28 Apr Confidence Tip 1: Improv Story
Randy Schwantz shares a story on how he overcame his discomfort of public speaking by joining an improv comedy group. He says challenging yourself and practice will build your confidence.
Summary of video:
Hey, this is Randy Schwantz. Let's talk about a topic that we're all interested in and that is confidence. It's interesting for me. Before I got into the sales training business, I knew that I wanted to try it and yet I'll admit I didn't have a lot of confidence in speaking in public.
The first time I tried it all I did was introduce somebody and, you know, it's kind of a five-minute bio about the person, but my knees were wobbling, my shoulders were shaking, and my voice was weird. It's just amazing how scary it was. I hadn't trained for it because I didn't want to do it anyways.
I decided to go to a National Speakers Association meeting. It happened that Jeff Brantley was there. As everyone went around and introduced themselves Jeff stood up and said, “Hi. My name's Jeff and I'm putting together a comedy team. Anybody interested come down and see me.” I've always been really sarcastic and kind of witty, but never just genuinely funny. So, I went down and introduced myself and ended up joining what we called Industrial Strength Comedy. That was our team and we did improv.
It was incredibly intimidating. Two members of the group, Francie Schwartz and Linda Canrac, were tough. I mean nasty “Bs” if you know what I mean. When you're trying to work it out and you're trying to do an improv and in improv there is no script, you've got to be on the spot, on the moment, you've got to be funny and when you weren't, they were on you. It was brutal. Very intimidating.
We worked together for two and half months, three nights a week getting prepared to do our gig. We then had six weeks of shows – Friday and Saturday nights at the Greeneville Pocket Sandwich Theater. I was in eight performances. Out of those eight, I would say in five, I felt on. It was so cool. The words just came out of my mouth and it was funny.
What's the point? Well, when I got into the world of speaking and training and dealing with groups anywhere from 5 to 500, I wasn't intimidated anymore. I knew that whatever came my way I would have some sort of way to deal with it. That confidence came from that training. It came from that skill building and from doing that training and skill building enough times.
How do you get confident? Well, there are a lot of ways, but one of the critical things to do to build or enhance your confidence is to be willing to almost explode it. To get uncomfortable, to be really uncomfortable. That's what Francie and Lisa did for me. They got me so out of my comfort zone that I was shaking.
To build your confidence find yourself a group that's going to challenge you. It might be Toastmasters. It might be a sales training group. It might be a lot of different things, but go do it and break it down. Your confidence will skyrocket.
That's my first tip.
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