Confidence Mindset: Controlling Your Life By Controlling Your Thoughts With Dennis R. Sumlin

 

The secret to building up your confidence is in understanding how your brain works. The world needs more of this confidence mindset, but so many leaders have a hard time building it. In this episode, Dennis R. Sumlin takes another approach at mindset shifts and targets confidence directly. Sitting down with Rodney Flowers, Dennis discusses the foundations of confidence and explains his views on what confidence really is and how it affects your life. He also touches on the topic of breaking your bad habits and patterns to become your best self. Plus, he leaves a tip on how you can become more self-aware and cognitive of your thoughts. Listen in and learn what you need to do be confident and start pursuing your goals with your chest out and head up high.

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Confidence Mindset: Controlling Your Life By Controlling Your Thoughts With Dennis R. Sumlin

As always, I’m excited about this show. I have Dennis R. Sumlin with me. He is a Confidence and Mindset Specialist and the Founder of Core Confidence Life, a men’s personal development service. He hosts a podcast of the same name. He has a background in communication, human psychology, sexuality and eastern spiritual studies. Dennis has been coaching and mentoring young men for many years. He has stopped by to share his knowledge and experience with us. Without further delay, let’s welcome Dennis Sumlin. Welcome to the show, Dennis. 

Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here. 

I’m glad to have you here. I was looking over your profile and I’m loving the work that you do. I believe that young men, in general, need all the coaching that we can get in order to be the men that we are designed to be in this world. To take on that role as a coach and a specialist, I congratulate you doing such a thing. First of all, how did you even get into Mindset and Confidence coaching? 

If your mind frame is correct and aimed the right way, you can go anywhere you want to go. Click To Tweet

It’s been with me my whole life. As the introduction says, I started coaching many years ago. How I got into coaching in the beginning was an exploration of myself. I coached from a position of experience. When I was younger, I had my own struggles with building self-confidence and having the proper mindset to keep moving. I didn’t have a real role model or another man to look up to. As I got older and moved into adulthood, I had to figure things out for myself. That brought me into studying mindset, human behavior, the idea of building confidence. The more that I gained knowledge-wise, the more I passed on to other people. We built like that. 

I started coaching many years ago on these peer coaching hotlines. It was built from there. I have had other jobs in different areas, such as communication and entertainment and so forth. I always circled back around to coaching. No matter what I did, I came back to helping people get where they got to go in their minds because it all starts in the mind. If your mind frame is correct and aim the right way, you can go anywhere you want to go. The more I discovered that for myself, the more I was able to help other people. 

What are some of the common pitfalls you find your clients or individuals fall into that you have to coach them out of? How do you do that? 

Some of the pitfalls we have are people who grow up with different areas of low self-esteem. There are a lot of different reasons for that, because of shame, stigma, stereotypes. A lot of men that I work with feel under pressure for a lot of different things. For example, there are people who are growing up who have low self-esteem about themselves. They don’t believe in themselves. They don’t feel that they have a purpose or they have problems seeing their purpose and talent. That could be for some of the reasons. Maybe they may not have had a solid role model growing up. They may have come from a troubled background. We help them discover their general-purpose and their own talents, and use those talents to get to where they want to go. 

Other people have specific challenges in areas such as relationships. A lot of people I work with have issues around finding a good relationship, stop attracting the same low vibration people they are attracting. Some of them need to build more confidence intimacy-wise. There are those as well. There are people who come to me when they want to set goals for themselves, and how to reach those goals, sensible goals, goals that fit their particular personality and style. We work on that as well. Those are some of the things that I come across. 

Finding a purpose is a high topic. Many people out there have a hard time with this. There’s not a solution that I’ve heard many people say about finding your purpose. What is your solution to help people who may have a hard time identifying what their purpose is? 

My philosophy is that we are already living our purpose, whether we even know it or not because our purpose is the things that we do every day. People get a little misunderstanding of the word purpose. When we think of purpose, a lot of us think of, “What am I going to do for a career? What job am I going to have? Am I going to do something big? I’m not going to be the president.” The purpose is everything. For example, your purpose could be to raise a healthy family and the job may be a means for you to do that. It may not even be your ultimate purpose.  

I start out by saying that purpose does not necessarily mean a career, number one. Number two, the purpose is something that we’re living every day, which is why we don’t see it. It’s so natural to us. It’s so intrinsic to who we are as individuals that we don’t see it. We’re looking for something big when we’re are living it when we look in the mirror. Number three, when discovering what our purpose is or seeing it for ourselves, there are a couple of things I suggest clients to do. Things like assessing what their natural talents are. We can’t often see what our natural talents are because they’re so intrinsic. There’s a saying that the eye can’t see itself. You don’t always see what you’re doing that’s great, wonderful and fantastic. To you, it’s ordinary and invisible.  

We look to reveal what’s ordinary and invisible to you and make it obvious what your gifts are. I also encourage people to ask other close ones to them, “What do you see in me? What value do I have in your life?” It’s an assessment of a 360 view of who you are, what you mean, what your talents are. We explore what your dreams are. What do you want to be? We all have something in our head that we want to be. Whether it’s big or specific, we all have it. We go about assessing what that is. Once I have all those ingredients, that 360 view of who you are, then we start working on how to get there. 

 

You are also a confidence specialist, which a lot of people struggle with confidence. Confidence is the number one cause of people not reaching their dreams. The people that have confidence seem to be able to excel at a very high level. There’s a disparity between those that do and those that don’t. It’s at different levels and extremes. Let’s open up the conversation about confidence. I want to start at the lowest level. That is, are we born with it? Is that something that people are innately born with? 

In general, all of us are born with different levels of personality traits. There could be somebody born that may be a little bit tougher, more prone to positive thinking. You might make the argument that it’s possible. There are some people born that may have a predisposition to be a little bit more confident than others. I might see that, but that’s not the rest of the story. We all can reach a level of confidence that works for us. You may feel, “Maybe I wasn’t born as confident or my brother’s more confident than me. Where did he get that from?” That doesn’t mean you can’t build it up. We all have the potential to build up our confidence in different forms, rates and levels. Being born with confidence is irrelevant because we all can reach that point. 

How do we do that? I want to get into the essence of increasing confidence. Not so much, let’s say with sports, if you keep practicing over and over, by repetition, you’ll increase your confidence. You get enough games and you increase your confidence. There still may be some levels or different times in your life or in a game that you may not have confidence. I’m speaking in terms of being confident to say, “I have an idea that I want to accomplish. I know I can go out there and make it happen,” versus living with a certain level of uncertainty. For example, we’re getting over the COVID situation, but yet there’s still a high level of uncertainty about what tomorrow is going to bring. How are we going to navigate the world tomorrow? There’s a lack of confidence and the ability to move forward for the sake of wanting to go back. How do we increase that confidence? 

First of all, I will say two things. One is confidence. You’re not going to feel wonderful every single day. When we get into these self-help personal growth things, a lot of people are under a myth that you’re supposed to be feeling confident, positive and motivated every day, every minute, every hour. That’s just not real because we are humans, our feelings, emotions and confidence levels fluctuate. I like to break that stereotype that just because you’re not feeling good on a certain day, it doesn’t mean you lost your confidence. It just means that you’re human. Positive thinkers don’t mean they feel positive every day. Optimistic thinkers don’t mean they feel optimistic every single day. We have to remember that. We can be generally confident and still have a bad day. 

Number two, the ultimate way to seal up confidence is by taking action. You mentioned playing sports or whatever like that. Once you do the work mentally, taking action helps solidify that confidence. You’re looking for the wiring behind that before we take the action. The wiring behind that is all mindset. When people lack confidence, usually, it’s because of perception. They may not know what they’re good at or what their talents are or how they come across. Once that blind spot is addressed, that can go a long way. Also in society, we face a lot of different pressures, stigmas, perceptions and messages from everyone else and everything else around us. 

Sometimes when we have low levels of confidence, it’s because of others’ perceptions of us. Maybe we had a bad upbringing, what our mama told us, what the success we had as a teenager, maybe we have a little sense of confidence about being able to attract the right person for us, or being able to perform a certain act or feel good about ourselves. The mental part of confidence is breaking through those negative messages, stereotypes, misperceptions, misunderstood concepts of yourself or the world, any stigmas, shame or guilt you may have inside of you. All those things pile on and causes us to underperform and doubt ourselves mentally. 

The ultimate way to seal up the confidence is by taking action. Click To Tweet

What I do is I look for those psychological barriers in the limitations and anxiety triggers. We look to break through those things. We look to question your insecurities, shame and guilt parts of yourself. We question those things that you may have been told were not good about you by other people. It starts in the mind. When you start challenging the negative messages in your mind you have about yourself, when you start questioning the things that you think you know and be willing to know and understand new things about yourself in the world, that is the first step. 

I appreciate that because I think of devaluing, preconceived notions, past programming and patterns that you’ve been exposed to as it relates to the shaping of your identity. You alluded to it in the past where people may have said, “You’re not good at this or that.” It could have had a negative connotation to it. Depending on who that person was in your life and how old you were, how mature you were at that time, you could have taken on that as part of your identity. It shapes your identity. It’s because we value that comment to the point where we’ve accepted it as our own. We need to devalue those types of things, disattach from them, and then replace them with more reaffirming, positive and inspiring thoughts about ourselves. What are your thoughts on that? 

Speaking of things that you’re told as a young person when you’re young, you’re very susceptible to having things absorbed into your consciousness sometimes without even realizing it. When you’re a kid, “You’re fat and ugly. You’re no good at math. You got a little pipi,” all these different things that you were told. “No one’s ever going to date you or to love you. You got a face only your mother can love.” Things like that. We questioned those things because we always have an inner dialogue. One of the hardest things to get people to do sometimes is affirmations. I’m sitting there talking to myself, whatever, but we’re always talking to ourselves. We always have an inner dialogue, delivering messages to ourselves, listening to other people’s messages, and repeating messages that were told to us long ago, “You’re not that bright. You’re sloppy.” 

Anytime you have these messages, you question them. I’ll give you an example for me when I was younger, I thought that women don’t like skinny dudes. I’m a slim guy. I’m not tall and muscular. I’m not 250 pounds. Women don’t like that. I’m a skinny guy. All around me, I’m looking at that and it’s not true based on what you’re seeing, but it keeps echoing in my mind. I had to challenge that. Is this true? Now that I know it’s not true, where does it come from? Where does my idea that women don’t like skinny guys come from? Let’s break that pattern. It takes a step of you challenging those messages in your head, seeing if they’re true, and then possibly going back and finding out the origin of them and breaking that connection as well. 

Did you ever find in that experience that you were looking for instances where you were validating what you thought in your mind? 

When you have a disempowering thought or any thought, your mind looks for evidence of it. If I’m saying women don’t like skinny guys, then all I’m going to see is big muscular dudes. That’s all I’m going to see with women. That’s all my mind is going to pay attention to. I may see other things, but because I have this belief already, all I’m going to see are basketball players. Our mind gives us what we’re already thinking. That’s why it’s important to challenge what we’re thinking because here’s a secret, the brain has no idea what’s going on. The brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imaginary. Our consciousness tells the brain what’s real and what’s imaginary. If you think that no one likes you because you’re skinny, then your brain is going to operate like that. You’re going to see things that are consistent with it. If on the surface, you may have a chance with somebody, you may count yourself out because you’re skinny. You’re going to go about fulfilling that prophecy. That’s going to circle back to confirmation, “I knew it.” The brain has no idea what it’s doing unless you tell it so. Question that. 

How do our beliefs drive our behavior? 

Our beliefs drive our behavior because in psychology, we have a confirmation bias. Our brain is conditioned to see the things that we already believed. If you think you’re not good enough, then you may not try hard enough. You may pass up opportunities that you feel intimidated by. You may overestimate somebody else’s abilities. You may constantly compare yourself to other people and over-exaggerate your own flaws. If you think you’re not good enough, your brain is going to look for every single reason why you’re not good enough. When you do that, you are building neural passageways in your mind. The more you think you’re not good enough, the easier it is to stay in that mode. The more you think it, the easier it is to think it. 

You’re reinforcing the thought. 

You have the power to reinforce that thought because our brain is now plastic. We thought way back in the day, maybe 100 billion years ago that after a certain point, your brain is set. It’s set in stone, but that’s not true. Your brain is not only open as a child, but it’s also open as an adult. We create different neural passageways in the brain based on our habits, behavior and thoughts. The more you think something, the easier it is to think it. The more you do something, the easier it is to do it. The easier it is for it to become subconscious. What I encourage is for people to be self-aware. They can catch these patterns of thinking and behavior. That way, we have a better chance and changing it. 

 

That’s an open statement. How does one become more self-aware? 

One of the things that we can do is write a journal. I always recommend writing or keeping your own personal journal to become more self-aware of your thoughts. Writing things down forces you to think much more cognizant about what you’re thinking. Often, we have 60,000 thoughts a day. Those things pass us by. We think this or that. We’re on to the next thought every couple of seconds. A lot of those thoughts are gray and muggy. We think about it, absorb it and move on. When you write down things in a journal, you’re forced to give life to each one of those thoughts. When you’re writing things, your brain starts working and starts uncovering more things. 

Let’s use this example we’ve been working on, which is women don’t like skinny guys. If I open my journal and start writing, “Why don’t women like skinny guys? How come this? How come that? Why am I so skinny? What could I do to get women?” If I start writing that down, my brain is automatically going to start thinking of more things. I find that you start thinking of different solutions or scenarios to that, and automatically challenging yourself with that. That’s the first step, writing things down, keeping a track of what you’re thinking, make it material for you. Also, paying attention to the different activities you’re doing during the day. If you know you have a particular pattern or behavior you want to change, start paying attention to the things you do around that behavior. What do you do before that behavior or after that behavior? Start keeping track of the moment-to-moment actions you’re taking in life. Starting with those two things, you can begin to start becoming more aware of yourself. 

How do we reverse a thought pattern, belief or habit that no longer serves us? 

I feel like I’m redundant, but it is the same thing. You have to locate that habit first and find out what it is. For me, it’s helpful to find out what the habit is and why it’s there because habits are often subconscious. Sometimes we have habits and we don’t even know how they got there or why they got there because we’ve been doing them for so long. The important thing is to question that habit, “I’m doing this. I don’t like this. What would be a better habit to develop?” Once you know what that better habits to develop is, you have to start consciously challenging it. This is where becoming aware of your actions comes in handy. If I know that I have a particular habit of scratching my hand, for example, there are a lot of things that lead up to that. 

Maybe I’m scratching my hand every single time I hear a certain song or every time I drink a certain thing. I’m making this up as I go along to show you that there are a lot of behaviors or triggers that facilitate this behavior. Once you know where you want to go, you start being conscious of what those triggers are, what the behavior is, and what you want to change. Start slowly changing it by changing those triggers around what that is and start building new triggers to support the new habits you want to build. It’s not an overnight thing. You have to become conscious of it. You have to be deliberate in questioning it and in beginning to start a new habit. It takes a lot of processes. Be patient with yourself. 

I’m so glad that you said that you’re being a little bit redundant here because what I wanted to highlight is the fact that it’s the same process. The only difference is sometimes those habits start to develop unconsciously. There are the habits that you develop intentionally, which is the self-aware self. It’s critical because when we talk about developing patterns and ways of being that you have adopted from your childhood, which is where we started this conversation, recognizing that the same way those debilitating or non-selfserving habits, thoughts, beliefs that were created, it’s the same pattern or process in which more empowering, self-serving and inspirational thoughts, beliefs and habits can be created and put into play. That’s the key for people. At least that’s what I would like for them to take away from this because sometimes we feel that, “I can’t break away from this. I can’t let this go or this is just the way I am.” 

If you think you're not good enough, your brain is going to look for every single reason why you're not good enough. Click To Tweet

What I like to highlight is the way you got there is this pattern, but the pattern is the constant here. We need to put different variables in the process or the pattern, and we can get a different result. This is how we do it. It takes more conscious effort versus unconscious effort when it was originated. That was profound in having it and understand it. We say, “I can’t change. This is just who I am.” Yes, but there is a way to change and that’s all mindset as well. It takes a little mental power and mental strength to do it, but yet the evidence of you being the way you are and realizing, “This is where it originated from,” solidifies the fact that, in my opinion, you can change. It’s evidence that you can change because we replaced the bad with the good for simplicity. 

Even the idea that I can’t change stops us from changing. Every belief that we have determines what we do. If you think, “I can’t change, this is the way I am,” then you’re not going to change because your brain is going to continue doing what you believe. If you believe that you can’t change, then you’re going to do and not do things that confirm that belief. I do believe that we do have a core personality. I don’t believe that I can turn myself into you and you can’t turn yourself into me. There are limits to this. I do believe that we have a core essence or core consciousness, but there’s a lot more flexibility, free will and plasticity than we often give credit to. 

Let’s dive into that a little bit because a lot of times, people use that as an excuse and I agree. Never is the intent, however. We don’t want to change a person into someone else or dismantle the person’s personality altogether. The idea here is to give them the tools that they need to reach the level of success, hope and achievement that they’re after. A lot of times that has a lot to do with what we think. It’s that part of the personality that holds us back, that has disbelief or that doesn’t consider themselves the type of person that can accomplish what it is that they want to accomplish. I believe by the mere fact that you’ve been able to think that by some way, form or fashion, you have the ability to experience that to some degree. 

The challenge is what are those things within your belief system or personality that can cause you to achieve that level of success. I believe that success is available to us all. It’s not based on personality. It’s based on your ability to do what we’re talking about here. You have the belief patterns, the confidence and the mindset to reach that level of success. If necessary, change the personality to some degree. You can’t be the next Bill Gates, but it doesn’t mean that the next person can’t achieve a certain level of success that’s similar to Bill Gates. That’s possible. 

When we change, we become better versions of ourselves. If I change and make massive improvements, I’m not going to be the better version of you. I’m going to be the better version of me. The qualities that we have that make us the best us, we already have it inside of us. We don’t know that if we’re still stuck in these disempowering patterns, but when we start developing confidence in ourselves and developing healthier patterns, we’re going to turn into a better version of us. Whoever you are in a basic sense is mostly going to remain. Sometimes people go, “I’m a different person than I was ten years ago.” I understand the purpose of that statement, meaning that they’ve made a lot of improvements and they’re happy with themselves now and so forth. You would just be the less healthy of yourself then versus now. 

When I was 20 years old, I was still Dennis. I was less developed, maybe less healthier Dennis, but I’m still Dennis. Now I’m a more healthy, more in control Dennis, but a lot of my personality traits are still there. They’re intensified or downplay depending on whether they’re beneficial or not. Remember that you can become the best version of who you are by releasing these unhealthy patterns. I’ll give you another example of me challenging things because it’s a belief that will stop you from sabotaging yourself. When you believe something, you sabotage yourself when you believe negative things. When I was a teenager, I was told, “Dennis, you’re pretty smart, but you’re wasting your time. You’re distracted a lot.” I wasn’t doing schoolwork. 

I was labeled, “That’s a smart kid, but he’s wasting it.” That got into my consciousness that, “Everyone thinks I’m intelligent and smart and a whiz kid, but yet I’m a waste.” That caused me to self-sabotage myself. If I’m wasting my time, then I won’t do anything. I’m going to continue doing what they already think I’m doing. I’m sabotaging myself. I don’t believe in myself. I don’t believe I can achieve anything because I’ve been told throughout my schooling that I’m wasting my time and intelligence. I take that identity on. After awhile, I had to challenge that identity that I was a waste. Who says that? Why would they say that? How does that manifest in my own life? 

Dennis, do you believe that many people are facing an identity crisis? 

It depends on the context. If you mean it culturally, there are some people, men in particular, culturally that might be feeling that they have a loss of identity because we’ve had several societal changes going on. Globally or culturally speaking, there are men who feel that way. I don’t know individually. I think it’s an individual thing. Some people are because of what we’ve been talking about, low self-esteem, disempowering messages, and some people are not. It depends on what scope of life we’re talking about. 

 

Individually and overall look at society, do you feel like there’s an issue when it comes to identity, accomplishment, overcoming challenges and opposition. 

This identity crisis is partly through our own creation because we spend so much time comparing ourselves to other people. We look up and compare ourselves to other people. Now, we’re in the social media age, so we’re seeing everybody else’s supposed good life and their workout regimen and their dinner. A lot of us are very self-critical where we are our worst critics as they say. A lot of people are suffering from self-imposed identity crisis. Not because they’re doing it to themselves consciously, but because that’s the way our minds work sometimes. We compare. We negatively contrast. We look at other people’s achievements while underestimating ourselves. Identity crisis can be solved individually. 

How do we do that? 

By everything, we’ve been talking about. If we’re talking individually, if I don’t know who I am or where I belong in the world, I can look at where those thoughts are coming from. I used to compare myself to a lot of other people. I’ll never be able to do that. I’ll never be able to get there. How do I have that person get over there? I can’t do it as they do it. Comparing myself to other people is a bad idea. I had to figure out who I was as a person. That goes back to a lot of things that we were saying, general writing assessment of yourself, getting feedback from people who are close and positive with you. We can sort out in our minds who we are and build our own identity. I feel that once we do the work to get to know ourselves as individuals, this idea of an identity crisis will melt away. 

One of the reasons I got into this business is because I want to be an example of what’s possible, but I’ve also seen people who didn’t believe that they could do what they see other people do. It’s not that they were comparing themselves. For example, LeBron James or Michael Jordan were successful people. Success as mostly defined by our society. Be successful, but they wouldn’t think that was possible or allowable for themselves. It was okay for that person. They could ride through a neighborhood and they would see beautiful homes. The people living in those homes are enjoying their lives.  

When it comes to them having that life or being in that spot, it was this thought or feeling that, “Maybe that’s not set aside for me. It’s set aside for them. That’s them. I have to settle for what’s going on over here.” It was not this bridge that they felt they could build in order to get to that space. They didn’t feel that they had the ability to do that. A lot of that is identity. It’s who you feel you are versus who you feel that other person is that has all of those things. That’s what I mean by the identity crisis because it’s available for them as well. You have to take on the identity to have those types of things, which is a choice. 

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I agree that the choice of how you think. If you’re looking at LeBron James and saying, “He has all this stuff and success, but I don’t think that success is for me.” Why? If you told me that, if you were a client and you said, “LeBron James has XYZ, but I don’t think that’s for me.” My first question would be, why? Why isn’t that for you? What makes him different than you? We’re talking about you’re not his friend and you’re looking at him from a distance. What makes LeBron James different from you? That’s the first question I’d ask. Why don’t you think that type of status in the world is for you? Once you find out why someone thinks that, then you can go about rewiring it. This is what I’m saying that this identity crisis challenges it because you are looking at, “He has this or that’s for them. That may be good for them, but not me. I don’t think I’ll ever get there.” You’re comparing yourself to them and to an imaginary standard of success. My question would be, why not? What makes them different than you? 

The answer to that question, I’m sure most people would say is, “First of all, talent.” 

What is your goal though? What about LeBron James that you think you can’t reach? Are you saying you’ll never have the success he has? Are you saying that you’ll never be the best basketball player? What are your real goals? I will come back to that question. What makes him different than you? Maybe if you wanted to do the same thing he’s doing, then you can set about doing that. If you feel you have a natural talent or drive to play that sport, but if you’re talking about the general status and success of him, what makes him different than you? 

The only thing would be talent and it could be network. I’m arbitrarily answering the question the way I would think someone would answer it. 

I’m going to keep questioning everything. Why can’t you build that network? Let’s work with the talent that you have because you may discover that talent wasn’t the only component to get him there. There are a lot of people with talent that isn’t where he is. We would have to break all this down into its many components. It’s not just cool to say, “If he’s got this and I don’t, that’s not for me.” I would automatically start breaking those down into as many components. 

You are a good coach because a lot of times, what we do is individually stop at talent or whatever answer we come up with in our mind. That’s an excuse. Sometimes this is going to be a harsh thing for a lot of people to say. We stopped because at that point, it’s on you. If you say it’s talent, that’s on you because you can work hard. You may not have the gifted talent, but hard work always outperforms talent. He can’t do it himself. He’s on a team. He has a team. There is a lack of somewhat talent. You have your teammates that can help you out with that. There’s a lot of controversy about LeBron James and his stats as it relates to his talent and to other players whom he’s compared to as the greatest of all time. 

We’re not going to get into that. I feel like sometimes we look for excuses. We get to that part. Here’s the process. We say, “I would like to have that.” We start to imagine ourselves with that, then all of this other stuff comes up like, “I don’t have the talent, the money and knowledge.” All of that is you. You can fix that. If you don’t have it, you can get it. You can develop it and do all of these things to put yourself in a position where you can succeed. 

What I would also add too is sometimes we get into what I’m going to make up a term here, pedestal thinking. You look at other people, “They reached that pinnacle. That’s amazing and great. I’ll never get there.” We’re putting them way up. You have to understand that everyone is a human. LeBron James is just a person. That’s all he is. You react like he’s somebody like he’s a God. He’s somebody. He’s just a dude. He wasn’t born on a team. He had to get to that point. From my experience of working in the entertainment business and things like that, believe me, the most talented people don’t always make it to the top. The majority of the talented people go unrecognized. Getting to where somebody public has a lot more to do than just with talent. 

How can people connect with you if they wanted to learn more about you or work with you? 

 

You can connect with me in a whole host of ways. The website to go to find out more information is CoreConfidenceLife.com. You can also find me on social media, Core Confidence Life on Facebook and Twitter. You also can join the men’s only private Facebook group, where we talk about overcoming inner limitations to reach the healthy relationships, pleasure and prosperity you want. That’s Core Confidence Life as well. The podcast of the same name, you could find that on any of your popular podcasts like iTunes and Spotify. 

You study eastern studies. You’ve done this for your own personal growth. How has that helped you? 

This is a good question because Eastern Spiritual Philosophy, all that refers to is Eastern religions. Here in the West, in America, we have this monotheistic idea of religion and Christianity. I am more from the Eastern religious area as far as my belief system. It’s more like Buddhism type things, holistic spirituality. Understanding spirituality from let’s say Buddhist or Eastern perspective helps me a lot because it opens up the world of possibilities. It takes away a lot of the micromanagement and the long list of stigmas and no-no stuff that we hear that the Western world gets obsessed with. Holistic spirituality is more about understanding the connection between you and the creator, and the fact that we all have creative power inside of us. 

We all have the power to exercise that creativity and design our lives. Also, it’s the understanding that everything on this earth is arbitrary. Once I understood that everything that man is governed by is made up by the powers that be at the time, it frees me to relate to the world around me and the way that resonates with me. The rules of the road that we live by, they’re all made up. All the traditions that we live by every day, most of them are all made up by people. Once I understood the power of creation, the power that we all have, and the idea that because everything is created in the mind and doled out to other people that I have that same power. I don’t have to go by what other people have made up. I can go by what resonates with me. 

That is such a profound understanding. 

It is and it is a deeper thought too. This is not saying anything negative about anybody, but most of the things that we learn in this Western society are wrong or misguided. A lot of the things that we were brought up believing are wrong or misguided. Not because our parents lied to us on purpose. It’s because they’re passing on the knowledge that they have. Once we get a little older and start looking into things, questioning things, challenging things, we see that most things are made up. That allows our mind to be open to many different possibilities. 

Dennis, I would like to thank you for stopping by. Having this conversation with me has been a great one, full of information. You are a great coach. Listening to you, I’ve challenged you a little bit and you have demonstrated your mindset and mental strength with your responses. You’re a great person to have on the team. You are a game-changer. I love the way you think. Thank you again for coming to the show. It’s been a pleasure. 

I greatly appreciate it. I enjoyed the conversation. I like deep conversations like this. Thank you. 

Before we go, we’d like to ask all of our guests that come on the show the Game Changer Mentality question, which is how we can bounce back from adversity, dominate our challenges and consistently win at the game of life? 

 

Remember that every day is a new chance to succeed and you always have the final say in everything. Every day is a new day to succeed and you always have the final say. 

Thank you very much, Dennis Sumlin. 

—

There you have it, folks. That’s another successful episode. You always have the final say. To me, that’s just extreme ownership. It’s taking ownership of every situation in your life. Owning where you are, where you want to go and what happened to you. 

Everything, the good and the bad. The idea that everything in my life, whether I like it or not, are things that I designed. How deep is that? Whatever is going on in your life, you did it. That’s not a blame game thing either. It’s not about blaming. It’s about taking ownership of everything. Even something in your life that you don’t like, you had a part in designing that. Don’t take that as blame. Take that as an opportunity. If I designed everything in my life this very moment, the good and the bad, that means I can design other things or I can change it. 

Stay in the game and stay strong. Keep grinding, winning and pushing. I love you guys. Until next time, peace and love. 

Important links: 

• Dennis@CoreConfidenceLife.com 
• CoreConfidenceLife.com 
• Core Confidence Life – Facebook 
• Twitter – Core Confidence Life 
• Core Confidence Life – Facebook Group 
• iTunes – Core Confidence Life Podcast 
• Spotify – Core Confidence Life Podcast 
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/Get-Up-Book/  
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/Essential-Assertions-Book/ 
• https://RodneyFlowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734 

About Dennis Sumlin

Dennis R Sumlin is a Confidence and Mindset Specialist, and the founder of Core Confidence Life, a men’s personal development service. He hosts a podcast of the same name. With his background in communication, human psychology/sexuality, and eastern spiritual studies, Dennis helps motivated millennial men break the cycle of anxiety and inner limitations so they can achieve the relationships, pleasure and prosperity they desire.

Dennis has been coaching and mentoring young men for over 23 years. He believes that everybody is born with natural talents and an innate sense of self-confidence. Dennis knows first hand the struggle to defeat lack of confidence, a low sense of purpose and manhood, and a stagnating, impulsive lifestyle. With no roll model to look up to, Dennis navigated life with a trial and error approach. through many rises and falls, he learned self-discipline, how to accept himself, and the secrets to prosperity, sexual fulfillment, self-love, and healthy spirituality. Dennis has knowledge/expertise in:

• Public Speaking/Communication
• Confidence and principles Development
• Eastern Spirituality
• Relationships and Sexual fulfillment
• NLP
• Astrology/Numerology

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