Super CONFIDENCE

Hi, this is AJ Hoog, the author of Effortless English. Learn to speak English like a native. Speak English confidently, speak English confidently. You join my VIP program and my Power English Course at EffortlessEnglishClub.com. Don't forget the club, EffortlessEnglishClub.com. And in fact, that's our topic today. Confidence, confidence. This is the number one thing my students want is to speak English confidently. I think in so many areas of life, we, people in general, are seeking confidence. Not perfection, confidence. What is confidence? We should talk about the word, what is confidence? And why is it important? Why do we want it so much? Why are we so attracted to this? Really feeling, right? It's quality, this feeling. We could think of confidence in terms of, you know, a negative definition, meaning what it's not. Confidence is the absence of meaning you don't have nervousness, fear, uncertainty, worry, embarrassment, right? These are all opposites. So when we don't have these negative emotions in some area of our life, we can think that we have, we have confidence. So you can choose any area, any activity, especially difficult ones. And we can think of, say, public speaking, giving a speech in front of a group of people. For most people, this creates feelings of nervousness, extreme nervousness, fear, and some people, very strong negative emotions of terror, right? Super fear. The opposite of confidence. So many times what people say they want, what they're looking for with public speaking is just confidence. They just want to be able to stand up in front of a group of people and talk about a subject that they know without feeling fear and extreme nervousness, terror, embarrassment, all of these things. Right? So for most people with public speaking, for example, they're not trying to become professional public speakers, right? Most people have to give a presentation at a job or at maybe a little conference or something for their career. Just want to be able to stand up there, talk about their work or talk about their topic in a confident way because, you know, most people, if they're giving a speech about something, well, then they know the topic, right? We don't usually give speeches about things we have no idea about. I mean, why would we do that? Why would you talk about a topic to a group of people that you knew nothing about, right? So if you're speaking at a conference, if you're speaking at a seminar, if you're speaking even at your job at a business meeting or doing a presentation, I mean, almost always the topic will be something you actually know well. In fact, in this way, when you take a public speaking course or classes, it's actually quite sometimes an unnatural situation because often they give you topics that you are either not very interested in and maybe don't know so well. They sometimes just give you a topic that, and then you've got to go research it and talk about it. I guess it can happen in the real world. Things like that do happen sometimes, maybe at a job or something, but most of the time you're asked to give a speech because you know what you're talking about. You have already some information or some experience to share with people and they recognize this and so they ask you or invite you to speak. Maybe it's about a paper or an article you wrote or maybe just some area of your career or job that you know well. Because of that, if you think logically, take away all emotion, in those situations, you should be able to just stand up and talk in a very relaxed way with total confidence. No fear, no worry because it's a topic you know. But for most people, just having the group in front of them, especially a group of people they don't know or don't know well, suddenly makes them feel fear, worry, nervousness. They lose all their confidence even though it's a topic they know. Similar for a job interview because in a job interview, what's the topic? You. You're just there to talk about yourself and connected to whatever job you're trying to get. So again, you should be able to talk about yourself quite easily. It's the topic you probably know the best in the world and yet we become super nervous in that situation. And then when people become nervous and when people lose confidence, then their performance goes down. So even though you might know a topic very well, might even be an expert, a world expert on that topic. Because of the nervousness of standing in front of a group, suddenly you're not able to talk well. And suddenly you look like an idiot in front of a bunch of people, even though you know much more about that topic than they do. And we see it in sports too. Many times. Many times. Many times in sports. The more confident team or person or player will beat a more skillful person or player who has less confidence. Where I've seen this so much is in martial arts. So say something like boxing, karate, wrestling, jujitsu, anything like that. I'm sure it can happen at the professional level. Usually at the professional level, they're quite confident. But it happens all the time at the average level, the average person like in a jujitsu gym or a boxing gym or something like that. Or you can have someone who's more of a beginner, but they're just confident. Sometimes you don't even know why. Why are they so confident? They're not even that good. But because they're so confident, they have no nervousness, no fear at all. They perform much better. They're just aggressive. They attack, attack, attack. They keep going. They don't quit. They don't hesitate. And because of that, they can often beat more experienced people, people who actually have more skill, but who are less confident. They're more timid. They're more worried. They're more nervous. They hesitate. They don't perform their skills well because they lack confidence. And so on the positive side, confidence, we can define it or talk about it as certainty. Certainty in your own ability. A kind of certain optimism where you just have a strong belief that you're good enough. You have a strong belief you will succeed or can succeed. A strong belief that a good outcome is certain. It's going to happen. You're going to do well. And when you have that feeling deep inside and that belief deep inside, then you don't think too much. You don't worry. You don't analyze yourself too much. You don't hesitate and wait and stop and I'm not sure. We say second guess. You don't second guess yourself. You're not constantly worried. Oh, wait, is this the right decision? You don't have doubts. This was often my problem in jujitsu because I wasn't confident. My other problem was that I was tired. I couldn't keep up with a lot of the people. I just didn't have the energy to go hard and still be able to go home and recover and have energy for the rest of the day and with my kids. So I had twin problems, two problems in jujitsu. One of them was just confidence. I had a decent enough amount of experience. I had watched tons of instructional videos. I knew tons of techniques, but I wasn't aggressive. I didn't just go and attack and just go, go, go. That's what a lot of the guys who did well and who might have had less experience than me, but they would beat me badly as they would just attack, attack, attack, go, go, go, go, go. Never stopping. No hesitation, no doubt. They weren't thinking all the time. They just, you know, they had confidence and it makes a huge difference in life. You see this with the dating, with relationships, right? The guys, so often, you know, guys, young men, even older men, who struggle with girls, with women. By struggle, I mean they want to have a girlfriend, they want to get married and they just can't seem to do it. And sometimes, you know, they get quite bitter and upset about it. And I used to be around a lot of guys like this. And, you know, they'll blame, you know, oh, you got to be rich, oh, you got to be handsome, oh, you got to be strong, you know, big and blah, blah, blah. They make all these excuses for why, you know. The girls aren't attracted. But the truth is it's confidence. Because you can find many, many, many examples of confident guys who just, they just walk up to girls and they start talking to them and socializing with them. No fear, no hesitation. They're not second guessing, they're not worrying. And no, every girl is not attracted to them, but they have no problem talking to girls and, you know, get going on dates and eventually, you know, getting a girlfriend, getting married. And they're not handsome and they're not rich. But they are confident. And you can also find examples of guys who have plenty of money, but they don't have the confidence in that area of life with women, with girls. And so, they really struggle. And the same too, handsome guys. Just being handsome isn't enough. You know, a really handsome guy, okay, you know, that looks like a model, you know, yeah, he can probably, you know, attract girls. But he may struggle just to go ask them out, just to connect with them, to socialize with them. So he may still struggle in this area of life. Confidence is key. And confidence, one of the things that makes confidence so important is that it can compensate for, what does that mean? It can compensate for lower skill. It can compensate for being a beginner. It can compensate for other weaknesses that you have. Meaning, it kind of balances out those weaknesses. It balances out those problems. So even though you may have a bunch of other problems, if you've got strong confidence, you can overcome those weaknesses, just with that confidence. I mean, I remember there's a famous jujitsu guy, Gordon Ryan. I don't know if he's still fighting now, but he used to be like the number one guy in the world. And I remember, you know, I read some stories about him and interviews about him. And one of the things people said about him, who knew him when he was young, when he was just a kid coming to the gym, like a blue belt, like just starting out. And he, you know, he worked hard and he was super enthusiastic. But he wasn't the best in the gym or anything, right? But what they did say that from the beginning, even as a beginner, he had this crazy amount of confidence. He just believed he was great and he was going to become great. He had total confidence in himself. I mean, really almost being arrogant, which is a kind of a negative word, which means you think you're super great and better than you are. But in some parts, some areas of life, it's actually can be quite useful to think you're better than you are. It will actually cause you to perform better. And so a lot of people said that people who trained with Gordon Ryan, when he was young before he became a champion, they, you know, said, God, this kid, he's just so, he was just crazy confident, kind of annoying in a way because he was so confident. But, you know, like it gave him incredible motivation and power and, and he performed quite well. And he had no fear, no fear, no fear of losing, no fear of looking foolish, no fear of making mistakes. It's the same with your English. You don't need to be perfect in English. Nobody's perfect. I make mistakes occasionally in speaking. Certainly everybody that makes mistakes in writing, in their writing, especially like a first draft, you need to be understood and you need to understand the person you're talking to generally. That's the basic skill level you need. And beyond that, what you really want is confidence, right, to not be thinking about grammar, to not be worrying about mistakes, to not be embarrassed, to not be shy, to just talk and communicate confidently. That's all you need, that plus basic fluency. And in language too, many times the people who are just kind of crazy confident, even as beginners, they improve faster because they're not afraid to try. They're not afraid to communicate. They jump in. My friend Joe was like this when we traveled in Spain. We did the Camino de Santiago together. I knew quite a lot more Spanish than him, simply because I took, I had taken Spanish in school, in high school for a year and in university for a year. And then I'd done a lot of listening and reading. But I wasn't so confident and maybe that goes back to my school days. There was something about it where I kind of was still had like grammar rules in my head and I had to force myself to try to overcome that. So I would get a little bit shy sometimes speaking to people in Spain. I still spoke a decent amount and I got around and made hotel reservations and had nice, nice simple conversations with local people. It was great. But his confidence was higher than mine. So I knew much more vocabulary than him. I probably understood better than him. My listening was better. But he was super confident. Even though he knew less Spanish than me, Joe's a super extrovert. He just loves talking to people. Like everywhere he goes, he just talks to strangers. Like, that's the other thing. I'm an introvert. I never talked to strangers. Never. Unless they talk to me first. So, but he'll just go to a restaurant and start talking to the people at the next table. You know, he's just that kind of guy. So we're in Spain and he's taking what the Spanish he knows and he's just constantly, hey, he's just chatting with anybody he can all the time. So his performance, his actual amount of speaking and even his fluency, how well the words would come out of his mouth and how natural he was, was better than mine because of his confidence. If, you know, if we took a Spanish test, I would get a higher score. Well, at least at that time, that was 10 years ago. But at that time, for sure, if we'd taken any kind of Spanish test, my score would have been much higher than his. But in the real world, talking to people, he did better than I did because he had more confidence, no nervousness at all. And then the other thing that confidence does is confidence is kind of creates an upward spiral. Because when you're confident, again, you, you just try more. And of course you do, you make mistakes, but you learn from them. You have your fearless. And so you actually improve faster. So his Spanish improved more quickly than mine did. And improved too, but his improved faster. Because he was constantly talking to people. So this is why in effortless English, I focus almost completely, so totally so much on this topic of confidence and so many of my lessons in power English and in the VIP program, especially are different ways, different techniques of helping you to feel more confidence. Because the other reason we're attracted to confidence is that it feels good. It's pleasurable. And so in anything in life, any part of life where you have confidence, you normally will enjoy it more. This is also true usually of skill. And when you enjoy things more, you want to do them more. And when you do things more, you get more practice and you improve faster. Now what is it? Last month maybe I did a, you know, a podcast about kind of like two different kinds of ways of thinking about confidence or improving it. And they're sort of the, you know, there's the short term, what I would call psychological tricks in some, in some ways of getting instant confidence, just feeling more confident, more strong, better right now, like very quickly in the short term. And then there's the long term confidence that's very deep. They're both very useful. They're both very useful. The short term confidence is useful. The techniques, and I teach you a lot of those techniques in the VIP program and also in power English too, but especially VIP program. Because when you don't feel confident, well, how do you become confident? There's two ways to do it. One is to use different techniques to change your beliefs, change your emotions, change even your body and your energy and instantly very quickly feel confidence. And then the other way, the long term way is just to get really, really good at something. And then you just naturally have that super confidence, right? I mean, if you're a professional basketball player, well, you've got a lot of confidence as a basketball player. Okay, you've spent years and years and years and years and years practicing and playing. You're playing with the best in the world at the highest level, even if you're not a superstar compared to most people, you know, your confidence playing basketball is very high, right? But that takes years and years to develop. That was exactly the same with public speaking. You know, if you become a professional public speaker and you make, you know, hundreds of public speeches, you're going to get more confident just by doing it that much, getting that much experience, you're going to get better. And if you make some effort to read some books, maybe take some courses and actually, you know, develop some technique and improve on your technique also. Yeah, of course, eventually you'll get confident. Like I'm a very confident public speaker now. It's just because I've done it hundreds of times, especially if you count my videos and my podcasts like this one, plus the many, many, many speeches and conferences and seminars where I've spoken in the past. As long as it's a topic that I know, and of course, as I said, usually it will be, you know, I don't feel hardly any nervousness anymore. And I have great confidence in my ability to just stand up and speak to people about a topic that I know about. In fact, I enjoy doing it. It's kind of exciting now. It's fun. But that's only because I've been doing it for years and years and years and years and years now, and I've got tons of experience. Okay, but what if you've got to give a speech next month and you don't have tons of experience? What if you have a job interview coming up? It's a job you really want and you don't have tons of experience doing job interviews. How do you develop that confidence in the moment for that one performance? And that's what all those short term techniques are for. And they are very useful. They get you to perform even when you don't have all that experience. Of course, the weak point of those techniques is they don't last, right? They're not long term. So I teach you. You can learn a lot of different techniques for giving a speech, right? Where you can use your body and get in a peak state. A lot of things I have you do in Power English and the VIP program. I get you jump, shoulders back. Imagine all these things, play exciting music. Use your body in certain ways. Use what we call anchors in NLP. You can do all that stuff when you're practicing your speech and then right before you give your speech. And then you can have a good performance. You can stand up there and give a good speech. But the thing is, if you have another speech the next month, you're probably still going to feel nervous and you're going to have to do all those same techniques again before that speech. You're going to have to keep using those techniques every time you have a speech because at a deeper level, you're still quite nervous. At a deeper level, you're still not confident yet. So you've got to keep using those techniques again and again and again and again and again. Same with English. That's why I have you do those techniques before every single lesson. They become a habit because you have to do it in the beginning. You just have to do it. You're going to need to do that for maybe a year or maybe a couple of years. Then once you become really deeply confident in English, once you really are fluent, once you get those breakthroughs, then you won't need to use those techniques so much because you're like, "Ah, you just have a deeper feeling of confidence." And you just know, "I feel confident about my English all the time. I don't need to get myself excited. I don't need to be in a peak state to feel confident about English. I feel confident about English always." Obviously that's the best situation. Obviously that's our long-term goal. But we have to use the short-term techniques to get us there many times. Because here's the other thing about confidence. The other thing about confidence is that it's very specific. There are some people who seem to have a very general confidence and they're just confident about anything they do. Good for them. Most of us are not like that. Most of us have very... Confidence is very specific. You can be very confident, let's say, about sport, but have no confidence. Be super, super nervous and terrified of public speaking. You might be confident with girls, let's say you're a young man. You might be really confident about talking to girls and getting dates, but you have no confidence in a job interview. So confidence can be something that's very, very, very, very specific. And this is the other challenge where, again, we have to use these short-term techniques. Because anytime you have to perform in a certain area of life that might be new where you don't have confidence, well, guess what, now you got to use those techniques again. So when you join my VIP program and/or my Power English program, I encourage you, please use those techniques. I remind you at the beginning of every lesson. And I know a lot of people do it. They do it. And I encourage you. I'm not just trying to be silly. I'm not just trying to make you motivated for a short time for no reason. With those techniques and those reminders, I'm training you again and again and again and again every single day to feel strongly confident when you listen to English, when you speak English, when you use English. And in this way, you will develop that long-term deep confidence much, much, much faster. And that's the real secret of effortless English and why it's so powerful and effective for so many people. Even more than the specific techniques of the storytelling technique and all the other language techniques I use, the real powerful, most powerful technique, the real secret power of effortless English in general, is that confidence training. So don't ignore that part. Do it every single time I mention it. You can do it more than I mention it. Do it, do it, do it. And when you learn other confidence techniques, whether they be about how to change your beliefs and your ways of thinking and how to change your habits, how to change your emotions in the short term and the long term, different mindsets and attitudes to have, other different kinds of strategies for developing confidence and success. Use them in your life. Use them with your English and use them in all other areas of life that are important where you need more confidence. Because you know what? I'll give you another huge benefit of confidence. The reason it's important and that you should develop it in every area of your life that's important. Confidence is anti-stress. When you lack confidence, you are more stressed in that part of life. Think about it. Nervousness is stressful. Fear is stressful. Worry is stressful. Anxiety is stressful. These are symptoms of stress. If you're at your job and you're frequently nervous, stressed, worried, the stress and this is bad for you. It gives you a low quality of life. It's an unhappy feeling and if you feel it a lot, you start to have an unhappy life. The same is true with relationships. If you have no confidence in relationships, whether you're a man or a woman, if you have no confidence in romantic relationships, your ability to find or keep a girlfriend, husband or wife, boyfriend, whatever, that becomes a source of huge stress in your life and therefore huge unhappiness. The same is true physically. You don't need to be a super athlete. You don't even need to do any kind of sport. Certainly nothing competitive. But to have a general level of confidence with your body, a feeling of energy, health, vitality, enough strength to do what you need to do in life. If you don't have those things, that lack of confidence becomes stress and unhappiness. Confidence then is the opposite because what is confidence? When you have that feeling of certainty, that things will be okay, that you're good enough in this area of life, that you can do it. It's a peaceful feeling. A lot of the times with this short term techniques that we need to use, we're trying to make ourselves very excited. You're kind of going to war, you're fighting, you're going to battle. What are you battling? What are you fighting? You're fighting your fear. So those short term confidence techniques, like before a speech, you're about to give a speech. I used to do this all the time before I would give a speech. I would jump around and play exciting music, jump around, make big powerful moves, get myself in an excited, super high energy peak state. I needed to do it to overcome the nervousness. But when you develop that deeper level of confidence, the long term, the very strong certainty that is based on experience, it's much stronger, much deeper. That is a feeling of calm. It's a complete lack of fear, a complete lack of stress. And it is a calm feeling and a peaceful, peaceful strength, calm strength. So now typically, before I give a speech or before I do a podcast or make a video, I don't jump around and try, I don't need to get myself all hyped up because I just have that peaceful, strong, confident feeling. I can just turn on my computer and start talking. I can just pick a topic, turn on my computer and start talking five minutes later. I don't have to do a lot of preparation and get myself all crazy and not necessary anymore. Likewise, a young man who's terrified of talking to girls. In the beginning, you might have to get yourself excited and go up there and try to be super outgoing. You'll find books and videos about guys trying to teach other guys, teach young men how to approach women and how to talk to them. It's a lot of short-term techniques for this reason. And because of that, it can seem very exaggerated because they try to teach the guys to be these super mega extroverts. Hey, how's it going? Super, super confident. Super, super, super, super talkative and entertaining and funny. And I think for some young men who are very shy and who really struggle in this area, they have no confidence. Yeah, you know what? That's probably useful. It's probably good. It's probably necessary. I went through a little bit of a stage like that myself. But eventually, when you get the real confidence, you're at peace. You're at peace with yourself. Your mind and your emotions are calm. Then you can just, with this example of dating, then when you're a young man, you can be at a social gathering, a party, a club. You can just sit down and just chat with the girl and you don't have to be performing in any way. Say, "Oh, hey, what's your name?" And just chat and have an honest, calm conversation. Really confident and very real who you really are. There's no stress anymore. There's no worry. There's no nervousness. And that is a wonderful feeling. It's a happy, peaceful, wonderful feeling. That's why we want it. It's just hard to get there. Okay, it takes time. Either you use a lot of these short-term techniques, or you're really getting yourself very excited and hyped up and doing all these psychological games on yourself. These are very useful things just to make yourself take action. Or maybe you're just a naturally confident person and that's what makes you take action. Or maybe you're just determined and maybe you don't use any of these techniques. There are some guys, for example, if they just decide, "I'm going to figure it out," and they just go up and they just start talking to girls and they have no idea what they're doing and they don't use any techniques at all. And yes, they often look like idiots because they're super nervous. But they just have some kind of mental toughness or persistence and they just keep trying and keep trying and keep trying. And so eventually, they just do become less nervous. Eventually, they get better and they do develop the confidence. It's a painful way to do it because it takes a long time and you have to go through a whole lot of failure and embarrassment and pain, but it does work if you can do it. I think using the techniques in the short term is better because you'll get better results and it's much more encouraging. So focus on this. Confidence is so, so, so important. Confidence in your English is more important than grammar rules. It's more important than your pronunciation. It's more important than how much vocabulary you know. Remember my example with Joe? It's the most important thing. It doesn't matter what level you are. I mean, if you're advanced, you know, you get high, high scores on all the tests, but you have no confidence. So then when you actually try to speak, you're all nervous and you can't get the words out. Or maybe you just avoid speaking at all. You don't even use what you know. What good is what you know? What good is your skill? It's no good at all. But with confidence, you will actually use that skill. And all your advanced skills and all your years of experience will come out. And if you're a beginner, it's the same thing. Instead of quitting, instead of giving up, you'll just use what you have the best you can. And because of that, you'll gain more experience and you'll learn much, much faster and succeed much, much faster. So that is why confidence is number one with effortless English and in so many areas of life. Lots of love to you. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.