Do you believe in yourself?

Hi, 

This week is going to be a bit of me talking through some negative self-belief stuff and revisiting the idea of the Easy-A. So if you want to get to know Kyle’s psyche a little better, you are in for a treat. 

Before we can jump in I need to do some defining:  

Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory: The belief that you can do a specific task in a specific situation. 

Self-Efficacy can be understood and remembered through these 4 areas: 

• Do: You have experienced a level of mastery or competence. 

• See: You have seen someone else demonstrate competence or mastery. “If they can so can I”

• Hear: An authority figure in the space affirms your effort, and gives you input on how to continue to progress. 

• Feel: The self-talk around the feelings. Changing from, “I feel nervous because I know I will fail.” to “I feel nervous because I know how much I care about this, and this energy will be the thing that makes me successful.”

As always, I am not a psychologist, and I am sure there is some nuance here, but this is the brass tacks. 

Cool now that we have that out of the way, let’s do some storytelling.

The summer before my sophomore year of high school, I ran my first ever double digit run. The reason is kind of funny. It was a summer Saturday, and I had been working on my pitch for my dad to convince him it was a good idea to buy me Madden 10 for the xBox 360. 

I mustered up the courage and trudged down the stairs with my mental pitch deck prepared. I start with, “I would really like to get Madden 10.”

With a coy smile he cuts off my pitch and says, “okay, I will get you Madden 10… if you run 10 miles with me.”  

One thing I will say, this wasn’t new behavior. He once bought my brother a game for doing a 7.5 mile hike. A bit of a right of passage in the Cole family, I guess. 

Long story short, we got out to trail, and the run was unbelievably easy. Like I was shocked. I had run like 3-5 miles 2 times a week for soccer conditioning and this run was a walk in the park.  

Or in another sense, I saw myself do something.  

In a lot of ways, this was one of the first positive momentum events that led to my running career. 

Just to tie the running thing up well, about a month later, I ran an 8k in Seattle and ran a time of 30:30… also felt easier than I thought it would. 

My belief that I could do the running thing was reinforced by those early positive signals. 

The winter of my fifth year in college, looking down the pike of graduating and turning away from running, I made the decision that I needed a hobby.

I wanted something that allowed me to get better at something and do nice things for people with it. I landed on… coffee. 

I have always loved a fun drink, and don’t love cooking. It felt like the perfect in between. 

The irony here is that I had a lot of moments, that when I look back on them, should’ve been the opposite of mastery or competence. But the people I was sharing the coffee and the moments with knew less about coffee than me, so they loved it. Thus, making me feel like I was good at it. 

It has now been about 8 years since I started tinkering with coffee, and I am really thankful that the people I was serving coffee to had no idea what they were drinking. 

The self-efficacy of coffee, for me, came from the luck of being in a psychologically safe place. 

That luck birthed a hobby that has brought me a lot of joy over the past 8 years, and I hope will continue to do so for many years to come.

The July after our first February Kickstarter, to be fair, there were very few things about shipping out our first Kickstarter that gave me the, “I am surprised this is going so well” feeling. But after we fulfilled those orders, when we turned on the website it was a very different experience. 

You see, the Kickstarter had a very unique feeling because there was a wave of support from friends and family. For those orders, you feel less proud of yourself, and grateful for the people in your life. I do not say that to diminish the support, I say that to explain that when your family buys the thing you make you don’t necessarily feel like the next Bezos. 

That being said, about 50% of the orders were from people who saw the product and bought into the idea. That felt good. Would we have gotten fully funded with that 50%? No, we would not have. 

Once again, not trying to diminish the experience, just trying to explain to you the feeling.

July of that year was very different. After we fulfilled the Kickstarter, we had 650 journals sitting in our kitchen that we shared with 3 other non-business related roommates. 

Looking at those journals we thought, “these are going to just sit here, aren’t they?” 

Well, in that same July, we sold out of those journals. 

All to brand new customers cold from Facebook Ads. We had metrics that would make ad buyers blush. 

It felt like magic. 

That was a problem. The issue that I had was I didn’t believe it was me. I believed it was something else. Not quite like a spiritual realm, but maybe just below that. 

When we look back at the Self-Efficacy Theory, we see that it is our belief to do a task in a situation. We build these beliefs through: Do, See, Hear, and Feel. 

On paper, the do was done at a high level, but the issue was the feel convinced me it wasn’t me. 

Now, there is some merit to that, Nick was also working on it with me so therefore all of the outcomes were shared. Thus the self-efficacy was also shared. 

But speaking from memory, I am pretty sure that at times we were both pretty surprised. 

The thing I regret from this time period is that I could’ve let that early success tell me something about myself, but instead I logic’d my way out of it. 

I allowed myself to stay in my imposter syndrome, even though I had seen myself do. 

These stories really jumped out at me because the first story is an example of an Easy A. I did something that is hard for some, but easy-ish to me. Followed the path, and built lifelong memories and skills because of it. 

The second story shows the power of luck in self-efficacy. Sometimes thinking you are good at something, especially as inconsequential as coffee, can keep you on the path. Maybe I am never a world barista champion, but I get to hear people say this to Casey, “You get coffee like this whenever you want? You are the luckiest person ever.”

That is the best thing to hear. 

The last story shows how the feel can stop you from seeing your do’s. This is probably the most important lesson to learn: 

What are the things that I am telling myself that are stopping me from seeing what I can be truly great at? 

My guess is that most of us have a lot of evidence of self-efficacy that we can’t see because of some internal narratives. 

Just some food for thought, 

Kyle