Hey, what's goin' on, guys?
So, recently over on my site, College InfoGeek,
I published a post on soft skills,
which are important to learn for getting jobs
and for doing basically anything in your life.
And today, we're gonna dive deep
into one of those soft skills,
because today, we're talking about
how to become a more confident person.
Now, I think a lot of people look at confidence
as one of those qualities that you're either born with,
or not born with.
When you look at one of those people who can just come
into a roomn and absolutely own it,
there's this feeling like that person was born
with that quality.
They are just innately confident,
and I might not be that way.
But, contrary to that popular belief,
confidence is indeed a skill that you can build.
It's a quality that you can cultivate
through deliberate action,
and through changes to your mindset,
and that's what I wanna talk about in this video,
because, you might not believe this,
but a few years ago, when I was early on
in my college career, especially when I was a teenager,
I was quite an insecure person,
and I didn't have a whole lot of self confidence.
Now, part of the reason for this was
that when I was a teenager
and when I was an early college student,
I had really bad acne, like a a terrible facial complexion,
and I almost felt like I had to wait
until I grew out of that, or grew out of puberty,
or whatever people told me would happen,
before I could be a confident person.
I felt like I was worth less in public situations
than I would be when I looked better,
and as I've learned, over the intervening years,
that was absolutely not true, but it's something
that really held me back when I was younger.
As you can probably tell right now,
things have definitely improved,
and that is due partly to age,
but it's also due partly to improvements in my diet
and my exercise regimen,
so keep that in mind, if it's something
that you're dealing with, as well,
but even before those improvements started to happen
with my face, I was able
to increase my internal self confidence
and decrease that insecurity I had,
through some changes to my mindset,
and through some challenges that I gave myself.
Now, four out of the five strategies
I'm gonna share with you in this video
involve things that you can do relatively quickly,
to start building your confidence,
or at least they were things
that had relatively quick results for me.
Two of them will be mindset hacks,
ways that you can subtly start shifting the way you think
about both yourself and the world around you,
and two of them will be tactical actions
that you can take immediately,
or very, very soon from now,
that will help to build your self confidence.
But before we get into those,
we have to talk about the most important factor
in building confidence,
and that is that you must simply do
that which you want to be confident in doing.
Confidence is built through experience.
But the key term that we should be using
to talk about this here,
and this really does make a difference,
is relevant experience.
You have to gain experience in relevant areas
to whatever you want to build confidence in doing.
And this is something that Charlie,
from the channel Charisma on Command,
makes sure to stress in one of his videos on confidence,
and I'm gonna be linking to that video
at the end of this one,
because I think it's a good followup.
But I really want to dig into this term,
relevant experience, because I think
there are two main areas that are related to it.
First up, we have the obvious one,
which is direct experience.
For example, if you're gonna go give a speech,
the tenth time you do that is gonna be much, much easier
than the first time,
especially if the intervening nine times went well.
As the former U.S. Secretary of State
William Jennings Bryan once said,
"The way to develop self confidence is to
"do the thing you fear and to get a record
"of successful experiences behind you."
And this is the dude who gave 500 speeches in 1896 alone,
and he's the guy who basically invented the entire concept
of the stump speech campaign,
so he is a guy that puts his money where his mouth is,
when it comes to getting experience.
Secondly, though, and perhaps even more helpfully,
you can gain experience in related areas,
because every single discipline in the world
shares certain qualities with other disciplines.
For example, even though I've only gone skiing
about six or seven days in my entire life,
I am able to ski double black runs.
I can ski moguls, I can go up to the top
of the summit and ski all the way down,
I have a disproportionate amount of skiing skill
for the amount of days I've actually spent on a mountain,
and that is because, at the beginning of this year,
I started figure skating as my winter sport,
and as I discovered, serious figure skating and
time on the ice translates surprisingly well
to skill on the slopes,
even though you've got big boards strapped to your feet,
instead of what are basically knives.
To give you a more professional example,
my ability to speak in public,
both on a stage in front of a physical audience,
and for however many thousands
of people watch this video through this video camera,
stems from my experience in podcasting.
Now, podcasting is pretty different
from making YouTube videos,
or from speaking in public,
because I'm just sitting in my room,
there's no camera or eyes on me,
but I'm still building my ability
to speak clearly and confidently,
and I podcasted for over a year and a half
before I ever started making YouTube videos,
and my experience as a podcaster,
both interviewing people on Skype,
but also just monologuing like a super-villain
in my bedroom, built a lot of those speaking abilities
and my confidence to speak in public.
So the lesson here is that you can find ancillary activities
that can help to build your confidence
and your skills in that main activity
you're trying to get good at.
But one word of warning here:
Don't let this tip encourage you to delay your first forays
into that difficult main activity
you wanna get good at,
because the stress of stepping up
to something you're afraid to do
is gonna help you progress faster
than all of your practice time in the ancillary activities.
And I'm gonna give you an example here
that might bring back some feelings of nostalgia
for some of you, because when I was eight years old,
I got my first Game Boy Color, and the first game I got
for that Game Boy Color was Pokemon Blue.
And as somebody who chooses the objectively best Pokemon,
Charmander, I had some trouble with the initial first gym,
because Brock is a rock trainer,
and fire doesn't do too well against rock, right?
So, my eight-year-old strategy was to just grind
for hours and hours and hours in Veridian Forest,
and in the easy areas,
so that when I actually went and challenged Brock,
I was so high level, that I could just steamroll him.
And I thought I was so smart in doing this.
But I realized later on that, if you have an easy time
with the gym leader, you get no additional reward,
and if you just scrape by by the skin of your teeth.
So, later on, I would just get as good
as I needed to be to beat him,
and the progress forward, and as I did that,
I realized I could beat the game even faster,
because when you step up, you get the rewards faster
than if you just stay in the kiddie pool area
for much, much longer.
So, build your skills and confidence
on those ancillary activities,
but before you think you're ready,
when you're still scared to do it,
jump in to that main activity.
And it doesn't have to be crazy, right?
As a public speaker, I wasn't giving
hour-long keynote speeches right at the start.
Instead, I took speech classes in high school,
and then in college, and then from there,
I moved on to joining Toastmaster's,
which is an organization full of people
who just wanna get better at public speaking.
It's really inviting, and it's all
about feedback and growth.
From there, I moved on to an organization called Ignite,
which puts on events where you give five-minute speeches
on a very constrained topic, your slides auto-advance,
and you have to practice,
and I thought to myself, that's something I can do,
and I did that twice, which helped to build my skills
even further, and now, I'm charging thousands of dollars
to give hour-long keynotes.
But it was a long and gradual path.
Alright, so now we're going to move on to the mindset hacks
that I talked about in the intro to this video.
We're gonna go a little bit faster here.
So the first mindset hack that just dawned on me
during my speech class, is that people in my audience,
or people who I interact with in the world at large,
they care a lot less about how I perform,
about the little individual characteristics
of what I do, than I think they do.
And Eleanor Roosevelt put this best.
She said, "You wouldn't worry so much about
"what others think of you, if your realized
"how seldom they do."
And like I said, this hit me in the face
like a ton of bricks when I was in my speech class,
because everyone was going up and giving their speech
in front of the class, and while they did that,
I would look at the audience and realize
that a lot of people were on their phones,
or on Facebook on their laptops,
or they looked generally bored,
and it just kind of dawned on me
that if I go up there
and give a basically mundane performance,
nobody's gonna remember it,
because they're thinking about themselves.
So in my mind, that meant there are
one of two possible outcomes:
Either I'll give a completely mundane, imperfect
not-that-great performance,
and people will be kind of bored,
they'll be polite, and they'll move on with their lives,
and they won't remember at all,
or I'll dazzle them.
There's a much, much less likely chance
that I'm gonna do something so stupid, so silly
or so embarrassing that they're going
to make fun of me or actually remember it.
And once I realized this, I was so much less scared
to get up and talk in front of groups,
or to do anything else.
And this leads directly into my second mindset hack,
which is to realize that people love confidence.
And here's the thing that kind of dawned
on me a few years ago.
Most people's average, everyday experience
is kinda mundane, right?
There's fun things you do,
and there are certain amazing days,
but work, school, the average human experience,
is kind of
meh.
You know, not all that crazy.
And people, they're fine with that,
but what they want is novelty.
What they want is something exciting,
something out of the ordinary,
something that makes them smile or laugh,
or makes them happy, and confident people
are much more able to deliver that,
than unconfident people.
So here's what I do.
When I'm invited to speak in front of an audience,
or when I have to basically "perform," quote unquote,
in any way, I picture a stereotypical image
of an unconfident person in my mind.
I'm just like, what is the complete average person
going to do in this situation?
Maybe they're gonna have more reserved gestures,
they're gonna look back at somebody else
who's kind of leading whatever's going on, for cues,
and overall, they're just not gonna have
a whole lot of confidence in whatever they're doing.
And how's the audience gonna react to that.
Well, one, they're not gonna heckle,
they're not gonna laugh, they're just gonna be like
Meh, and they'll go on with their lives,
and they won't remember it.
Now, here's the key part:
Once I have that picture in my head
and I realize that the worst possible scenario
for that stereotypical person isn't death,
isn't heckling, isn't rotten tomatoes,
it's just moving on with their lives,
I resolve to be better,
because I know people love confidence.
They wanna be happy, they wanna smile,
they want something novel.
So I step into it, even if I don't actually feel
that I have the skills to pull it off,
I just try to do it.
For example, my girlfriend dragged me
to a renaissance fair in Minnesota last weekend,
and I had a lot of fun,
so I won't say dragged, but she brought me to it.
And we went to see one of the shows they had
at the fair.
And I didn't know it at the time,
but this show had a lot of audience participation,
and I was the lucky, or unlucky, however you see it, person
who was chosen to go up and do the most stuff onstage.
And this culminated with me having to put a bra
on my head, and give my best evil laugh,
and then pick a dude up and spin him around,
and I was scared, to be honest.
If I had been like 17 years old when this had happened,
I would have just refused to go up,
but I went up, and I looked out at the hundred or so people
in the crowd, and I realized these people paid money
to come here and have fun,
and if I'm sheepish, if I put my hands in my pockets
and look back too much, they're not gonna have as much fun
as if I just completely make a fool out of myself,
and step into the persona of an actor.
Now, I'm not an actor, but I can at least try to do it,
because I know it'll make them happy.
Alright.
So you've got the mindset,
you've got the commitment to doing,
now let's get into a couple of tactical decisions,
actions you can take right now
that are gonna help you become more confident.
And the first one is to record your accomplishments.
Now, you have a couple of different ways
you can do this.
One way, and I've tried both of these,
one works better than the other for me,
but one way is to keep a daily accomplishment journal.
So maybe you wake up and you have a to-do list
every single day.
Well, at the end of that day,
simply write down what you did, in Evernote,
or a journal that you keep with you all the time
that you never throw away,
and then, when you're facing something
you're not confident about, look back
through your accomplishment journal,
and it will remind you that you have overcome
so many challenges in the past,
many of which you didn't think you could do,
until you achieved them, and that will help you
to realize that: I am a human being
who overcomes challenges.
I get stressed, I get scared, but I win
more often than I lose, and that is
what I'm going to do with this next challenge.
Now, this is the exact same mindset that I use
with my impossible list.
And this is not a daily accomplishment journal,
but this is a public list on my website,
where I list out all of my big goals in life,
and then I cross them off when I accomplish them.
And what I do when I cross them off, is I iterate
upon those goals, and I add the next more difficult goal
beneath it.
And the key thing here is I'm leaving the goals
that I've achieved up there to remind me
that I've overcome them, even though I was once
unable to do them,
and now I'm challenging myself to step up
and keep doing that in the future.
And this helps me to keep my confidence high.
And that finally brings us to my last tip for you,
which is another tactic.
And this is very different, and it actually takes
the focus off of you.
So this is something a personal friend of mine
once told me about confidence.
And she said, simply speak more slowly,
and speak less, smile more, and put the focus
on the other person.
Try to be a great listener,
and try to build up the other person
in any other interaction you have.
This is a really good tip for building up
meaningful relationships, for building friendships,
and for making other people happy,
but it's also going to build your confidence,
because when you do this, you'll start coming
out of your interactions and conversations
with other people happy, and they'll seem successful,
and you'll realize, this was a great conversation
and I didn't have to spend any of my effort
trying to build myself up, or make myself look good.
And what this does is it starts to build
this internal self confidence.
You can feel really good about yourself
without having to boast about your accomplishments,
or one-up things people say.
You just know that you're a confident person,
and you don't have to try to wear it on your sleeve.
So guys, I really hope you found this video useful.
I know it was longer than usual,
but I really hope you got some value out of it,
and like I mentioned earlier on in the video,
Charlie over at Charisma on Command
has a really great channel full of content like this,
but the one video I want you to go watch,
it's basically your homework after this video,
is this breakdown of Conor McGregor,
the UFC fighter's, confidence.
And he talks about relevant experience,
and he talks about mindset things,
so I think it's a great complement to this video,
and I'm gonna have it linked down in a description below.
If you like this video, you can definitely leave a comment,
and if you want me to do more stuff like this
in the future, ask questions down in the comments,
so I know where to put my focus, and beyond that,
you can subscribe to this channel to get more content
on being a more effective student and, heck, human being,
every single week, by clicking right there,
and you can also get a free copy of my book
on earning better grades by clicking right there.
If you wanna watch another video of mine
you might find interesting, check it out right there,
and you'll find more useful links
down in the description below.
If you enjoyed this video, give it a "like"
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See you next week.