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