We were lucky to catch up with Heath Martin recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Heath, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
Confidence really comes from constantly improving your skill, knowledge, or ability to do something to a point where you have proven evidence that you posses the skill, knowledge, or ability to be proficient in it.
As an example, you will not be confident in yourself if you constantly fail to keep the promises you make to yourself. Alternatively, if you consistently follow through on things you say you are going to do, then you will be confident that you can get things done and be productive. Confidence comes from having both competency and the required reps put into a certain skill to point where you feel like you can execute upon that skill at any given moment.
For me, my confidence came slowly — I had to put in the reps into certain skillsets, such as business or sports, to where I had eventually proved to myself that I was proficient in those specific areas. That evidence-based proficiency I built eventually lead to bulletproof self-confidence.
For me, I think the tiny “wins” build your self-esteem. You perception on your own worth and qualities comes from your ability to achieve small “wins” on a daily basis. As example, if you are an athlete, starting the day off with a healthy breakfast is a small win, then going to train or workout is another small win, and then eating a healthy lunch to recovery is another win, and so on. Eventually you start stacking these small “wins” to a point where you are constantly “winning” inside of your own life. The mentality you build from doing this will not only make you extremely confident in yourself, but it will also make you feel like you have the qualities and worth to accomplish anything you want.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Firstly, I am a professional soccer player/footballer — progressing within the game is something I intend to do in the immediate future. Right now I am actually progressing really well within my pro club, and I have seen a ton of success this year — scoring my first professional goal, contributing to shutouts and wins for our squad, etc. It’s truly been a wild ride from when I began as a pro athlete…I trained by myself for an entire year (without a team) before signing my first pro contract and really just built a mentality around day-by-day improvement. This has really been the secret to why I have done as much as I have on a personal level.
Additionally, I have a brand, Nonstop Progress, where I help players get pro-level training to help them develop and improve as players to get into pro academies, earn scholarships, and sign pro contracts — we have helped a lot of players do all of these, and have seen a lot of success stories from players who use our science-based training methods. For some backstory, during that entire year I trained by myself, I basically perfected individual training and built a proven system to improve individually. Then I spent a full additional year after that gathering hundreds of scientific research to improve and enhance the individual training methods I created even more. Everything we do is proven by science, and based on all my years as a pro player and growing up playing in multiple pro academies.
We just launched our brand new Nonstop Performance Program — a huge program that includes 4 completely unique 4-week training programs using our proven methods to allow players to improve individually. It’s a huge program, including over 230+ pages, 100+ training & gym sessions, 80+ pages of performance research, 30+ pages of science-based mindset, habit, and motivation training, follow-along stretching and mobility routines, and so much more. This program is truly the most complete pro-level training program that is available anywhere — we are really proud of what we have created and are super excited to help driven players really make leaps and bounds towards achieving their goals of playing in an academy, getting a scholarship or signing a pro contract.
Definitely check us out on social media if you are interested in taking a look at the way we go about our training — there is definitely something for every player out there!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I would say three of the most important qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge would be focusing on improving everyday, being someone who never gives up, and become a person of value.
Firstly, you want to be focused on improving yourself. Considering that you only have control over a couple of things in life, you might as well be focused on those rather than trying to control things you can’t. You can definitely focus on improving yourself — not just as an athlete or at your job, but also your personal self. As I mentioned before the small “wins” accumulate and boost your confidence and self-esteem…this unlocks a completely new mindset — one without boundaries. You began to believe you can do and accomplish whatever you want, and once you are in that space mentally, you can make big things happen. Additionally, you began to get a sense of mastery as you improve at something, and this is proven to increase your intrinsic motivation to continue doing it. Put simply, you increase your confidence, self-esteem, and motivation through focusing on improving yourself overall. This is powerful and should be used by everyone. (I named my brand “Nonstop Progress” for this reason)!
Secondly, being someone who never gives us is a given. The successful people are really just the ones who continued doing (whatever it is you do) one more time until they found success, or they just continued to go through the rejection and adversity until it eventually ended. The goal is to be a relentless, and driven individual that can take rejection seamlessly, and continue to grow and learn from those rejections to build towards becoming the person necessary to succeed. If you do that, you can do almost anything you set your mind to (I am a living example of it)
Obviously you have to be realistic too — you won’t get the job you want if you don’t have the qualifications necessary to do it (no matter how many times you apply or for how long you try). So that leads me to my next point — become a person of value.
A person of value is someone who actively looks to gain skillsets, learn new things, gain new ways of thinking, grow as a person, and have as many high-value relationships as possible. You become a person of value when you have skills that allow you to add value to other people. You can do this through many different ways — the foundational mindset of being open to learning and growing is a universal skillset that you need to become a person of value. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s a continuous process. When you start to meet new people, find ways to add value to them — you’ll be surprised how many of them become close to you and reciprocate that value back to you later on (even if it doesn’t happen, you just got valuable reps in that can further improve the skillset you were using).
The bottom line is to focus on growing and improving, never giving up on things that matter most to you, and becoming a person of value along the way. These three will open doors that you never thought possible.
Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
I think almost everyone has felt overwhelmed with big goals they set for themselves which ends up making them feeling unrealistic. Then that person will typically not feel motivated because they don’t believe they can accomplish the goal, and they end up just giving up.
The absolute best way to prevent feeling overwhelmed, in my opinion, is to break the big goal down into smaller goals that feel more achievable. This takes the stress off and gives you a step-by-step process to go off of that builds toward the big goals you have. An example of this is taking the big goal and breaking it into monthly goals that can be achieved that will eventually add up to the big goal. Then you can take it a step further and add weekly and even daily milestones that can be achieved to eventually add up to the monthly goals which eventually add up to the big goal you have. Also, if you struggle with time-related pressure, such as feeling stressed when you need to get a lot done, you will want to focus on the smallest tasks first, get those completed, and then slowly start to finish the bigger tasks. This allows you to gain whats called “work flow momentum” — completing one task after another makes each consecutive task much easier to complete. By the time you get to the big tasks, you’ve already completed a bunch of other things so you feel like you can get the big ones done too.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nonstop-progress.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nonstop.progress/?hl=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NonstopProgress
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nonstop.progress?lang=en
