How I Found Confidence!

Welcome back to Real Talk with Elliott! As you can see, I’m in a hotel room. I’m on the road, so I am super excited cause I’m gonna answer a question today. Remember this is the series where I’m either out in the community talking to people about questions they have in their lives, or I’m talking to people or people are sending in questions, I’m responding to them. And I do this because I just wanna make a difference in people’s lives. So today’s question comes from Rashida Henry who asks, “I would like to ask, how did you build your confidence and how did you find good mentors?” So actually those are two questions obviously.

So the first question I had a really difficult start to my life as it relates to confidence. And the way that I built my confidence is a couple of things. I started doing tasks that I knew were hard, that I enjoyed and kind of dedicating myself to them. The first one I remember was playing baseball. I started working really, really hard to be the best baseball player I could be. And then every sign of progress was, was something I could then draw upon to build my confidence and make and like feel good about myself. And it was, it was so interesting to watch that shift happen and the more my confidence built, the more I believed in myself and, and my resilience built. I felt like I can get through and deal with just about anything. And the longer I aged, the older I got, the more evidence I had of that. And that’s really what made the big shift for me. So I started doing tasks and then developed the ability to look in my history for evidence that I could, I could do hard things. So that was how I built my confidence.

And how do you find a good mentor? Man, that is a really, really important question. Mentorship is super important and I’ve been lucky enough to have some tremendous mentors in my life. The number one rule, and my grandmother said this, don’t accept advice from people in a worse situation than you. And I always say like, find a mentor who has been down the path you want to go down, find a mentor who is advocatory of you going in the direction you want to go to, and has already done it. Once you do that, it’s game changing. I think sometimes people find them the wrong mentor because they didn’t really find a mentor that can guide them appropriately towards where they want to go because they have not been there themselves.

And I have multiple mentors in my life cuz there are multiple things I’m trying to achieve. So I think that’s the really, really important thing. So Rashida, I hope that helps. Anybody out there listening, hope that helps, hope your confidence grows, Rashida, I hope all of your confidence grows and hope you find a brilliant mentor that helps you get where you want to be.

And for everybody else, please continue to send in questions. I love making these videos, I love interacting with you guys. You can leave a comment below with your question. You can send me a DM on social or you can email me, you can send me a text message. I’ll put the number on the screen, but you know, I love it. So come on, send in those questions because I cannot wait to make a video for you.