Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. My name is Ian from East and if this is your first time listening to the show, I just want you to know that this is going to be a little bit different than other episodes.

Usually I sit down with a guest that could be a celebrity athlete, entrepreneur, anybody that has experienced significant pivots in life.

I call them redirections and these redirections could come in the form of a career change that they didn't see coming.

It could be in the form of an illness that completely derailed them or any really unexpected event that took their life from what they knew and forced them to something completely brand new, something that they didn't know or expect or could have prepared for.

The reason I wanted to start this show is because that's what I've experienced in my life. I got picked up by the NFL after I graduated from Vanderbilt and thought that I was going to be playing in the NFL for 20 years and live a nice, cush life.

I ended up getting cut and now over the past four years I've gotten cut from six different teams over eight different contracts.

It's just not the way I thought my life was going to be. I wanted to talk with these people to glean wisdom from them on how they've dealt with these unexpected events and share that wisdom with you along the way.

Today is going to be a little bit different because there was a topic that I've been thinking about that I thought was important enough for me to just sit here and chat with you guys about.

That is how to build confidence.

It's a tough thing to do and football season is now starting again and I've now flown to DC and the off season has started and so I'm walking around the facility and I realized that my first week of being back in the locker room and being back in the weight room around these coaches and other players that my confidence level was just absolutely destroyed.

I don't know what it is. If you see me on the street outside of anything football related, I don't come off as like a super arrogant guy but I'm confident.

I would consider myself a confident guy but when I'm doing football things whether that's lifting or on the field practicing or meeting with the coaches, my confidence is shattered.

So really for those of you who have followed my journey the past four years has been a challenge to myself to figure out why I don't have that confidence in the NFL setting and how I can build that confidence back up.

So I started putting together a list a little bit ago and I've since asked a lot of my teammates how do you regain confidence when you don't have it.

I wanted to be really intentional about it and almost scientific in how I went about the process of building back confidence because really if you saw me run the football facility I wouldn't make eye contact with you and that's because I didn't feel like I had the self worth to or it was worth your time for me to have a conversation with you.

So I'm very short in conversation, try to avoid them at all costs. I am kind of sad and mopey around the facility and all this stuff affects my performance ultimately in what my job is which is to play football in the long snap specifically in football.

So I wanted to sit down with you to tell you the list that I came up with and the list that these other NFL players, these elite level athletes who I think are well experienced to talk about this topic.

I wanted to share those with you because I thought it was really really important.

And again, for those of you who have listened to this podcast, you know this but I don't consider this a motivational podcast and I don't really want to come off like that.

What I do want to do with this episode specifically is give you tangible things that I'm working on, share them with you in hopes that you could share with me ways that you build confidence.

And I think that that would be the most productive way to go about this. So I'm not going to be super raw raw. This isn't like you know wildly proven. These are just things that I'm working on and practical tips that have worked for me.

And so this could apply for you if you feel like you don't belong whether it's in your school classroom, whether that's at your job, whether that's at your athletic event, whether that's extracurricular or a club team, whatever it is.

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