Dyslexia Book, Day 2 of 30:

How to Build Un-Shatterable Confidence & How to Dream

10 min readJan 2, 2019

Cliff: “When I grow up, I’m going to be President, a Billionaire, and a Pop-star”

Teacher: “All at the same time?”

Cliff: “Yes”

When you ask a child in pre-school what they want to be when they grow up, answers like “Astronaut” and “Ballerina” are common. Usually, at some point, those dreams fall by the way side. But that level of ambition never left me, and it never will, it’s only grown with time. I have a goal. A “Why”. A dream — of who I’m going to be.

That dream of who I am going to be is always changing and growing, and I’m always chasing it down.

Along the way I grow: I become more creative, more percerviering, I build my body and my ability to think, I learn how to interact with other people, I even learned how to read. And when reading wasn’t effective enough to help me reach my goals I found ways around that obstacle too.

I was going to write this section of the book about how I fell in love with books, then I thought to write it about technology, or brute forcing problems, but then I realized that I should start at the beginning — with the fire inside my soul.

My dreams of the person I am going to be and my desire to be great are the reason I do everything I do at high intensity.

My desire to be great is so strong that even when I was little I sometimes felt like it would burst out of my chest and start bouncing off the walls. This “Why” that I have is very important, it is the reason why I work hard, why to me “Work” doesn’t actually look like work — it’s like a quest in a video game because at the end of the day I reach my goal. It’s fun. It’s why I never take no for an answer and I never give up.

For dreams to be this motivating they need to be BIG dreams. But it’s only possible to dream big dreams when you feel confident.

So before we dive into how to paint your dreams. Let’s dive into how to build confidence.

How to Build Un-Shatterable Confidence

Part 1: Unconditional Love + Growth Mindset

I was a very small kid, I was born premature, so I was very easy to pick on.

In 3rd grade I was bullied severely. And still I thought I was the bomb. How does that happen? How does a little kid that gets picked on and can’t read Still think he is awesome? There’s a couple of reasons:

❤️ Unconditional Love ⬅ The Foundation

I had unconditional love and support from my family. My parents made me feel special, they told me they loved me all the time. I got a lot of hugs and kisses. From the way I’ve been treated my entire life it is very clear for the inside of my psyche that I will always belong — this is super important. This is not something that I only understand in my brain it is something that I FEEL deep deep down in my soul.

I know I will always belong, that I will always be cared for that I will always be loved.

I’m one of 5 kids, so I got this love not only from my parents but also from my siblings. Kids follow their parents so if I see my dad hug and kiss me, I’ll hug and kiss my brother Tyler. And Tyler and Alex and all the rest of my siblings will do the same. This makes me feel I belong.

Physical touch is something that is very important to humans and it’s hard wired into our brains and our bodies. Words of affirmation are the same — we are designed to crave and want this acceptance.

Especially when a child is young and struggling this desire to belong is very fragile. When it does not matter how you do in school, how you do in a soccer game, even how you behave at dinner, that is very powerful. If you feel your family will always love you no matter what there is a baseline of confidence that you can never drop beneath.

That means that you can afford to take more risks, you can afford to put yourself out there, you can afford to fail.

Because even if you do fail, your family will always love you.

As a parent, you have more ability to impact your child’s confidence than anyone in the world. Be their bedrock and make sure that they know inside core of their psyche (this is not a thinking it’s a feeling) that they will always belong, that you are always there for them.

Parent’s do this naturally, but you can consciously choose to do this more. If your child is going through tough times do this extra. Make sure your children do it (give constant love and support) to each-other. Have a talk with your oldest kid especially since the rest of your children will follow their lead most. Explain to them why this is important.

It’s ok to get mad at your child, even frustrated. But after that happens make sure to go back and give them love.

There are 5 well documented Love Languages:

Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Acts of Service, and Gift Giving. For each person the order and importance of these are different. As you grow it’s important to be self aware and realize which ones fill your cup most, for me it’s physical touch and words of affirmation. So I make sure I get those things, the more of those things I get the more confident I feel. If you are a parent, figure out which are most important for your child.

I was wary of writing this section initially because I thought “well is this really useful to write about? All families show love.” On second thought I realized that everyone can increase the amount and intensity of love they show.

I also watched “Tare Zameen Par” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGQ9IBslOUM) a movie about a dyslexic child in India. And realized that the way the father acts in this movie is an easy trap to fall into: Getting tired and blaming the child but forgetting to reinforce the love after getting mad. So I decided that writing about showing unconditional love actually is the right place to start when writing about how to build up someone’s confidence.

But what if you grow up and your family was not supportive? Or what if you do have a super supporting family but you want to take it a step forward.

The next step is to **take responsibility for your own feelings and your own state**, and make sure to gather the emotional resources you need to maximize your confidence.

This is a non-obvious concept, so I want to make sure this idea is in your brain:

You can *gage your own emotional state* and the well being of your confidence. Then, you can assess your environment for how it supports you and act to change and improve it in the ways that would be best for growing your confidence in the longterm. In this way, you can consciously take action to build your own confidence.

I use to (and still do) day dream and think about how awesome I will grow to be when I’m older and how awesome I am now. I imagined that I was the hero in every story that I read, if I went to a show I’d imagine what it would feel like to be the person on stage. Imagination is a powerful thing, do it for yourself or teach your child how to do it for themselves. I’d also give myself words of affirmation all the time:

I would stand in front of the mirror and say good things about myself to myself. And if my sister criticized me for it, and put me down, i’d found another moment and explain to her why it was important to me to have high self confidence in myself and ask that instead of pulling me down to reality that she would help me build inside myself a vision of myself that is greater than what I actually am right now. In this case I am editing my environment to maximize my own confidence in the long-term.

Thinking that you are greater than you are actually are is a very useful thing — it allows you to go after goals you wouldn’t chase down otherwise, it allows you to dream really big, and kindle motivation inside yourself. Once you aspire to big goals, there is a huge motivation to grow and improve personally.

Having a home environment that facilitated giving me the emotional resources to feel that I am Great allowed me to go after super audacious goals (even if I was not ready for them yet). If I failed that was ok, I had an amazing baseline of love and acceptance that my family provided. I would usually fail — but in failing I grew. And every single time, after failing over and over and over again, and growing more and more and more. I eventually succeeded and along the way became the person I wanted to be.

- “Love No, because for every 100 No’s you get you will get 1 Yes”

- “You cannot fail unless you quit”

- “He who has a Why to live, can bear almost any how” (both Friedrich Nietzsche & Viktor Frankl)

🚀 Growth Mindset ⬅ How to Grow It

Parent’s sometimes make the mistake of telling their kids that they succeed in something because they are “smart” which means that if the kid start’s failing they are “not smart.”

The goal should be for a child to realize that they will continue to get better and better and better with time and practice. That their ability is not fixed (static) that it will improve as a result of their work (dynamic). Thus, the conclusion is that anything is possible (given enough time and effort).

I think that it is actually incredibly important to tell your kids that they are smart, and to tell them that all the time. But, it’s also very important to show the kid that they achieved success because they worked hard, and Learned something new.

This idea is often referred to as “Growth Mindset”. People with Growth Mindset’s believe that their abilities can be improved through dedicated work over time, (natural given talents or abilities are just a starting point), while people with Static Mindsets believe that they do well because they are “Smart” not because they worked to grow.

People who adopt a Growth Mindset are not afraid to fail because they know the possibility to grow, learn, and improve is there, but people with Static Mindsets are ashamed to fail because it shows they are “stupid,” “not talented,” or “unable” to do something.

Thus building a growth mindset yourself and fostering it in the others around you is results in a love of learning and a resilience to failure that is critical for great achievement and building confidence.

Every time I did something good:

“WOW! Cliff you are so smart, how did you figure this out? You worked so hard on this [fill in the blank: puzzle/ on swimming 200 laps/ on getting that solo in quire, etc.].”

When I didn’t succeed in something the response was never ever “O you are stupid” and not even “You could have done it, but because you are lazy you didn’t get it” it was “hmm how can we look at this from a different perspective? What can you do to solve this problem? etc.”

Even if I was being lazy we would together analyze: “Why does this not give you energy? When is this fun? Where are you physically when it’s easier to do it? Is it easier to do with friends? Why are you doing this? Why are you not motivated here?”

After celebrating a win my parents would also push me to do better: “O my gosh you got a 91 on the math test?! Way to go :) I’m proud of you. What do you need to do in order to get a 100? Let’s look at this together. Ok great let’s see if you can get a 100 next time.” Notice that the focus is on the ACTIONS that I took (or could take next) and what I did, not on my static attributes.

Teaching a kid that their success is a function of how much they try and how creatively they approach a problem and that they can achieve ANYTHING as long as they give it enough time and effort is pivotal for helping them develop a love of learning and a resilience to failure. When a person realizes that they can always get better and that failure does not reflect that they are “bad” it is impossible not to feel more confident because that realization clarifies that you can always get better and that failures do not matter much.

Even if the environment around you is not doing a good job of fostering growth mindset build it within yourself. The best ways of doing this is to read (or better yet listen to audiobooks, or Speechify) the biographies of people who have extreme growth mindsets like Theodore Roosevelt and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In the next installment of Cliff’s Dyslexia Book I’ll give you a specific challenge that will help you build up your confidence and permanently increase your overall happiness. Click here to read the challenge: