This is Charlie from Charisma on Command and today I'm going to be doing a Confidence Breakdown.
Now, confidence is different from a lot of the other breakdowns that I've done, because
so many of them are immediately visible in the tonality, body language, and other external
signals. Confidence is more of an inside game, but it does leave clues, and that's what we're
gonna be looking for. How do you get confident and how do you display it to other people?
The person I've chosen is extremely confident--Conor McGregor. If you don't know him, he is in
the UFC. He's about to fight for the title bout in just a few weeks, we'll see how that
goes, but I want to start by showing you just a couple of clips if you're not familiar with
him, to show you what his confidence looks like.
Now you may be watching this and think, "Okay, what makes this guy so special? Everyone in
professional sports is constantly trash talking. How do we know that this guy actually believes
what he says he believes?" And so, I want to pause right now and show you what an unconfident
boast prediction that somebody's gonna win looks like, versus Conor McGregor, who almost
certainly believes exactly what he says.
So this is a clip from one of Conor's earlier fights, and they asked each fighter how they
see the fight going. First, Conor's opponent.
I want to go back and pause that. Look what he does after he says that he's 100% confident.
His eye twitches, he flinches his head, he starts to nod as if overcompensating, and
then makes this little shrugging attitude. One more time, because this is really important.
These are the micro expressions that belie a lack of confidence.
Now, he might not be certain that he is going to lose, but he is not 100% confident and
that is what it looks like. When you cannot just let it sit with what you've just said.
Contrast that with everything that you just saw from Conor.
He can make these boastful, aggrandizing statements, and then, just sit there in it, because to
him, it's as obvious as I have five fingers, as two plus two equals four. It is just a
fact to him. So let's look at how he talks about how the fight's gonna go.
Now he doesn't have a vision of what's gonna happen though, as you can clearly see. Yeah,
throughout training camp, you definitely have shots that you see, that you feel cracking,
you know, you feel them shots happen, you know, but this is, trust me, this is a fourth
round K.O. for me. I have no doubt in my mind. His toes will curl and I will celebrate.
Now they cut that a little bit short, but you see, he can just sit there after he says
that, and that gives him such an advantage when he steps in the ring, because while the
other guy might really think that he has a great shot, he's got to be wondering what
makes this guy so certain he's gonna win. How can he know? And that's what we want to
explore now. How can you develop that sense of just absolute certainty that you're going
to achieve your goals.
Oh, by the way, before we get to that, for those of you who don't know the UFC and are
curious, this is what happened in the fight in the first round.
How do you get that kind of confidence? Well, the most important and the foundational piece
is relevant experience. This is kind of a "Know the." If you've given 20 presentations
before, you're gonna feel much more comfortable than you did when you gave your first. That
is what relevant experience means. It means you've done something successfully in the
past and you think that going forward, you will be able to continue to do it that way.
Conor McGregor spells it out very clearly right here.
My confidence comes from my performance, my work in the gym, my work ethic, you know.
They don't walk out harder than me and they don't want it like I wanted, you know. My confidence
comes from looking around at the division. I don't see anything in the division that
troubles me; not one of them. They don't move like I move. They don't think like I think.
And they don't talk like I talk. That's my confidence.
Okay, so that's all well and great, but how do you become confident before you've got
the experience, right? Because there are people like Conor McGregor who, for no reason at
all, just came up and seemed to believe that they're going to be great when they had no
reason to. Just check this out.
I'm a professional MMA fighter with a record of 4 and 1, and I'm an up and coming fighter,
and without a doubt, you will see me on the UFC in the near future, without a doubt.
So that's in 2008 before he really has any good credible reason to believe he's going
to do it. So how does that happen? And this is step 2. Step 2 is to focus on the things
that you have control over.
People who lack confidence tend to focus on the things that they don't have control over.
Will the people like the presentation? Is the guy that I'm going up against gonna be
training? Conor, very singularly, when he is looking to be confident, focuses on the
things that he has control over. Will he plan against a certain person and create a strategy
that's going to be effective against them? Absolutely. But when he draws on his confidence,
he doesn't go for anything that is outside of his control, and that's how it's 100% certain.
Just check this out.
So we've got two pieces so far. We've got relevant experiences and focusing on the things
that you control. But I think it's this third piece that really separates Conor McGregor,
and that is visualization. Visualization is how you can gain relevant experience--that
first piece--without actually having to do it. Because the truth is, you might only get
one shot at your UFC title fight or whatever big presentation that you have to give, or
any chance that you have. So this visualization piece gets you a chance to build relevant
experience inside your own head, and to see it going the way you wanted to. So you just
got to catch some quotes now from Conor, talking about how exactly he does this visualization.
All that matters is how you see yourself. If you see yourself as the king, and you see
yourself with all the belts and all of everything, and no matter what everyone says, as long
as you see that and you really believe in it, that's what's gonna happen. Who can tell
you what it was? Who says what way you see things? Who says what you see off your eyes?
And then, I saw myself in that light. I saw myself as the number one. I saw myself as
the champion even before anyone else did. I just kept that in the end.
So this is really interesting because when you hear Conor McGregor talk, it might come
across as boastful, but he, oftentimes, makes incredibly accurate predictions of how his
fight will go down to the round, and how his knockouts will occur, whether it will start
with a jab and ending in right over hand. He's incredibly specific. And it's because he has this vivid
on-going visualizations in his head of exactly how he's gonna win.
Now, right here, he talks about seeing the belts, and that's important. But when you're
visualizing, it's not just about visualizing the end or award that you're going to get.
It's about visualizing the struggle, and how you're going to overcome that. So you better
be sure that Conor sees his fights when you ask him how they're going to go. He tells
you second by second how he has seen it play out in his head, dozens, if not, hundreds of times.
So I'm going to go now to a compilation clip that I found on YouTube. It's awesome. I'm
gonna put a description up here. And it shows Conor McGregor making all of these amazing
predictions, but notice how, in his most recent fight versus this guy named Chad Mendes,
who is an excellent wrestler, he doesn't have this weird visualization where he just coast
to victory easily in the first round. He recognizes that yes, he's going to get wrestled down
to the ground. He's gonna be put on his back. But in his visualizations and when he talks
about the fight, it is a realistic victory. It's about getting up from being on the ground
and overcoming that challenge. This is what you need to put into your visualizations.
What are you gonna come up against? How are you gonna overcome it when you get put on
your back? That is gonna make them much more powerful.
When I'm pressing him, I'm pressing him, and we have these exchanges, and these scrambles,
and his belly is gonna be bleeding in and his body is gonna be screaming for oxygen,
and I'm gonna be still down his face, cracking him with everything I have, every shot, the
heel, the knee.
When you get me down, you hold me down, I'll butcher you from the bottom. I'll get back
up and I'll butcher you on the feet.
So that's how Conor McGregor purposely visualizes his victories with the challenges he'll overcome.
But what do most of us do? Without realizing it, we see things going terribly, right? We
imagine everything that could go wrong, play these scenes over and over again in our head,
and then, almost guarantee that that happens to us. And Conor talks about this as well.
This is what he did early in his career when he lost some fairly easy fights; certainly
easy compared to the guys he's facing now.
So this isn't a secret. This isn't about just going out there, putting what you want
to the universe, and then, magically receiving that back. This is about actively engaging
your own imagination so that you are getting practice experience, except it's all in your
own head. Because the truth is, our nervous systems do not do a very good job of differentiating
between experiences that we have out in the real world, and experiences that are vividly
imagined. This is why you can get scared of things that don't happen. This is why we can
go to movies and be terrified, even though it's not actually occurring.
Use this to your own advantage. Go through, see the specific, concrete challenges that
you might face in something, in some area where you want to be confident. I've seen
Conor talk about one opponent he had who was a great wrestler. And he talked about how,
yes, he was going to get taken down, but how he would beat him from the floor, and get
back up. And it was very clear he had seen that happen and practiced it in his head over
and over and over. And after seeing something play vividly so many times, you, too, will
have the certainty that it is going to happen. That is the secret to Conor McGregor's confidence.
So, in sum, the things that you can learn from Conor McGregor about confidence are one,
yet relevant experience you need to practice. To be frank, all of the visualization in the
world will not help if you cannot execute on the basic mechanics of what you're trying
to be confident in. If you gave someone a basketball that had never seen one, and had
them visualize making it, but didn't know how to shoot, all that visualization would
be for naught, because the idea of visualization is that it is a substitute for refinement
and practice, but it cannot get you those basic, basic skills. It's for refinement.
Second thing, draw on what you can control when you are trying to see why you are confident.
Obviously you're gonna want to strategize for things outside of your control--your opponent,
the weather, whatever it is. But when you're thinking why is this gonna work for me, go
back to the things that you control--the time you put in, the skills you have, the abilities
that you developed--those are all going to help you.
And then, third, vivid visualization; not just of the victory that you want, but of
the challenges that you will have to overcome to get there. You cannot leave the challenges
out. This isn't about just wishful thinking. It's about winning over and over and over
again in your head despite the trials and tribulations, because, again, that goes back
to that relevant experience that your brain is gonna go, "Oh, guess what? I've actually
done this a hundred times before," which is gonna give you the confidence to go on.
So, all of these things are things that you could do in advance to be confident. If you
want to know something that you can do basically within five seconds to one minute, when you're
in that situation where you really need to execute, go ahead now and click the link.
It will take you to a page where there's an email sign up, and you can get that video
immediately. This is part of a larger course on how to be confident. There's lots of different
strategies, but this is the one that is, by far, the quickest acting, and the one that
I use every single time I'm in a situation where I need to be confident. So if you want
to get that, go ahead and click the link.
I hope that you've enjoyed this video. It's been a bit of a departure for me, so let me know
if you liked it. Subscribe, of course. Leave in the Comments anyone else you would like
that you see me do a breakdown of, and I'm excited to see you in the next video.