Pybites Podcast

#007 - How to become more confident?

Julian Sequeira & Bob Belderbos

In this episode you'll hear a fragment of our Confidence Training, how it can be learned and earned!

If you like this you can watch the complete training with slides here.

Don't let imposter syndrome hold you back from achieving your goals!

Welcome back to the Pibytes podcast. In today's episode, you will hear a fragment of our Pibytes confidence training, in which will show you that confidence can be learned and earned as a developer in pythonista. If you like this fragment, you can watch the full training on pibytes confidence. That's pybit es confidence. Now let's dive straight in. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Valdebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. So you want to feel more confident. You can actually work on it. As Julian said, it's in your control. And it all starts with setting a goal. Not just a goal, but think big, and then you plan it out over the months to come, the actions you will take every month to get closer to that goal, and you break that down in weeks. You plan out your week and you plan out your day, and you stick to your plan, because we found that the more confident we are when we actually follow our plan, be accountable to each other, to pie bytes, to ourselves, and execute every day. And we also do a time audit to keep track of where our time is going. Anything to add to that, julie? Yeah, I mean, one of the things I want you to consider here is that, yes, you're setting a goal. All of that stuff you're planning out. But at the end of the day, this is all of, all of these things are in your control. You're planning out the actions you're going to take. You're deciding what they're going to be. Your week, you, which you would have planned out in advance, you're planning these days out. You're in control of your actions. So therefore, when you get to the point where you have to execute, you know what you have to do, because you planned it the day before, the week before, the month before. So it takes away the fear, because you don't have to make a decision. You've already done that in advance, that your previous self has done it, so you're in control. It helps you build that confidence. You go straight into your day thinking, this is what I'm doing, I'm going to achieve that. I'm going to accomplish it, and I'm going to plan out what I do tomorrow. So there's no more thinking, you know, past tense. There's no, what should I have done today or what am I going to do today? There's none of that uncertainty. You've planned it, you're confident, and therefore you're going to be accountable to yourself and yourself only. Yep. Again, remember that success happens outside of your comfort zone. Like we are saying to each other, if you're not getting uncomfortable every week, you're probably not making enough progress. Exactly. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. The second we just fall into the plane day to day and nothing exciting happens, we're not uncomfortable, we're just cruising. That's pretty much when we find ourselves at our most bored. And that's where we think what's next? You know, what are we going to do? What? It's because we're in that comfort zone. We're not pushing ourselves outside of the status quo. And it's a really important thing to remember that. That is when, and look back on your pre, your life so far, every bit of success you've had would have happened when you're outside of your comfort zone, whether you ran, you pushed yourself harder and ran a race, you know, whether you applied for a job you didn't think you'd ever get, you know, even if you just started talking to someone you never thought you'd be friends with, you know, you pushed yourself outside of that comfort zone and there you are with that success. And so on that note, like we've just mentioned, you are the only one who can change that. We can tell you to do this stuff as much as we want, but at the end of the day, you can either just close this video and get back to work, fall asleep on the train, or you can do something about it. You can decide you're going to get to work, you're going to make a list of everything you're going to accomplish today, and then you're going to stick with it. So try and do these things. You are the only person who can push yourself outside of that comfort zone to make these changes for yourself. Yep. And don't procrastinate on your dreams. Those things can be huge and they feel like a big mountain. But it's important to gain small wins at the start, and then you gain momentum. Then it becomes a flywheel. And what is often stopping us from getting there is perfectionism. And we quote here an example we often hear, like, I need to do XYZ before being good enough to even apply for a job. And often that's not the case because once you start interviewing, you actually learn what you're doing wrong or what, you can improve, and then you can start to iterate and become better. And if you're not taking that action to go to your first interview, you would never know. So you basically stall your progress. Yeah. The reality is, with perfectionism, if you wait until you're perfect, which is never, ever going to happen, you will never be able to achieve anything. So if you wait till you're perfectly good at Python, well, sorry, Python keeps changing. It keeps iterating, it keeps improving, and new updates come out all the time, so you're never going to be perfect at it. And if you wait until you're perfect to apply for that python job, well, that job's gonna go. Someone else is gonna snap it up. Someone who is happy to be outside their comfort zone, who isn't waiting till they're perfect to apply for it. Yeah, it's better to take imperfect action than do nothing at all. Make it before you make it. Make it before you. I segue. Right, exactly. I mean, some skills are only gained by getting out there. We put a few examples on here. For example, I migrated to Spain 15 years ago. I could speak at Caineh, but I had a hard time understanding the Madrilenos or the people from Madrid. You know, that was uncomfortable. And I was like, I had to defend myself there. But, yeah, after a month, I could successfully do that. And I went through that process, through that pain outside of my comfort zone, and eventually got there. Yeah, it's amazing, man, because I can't even pronounce that. So. All right, so my one. My first one here is that pibytes. You think about it like. So when we started py bytes. I mean, Bob, you knew a little bit of python. You've been programming for a few years, but I'd never been a coder. I didn't even know the python language. And yet here I was, starting a blog where I'm essentially teaching people how to code in python. So that's a huge fake it before you make it step. It was just a imposter syndrome, nagging at me the whole time. Are you sure you're good enough to do this? But just did it. And look where we are now. That's huge. Yeah. I got another example I presented before a group of people. I mean, I have that typical fear of public speaking many people have. And, yeah, very tough. Funny thing, though, is that I thought I sucked. And then later, I asked for feedback, and people actually said, well, you look very confident. Oh, okay, cool. So by getting out there and asking for feedback. It wasn't that bad. Yeah, that's brilliant. I mean, that's. And that's one of the hardest ones to do, presenting. Right, so. And my last example here is, without going into too much detail, sun Microsystems, the age old IT company. I started my career as an intern there, and I landed that by applying for the internship, and I got it. I didn't have any prior technical training to do with servers, to do with data centers or anything like that. I didn't have any information technology degrees or experience. I was pretty much fresh out of high school. And I managed to get it by going in there and just being passionate and confident and just loving computers and it, everything it. And that's what got me through the door. And I actually ended up beating out people who had gone to university and were midway through their degrees. But it was just through that pure enthusiasm and passion that I managed to get my foot in the door there, and that's my entire career is just branched from there. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte friends, that is Pibit es friends, and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show. And to join our thriving slack community of Python programmers, go to Pibytes community. That's Pibit es community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.