It’s easy to assume that successful people in this world have an abundance of confidence and never-ending self-belief, but it’s just not true. Everyone has periods of time or situations where they don’t feel confident. In this case study we will look at Bear Grylls’ confidence journey and some of the tools he uses to keep his confidence up.
The public image of Bear Grylls is that of a fearless adventurer. He was an SAS trooper with the British Army before he was medically discharged after breaking three vertebrae in a parachuting exercise that went wrong. 18 months later, at the age of 24, Grylls climbed Mt Everest. He achieved fame through the television show Man vs. Wild, which focussed on him being dropped into inhospitable environments with nothing but his own survival skills to stay alive. He has since gone on to make another 15 television shows and sold over 20 million copies of his books.
As a child, Grylls really struggled with confidence. He wasn’t a cool kid: he spent his formative years being largely invisible. He was a shy, kind and gentle kid in an environment that didn’t appreciate those traits. Like many people, Grylls struggled to find his identity in a world that valued kids that were good looking, sporty or smart.
Grylls’ father had been a commando in the British Army and introduced Grylls to climbing. It was the love of going on adventures with his dad that allowed Grylls to start feeling comfortable in his own skin. His father believed that the most important things in life were finding something that you loved to do, being kind and being resilient.
As a teenager, Grylls learned a philosophy that has served him well for the rest of his life: you can’t always be the best, you can only do your best. He tried out for the school rugby team and made the fourth grade team not as a player, but as the linesman. Grylls had a choice: be bitter about not even making the team as a player, or be the best linesman that he could be and give out half-time oranges better than anyone else. Grylls chose the latter.
This lesson about choosing to do your best has served Grylls well ever since. It’s a lesson he acknowledges that he may never have learnt if he had been a naturally gifted rugby player who didn’t have to work as hard. When you set your sights on being the best you are choosing a goal that has a lot of external factors that you have zero control over. You can’t control if someone is better than you. All you can do is choose to do the absolute best that you are capable of, a choice that is available to all of us no matter the circumstance.
As Grylls has grown older he has realised that we often develop erroneous perceptions of what confidence is and what it looks like. Confidence isn’t being the alpha dog, beating your chest and being noisy and extroverted. Confidence comes from the inside and it’s quiet. Struggling with confidence early in his life gave Grylls the inner strength and the resilience skills that he has relied upon ever since to achieve things he never thought were possible.
The people who make it to the SAS aren’t the ones with the greatest physical prowess. The SAS requires a high level of fitness but the people with the egos talking it up in the beginning and making all the noise are often the ones who don’t make it. They’ve spent so much time developing their physical muscles that they haven’t developed their heart and spirit.
It is counterintuitive, but the people with the biggest heart and spirit are actually the people who have failed the most. Heart, spirit, resilience and confidence muscles only flex when you fail at something, so it is the act of getting back up after each and every failure that makes these muscles strong. If you never fail these muscles never flex and therefore they atrophy. Success at anything doesn’t come from never failing, it comes from never quitting.
Grylls’ confidence weapons are available to everyone: be dogged, be determined, be resilient and come alive in the big moments. These aren’t God-given talents, they are skills that can be learned by anyone.
The mere premise of someone like Bear Grylls struggling with confidence is completely incongruous with our expectations. Yet his broken back meant that in the blink of an eye he lost his physical capability, his job and his identity. Had he not developed his confidence weapons and learned to exercise his resilience muscle from a very young age, he wouldn’t have been in a position to go on to be one of the youngest people ever to climb Mt Everest.
Confidence and resilience muscles operate in parallel. Grylls recommends doing something uncomfortable every day to keep your resilience muscle in condition. He is a long-time proponent of three minute ice baths, be it a mountain stream in winter or a cold shower. There is very little in life that you can’t endure for another ten seconds. Every day we have situations where our mind wants to give up long before our body gives out. Choose the discomfort. The pain doesn’t last forever and all wins, no matter how small, help build your confidence.
Confidence is a journey and there is no level of success or singular achievement that will resolve your confidence struggles in one fell swoop. It’s making the choice in that moment that will give you the Confidence Advantage and the more you flex the confidence muscle the stronger it gets.
