We’re gonna be starting with an overview of the 3X Model.

The 3X Model is the underlying core concept – the foundation of authenticity and confidence.

So I’d like to give you a little bit of background as to where this model came from and what it’s all about.

The Birth of The 3X Model

Essentially it’s the result of over five years of exploration, study and research into the most confident and authentic people I could find on the planet. It’s been tested rigorously by myself and by many of my clients to determine how it works and what this sort of secret concept underlying confidence actually is.

What I’ve noticed is that there are patterns – behavioural patterns, thought patterns, belief patterns – that separate those who are truly confident from those who have low self-worth.

In truly confident people I saw patterns like consistency, living by values, the ability to do uncomfortable things in order to do what was right.

In people with low self-worth, I saw patterns like procrastination and fear-driven behaviour.

And I saw that these patterns could be mapped, and what I was really interested in was mapping the difference between those who had confidence and those who lacked it.

What is confidence and authenticity?

This model is also used to answer this questions. Essentially ‘confidence’ in my definition is the certainty in yourself. It’s the ability to rely on yourself, to trust yourself to do the right thing, to require nobody else but you.

A key definition for me – what I call the ‘confidence tipping point’ – is when you get to a stage in your life where you would not trade places with anyone else on the planet. You are so happy and so content being who you are that you have no interest in being anybody else.

‘Authenticity’ is an interesting concept. A lot of people struggle with this term. I think it’s been thrown around in the self-development world far too often.

For me, authenticity is not a destination – it is a process. It is not an identity – it is the act of being in any given moment. It is the alignment between who you are in this moment and who you wish you were.

Finding authenticity through confidence is about closing that gap – what I call ‘the authenticity gap’ – going from being someone who watches himself or herself not be the person they want to be, to actually in the moment being that person, no matter how uncomfortable or comparatively dangerous that might be or seem to be.

What is The 3X Model?

Essentially the 3X Model has three ‘stages’ that go on a cycle, and a confident and authentic person regularly flows consistently through these three stages.

The three stages, as I’ve named them, are Explore, Engage and Release.

Now these are just words, and these words will change depending on the context during which you apply the model, but for now, let’s use those words and talk about what those words mean.

Essentially the model is about trying to remain present while constantly flowing through different states.

Stage 1: Explore

In the Explore stage, we are trying to figure out what the truth is. We’re looking at all the information available to us, all the evidence, and using that to figure out what is true and what is real right now.

This stage is related to the fact that I found so many people who are confident and authentic are closely aligned to objective reality.

Now, we’ll never know what objective reality actually is because we’re humans and our brains are too confusing to actually figure out an agreement between everyone as to what is real, but what you’ll find is that the closer you are to objective reality, the more certain you are, the better facts that you’re dealing with, the better information you have to work with.

When you’re distant from reality, when you’re living in a fantasy world, you’re so far from information that can help you that you end up sabotaging yourself.

So in the Explore stage we try to find the truth, because the truth is what will help us most in any given situation. It’s what it’ll keep us present and keep us focused.

Stage 2: Engage

In the second stage, Engage, we actually put that truth to work. We do something.

An easier way to describe the stage would be to call it the ‘action stage’. So if the Explore stage is thinking and planning and preparing, then the Engage stage is where you take action, where you test and where you experiment. In this stage, we put that truth to the test and we see how we can use it to better our lives to engage in the world in a meaningful way.

In a sense, we’re cycling through time periods here as well.

In the Explore phase, we’re using curiosity to plan what will come; we’re future-based thinking. In the Engage phase, we are here and present, we’re doing it in the moment, which leads us to the third and final phase, and this is an interesting one and I think the most neglected one: the Release.

Stage 3: Release

This is where we allow our experiment to be finished, our test, our actions, to have an impact. We sit back and we receive the information before we decide what we’re going to do next, and then we go back into exploring again.

So essentially we look for the truth, we express ourselves in some way, and then we reflect back on what happened with that expression before we decide on our next move.

It’s this pattern that I saw happening in confident and authentic people. They’re present by constantly working with what they’ve got in terms of information, boldly taking action and testing things – not assuming they know the truth until it’s been tested, and they’re sitting back and taking the time to heal, reflect and absorb information and feedback from the world.

Fractals

The 3X Model is also ‘fractal’, meaning it changes size and shape.

So in a conversation, you might think what you’re going to say, say that thing, and then wait for them to respond – thought, action, reflection.

Or your entire career could be described in this model, where you plan what you want to do for a job, you go and apply and test out different jobs, and then you sit back and reflect on those jobs to feel which one was the best fit for you.

So at all different levels, this model applies, and it spins as you stay within the model, which comes to the concept of ‘problems’.

Problems = stuck

I define problems as being stuck in the model, where you’re overdoing one or two of those stages and neglecting another.

You might be all thought or all action or all reflection, or a mixture of two stages without a third, but because you’re stuck you’re not cycling and flowing, you’re not going with time, going with reality.

You’re stuck in the moment, or you’re stuck in the past, or you’re stuck in the future.

CORE VALUES

This model is based on core values, which is going to be another huge theme throughout this entire course.

Core values are the essentials that you were born with about what it means to live the right way, what it means to be authentic for you. Think of values as the kind of diamond or the light at the centre of who you are. You started that way!

You watch any child learning how to walk, learning how to talk, experimenting with the world – there’s no self-consciousness, there’s no worrying about what other people think, there’s no accepting other people’s beliefs without testing them.

A baby already has all the tools it needs… and then it meets the rest of the world – with their fears and their insecurities and their misbeliefs and their misunderstandings – and those are absorbed by the baby, who turns into a child, who turns into a teenager.

And by the time the baby is able to think critically, by the time it’s grown up to a stage where it’s brain has developed enough to be able to make its own decisions, it’s often already too late.

All the fears and insecurities of the adults and surrounding influences in its life have been absorbed, and the diamond in the center – which already knew what it needed to do – is now covered in a fog or smoke, it’s covered and veiled in fear, and it’s so much harder now for the grown-up child to figure out what the right thing to do is.

Using the 3X Model is about finding those values again; to live by the values that a simple child lives by, to do what is right rather than what is easy, and to understand that what is right for you as your own unique thing.

With the three stages in the 3X Model, we closely align them to three of the main values.

For Exploration, we align it to the value of curiosity – we use an open mind to explore the truth, to make sure that we are not basing things on assumptions, stereotypes or categorizations that are no longer true.

For Engagement – the Engage phase of the cycle – we’re going to be based on the value of honesty. We’re going to be trying to do what is true. The reason it’s so important for us to be honest is because dishonesty is what creates most self-worth issues.

When we are dishonest, we send ourselves a message that our truth is not good enough, and it’s through sending this message that we destroy our own self-worth. Every time I tell a lie to somebody else I’m telling myself that whatever is true about me must be ‘wrong’; it must be hidden, which brings me to the definition of shame.

We reveal what is true about us in order to give ourselves the message that it’s okay, that we accept whatever is true about us in the Release phase, we are based on the value of respect – self-respect and respect for others.

In the Release phase, we respect ourselves by giving ourselves a break, by giving ourselves a rest and allowing ourselves to be changed by the feedback that we receive from the world. In a conversation, we respect the other person by allowing them to contribute to the conversation, to influence us before we decide what we’re going to say next.

Respect, curiosity, honesty – a flow through these values is what will create authenticity, which is a moving state.

Shame

Now I’ll be working on an assumption that confidence is one end of the scale and shame is the other, and the two shall never meet – they are polar opposites.

Shame is the kryptonite of confidence. You can be confident and nervous, you can be confident and doubtful, you can be confident and confused, but you cannot be confident and ashamed.

If you embrace whatever you are, you are confident. If you hide what you are, you are ashamed. In the Engage stage, we use honesty to destroy our shame.

Emotions

We are emotional animals.

We have the questionable gift of rational thinking, where we are able to backwards-rationalize our decisions.

We’re able to plan future events, we’re able to predict what’s known as ‘counterfactual’ situations (we can make stuff up), and because of this reason, we seem to think that we make our decisions consciously, that we make rational logical decisions. It’s simply not true.

Our decisions are made emotionally. We are essentially mammals and we make our decisions emotionally. So rather than fight this, we’re going to use it.

Your emotions are all helpful and they help you move through this model. They give you warning signs as to what’s happening with you and they help you to engage in the world in a meaningful way.

What is life, other than a series of emotional experiences? That’s all life ever will be for us for any of us; it’s the emotional movie we play inside our heads.

So we use emotions to figure out what value needs to be engaged in. We use that value to move through the model, and as we move through the model things just get better and better and better.

Don’t Believe Me

You don’t have to believe me yet, in fact, I don’t want you to believe me! I don’t want you to trust me. I want you to test me!

This model – and all the ideas that I talk about about in The 3X Confidence and Authenticity Masterclass Program – are there for you to go out and experiment with.

I don’t know the right way for you to live. You do, though – that I believe. It’s already in there.

You know that guilty feeling you get when you’ve done the wrong thing? How did you know? Some part of you did. That core value-based part knows when you’re not living up to your own standards.

The 3X Model helps you relieve yourself of that kind of guilt, because you’re going to be seeing yourself do the right thing over and over and over again and that’s what builds confidence; trusting yourself to do the right thing, no matter what.

Key Things to Remember

Learning this model is done through using it. Practice practice practice!

If you already knew how to be confident and authentic, you wouldn’t be reading this, which means whatever you’ve been taught so far didn’t give you everything you need. I invite you to have an open mind to the concept that what you’ve been taught so far is total crap!

The people who have taught you as you were raised from a child to a teenager to an adult, may not have known what they are talking about.

Unfortunately we humans have this inability to say no to giving advice – we will advise others and tell them how to live even when we don’t have a clue ourselves, and that’s what you’ve been subjected to your entire life.

The people who told you what the right thing to do is, what the right thing to believe is, how you should think and act, those people may not have known what they were talking about, but they might have sounded like they did.

I want to help you find something that nobody else can find for you, that nobody else can tell you how to do: a way of living by your values, so that every night as you’re going to sleep you’re proud of the way you behaved, and it creates a long-term feeling of self-worth; a consistent thing that cannot be moved by anybody else.

I want to help you create total self-reliance, where you can gain support from others but you don’t need it, where you can approve of yourself so that nobody else is required to.

This is like scientific method: you create a hypothesis about what is true, you test that hypothesis, and then you measure your results. Those are the three phases of the model – Explore, Engage and Release.

The whole course will get into much more specific detail in the key areas, including how to figure out what your values are, how to practically apply all these stages of the model and what that looks like, and why you need to do it.

We’re going to be looking at some of the key influences that confidence has in your life, and this really brings us to the overall theme: I firmly believe that being confident, that being yourself, being

Authenticity is the most enjoyable way to live, that there is nothing better than that. That no results – no million dollars, no public acceptance, no anything from anyone else – will match the joy that you’ll feel in being confident in yourself.

So come with me as we explore the psychology of confidence together, as we learn how to put confidence and authenticity into action so that you can actually see changes occur in your life every single day.