Jocko Underground: Self Confidence | Overcoming Fear of Confrontation

Self confidence issues you might be causing. Injury holding you back in life. Balancing obsessions and priorities. Making sure you're ready to begin a career path. Overcoming fears of confrontation. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jocko Underground Podcast number 130, sitting here with Echo Charles. We're going to roll into some questions. Echo Charles, what do you got?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I have a six-year-old son. His mother and I are divorced and have been for some time now. We have both moved on, have very involved partners who also have children. But I've noticed some issues that have been consistent since he was very young. He lacks a lot of self-confidence, especially when he's around his mother. He completely shuts down when interacting with new people or people he doesn't interact with regularly. Initially, I thought this was due to speech issues he has. But when he's around my stepchildren, he's very outgoing and confident, like he's a completely different child. To help his confidence, I signed him up for wrestling at his local school. He would act excited around me prior to wrestling starting, but his mother reported he was having severe anxiety and fear about starting wrestling.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  And he told her he didn't want to participate. The first wrestling practice he attended, he wouldn't even watch the practice. He continued to cry facing the wall. That changed some when his mother left. He livened up and began to watch the practice at least. He was asking me questions and seemed genuinely interested, but he wouldn't take that next step and actually participate. His mother took him to the next practice and he did watch with her, but she told me that she would not be taking him anymore due to her believing she is the obstruction. Unfortunately, I'm a police officer who works second shift, so I rely on her to take him to practice once or two days a week. I organized his stepmom and his grandmother to take him on the days that I work.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  And when I informed his mother of this, she refused, saying that she would take him because she didn't want him to feel abandoned. I recognize I've got some codependency issues that I'm working on, just like his mother. But I feel like embracing and encouraging this codependency is only going to hold my son back. Any feedback would be great.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  As I once told Echo Charles, bro.

• 2:04Jocko Willink?

  Your son is six, he's gonna be fine. He's fine, he's gonna be fine. Like this is literally, none of this is any factor whatsoever. And I know that sounds really hard to say because it's your kid, but he's gonna be totally fine. I told you that when you came to your, your son, his first jujitsu day. Yep, he just turned five, by the way. He just turned five and, and he didn't freaking immediately turn into Andre Galvao.

• 2:30Jocko Willink?

  He didn't like it. He didn't want to train. And you came home bummed out. And I was like, bro, he's five. It's gonna be fine. That's the same thing I'll say here. Dude, he's six. This is like no, literally no factor. You know, can turn it into a big factor? You making it into a big factor? Don't make it into a big factor. I know it's hard because you think, if he doesn't get this training, his confidence is gonna be bad forever. No, it'll mess up his confidence. It's like, you have to do this thing in order to ram it down your throat and we're gonna be in there awkward. Now you see the other kids saw you cry and now they're looking at you like you're wimpy and now you feel wimpy. Like all these things are gonna add up. Just chill. Just chill. I would say actually, if you can find some jujitsu, might be a little less intimidating than wrestling practice.

• 3:13Jocko Willink?

  Work with him outside of the actual practice. Dude, at six years old, he doesn't need to go to any jujitsu classes and he can get advanced. He can be, he can be on par with any other six year old by you wrestling around with him and doing jujitsu with him and teaching him arm locks and all that stuff. And, and you'll be bonding with him and having fun. And then guess what happens when he goes to class for the first time? I know what I'm doing. And all of a sudden, that's a little bit fun. Maybe get one of his buddies to come over the house, teach him some jujitsu too. Some of my friends, some of my son's friends didn't like jujitsu or wrestling or whatever when they were young. Didn't like when they were five years old, didn't like when they were six years old, didn't like when they were seven years old. Ethan, you know Ethan? He didn't like it. Six years

• 3:57Jocko Willink?

  old, five years old, seven years old, eight years old, nine years old. Finally, I think it was nine years old, he was into it. Now was he like, like his whole jujitsu opportunities were gone? No, dude, he's sick. Got freaking could be as good as he wanted to be.

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  Now my son and all his buddies do, they do jiu jitsu. My daughters do jiu jitsu. They all do jiu jitsu. That's what's happening. The fact that the kid doesn't want to do it or is intimidated by it or cries about it. It's all there's all these little things are going on. None of them matter. None of them matter. Hey, and by the way, he can only go two days a week with you. That's enough. That's more than enough. He can go two days a week. No factor. All good. You wrestle with him on the other days. Wrestle a little extra. Have some fun with him on the weekends. Get some mats in the house. Dude in the carpet. Dude in the bed.

• 4:48Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's what we're doing, man. Make it fun. No pressure. He's gonna be fine. He's six. He's six years old.

• 4:57Jocko Willink?

  I have a friend that wrestled in college, didn't start wrestling until his sophomore year of high school and he was a champion wrestler.

• 5:07Jocko Willink?

  The white buffalo. Jake. He didn't start playing guitar until he was nineteen. That's when he started playing guitar. And he's a rock and roll legend, y'all.

• 5:20Jocko Willink?

  Josh Hall didn't start surfing until he was fifteen. You see what I'm saying?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  Like this doesn't matter. This doesn't matter. But Tiger Woods started, your, your son's not Tiger Woods.

• 5:31Jocko Willink?

  Don't force him into it.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  He's gonna have fun. The best thing you can do is make his life fun. We talk about that, we, you and I talked about that preparation thing. And you kind of debunked it a little bit because Cairo, you had trained him. Like he kind of knew what to expect and it still didn't like it the first time he went. But it definitely is going to be more comfortable. He also, you made it comfortable in a way where all of a sudden this new thing that he was going to is a little bit shocking.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 5:59Jocko Willink?

  It's not just my dad doing this. Now there's this random people.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:03Jocko Willink?

  They're looking at me.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they weren't really doing jiu jitsu. They're doing drill. They're doing stuff that he didn't connect the dots. He was like, what's going, it was just, yeah.

• 6:11Jocko Willink?

  So you should have done some of that stuff with him.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, should have. Yeah, I should have just brought him with me when I go train. That's what I should have done. Probably. I don't care what you do. Watch me. Go jumping class. Don't care. Have fun. Play with the freaking all those foam balls around. Yeah, go do whatever. Have fun. Be happy to be here, you know? Yeah.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Jocko Willink?

  The, the thing that we said on the last underground podcast, I got asked about like kids. It's the leadership principles that we talk about all the time. Cover move simple prioritize next to decentralized command and then the relationship part. Trust, listen, respect, influence and care. That's what you should be focused on with your kid. Trust, listen, respect, influence and care. Six years old. Yep. Give them some trust. I don't want to go to jiu jitsu. Okay. Well, what do you feel like doing? Let them influence you. That's how you build a relationship.

• 7:02Jocko Willink?

  That's how you build a relationship. Trust, listen, respect, influence and care. You do that. You give them, when you allow them to influence you, you'll get influence with them. When you put trust in them, they'll trust you. That's what we're doing. Kid's gonna be awesome. Your kid's gonna be awesome. That's what's gonna happen.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  He mentioned the confidence thing, right? Like he's like shine, confident, whatever. Here's two kind of. I'm not saying they're easy fixes, but they're really simple things you, you can do. If you can remember to do it, because a lot of this takes self-control, but. That I would wager you'd see immediate results like pretty, pretty quick with kids and confidence. So. I know one thing that can cause kids to not be confident. Is if they get in trouble for every little thing they do, like real trouble, you know, not like they're just used to mom and dad yelling. So who cares? And they don't care. But I mean, like, are they getting scolded for doing every little thing wrong? That'll make someone very not confident. And then on the flip side.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Are they getting praised for doing things right or empowering like, or are you empowering them to do things right? Right? That's essentially it. So if you can flip, because it's super, it's very natural to be like. Oh, they did it wrong. So that, that, that mistake or that error stands out more so than stuff they're quote unquote, supposed to be doing anyway. Right? Because that doesn't stand out. So it's easy to, to, to, to, to run it like that where you, you. You react and respond to errors and stuff, right? So it's easy. That's easy. So you gotta kind of put some mental effort into it. So instead of. Scolding somebody, and I'm not saying that's what he's doing, but I'm, I am saying a lot of times if a kid is not confident, it's because he gets scolded for every little freaking thing he's doing.

• 8:46Jocko Willink?

  Including like.

• 8:48Jocko Willink?

  Don't cry. Don't stare at the wall. Hey, get over here. Don't act like that. Like those are all the things you're talking about. Yeah, you're right.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Everything. So.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Kid's six, bro, he came like that, bro, leave me alone. I don't know what to do. You gotta tell me what to do. And I'm gonna go wherever the payoff is and I'm gonna be scared of everything else, especially if I'm getting some kind of pain from it. You know, so if I do this, I make mistake, pain, I ain't even gonna try that no more.

• 9:12Jocko Willink?

  So there's three other things that I could have tried, but I'm not gonna try them either because I don't even know.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  I don't like it's cold, it, I don't know that kind of stuff, you know, but if, if they get a feedback like, oh dang, that was good job. They'd be like, oh shit, I can't wait to do that again, or something like that again, you know, so. As a parent, if you flip that around and be like, hey, I'm not gonna make these big deals out of errors. Like I'll correct errors, but like, oh hey, that was a good try. That was a good try. Do it this way. Try it again, you know, instead of don't do that, don't do that, don't do that, right? Um, and then when you see behavior that you like, you praise it. Don't correct it. Don't say how they could have done it better, nothing like that. Just praise it like, hey, that was good. That's very powerful. That was good. You should keep that up, you know? If you do that consistently, you'd be surprised how quick that can uh, uh, change a kid's behavior. Um, again, I don't know the whole story and I'm not a therapist, so I'm not, you know, there could be a lot more to it.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  But I think that those, just that. If you just start implementing that consistent, gotta be consistent, because if it's inconsistent, it won't work. Um, I, I feel like, I believe.

• 10:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the thing you gotta watch out for is like, they can read you. You know how a dog can tell when you're like mad or whatever?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:14Jocko Willink?

  Or a dog can tell when you're like gonna get, take it for a walk.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:17Jocko Willink?

  Your kid, when you're disappointed in your kid, they can see it. So when the kid is like bummed out, they know that the way that they behaved made you disappointed. Now they, same thing. It's basically the same as a scolding. It's just a non-verbal. So, yeah, those are, those are really good points, man. I like those points a lot.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 10:36Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, those are also just leadership things.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Fully.

• 10:38Jocko Willink?

  It's the exact same thing. If you're my employee and you make a little mistake and I jump down your throat, your confidence goes down. That is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen, go to jacounderground.com and subscribe. And we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control and we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is, free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors.

• 11:18Jocko Willink?

  And we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So, thank you. It's JacoUnderground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email [email protected] and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.