Gaining Real Life Wins In Order To Build Self-Confidence

AI Generated Transcript (I only fixed glaring errors and added some paragraph breaks):

The importance of getting wins under your belt in order to build self-confidence so you can do the next things in your life. That is what I am thinking about this evening, or tonight.

I'm also doing this recording in a place, a room with a fan, so I'm really interested to hear how that sounds.

But I'm contemplating this by looking at my own life and thinking of the things that I was affirmed in when I was younger and maybe the things that did not happen that could have happened. And I believe my point is not to complain about myself, but to be a learner so that I know how to pass on wisdom to the next generation.

But I believe I lacked activities and projects that would build confidence in things that can be applied in the real world.

Now let me tell you a little bit about what I mean, and this may change your thoughts about yourself and your own life. But I was the younger you go in my life, the closer to an A student that I was. I was a top student.

I remember I went to a little Christian school and I remember standing up in church because I was one of the top several students in the whole school. I was always affirmed for being intelligent. I got good grades. I was often told I have a good future. This carried on. I excelled at school.

Even though I showed some early signs of some interesting productivity problems. I was an A student, yet I remember getting in trouble for my desk being a complete mess. I was an A student, but I remember having to stay after school and write out my spelling homework over and over because I didn't do my homework.

I remember many mornings in the van, this blue van that my parents had, in the school parking lot. My mother actually worked at the school. So I was in the school parking lot, in the van, frantically doing the homework that I had to rush inside and turn in soon.

So I moved onwards towards eventually high school. I departed from the private school because there was no availability for ninth grade. So I had to go to the local public high school.

When I got there, they tested me and looked at some things, and they gave me the opportunity to advance a grade. Because my knowledge level and everything was it was more advanced than where I was supposedly going to fit in.

And someone talked me into not doing that for the sake of social development. I personally think that was a mistake. Would have been better for me to get out of there as fast as possible.

But I remember I developed some things, some ideas that were not wrong. By the way, I could tell another version of my life which is also true about all the good things I've learned. But this is what I'm thinking about today. This is my blog of what I'm thinking about today.

So I didn't do extracurricular stuff, hardly at all. I mean, I sort of did actually. I'm thinking out loud here and remembering a whole other side of this story. But I didn't do a lot in school that I could practically apply in the real world. I just got A's on tests. I got good grades. The teachers apparently liked me. But I wasn't interested in hardly anything.

Now just a side note that goes against my whole talk. I did always tend to have a job. At first I worked in the cornfields like everyone did around here, detasseling corn. I had a paper route. I worked at a pizza restaurant for years. I don't even know why. I didn't need the money. But so my extracurricular activities were a real work experience. I eventually became a supervisor, worked in a cereal packaging factory, worked on a construction site. There's a number of things that I did. Those had actually in some ways more real life value than some of what I did in school where I got A's and was told I was one of the good ones.

I even remember being sat down in a big room where the guidance counselor came out and basically said, some of you are going to college and some of you are never going to be anything more than like a factory worker or a blue-collar worker, whatever. So I was basically told I was going to be one of the successful ones.

But when I got out of high school I was pretty lost. I didn't have a lot of internal drive until I encountered God in a huge way in 1991, a couple years after high school, and ended up going off into world missions, working with Youth With A Mission.

That was spectacular. I learned so much there. It was a very intense learning time period of my life. But even there, I didn't learn a lot about how to do life and how to do money. We learned how to not have money.

So I'm trying to remember, I'm going stream of consciousness here, I'm just talking about the importance of learning things that give you confidence.

Like if I had kids, I haven't had the privilege of having kids, but if I had kids, I would want to teach them to try things and take risks. I think I would make them go out for a sport. I was not made to go out for a sport. And by the way, I'm not complaining about my parents. I'm learning. This is me learning out loud.

I would require my kids to do sports of some kind, or at least try things, at least try things, learn how to try things.

I think I once heard this story of a dad who would not let his son sleep in on a Saturday. He would pull him out of bed, hand him a rake, and say, walk down door to door, knock on every door, and offer to rake the leaves for five dollars, which was a lot back when I was hearing that story, or the person telling me was even older.

So practical things build your confidence so that when you go out into the world, like kind of going out into the world, I'm really smart and I have A's, I'm not sure that's as valuable as some of us were told it would be. That guy who knows how to go out and learn how to do a job, not just have already been trained how to do the job, but on the job has confidence to learn how to do the job. That guy has more than A's, if you know what I'm saying. He has a skill, a life skill. I would want to give that to my kids.

I think I wish I'd had more of that myself. I did take risks. I did do things, great things, I did great things. God led me on a path of doing great things. But I feel like I was always underdeveloped at taking risks in real life skills that would make, especially things that would earn an income. I was particularly bad at that. I was an idealist, total idealist.

So I realize I'm wandering all over the place, but hopefully what you will get out of it, if you are one of those people that maybe you felt like you were not, the top academic student, that you weren't that kind of person, but you did go out and work and get a job, and maybe you even worked your way through the ranks, or maybe you've just been faithful at a job for many years. I just want to affirm you, and I want you to be affirmed, that if you know what to do to be able to take care of your family and pay the bills, take care of your wife and your kids and pay the bills, I guess I'm talking to the men on that one, you have life skills that are better than A's and B's in grades.

And I think there's some people, it seems like a lot of the people I have known that are really excelling at life weren't A students. Sometimes they were troublemakers.

So there's nothing new about these ideas, but they're what I'm thinking about today. So in developing yourself and in developing your children and anyone that you influence, make sure, oh yes, the confidence to take, to have wins, to know you can do something.

If you have gone out and gotten a job and paid the rent with that job, you kind of have a confidence where you know what to do. If you have gone out and done a job interview or a whole bunch of job interviews and gotten a better paying kind of job, a more professional career type job, you have skills.

There's something, you have a confidence, you have a win under your belt.

So let's say you lose your job, you go, well, I know, I'll do what I did last time. I'll be out every day. Now if you've never done those things, you've never done a job interview, you've never gone out and gotten a job and paid the rent, you've never done things that really practically benefit others or someone will pay you for it, you might lack in self-confidence.

So a part of being developed is growing in self-confidence by getting some wins under your belt. I think one of the most important reasons why we have to take risks and try new things is because we have to get wins so that when we have the losses, we're okay with it.

I just thought of a great example of this. I was never much of a fisherman, although my dad and my uncles loved to fish. So sometimes I ended up with them. I remember one particular trip, I think I was there for the company, and I'd never been on a six inch.  I went on numerous trips where nothing was caught in places where allegedly there was a lot of fish and the fishermen that took us there were shrugging their shoulders and surprised.

But on this trip, I think it was in Canada, southern Canada, I don't remember exactly where it was, Lake of the Woods area, we were out there fishing and we hit a spot where we were just pulling in the walleye, we were just pulling them in. And for the first time I realized, I don't like fishing, but I sure like catching. And this is so much fun.

I think I understand why somebody would spend hours of not catching because of this moment where you are catching. In other words, I had a win under my belt now. Now I know what it's like. Now I know what the mysterious day of catching lots of fish is like. So it gives me something to look forward to.

I also learned that sometimes it's just about being out there with your compatriots and floating on the water and enjoying the beauty of nature. But that giving that, you're going out and doing it and persisting until you succeed and then you have a win under your belt.

I recently heard an online entrepreneur guy who does Amazon business and other things, and he was talking about how he believed it's not fair to not admit that luck is a little bit of how you succeed in business. He wasn't saying it was all about luck, he was just saying you have to admit that luck is a real factor, chance is a real factor.

And then he shared how the very first project he took on to make money online in an online business, it worked. The very first one, it worked and he profited from it. And as a result of that, he was confident that he could do it.

It wasn't like maybe someday I'll do this. He went and did it and it worked and he made a profit. So he was more free to try things because he had that win under your belt.

So I guess the moral of this story is take risks and persist in order to get wins under your belt.

And while you have that, you might be plagued with self-doubt or feeling like you don't know what to do. You got to get those wins under your belt.

All right, God bless. Thanks for listening to this even longer voice note.

Jon Davis, signing off.