Jeff Callahan is the founder of Become More Compelling and author of the Amazon bestselling book Confidence-Maxxing: How to Crush Awkwardness, Build Social Confidence, and Become Unforgettable, released on February 10, 2026.
Jeff shares his remarkable journey from being painfully shy with a speech impediment to becoming a leading coach helping hundreds of ambitious overthinkers master their people skills. Through a decade of trial, error, and real-world coaching, Jeff distills confidence into a simple, no-fluff equation: skills + reps + time.
In this episode, you’ll hear actionable insights on:
- Overcoming the fear of public speaking and conversations
- Dialing in your energy to enter groups confidently
- Using environmental cues to start natural conversations without overthinking
- Breaking imposter syndrome with small social wins and reviewing them regularly
- Why action dissipates fear
- The “movie poster reframe” to free yourself from worrying what others think
- Building unconscious competence through repetition
- Practical tips for tech professionals and introverts who prefer code to small talk
Whether you’re preparing for your next conference, Zoom call, networking event, stage talk, or simply want to feel more at ease around people, this conversation offers practical tools to stop overthinking and start connecting. Jeff’s grounded, systems-thinking approach makes confidence feel achievable, not magical.
Timestamps
- 0:00 Intro
- 01:38 Jeff’s Journey to Confidence
- 03:22 Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking
- 06:16 The Importance of Small Wins
- 12:10 The Writing Process and Impact
- 18:08 Practical Tips for Better Conversations
- 25:00 The Power of Letting Others Share
- 25:41 The Art of Asking Good Questions
- 26:25 Confidence Through Curiosity
- 28:33 The Movie Poster Reframe
- 30:44 Raising Confident Kids
- 32:27 The Impact of Public Speaking
- 35:18 Overcoming Fear in Social Interactions
- 42:53 Breaking Down Confidence and Presence
Links
- Get Jeff’s Book on Amazon: Confidence Maxxing
- Jeff’s Website: Become More Compelling
Transcript
If you wanna change your life, you need to talk to people. If you want a new relationship, it starts with a conversation. If you want a new client, that starts with a conversation too. And if you wanna sell product to many people, you’ve gotta talk to many people. Connection and conversation is so critically important, especially in the age of ai, where just having a clear signal makes deeper connections and helps you rise to the top. My guest today, Jeff Callahan, is the author of a book Confidence Maxing. He has so many unique perspectives, he has a very interesting way of seeing things that just make sense.
At the end we talk a little bit about the idea of confidence, the idea of presence, and how these are like zip files that actually have so many other things within it. You kinda have to click into it and expand that. I enjoyed this conversation a lot, and if you are looking to increase your influence in your niche, in any sphere whatsoever, just looking to get started on YouTube, starting a podcast, or just appear on a podcast.
Getting that confidence in your message is so important.
Kathy: Jeff Callahan, I’m so glad you’re here. How you doing today?
Jeff: I’m doing fantastic. I’m excited to be here, Kathy.
Kathy: Awesome. Great. Well, for our audience, just give us a high level overview of who you are and what brought you to where you are now.
Jeff: Yeah, so, uh, my name is Jeff Callahan and I’m the founder of Become More Compelling.
And my backstory is that all the way from junior high, high school, even some of college and even some professionally, I was painfully shy. In fact, I had a speech impediment so bad I couldn’t say my own name. And as you might imagine, that made it a little bit more difficult than it needed to be to as far as connecting with other people and improve my people skills.
And yeah, I realized, I was like, you know what? I’m planning on living a long time. I don’t particularly wanna live the rest of my life this way. So I went on a self-development binge. And, in 2014 I found it become more compelling, where my simple goal is to help people develop their people skills, their social confidence, so that they can get more outta life by connecting with other people.
And, uh, recently, uh, well I depends on when you, when you listen to this. I, I am a published author. If you listen to this after February. 10th. My book Confidence Maxing is coming out soon. So I’ve been going through that whole process and that’s been a lot of fun too.
Kathy: That is amazing. And you’ve obviously done quite well with this ’cause you’re on podcasts now, and that could be very frightening for a lot of people.
Jeff: Because of my business i, I’ve had to be in front of the camera quite a bit. Uh, yeah. You know, I’m the only person in, in my company outside of the contractors that I have. And so it’s all on me to, to do these guest appearances.
And you’re right when you say that some people, they get extremely nervous when they appear on camera. And it’s something that, uh, I, I started making videos back in, gosh, 2014, something like that. Yeah. So kind of by brute force had to hammer that fear of anxiety outta my system. So
Kathy: yeah. Yeah,
Jeff: you’re right.
Kathy: How, how did you do that?
Jeff: A large volume of repetition? Uh, yeah. Uh, an insane amount of just. Trial and error. Trial and error. Trial and error. And, and I vividly remember, uh, in our old, old, old house, I had a studio in, in the back room. And when those first videos, I would try something, it wouldn’t work very well, and I would just sit down on the floor and I’d be like, oh my God, this is so difficult.
But the reality is like any skill you just have to put in, uh, and I talk about this in the book, but my equation for confidence is simply, skills plus reps, plus time. And you can’t shortcut any of it. You gotta have the skills, you gotta put in the reps, and then you have to put in those reps over time and then you will become confident at whatever it happens to be.
You know, I do a lot of communication skills, but it doesn’t matter what skill you’re, you’re doing, it could be programming WordPress, right? Like you just have to bang your head against the problem over and over, and then if you’re doing the right things over a long enough time horizon, you’re going to become more competent and confident whether you want to or not.
Kathy: Right. Yeah. It’s almost like confidence comes from doing it. You can’t like talk yourself into the confidence first. The action has to come first. The repetition has to happen, and then you become confident that yes you can.
Jeff: Yeah.
Kathy: Yeah, a
Jeff: hundred percent.
Kathy: Yeah. And the number, I think it’s the number one fear, even higher than death, is the fear of public speaking.
Nobody wants to do it, do they?
Jeff: No, they, they don’t wanna do it. And, and the reality is, sometimes you’re thrust into it, maybe your company’s like, Hey, I want you to give this talk. And they’re, they’re like, they’re not suggesting they’re telling you to do it. Right. Uh, or it might just be presenting something at a meeting.
Uh, but I think, I think the kernel fear of public speaking can, can range from, I’m just talking to one other person, to, I’m talking of a, talking to a room of a, of a hundred or, or a thousand people. And so, uh, I, I think what a lot of people find is after they do something and it goes better than they expected, they realize that there was a false story they were telling themselves about, oh, it’s gonna be the worst thing in the world. And it’s like, well. Actually, no, it, it ended up being okay. It ended up being somewhere in the realm of survivable to enjoyable. Somewhere in that range.
Kathy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you’ll never know unless you try.
Jeff: That’s right.
Kathy: What would your advice be to someone who, they’re just, they don’t feel confident anywhere. Or the story that they’re telling themselves in their, in their head is, I can’t, it’s too hard. Who am I to to do this as sort of the imposter syndrome. They just have a number of different stories that tell them that they can’t do something, anything, but it’s something that they either want to do or something they feel like they have to do, but they just are so blocked.
Jeff: Yeah, so what I found is that typically a, a feeling of lack of confidence, it’s hinged on, I’m trying to do this new thing typically, uh, because if you’ve, if you’ve done something, uh, for a large amount of reps, then you end up feeling competent at it, right? So a lot of people end up feeling competent at a lot, a lot of the aspects of their job, but then there might be something that they, they want, it might be a solopreneur project that they’re doing or something else that, where it’s new territory. And so one of the most important things that you have to realize is everything is gonna be difficult in the beginning, but the more I do something, the effort involved is gonna decrease.
And so keeping that in mind of look, everything will be difficult in the beginning. The more I do it, the easier it will get. And so that a lot of times helps people get that initial push of like, expecting it to be a little bit more challenging in the beginning. The example I always use is say that you’re, you know, it’s January, you’re going into the gym, you’re gonna get fit this year finally, and you’ve never done anything like that before. Well, when you go in, you have to learn all of the different lifts that you might do. You have to try not to injure yourself. You don’t know where to put your water bottle. You don’t know what the check-in process is at the front desk. And, and so the cognitive load is extremely high.
But six months later, if you stick with it for that amount of time you go in, you kind of zone out, you play your podcast. Maybe you talk to a couple people and then you’re already back at your car and you’re like, ah, what happened? Uh, I just went in and did all of it because.
The repetitions that you’ve put in end up, making the entire process really easy. And, and to your point, in the very beginning, I think really keying in on small victories that you can stack and then reviewing those victories, I call it social wins in, in the context of communication where you cannot be confident unless you feel competent.
And so the way to feel confident is to try things and then write down even like the smallest victory, like I made eye contact with someone, I smiled at someone, and then review those every week. And so you create a constant winning state that then develops into confidence later on because you’re showing your mind frequent proof of your own competence and eventually you’re going to start believing the proof.
Kathy: Right? That is so true. It almost becomes, once you do something new and you do like going to the gym, think about how many times you drive. If you do go to the gym and you’ve, you’ve developed that habit and it’s, you forgot how you even drove there or how you checked in, it just becomes such a habit.
It becomes almost unconscious. And then those things that seem scary at first are now unconscious capabilities that we, we take it for granted a lot of times too, that we’ve created these unconscious capabilities. And then I think a lot of times people talk them themselves into thinking, well, the things that I can do, the, all the habits that I have that maybe other people don’t have, I’ll talk myself into thinking, well, everybody knows this or everybody else can do this because I can.
And it’s, it just seems like such a basic thing that it doesn’t seem like something that I should be sharing because everybody knows. Like in my space, a lot of times it’s security. Well, everybody’s using a password manager and then I talk to somebody and it’s like, oh my gosh, no, they’re not, and they need to know this.
We talk ourselves out of doing so many things, don’t we?
Jeff: Uh, in, in reality, they’re, they’re using the same password they’ve had since 1998, just with some extra numbers and the exclamation point at the end because they’ve had to. Right. Yeah. And you, you’re right when you say there’s, I, I think I’ve heard this referred to as like the curse of the expert, where you assume that, oh, doesn’t everyone know this? Well, actually no, they don’t.
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: It’s like the fish swimming in the water and you’re like, oh, yeah, well, everyone knows that there’s all this water around us.
You know? One of the things I thought about as I was writing my book, I actually have a sticky note right here on my, on, on my computer that says, the chapter you write today will end up being the most important chapter someone will ever read. But the thing is, I don’t know which chapter that is, because it’s gonna be different for every person because, for some people.
The way you explain something, even though you’ve heard it a thousand times, and the way you deliver that information to that person is gonna hit them at the exact right time, where they’re gonna connect with it and be like, oh my, the. I’ve lived my entire life this way, and now my entire life is different because I understand in the way that you said it.
And so not taking your own knowledge for granted is, is also really important, I think.
Kathy: Right? Yeah. Because everybody that consumes your content, that reads your book, is having their own individual experience of it, too. So like I’ve written a couple of books like the, I. The thing I noticed was the writing of the book, the publishing of the book is one thing, but then when people get it into their hands and you get feedback, it’s like each person has their own experience of it, their own, like they get something out of it that’s uniquely them.
So it’s like that experience is not yours. Like you, it’s almost like you birth this thing out into the world and you have to almost enjoy and let go at the same time. Like, enjoy the fact that yes, I made an impact on someone, but it’s not mine to it. Like I didn’t do it like they took it in, in a certain way.
Right. So it’s, it’s really interesting and I think as more and more content creators start putting information out there, sharing their knowledge, sharing their expertise, taking that leap of faith into being confident in front of a camera or writing a book, whatever they’re doing. Really understanding that who you’re doing it for.
It’s not about you. Right.
Jeff: Yeah. It’s, it’s so funny because, and I don’t know if this is your experience with your book, is, for me, it took a year, like a year of writing. Like the amount of writing versus editing. I feel like the editing took two x as long
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: As the, uh, writing the polishing and you’re like, oh, I thought, I thought the writing would be the hard part.
The editing’s the hard part. And you spend so long in roughly isolation, writing the thing out. And then when you start to get feedback in which I’ve got a sort of a team of people that are, are, uh, re-read the, the book in preparation for launch week, which is coming up. I’ve received a couple notes from people and saying like, I love the few minutes I get per day to go and read your book, because it’s really impactful. Really awesome. You know, I’m enjoying it. And to hear that and get that feedback is just the stuff in your book is good, which it sounds a little braggadocio.
I know the stuff in my book is good because I’ve tested it with so many clients. But to hear it. In the real world from someone who’s not your editor, for example, you’re, you’re like, okay, yes, it is working, it is good. People do like it. And so to get that confirmation is really nice.
Kathy: Yeah, that’s great.
Is this, this is your first book?
Jeff: My first book?
Kathy: You scared? What about launch week?
Jeff: Not really. Uh, yeah. You know, the, the way I view it, my wife cracks up when I trot out like a folksy term, but, I’ve heard it referred to as the hay is in the barn. Where, you know, like the Hays in the barn, you know, you’ve already done so much work.
Yeah. At this point nothing’s gonna change because the book’s already written. The copy’s already locked. Yeah. The editing’s already done. Amazon is waiting to publish it. I’ve got author copies coming and so okay, we’re good now. And now I get to do the fun part, which is actually like hopping on podcast with people like you where I can talk about it. I’m sure it was this way when you wrote your books, there’s kind of a, a goldilock zone right after you complete a book where your mind is so engrossed in what you’ve written and what you’ve spent so long focusing on.
That’s like, I feel sharper mentally, from all the concepts that are in my book, because when you write, you have to clarify your thinking anyway. And so I’m kind of enjoying this really nice sharpness that comes with talking about my book, thinking about my book, and sometimes even dreaming about my book and changing words around and stuff.
Are you having, you having a couple times during the editing process? I was having some, I was having some, uh, book editing dreams, which, uh, I was surprised at that. I wasn’t expecting that.
Kathy: That is so cool. It is such an engrossing experience though. Like the last one I wrote I couldn’t do, I couldn’t write anything else.
Thank God for ai, because this was just like, help me out with this other stuff I have to get done. But it was such an outpouring of everything I, and I was so engrossed in it. It just took over everything almost I felt to the point where the book started to take on a life of its own to the point where I felt like I was just a participant in making sure it happened.
Did you ever get a sense like that?
Jeff: Yeah. When you’re really getting the flow. For me it was, uh, towards the last half of the book when I’m, when I’m talking about storytelling and some of my, yeah. Really favorite topics where you’re just in the zone and I’ve heard other authors talk about this where it’s more like you’re just sort of.
I don’t think in these terms, but I’ve heard it described as like you’re a scribe for the muse. Uh, yeah. Where it’s like it’s moving through you and you’re, you’re just there writing stuff down, right?
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: Uh, and, and I think really all that is, is simply, you know, the material really, really well, probably the best in the world.
And then, you know, in what order to put the material in so that you can get it into the mind of someone else, uh, in the same way that you think about it. And yeah, that’s really what I view the book is, is like it’s a copy of my mind Yeah.
Kathy: For
Jeff: someone else delivered in a very particular sequence, uh, so that I don’t have to be there to help them get the result that they want.
Great. If they wanna hire me, great. That’s fine. I’ll, I’ll let them. Right. Uh, but there are people that I will never meet that will read my book and then they’ll reach out to me and say, oh, this. This changed my entire life and like that’s the stuff I know will happen. Uh, yeah. And I’m excited about it.
Kathy: Yeah. That is really cool. What is the, the big thing from an author standpoint that you want somebody who finishes your book to get? Like, what’s your hope that they get?
Jeff: Yeah, so I think, uh, my, my, my hope is that they feel. They feel more confident around people so that they can do bigger things. Mm-hmm. Um, in many ways, developing better people skills.
It’s a, it’s a good goal, but it’s sort of a hurdle on the way to something bigger. Right. They want to, you know, finally branch out and start their own company. Right. And they know, know they need to be a good leader. They know they’re gonna have to talk to a lot of people for either raising funds or just talking to customers, right?
Uh, and so there’s, there’s usually a bigger why. And so what’s interesting about what I do is there can be a lot of shame or guilt around I feel like I should have developed these skills earlier in life, but I haven’t. And so what that leads to is a feeling of these, ’cause no one talks about it. They talk about it to me, but they don’t talk about it.
Nearly anywhere else. Uh, and so once they realize that they can change what they thought was unchangeable, then they kind of look around in their life and say, well, if I could do that, yeah. What else can I do?
Kathy: Yeah, that’s great. Okay, well there’s gonna be links in the show notes, um, both on the website and the YouTube description box.
I’m just gonna highlight that now since we’re talking about the book where you can go get the book. Um, this’ll come out probably mid-February, around the same time as your launch, so hopefully we time it just right. But, for people who are like really having a hard time, like with conversations. What are some easy ways that people can, can get started having easier conversations?
Jeff: Yeah. In a sequenced order, one is a mistake that people make when they’re entering conversations. You know, say that you’re at a, a meetup or a conference or something like that, and you’re like, Hey, there’s someone over there, I would like to, like to go talk to in between session breaks or whatever.
They default to what I call safety energy, where, you know, maybe there are a couple people talking and you kind of do the penguin walk and you’re over there and you’re just kind of hovering on the outside hoping that they’ll invite you in. And they might, and that would be great. But that’s the kind of the wrong way to go about it.
The right way to go about it is to dial in your energy and be a little bit more enthusiastic than you normally would be. And the the reason for this is because we also have to sort of view things from other people’s perspectives as well when they see someone walking up. They might be thinking, ’cause everyone is a little self-conscious in varying degrees.
Oh, I, what’s this person want? Are they, are they cool? Are they a bore? Are they, you know, what’s going on? If you can communicate to them like, Hey, I’m enthusiastic, I’m going to commit to talking to you, you know, maybe by asking a simple, simple question like, oh, do you enjoy the, uh, speaker that just, uh, spoke on stage and you have good energy, higher energy, uh.
That is actually enabling the other person to boomerang that energy back to you, you’re, you’re giving people permission on how much energy they can return to you. Um,
Kathy: mm.
Jeff: Because you, you’ll notice in different areas of life, like no one’s gonna be that bombastic at a funeral. Right. ‘Cause the energy level’s appropriate for that setting.
Sure.
Uh, but they are going to be maybe a lot more energetic at, uh, you know, a party or something, something like that. Uh, and so you, you have more control than you think on how you present yourself. Um, and I’ve got more thoughts, but any, any thoughts or observations on that?
Kathy: Yeah. Dialing in energy ’cause Okay.
I imagine, you know, you’re nervous. Maybe you don’t know. Like the first event I went to in the WordPress space, I didn’t know anybody at all. Um, so I’m put trying to put myself back into that place. I don’t know what I did, I just was me. Um, but for somebody who, and there’s a lot of people in the tech space especially who go into tech ’cause it’s like, I’d rather talk to a computer than a human.
But there are, the reason we use computers is to enable other humans. So it’s really important for, for those people to learn these types of skills. So you’re feeling nervous, you’re feeling anxiety. You may actually have sensations in your body that are telling you don’t do this. What, what should you do?
Like, do you talk to yourself? Do you breathe deeper? Do you, I, I mean, I have a lot of ways that I do, you know, get myself energy up for like if I have to give a presentation. But for somebody who’s like really in an anxiety state, what techniques could they use?
Jeff: Yeah, so, uh, one, one that is useful, I didn’t come up with this, but uh, because this is, this is a pretty famous example, is box breathing where you inhale for a four count, you hold for a four count, you exhale for a four count and repeat.
And if I’m remembering right, that’s triggering your parasympathetic nervous system. Yeah. To like your rest and digest where it physiologically is gonna calm me down a little bit. Um, what else I, I, I think is really helpful is. Like my people tend to be overthinkers, you know? And so if they’re able to just think a little less before the event, that can usually be pretty helpful.
What I mean by that is simply if you know you’re going to be in some situation, it doesn’t have to be a conference, it could be something else, where you’re like, Hey, I know that there’s probably gonna be this type of situation that might arise. A session might end, everyone’s out in the hall, maybe grabbing drinks, and if I see someone who is looking around, I’ll go talk to them.
So I call that if, when, then. Where, if this happens or when this happens, if this condition is met, then I will take an action. And so you do a little bit of thinking ahead of time, just in a, in a very loose way where you think, oh, well, this set of conditions. It’s probably gonna happen. And so when that set of conditions and materializes in the real world, you’re not stuck thinking, should I or shouldn’t I?
Mm-hmm. You’re thinking I’ve already thought about this. I know, look, it’s happening right now, then I know I can go up to them. And so if you go up to them, what should you do? What should you say? So I’m of the opinion that what you say first actually doesn’t matter a whole lot. At a conference, or any situation where there’s kind of an expectation of socializing, it can be as simple as like, Hey, I don’t think we met before. I’m, I’m Jeff. And that first little bit, the reason it doesn’t matter a whole lot is because you’re just breaking the bubble of yes, you and another person. And what, what’s likely is that that other person, they’re having to adjust to a new person being there and they’re, you know, all these signals that are traveling back and forth.
So what you say second is, in my opinion, way more important than what you say first. Uh, and what should you say second? Well. If you’re starting a conversation, the, what I tell my clients all the time is the social answers that you seek are in the environment waiting for you. It’s very rarely, if ever, going to be magically locked in your brain, where you just somehow come up with the perfect thing.
It’s like the perfect thing does not exist. So if I’m at a conference, I think about what, what I share with the other person. We just watched the same speaker. Okay. That’s right in the middle of the bullseye. That’s probably the best thing to go with. But there’s also, uh, the, the drinks table, the snack table that we’re near, the lobby, that we’re near the hotel, the city.
And so there are all these overlapping things. The topic of the conference, like if it’s a WordPress conference or something like that.
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: So there’s so many layers to what you can go with that. Is is reasonable. Right? Uh, and so that’s how, how, how I tell people in terms of thinking about do your thinking beforehand and then look to the environment to figure out what you should say.
Kathy: Yeah, yeah. For sure. That I, that was always my icebreaker was asking them a question like, how do you use WordPress? Like that? Yeah. ’cause so many people use it in different ways, but it’s like they’re there at a WordPress conference. So I ask them, how do you use WordPress? And I’d also. Not go into, like if somebody, if there’s a group of people already having a conversation, like let them. And I would go find the person who was sitting looking at the schedule or some something that you could tell somebody was like, just filling time and they’re alone too.
And those people, you just sit down next to them and just What you said, hi, I am Kathy. How do you use WordPress? That type of thing. And then you immediately have someone to talk to. Someone that, and letting other people talk about themselves. Everybody wants to talk about themselves.
Everybody wants to share. And so giving them the opportunity to share first. Just, it works so much better. ’cause it just like puts you at ease.
Jeff: Yeah. I, I always think about it just like, ho holding the door for someone. Like,
Kathy: yeah,
Jeff: if I’m approaching a door and we kind of both get there at the same time, I’m gonna hold the door for you because it’s just a nice thing to do.
Uh, and then, you know, maybe there’s another door. We, we’ve all done the thing where there’s like the, like the double set where you hold the door for someone and they hold the door for you. It’s like, okay. A conversation could be a lot like that where
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: Uh. And what’s funny is the people that ask good questions, they really stick out because it, it actually seems like people don’t ask as many questions as maybe they should.
Yeah. Where they just kind of, they talk about themselves and they kind of talk about what’s going on with them and or their opinions on things. And just a really good, well-placed question where you pause and let the other person talk. It feels a lot more rare than maybe it used to. I don’t know.
All I know is I’ve been noticing it a little bit more where, you know, I’m grabbing coffee, coffee with people talking about the book, and they’ll ask me some, some questions and, and you know, I’ll have to actually think and have a good conversation. It’s really rewarding and really refreshing.
Kathy: Yeah. You know, what I’ve noticed is the people who ask questions and want to dive deeper on you. They’re usually really smart people. They’re trying to figure stuff out. They wanna know what’s the opportunity. They want to, to see a pattern. They’re trying to explore their reality. They, they don’t really feel, they, they’re more confident.
Like I’ve met a number of very intelligent people who are entrepreneurs, and those are. They’re always fun conversations ’cause they’re the ones that are asking me more questions than anything wanting to know, what are you doing here? What’s this all about? What’s the opportunity there? And they’re trying to, they’re seeking opportunities.
They’re seeking further knowledge. So I always just like. I always take a step back of just like I know what you’re doing. You’re not just having a conversation
Jeff: d kind of questions too, right? Yeah,
Kathy: yeah.
Jeff: Like, like they’re asking higher level questions, strategic questions where they’re like, well, have you thought about this?
And like, like, what’s your view there? And it’s like they’re, it’s like, I’m just thinking of this now. So hopefully this lands, like they’re looking for a software update. Yeah. They’re looking for like a mental model software update where they’re like, Hey, maybe there’s something I can learn by seeing how this person does something.
Or maybe there’s something that I can help this person with or get them to think about something a little differently.
Kathy: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It’s, um, yeah, I, I think that’s another way that people can find confidence in having those kinds of con conversations. ’cause I know a lot of people who are, you’re in the tech space, you’ve obviously had to figure out a lot of things, figuring out patterns especially, just look at a conversation as another pattern to figure out.
This is just, it doesn’t matter if you’re judged, you’re, you’re there on your, spelunking into other people’s experiences. What do, what can you learn? How’s this gonna help you grow? How’s this gonna help you do something that you’ve never done before? How’s it gonna help you find greater confidence in, in your knowledge, because knowledge helps with capabilities and confidence as well. So it might be just an interesting reframe to, to see it as opportunity.
Jeff: Yeah. And to your point, one of the biggest things that holds people back generally from from confidence and other things is simply the fear of looking silly or being embarrassed.
Right. Uh, and, and I think this, this goes to, to the kernel of, uh, the fear of public speaking when really. If you boil it down, people are concerned with what other people think of them. How I think about this is, I call it the movie poster reframe where, picture, you’re walking past a bunch of movie posters on the outside of a, uh, a theater and you walk past your own poster.
You’re the biggest head on that poster. You know, maybe your, maybe your spouse is next to you on your left, a little bit smaller. And then you’ve got your family, maybe your kids, and maybe some really close friends at the bottom, they’re all the smaller heads. You’ve got important people from your past.
At the tiny little text at the bottom, you walk a little further and you see your spouse’s movie poster. If they’re the biggest face on the movie poster, you’re now in the same spot they were. And you’ve got some of their friends and, and so on and so forth, and you get down to just people that have, that have met you.
And for most people, you’re not on the movie poster. I’m sorry to break it to you. You’re, you’re not the major head. You’re not the supporting head. You’re not on the head to the bottom. You’re on some people’s movie posters, you might be in the text at the bottom, but many of them you’re not. And what I like about that actually is it’s very freeing because if we’re concerned about talking to someone, we’re concerned about reaching out to someone. We’re concerned about asking for something, whatever it happens to be, we’re trying to grab onto something that we never had, which is we’re afraid of losing some thing that never existed.
And odds are when you send that email, that’s a, you know, a pitch email to do X, y, z thing, or you start that conversation with someone at a conference, guess what? There’s all upside. There’s no downside because you never had anything in the beginning.
Kathy: You’re only the main character in your own play.
Jeff: Yep.
Kathy: Yeah, that’s so true, and that’s definitely a good way of thinking about it. You’ll appreciate the fact that my daughter told me that she wasn’t worried about something. She’s 17. Because other people are just worried about themselves. Yeah,
Jeff: just like, oh man, she, she’s gonna go places because think about at 17 having that mindset.
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: Because most people at 47 or 57 don’t have that mindset, you know? Like, she gets the benefit of time. Like I work with all, all, all ages, pretty much like anywhere from. Some, occasionally college students, rarely, but occasionally up to people in their sixties. And it’s less just like the younger you are, if you have sort of a good mental operating system, uh, for approaching this stuff.
You’ve got the time horizon.
Kathy: Yeah. That,
Jeff: that people, you know, that other people just don’t have.
Kathy: Yeah. Yeah. I might not have done a lot of things right. But I raised a couple of kids that are. That won’t need me soon. So they’re doing it exceptionally well. It’ll be exciting to watch.
That’s the goal, right?
That’s the goal. Yeah. But it’s kind of like, well, they call me, my son’s 25, he calls me if like he gets hurt or if he can’t figure out his taxes. I’m like, Don, don’t call me about that. Like that’s a last thing you wanna call mom for. But, uh, stuff,
lemme give the number of
Jeff: my accountant.
Kathy: Exactly. It’s just like some things, but you know, like if they, I’m still mom, I’m always gonna be mom, but it’s like, yeah, they, they’re very confident in who they are and what they’re doing and where they’re going.
Even, even at 17. So yeah, they, they will do amazing things. So I’ve done something right in my life. So that’s,
Jeff: yeah. Obviously.
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: It’s
Kathy: obvious. That’s encouraging. Um, okay. I wanna talk a little bit about public speaking because I really firmly believe that no matter who you are, whether you are in tech, whether you are an accountant, whether.
There is the, the one thing that has changed my life more than anything else has been standing on stages and sharing my knowledge, my experience, my stories. And obviously a call to action. But all of these things changed my life. Um, I don’t think I am the best public speaker in the world, but I had the con, I built the confidence enough to get up there and do it, and I think everyone should try public speaking no matter how scary it is.
So help us find that confidence. What would you say to someone who will be benefited by putting their voice out there, whether it’s on a YouTube video or on a stage on a Zoom meetup? What, wherever they’re going to be able to share themselves, how can they get over that first? Yeah. It’s gonna be scary, right?
Jeff: Yeah. And so how I think about it is, and I I think this resonates for, for a lot of people, is I really need a why to be able to do something. Like if there’s no, why attached, I just don’t care.
Kathy: Sure.
Jeff: Uh, I think a lot of people like that. Like you think I, I wanna know what the benefit is. Well, I’m also a systems thinker, and so when I think of the surface area of luck where.
Say that. We’ll take two extreme examples. One, one example is over a 12 month period, someone only leaves their house once and they go talk to one other person. Guess what? That’s a lot of pressure on that one interaction. Say this person’s goal is to, you know, find a business partner for a startup that they wanna try their hand at.
That’s a lot of pressure on that one person, and the odds of it actually working out are next to zero, right? Because it’s just too much pressure on that one person and everything has to line up. It’s not realistic. Another extreme example, say that you met a hundred people a day for a year. How many potential people could you connect with o over that year?
It would be a lot. And what’s great about speaking. In terms of, you could be on a stage, you could be on a YouTube video, you could be on a Zoom meetup. You get to scale that feeling of hey, I am one person. I’m speaking to many people. And so it is way higher leverage than just going meeting people one-on-one, which you should be doing.
But probably that comes after when people approach you after the event. And so if you view it through the lens of look, I might wanna. Might wanna just make more friends. Great. Might wanna meet a business partner. Great. Might wanna just have more connection professionally. Great. The answer to 80% of your problems in life, simply meet more people.
You don’t like your job. Meet more people. You want to go on more dates, meet more people. You wanna, you want to accelerate your business, meet more people, right? And so first, get that why. And two, just realize that like, look. It’s scary for effectively everyone. I think there’s a false sense that people carry with them that says, oh, because they look at the TED Talks, they see a Simon Sinek or whatever.
I don’t know Simon’s internal thoughts, right? But for the vast majority of people, they are way more like you than you might think, because a lot of people fall into the trap of comparing their inside to other people’s outside.
Kathy: Mm-hmm.
Jeff: And we can’t do that because everyone has an inner life. Everyone has inner fears, and most people tend to feel a little bit nervous before any event that they do.
IN there are probably some people that just never feel it. That’s great. Naturally gifted. I’ll put that in quotes because they probably just learned it really early. They had a, or they had a really charismatic parent or something like that. But if you can internalize the, the notion that like, Hey, there’s not as much of a gap between me and other people as I might think.
That to me is one of the most helpful reframes of, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this thing. It’s scary. Well. Life is scary. Have you ever driven on an interstate, a rush hour where there semis, like that’s actually dangerous. That’s way more dangerous than signing up for leading a meeting at your company where you know it’s a little bit larger meeting than you’ve ever been in, and you’re gonna present this thing great, do it. If you can engineer it so that you are putting yourself in positions that are reasonably small at first. Recording a video and posting it on YouTube, I think that would count. And you can get repetitions and then look back and say, Hey, every time I do this, I’m improving. Yeah. Great.
That effort, gravity has taken place where that effort is getting lower and lower and lower every time you do it. Yeah. Any, any thoughts on any of that?
Kathy: Yeah, no, I think the really good. Insights and takes away a lot of the, the spins that people get in their mind when they’re overthinking of like, oh, I’ve got to do this thing, and I’ve got to go meet people, go speak at this group, that kind of thing.
The the one thing that I would say is the fear never goes away. It never really does. It lessens, but like I’ve done, I, I won’t even try to count how many talks I’ve done. I had to do one yesterday and it’s been a while, but I still, you know, the energy is amped up before you go into it. It, as soon as you start speaking, it starts to dissipate.
It’s just like the 15 minutes before you have to do the thing. Mm-hmm. That it’s, it’s always going to be scary. So you just kind of habituate yourself to understanding that. That, that fear is just always, always going to be there. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it.
Jeff: Oh, yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And if you’ll indulge me, I’ll, I’ll read you a one sentence quote from my book.
Yeah. I have pulled up right here. In the last chapter, I do 20 lessons over 20 years. And the 20th lesson is you don’t need to be socially fearless. You need to act to dissipate the fear of being social. Now insert anything in place of. S being social and s and socially fearless. To, to act dissipates fear, I am convinced that the more internal focus that you, that you, you put on yourself, why am I this way?
Oh, I’m in an interaction. How am I doing in this interaction? Guess what? The report card you give yourself is always gonna be a failing grade because there’s too much introspection. The more external you go, you end up not concerned with your interstate much at all. You’re asking questions, you’re making observations, you’re being curious.
And guess what? You’re starting to enter, like that flow state of, Hey, I’m just talking to people.
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: That’s what I do. Uh, yeah. So, yeah, I’m convinced that it’s okay to reflect and reflecting is good, but don’t reflect while you’re in a social interaction. When you should be present, because nothing, nothing good will come of it,
Kathy: right?
Jeff: Like I, a few years ago, I did a training for one of the biggest churches in my area. And I did not think at any point when I was running that workshop, how am I doing? Because there’s no upside there. Mm-hmm. Uh, instead you’re thinking really tactically like, you know, I, how much time is left in this segment?
And like, maybe, maybe I’ll go over to this table ’cause I haven’t heard from them in a little bit. You know, you’ve got your, like, your Britney Spears Mike or whatever, and you’re just walking around. And that’s way more helpful. And so, yeah. Trying to go more tactical and like what’s actually happening.
That’s a good move. Instead of thinking internally, how am I doing?
Kathy: Yeah. Oh yeah. As soon as you go internal, it’s like you, you, you’ve. Yeah. You’ve ruined it being present. Yeah. You, you have to be, you have to be present. Somebody asked me a question a few weeks ago about, it was like a sales training.
Um, somebody invited me, oh, I’ll bite, I’ll go to this. And they asked the question of like, what three words would you say identify your capability. When you know, you’re, you’re in a good sales call and I, I couldn’t think of a sales call ’cause I’m like, no, I’m really doing any sales calls. But I thought about this podcast and it’s curiosity, presence, and playfulness and I just honed in and then I’m like, wait a minute, that doesn’t just apply to this podcast. That applies to pre presenting. It applies to having a conversation with my kids. It has it, everything. Just being present with someone. That’s why I don’t, you know, I told you before we started recording.
I don’t come here with questions. I wanna hear from you, and I wanna have a conversation with you. I wanna be present and I wanna follow where that curiosity takes me, and then I wanna play in that space. And it just encapsulated everything for me, like my presentation, everything I, I want to bring that not into just the podcast, but like everything I do, and I think it really applies to, there’s no co no need for confidence there if you’re just going into it for curiosity and playfulness. Your confidence then comes out you, because you’re con, I really believe that we have everything that, whether it’s God given, however you wanna frame it for yourself, we are all that we need in order to live a successful life. We just have to let it out and our minds are the thing that doesn’t let it out.
Our, our thinking, the stories we tell ourselves, we’re blocking confidence more than anything else. Yeah. And so you can use a lot of these techniques and you know, I use the box breathing all the time to calm me down to, to sleep sometimes just shut off brain. Um, but we have it in us, don’t we?
Jeff: Yeah.
And there’s so much to unpack there. One thing that I’ll posit, I’m not particularly fond of the term, confidence or presence, not because they’re bad terms. Uh, you know, I literally name my book, uh, confidence Maxing. Uh, but they’re, they’re what I call zipped terms, like a, like a zipped file that you might, you might download.
Yeah. Because really you have to explode that file and there are nested skills within each of those. Right. And I think that feeling of playfulness, and curiosity, those are certainly two of the skills that would go into being present.
Kathy: Yeah.
Jeff: And so whenever you hear someone say, oh, just be confident or just be present, well, you really have to click into that and figure out like, oh, well what’s actually in, like, what are the skills?
Because you can’t tell an employee. Hey, I need you to be more present when you’re answering the phone. That means different things to every person. Sure. I need you to be more confident when you’re on the phone. Well, that means different things to every person. You need to say, Hey, here are the skills.
Like I, I want you to be, uh, you know, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this. Uh, so that you can actually get your arms around it, to really dig into like what that actually means. And then. It becomes easy because it ends up being a downstream effect. Where the upstream effect is probably, I don’t wanna be internally focused.
I wanna be focused on the other person. I wanna be playful, I wanna be curious, I wanna be knowledgeable about the thing that I’m helping them with or whatever happens to be. And then you’ve got all the ingredients for presence and confidence, but you’ve labeled all, all the associated skills earlier in the flow.
Kathy: Love it. I love it. This might be my favorite clip from this entire episode because you, you explained some things that I kind of knew intuitively, but you explained them in a way that just really succinctly got to the point of what I’m really aiming for with confidence, with presence is that there’s a whole other set of other things under there.
So watch for that clip. That was great. That was amazing.
Jeff: I’m sure you could explain things about WordPress and security that I wouldn’t know anything about, and it really just comes from a decade plus of exposing yourself to these concepts constantly and thinking about the man.
Like, I, like I told you, it’s probably a little bit of a the sharpness from writing the book, that is still in my mind most likely. So that’s what I’ll chalk it up to.
Kathy: Amazing. Well, with that, I am going to be respectful of your time because I wanna see this book do really well. You are an amazing, this is one, one of my favorite conversations that I’ve had on this podcast yet.
So thank you so much for being here, Jeff. Just for people who are listening. Where can they find you online? And we’ll have links and everything, but just in case they’re listening, where can they find you?
Jeff: you can find me on social media at the Jeff Callahan. And then if you wanna check out my book and you can read a free preview chapter at becomemorecompelling.com/book.
I wanna get this book into as many hands as possible. ’cause I know that for some people reading it, it’s gonna change their life. And that’s the goal and that’s the purpose.
Kathy: Amazing. Well, thank you for giving us a taste of all of that today.
Jeff: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you.
