EP 95
Welcome fellow confidence crusaders, neuro nerds and success equalizers. This is your podcast, Real Confidence. I'm your host, Alyssa Dver, and I'll be sharing a bit of basic brain science, some surprising social secrets and a touch of tough love. Why? Because I believe confidence is everyone's fundamental right and choice. So let's get to it.
Alyssa Dver:
Ah, the good old days. Maybe you're old enough to remember playing outside somewhere in the neighborhood. Your parents probably didn't know exactly where you were, and sometime, as it had just gotten dark, maybe you wandered back inside. Maybe you remember not have any any tech headaches or the pressure to upgrade your phone all the time. Maybe you remember that TSA wasn't anything that we even knew about, and they certainly weren't visible at any airport, and the ultimate that we thought going outside with baby oil and reflectors so we could get as much sunburn as possible was a healthy thing. I know it sounds crazy, right? And perhaps you're saying, Well, you know, ignorance, Ooh, that was bliss. We didn't know, and so it was just good old times, and we just didn't worry.
But truth is, is that there was a lot to worry about, and unfortunately or fortunately, I guess, depending on how you look at it, our memories get dulled. We soften those past experiences by remembering perhaps the good things and not so much the bad things, and our brains will then really almost recreate the truth, or what it believes to be true. And so we filter out all the things that we don't want to remember, the things that maybe were hard, painful, challenging. You can call it compartmentalizing, and there's 1000 other ways that psychologists and sociologists kind of capture this idea. But it's important to realize that sometimes, when we reminisce, it wasn't all so great.
So is it easier to think of the past as being easier? Yeah, absolutely. So is it easier to think of the past as easier? Yeah, of course it is. It just makes it easier to think that things weren't so hard, and that today, all the things that we're dealing with are so much worse. So you know, there's probably a lot of neurological reasons and otherwise why we think that, you know, we forget that we had to use maps, and that was challenging for a lot of people. We forget that we had to share a landline with our siblings and argue over get off the phone, right? What about those bad sunburns that blistered and hurt like hell, right? I had a few too many myself or missing an episode of your favorite show because there was no recording or, you know, Hulu at the time. And so, you know when you missed an episode, ooh, it was horrible. And I remember missing an episode of Friends and literally being so frustrated the next day and having all kinds of conversations with friends of my own to say, fill me in. Fill me in. Fill me in, right? But it wasn't the same.
But speaking of the show Friends, I've always been fascinated with that it is so popular with young people, and when they are been interviewed to ask why, it's because they say, oh, things were so much easier than we didn't have the pressures of texts or Google and distractions, and we people could have conversations and actually get to be genuinely friends. And, you know, in a totally funny way, I guess in some ways, we were a lot more connected then. But what does this all have to do with confidence? And I think that we often hurt our confidence. Actually, let me take that back. We always hurt our confidence by thinking things are harder now than they were, and not giving ourselves the benefit of the benefit of the doubt that we can deal and overcome a lot of things and that we did in. The past, and we just don't give ourselves enough credit.
So in reality, a lot of the challenges today are really just newfangled or renovated. We'll say issues of the past. I mean, just in the time frame that friends the show was on, there was all kinds of garbage going on in the world, things like the Bosnian War and the Rwanda genocide. We had scandals like OJ and Tanya Harding. That was, you know what it was, blizzard of 96 you know, all kinds of climate issues too. My favorite all time thing was the Hoover Institute issuing a report that said global warming will probably reduce mortality in the US and provide Americans with valuable benefits. So not only do we dull the past, but apparently we erase some of it so we don't look so stupid.
But you know, that's the reality. Life isn't always easy, and quite honestly, never has been. I often remind myself, think of the pioneers in any country you know, living without electricity or running water and all those things, or tools, medicines, even just a simple ibuprofen. You know, we've come a long way as a society, and of course, as individuals. We've dealt with a lot in our lifetimes. I don't care if you're 20 or 80, we've dealt with a lot of things in our lives. Most likely things that are, at the time seemingly insurmountable, and you get through them, and you figure out a way to get up and around and then again, maybe soften that memory so that you can continue forward. And yet, when we face a new obstacle, whether it's trying something new or dealing with the news, we forget we've been here before we can do this. We did it before we can do it again.
So I'd like to kind of put a call out to all of us, because the we in that statement isn't just we as a society, but it's we as individuals that when faced with something that is scary or something that seems completely and utterly new, probably isn't it probably is something that is familiar that we just forgot, Something that is like something else that we've done, but we don't recall overcoming it in the past and reminding ourselves we can do it again now. So help yourself, help somebody else remember, and in that same breath, maybe give the modern times some credit, because at some point they're going to be that blissful past too.
Before we totally wrap up, I want to let you know that full transcripts and show notes for this and other real confidence episodes can be found on www.AmericanConfidenceInstitute.com/podcast. I also want to remind you once again that the best way to get confidence is to give it to others, and you can do it just by liking and sharing this episode on your preferred podcast and social media channels. You can even give me some confidence by noting topics you'd like me to consider for the future. So for now, this is Alyssa Dver. Thank you for helping to bring more confidence to the world.
Master editing done by Ben Weinstein with original music performed and composed by Jeff Mitchell. Real Confidence is a production of American Confidence Institute, All Rights Reserved.
