Baby sitting for a dear friend of ours. It was a wonderful honor as I think it’s the first time that they’ve left their babies with non family members. Although Pete has known them for avery long time we practically are family. I have to say there is something about holding an eight month old baby in your arms when they are having a bad dream and gently rocking them back to sleep. It was one of the most incredible moments in my life that I will treasure forever.

Tech of the week

Downcast : I was talking to my fellow podcaster Chris Janzen today and we were both moaning about the awful Podcast app that was release for iOS6. They really have made a right dogs dinner over at Apple on this app. It’s very poorly designed and certainly doesn’t function adequately to really follow a larger number of podcast. So I’ve been using Downcast as my replacement podcast app. Now this is a paid app, but considering how bad Apple’s own one is, and how much enjoyment I get out of listening to podcasts everyday I thought it was worth the 69p or 99c. As always there are thousands of podcasts covering everything from personal development, motivation, and productivity as well as awesome DJs that play great sets of music each month for you to enjoy for free! So give Downcast a go and start enjoying podcasts the way they were meant to be played.

The First Technique I Teach to Building Confidence

Where to start? You may be new to personal development or very experienced but today I’m going to give you a tool, a technique if you will that will start to make a significant difference

For those in the corporate world lets call it a stake in the ground, for everyone else think of it as a measuring stick that you will use to give your life clarity and focus. And in the long term it will allow you to simply and easily look back and know for sure that you have made progress.

Why: lacking a realistic view on the state of they own confidence. Often they will feel overwhelmed and struggle to see a time when they haven’t felt like this. By doing this exercise you will be able to accurately measure your own confidence levels, and determine what the true state of emotional flux you are in.

When: Once a day, pick a time when you feel at your highest or lowest confidence. It doesn’t matter when you pick the moment, you can even do it retrospectively if you are too caught up in the moment to catch it. The important thing here is to record the moment, not the average, this isn’t about how you felt over all, but in that specific moment in time. I say do this once a day, but some people find it even more beneficial to do it several times a day. But focus on doing it at least once. If you want to do it more often that’s up to you. But don’t feel you have to commit to it. Once a day would be perfect. More would just be a nice bonus

What: Write down a rating, grade yourself out of 10. 1 being really bad and 10 being better that you could have ever dreamed.

And that’s it! Now you might wonder what the point of it all could possibly be, well I’m going to hold off on that until the next show, because I want you to at least give it a go before I let you in to the results.

The reason is, I don’t want you to try and over analyse why you are doing it, or what the results mean. I just want you to become more aware of moments in time that your confidence is high and/or low. If you like you can send me your results, but this works equally as well if you keep the answers private.

Start right now by thinking back on today, whenever you end up listening to this. What went well today and what was your confidence rating or what went bad, or at least could have gone better in your eyes and how would you rate yourself? Write that number down, and make a note of what was going on in that moment. Who were you talking to? What were they saying? What did you say? Was there anyone else there? What were you thinking at the time? Write down as much detail as you can, but make sure that it’s only during that moment. Remember it’s not about the day as a whole, but a specific moment in that day.

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