James Smith is one of the main reason that I started this blog. In January 2023, I took some time to listen back to my favourite Diary of a CEO podcast episodes and write about my top 5.

It was though but fun ranking all the episodes that I’d enjoyed and then trying to pick the 5 I enjoyed the most.

James Smith wasn’t someone on my radar. I knew of him but I had never really explored who he was. My perception was that he was another one of these ‘shock jock’ fitness influencers that likes to go against the grain and say things for the shock factor.

Steven Bartlett does describe him in the show notes as having a ‘no holds barred approach to fitness advice’. But after listening to this episode and paying a bit more attention to James and what he is doing, my original perception has since changed.

He’s a confident guy. And he wants to use his confidence to breed confidence in other people through what he does. And if I hadn’t listened back to this episode, I probably wouldn’t have got my shit together and started this blog.

As a fitness coach at heart, James has spent a large part of his working life around people who are wanting to change; either get fitter, stronger, faster or lose the weight they’re not happy carrying around. But rather than just help people shift the few extra pounds or finally get the 6 pack they’ve always wanted, he cuts through to the REAL reason(s) why they want what they want.

And a lot of it comes down to confidence and how they feel. It could be that they no longer feel ‘sexy’ for their partners or don’t feel comfortable when they take their top off in public. He called these ‘pain points’ for his clients. And when he works with a client, he has to get to the core of the issue and find the real pain points so that they can work together on how to start the change process. This is more often than not a case of building confidence. 

Before he began working as a fitness instructor, he worked as a door to door salesman. This is where he believes a lot of his confidence was built and developed.  He explains that he became aware that confidence is a relationship with failure. Doors being slammed in his face, phones being hung up when he was trying to sell were demoralising. But if he got 1 sale from 100 sales calls, then he had the evidence to back himself.

Building resilience is key. We all get knock backs throughout our careers and lives. Having the resilience and strength to find a way to deal with it and bounce back is so important. So when people like James Smith share their story of how they dealt and managed failure, we can take these examples and apply them to ourselves.

“Anxiety predicts failure and confidence predicts success”

We all have anxiety. And for some of us it can vary on how severe it is and when we feel it. Managing anxiety is hard. Especially if we find ourselves in a situation where it becomes amplified. Standing in front of strangers with a mic in your hand or even just trying to hit ‘record’ on your phone camera to shoot a short video. It’s a natural feeling and completely normal to have these pangs of anxiety. But it’s our relationship with anxiety which predicts how much we let it control us.

Fear of failure naturally crosses our mind when we are anxious. ‘What if i forget what I’m supposed to say…’ or ‘What if they don’t like me and I don’t get the job…’ and ‘What if no one likes me and this flops..’. Unfortunately, shit happens sometimes.

There will be times that you don’t get the job that you wanted, or times when you do say something all jumbled up during a presentation. And for James Smith, he uses the memory of doors being slammed in his face on his door to door sales calls. But what he also uses is the knowledge that after so many doors being shut in his face, if he kept going, he’d get that one sale he needed. So using the confidence that he CAN sell the product because he had the evidence, he was able to keep going.

This rings true when he found himself on the other side of the world in Australia and his original plan wasn’t working. He wasn’t getting the same success as a PT in Australia as he’d had in the UK. His confidence was low and he was anxious about what he was going to do. So he decided to record a few videos on his phone and start putting them out on Facebook and the rest is history.

One of the main takeaways I took from this episode was the power of audacity. We can often associate audacity with negative connotations. We can look at someone like James and think that he’s over confident and has the audacity to say the things he says on his social media. We need confidence and audacity to achieve the things we want to. 

But having the audacity to ask difficult questions and not be worried about how other people think is huge when it comes to building confidence. He references a great experiment he heard on The Tim Ferris Podcast about asking for a 10% discount when buying a coffee. And goes on to quote Mark Manson with a quote I really like – “People wouldn’t care what other people thought of them so much if they realised how seldom they do.” 

We worry about what other people will think about us. And this builds anxiety in our heads. The anxiety relates to the reason we often don’t start the blog or podcast we have always wanted to. Or getting our message across the way we want to get it over.

We live in a polarised world where everything we say and put out on social media is open for others to judge us on. If you are less anxious and a bit more audacious with a positive outlook on your expectations, then with small steps you can achieve a lot more than you can by sitting wondering about it.

For me it was toss up between James Smith or Sir Richard Branson to add to my top 5 episodes. Sorry Dicky, James pipped you to the post on this one.

Check the full episode on YouTube –  HERE 

Listen to the episode HERE