I remember a long time ago I decided to learn the piano.

I bought a fairly cheap keyboard, and couple of “do it yourself” learning books.

And I stuck with it long enough to be able to play a few fairly complicated songs from memory.

At the same time, I didn’t really want anybody to know. If my friends and colleagues knew, they might ask me to play in front of them (or so I imagined).

Playing at home seemed fine, but the idea of playing in front of people was something I was definitely NOT interested in.

Funny how a lot of our behaviors are like that. We do great on our own, but are embarrassed as hell if we find out somebody’s watching.

If you ever get caught singing in the car, you know what I mean.

There’s a reason why that saying, “Dance like nobody’s looking” has so much power.

Something about social pressure makes us cringe.

On the other hand, if you get unexpected and positive social attention, there’s not much that feels better.

Napoleon learned a long time ago that the easiest way to generate loyalty among his troops was to praise them in front of others.

The funny thing is that if you watched two videos of two different situations, it would be hard to tell the difference between social pressure and positive social recognition.

If you’ve ever done something publicly, thought it went terrible, and then were told you did perfect, you know what I’m talking about.

Back when I was doing Toastmasters, for example, I’d give speeches. I’d think I’d failed miserably, and then people would come up afterwards and not only compliment me, but ask me for more information about the topic.

The truth is that feeling confident or not confident when doing something is more of an inside game than most of us realize.

If we imagine something is going to be hard, or we’re going to fail, we’ll feel nervous and anxious.

But if we imagine something is going to be easy and we’ll succeed, we’ll feel like we own the situation.

The good news is that both of these “hallucinations” is totally under your control.

You just have to learn how to “front run” your brain so it doesn’t slip into automatic thinking.

To learn how, check this out:

Self Confidence