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" to support this channel, and
thank you so much for watching. See you next week.
Thank you for your hardwork.
Here's the article, finally! https://collegeinfogeek.com/building-confidence/