Time to End the War on Confidence
Thor Holt
My dear daughter, I am so proud of the peaceful, wonderful human being you’ve become as you start out in your career, age only 17. You’ve already been coaching younger children and working professionally with horses from age 11. I’d love to share a lesson that I learned with you that I wish I’d learned at your age. Remember the stories I used to tell you about my hippie upbringing, how I was put in this fish box with a sheepskin to keep me warm at night and how ashamed I was of that upbringing? Well, it turns out the shame wasn’t because of the circumstances that I was brought up in. It was the story that I told myself about myself.
This last summer solstice, I caught up with an old hippie friend of my parents, and over a shared nostalgia, not a shared joint, I promise. She shared how I’d always been a sensitive wee soul, creative, artistic, but encouraging the other little hippie kids to do active things. And they were like, “Chill out, man. Too much marijuana in the muesli.” So yeah, how life might’ve been if I hadn’t masked that creative and sensitive side with too much alcohol over the years. And how embarrassed I was when my father used to tell the story of how him and mum met dancing on LSD in the hills above Loch Ness. And I said, “No, dad, those goats were running away. They weren’t dancing.”
We were sustainable 40 years ago when it was considered a mental health condition, right? It was like those hippies are [inaudible 00:01:28] crazy. And we used to recycle everything, right, including tin bath water, before we got that avocado sweet we all pined for in the ’80s. So finally when we got a generator, there it is, the Lister diesel generator. It was simply used two hours a day to freeze the home-cured sheep that turned me vegetarian. And I still recall the lost souls that came from all over the world to stay in the Croft that my mum and dad welcomed with open arms, organic eggs, and a purpose. And we’d sit around the table and connect and listen and tell stories and debate. I’m going to make a comparison now that might shock a young lady like you at age 17. I also thought all drugs are bad kids, all drugs are bad.
Because I bought into Nixon’s war on drug story over the years, and I believed false narratives also about myself. And I wonder if any of you have ever done that? Have you ever found yourself believing negative things about yourself because… Oh, the slides are getting ahead of me. The creative geniuses over the years, the Beatles, Aldous Huxley, Jimi Hendrix, and indeed the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that you use the tech of to this day, they all altered their perspective using mind-altering substances. Now, I’m not trying to sell you, my daughter, or you guys, on hallucinogenics. I promise I wasn’t allowed to encourage class A usage tonight. But I’d like you to think of your mind like a picture frame and the stories you tell yourself as the images in that picture. And what I’m going to encourage you to do is to microdose yourself every day with positive but true stories about yourself.
And the structure I’m going to give you is a lot simpler than the structure of LSD there on the screen. The structure is not coming up next. Imagine if everything you thought about your own capability was upside down. Imagine the potential if you would flip it on its head and tell yourself positive stories about yourself. My dear, dear girl, my dear daughter, you’re such a wonderful human being. You’re worth every ounce of encouragement, confidence, and love that I can give you. But what matters the most is the story you tell yourself about yourself. I believe in you. I love you. Dad.
Thank you very much. Me, Timothy Leary. And you can applaud him too. He was called the most dangerous man in America by Dick Nixon, named aptly. Timothy said, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” And he challenged societal norms. And that was not encouraged and still isn’t in a lot of places. But I don’t want you to drop out. I want you to drop in to your natural potential and grow with it. I’m not here to sell hallucinogenics, as I say, to you or my daughter, but I am here to invite you to embrace your natural potential. And this microdose story SCAR is what I encourage you to use.
The situation is why you were hired. Why did they hire you? What were the results that you produced before? The challenges you’ve overcome in your job so far, the actions you took and the results you delivered. It’s time to end all war. But specifically tonight, yes, I am anti-war. It’s time to end all war. Specifically tonight, I want you to end the war on self-confidence in your career, okay? I want you to take a daily dose of SCAR situation, challenge, action, result, and build a bridge to your career potential. And once you’ve got through my painful, what do you call that thing, that painful, mind blank, mixed metaphor, that was it. I would love to hear what possibilities open up for you.
