around like a headless chicken or just too caught up in their own head to remember what a smile is.

Which means if you're a young lad who's travelled up from Kent for the day and is hoping to socialise and meet new people, it wouldn't take long for you to conclude "these Londoners are an unsavoury bunch of people you know. So mean and nasty looking. It's impossible to talk to them!"

So after an hour of being in London that's what I concluded.

I was sat on the tube looking at all the screw faces around me, starting to feel disheartened by the lack of smiles and I even started to frown myself.

But then a thought flashed through my mind...

"Don't let other people's foe signal intimidate you. Don't trust them. Believe that deep down, given the chance, these people would lighten up. They're hoping, in fact, for something to happen so they can lighten up. In a world of foe signals, stand firm, and emit friend signals."

Foe vs friend signals is an idea from FBI agent's Jack Schafer's book the like switch. And the idea goes like this...

Go to London or the most dangerous part of your town and you'll see plenty of foe signals:

- Frowning

- Eyebrows tight

- Squinting eyes

- Tense jaw

- Aggressive stance

- The urban scowl (see cat below)

Foe signals indicate; "don't mess with me. I'm not in the mood. Nor do I care for who you are. Get out of my way or deal with the consequences."

On the other hand, friend signals indicate: "I'm on your side. I like you and I'm friendly. Let's have a chat."

They include:

- Eyebrow flashes

- Head tilting

- Smiles

- Eye contact

- Pupil dilation

- Touch

- Mirroring

- The inward lean

- Verbal nudges (yep, ok, go on, hmm)

If you want to see experts in friend signals, pay attention to any street seller or salesman.

They actively search for people showing friend signals, reciprocate and then start an interaction.

So the practical takeaway here is...

When you're feeling social, don't be put off by other people's foe signals. They could just be having a bad day or not realising what their body language is conveying. For yourself though, be stubborn in emitting friend signals. And you'll notice you not only encourage others to reciprocate but you'll feel better.

As always, just remember the basics; emit the energy you want to receive.

Go deeper:

- In the upcoming social skills course and in future videos, we'll deep dive into how to encode all the necessary friend signals and decode foe signals.

Now let's finalise with this week's personal realisation...

3.) Bullshit

I'm not sure if this is just because I'm a YouTuber, but I've noticed over the past few weeks my bullshit detector for the content I watch has improved.

Within the first few seconds of someone's video I can pretty much tell if the intention behind making it was genuine or not. As in, whether they created it from a place of genuine curiosity and creativity or if they just made the video to make money.

I assess this by whether they depict what they're saying out to be the ONLY truth and whether they use fear-based, narrowed language.

For example...

- "If you don't pay attention to this, you will fall behind..."

- "This is the only thing you need to do..."

- "You're a loser, and you just need to be more like me..."

- "The only way you can get ahead is if you listen to what I say..."

Caveat: I fully understand in previous videos of mine I've used language similar to the first 2. But now it doesn't feel right.

I don't want to scare you. I don't want to force you. I don't want to rush you. I don't want to create from a place of fear.

I just want to learn cool shit and share it. If you want to listen, cool. If not, GO FU... joking, also cool.

But that means my brain can no longer handle listening to anything from a person trying to hustle or scare me.

In fact the past few nights I've found myself scrolling youtube for 5 minutes then stopping because nothing was worth watching. In every video someone was just creating a mindless problem to try and convince me their word was law.

Some quotes related to this are:

- "If they wrote it to make money, don't read it." - Naval Ravikant

- "If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly." - Nassim Taleb

Some books that explore these ideas further:

- There is no how by Kapil Gupta (read this recently, awesome short book. Goes into the idea of why prescriptions, how tos, hacks etc. are useless)

- Power vs force by David R. Hawkins (haven't read this yet but heard great things about it. Perhaps it explores the idea of intentions behind things?)

Final question:

- Is the content you're watching truly enriching your life? Or is it just making you feel afraid, insecure and as if you now need to rush to justify your existence?

That's all for this week.

Thanks for reading,

Lew

Quote of the week: