Happy Sunday, and welcome back to the 187th edition of The Breath Letter.
The newsletter that provides you with actionable takeaways from 1 Breathwork insight, 1 Breathwork quote, and 1 Breathwork resource from BreathingByEd, a Certified Oxygen Advantage Advanced Breath Coach, every Sunday morning.
I hope everyone took the opportunity to enjoy how everyone seems to forget the tortoise won the race in The Breath Letter #186. If you missed it, be sure to check it out!
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Now, let’s get into The Breath Letter #187…
Breathwork Insight
Beijing.
February 2022.
Women’s freestyle skiing big air final.
Eileen Gu is eighteen years old, standing at the top of the ramp on her third and final run, already guaranteed a podium spot.
She doesn’t need to do anything risky.
Silver is locked in.
She could play it safe, land something clean, and walk away with a medal at her first Olympics.
Instead she decides to attempt a double cork 1620, four and a half full rotations, a trick she has never once attempted in competition.
Never.
The first time she would do it at competition level would be right now, at the Olympic Games, in front of the world.
She drops in.
She lands it perfectly.
She wins gold.
The best part?
The move was entirely unplanned, Gu said after the event. “I was guaranteed a podium spot when I dropped in.”
Nobody in that moment was telling Eileen Gu she was confident.
Nobody was handing her a list of affirmations to repeat at the top of the ramp.
What she had was something far more useful than any of that…
A body of evidence, built across thousands of hours of training, that her body and her mind could point to when the doubt arrived.
And the doubt always arrives.
The question is what you’re holding when it does.
One of my favourite quotes of all time is…
“You don’t become confident by screaming affirmations into a mirror; you become confident by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.
Outwork your self-doubt.’’
Alex Hormozi
Doubt has stopped me from doing more things than I’d like to admit.
You know the small things like sending an email I wasn’t sure about, putting work into the world I wasn’t confident in, starting something before I felt ready.
And the pattern is always the same.
I sit with the doubt long enough for it to feel like information.
Like it’s telling me something true about my capabilities rather than just doing what doubt always does: show up uninvited before anything that matters and make itself seem bigger than it is.
The thing I’ve learned, slowly and mostly through experience rather than wisdom, is that doubt doesn’t go away before you do the thing.
It goes away after.
But never goes away forever.
Every single time I’ve done something I was scared to do, for example, publish the first edition of The Breath Letter, the doubt that felt enormous beforehand collapsed to almost nothing the moment I was actually doing it.
Not because the fear was wrong.
Because action creates evidence, and evidence is the only thing that actually speaks to the part of your brain generating the doubt in the first place.
The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
That, my friends, is not some motivational BS quote; it is literally what I have found to be consistently true.
Now, personal experience is obviously the best piece of evidence I can go off, but what’s interesting is that the science is blunter on this topic than most people realise.
Joanne Wood at the University of Waterloo found that positive self-statements backfire specifically in people with low self-esteem, the people who reach for them most.
When someone with chronically low self-esteem says “I am a lovable person,” the immediate response is resistance and counterevidence.
The brain detects the gap between the statement and its own internal data, and the doubt that follows is stronger than the doubt that was there before.
The mechanism is called a contrast loop, a cognitive process where aspirational statements collide with a negative self-concept and reinforce existing self-doubt rather than replacing it.
You are not reprogramming the brain.
You are highlighting the distance between where you are and where you’re claiming to be, and making yourself feel that distance more acutely.
What actually builds real confidence is what Albert Bandura called self-efficacy.
Belief in your ability built through mastery experiences.
Doing the thing.
Doing it again.
Accumulating a record of actual evidence that exists independently of how you feel about yourself on a given morning.
Eileen Gu didn’t stand at the top of that ramp repeating that she was capable.
She had the evidence.
Every training session, every competition, every run she’d ever completed was sitting in her nervous system telling her something that no affirmation could replicate.
She knew, because she’d done the work to know.
So as you go about your Sunday, I want to invite you to stop waiting to feel ready.
Because guess what, my friends?
You’re never going to feel ready.
Nobody does.
Readiness is mostly a story we tell ourselves to justify not starting, and the feeling we’re waiting for doesn’t arrive before the action; it arrives because of it.
Look at what you’ve already done instead.
Not what you wish you’d done or what you’re planning to do.
What you’ve actually done, finished, survived, built, shown up for on the days you didn’t feel like it.
That’s your evidence.
And it’s already more than you’ve been giving yourself credit for.
The doubt will still show up.
That’s fine.
It shows up for everyone, including eighteen-year-olds at the top of Olympic ramps.
The difference is just what you’re holding when it does.
Happy Sunday, and see you next week!
*BREATHWORK DISCLAIMER*
Breathwork can have an intense effect on the cardiovascular, endocrine, respiratory, nervous, and lymphatic systems.
If you are pregnant or have any medical problems with these areas of your body, do not practice breathwork until you are advised to do so after a consultation with your doctor.
For more disclaimer details, please click here.
Breathwork Quote
“If you always want more, then you’ll find the most you can have will always be too little.”
- James Clear
Breathwork Resource
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What has BreathingByEd been up to this week…
Listening to my guided BreathingByEd Breathwork for Sleep session.
Sharing that Breath Letter subscribers can access a sensational EXCLUSIVE BREATHINGBYED DISCOUNT of 15% on their Dream Recovery mouth tape using the code “ED10“.
Inviting you to leave a comment on what topics you would like to see in future The Breath Letter editions.
I hope you have a great Sunday, and until next week.
Ed
P.S. When you’re ready, here are 2 ways I can help:
1. Do you want to empower yourself with scientifically proven breathwork protocols to help you self-regulate your daily stress and anxiety, maximise your sleep and significantly enhance your daily performance using my ‘transformative’ Breathe2Achieve program?
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