[Music] hi everyone my name is Vin Jiang and I'm an entrepreneur magician and communication skills expert I spend the majority of my time teaching people one of the scariest things in the world parenting it's frightening I've never known such fear in my life no I'm definitely not an expert and qualified teaching parenting though it is one of the scariest things in the world look at this experience I had with my son [Music] we were just trying to have a little bit of fun with lanterns and we need to lit the whole house on fire look
what I am qualified at teaching is communication skills and public speaking and over the years of running the workshops and classes whether it be in person or virtually I've learned something really interesting about my students more than 50 of my students suffer from shyness and when I say shyness I mean crippling levels of shyness it stops them from speaking up in the workplace it stops them from making new friends overall it stops them from getting the most out of life and you're probably not going to believe me because of the way you see me now
but I also used to be really shy I also used to suffer from social anxiety and I've been on this communication Journey now for the last 10 years of my life plus I want to show you a video from about seven years ago and this was me trying to speak to the camera to improve my communication skills and this was me also after a year of training check this out hey everyone um Welcome to My Garage office slash um home where I sleep everything uh I just have to make this video um I think I
said man was been already I'm not sure but I press record and I just want to see what comes out but oh good like I can't handle any more of that I'm only going to play about 20 seconds of that but you see I hope you agree that I've completely transformed you you some would say I went from being a caterpillar to a beautiful butterfly actually I don't like that metaphor I don't want to be a butterfly I'd rather be a viking nah who am I kidding I'll never be able to grow a beard like
that but I do remember being so shy that there was this one moment and this was about seven years ago as well when I went to a networking function to try to build my business as a young professional magician and it was one of those networking functions where you kind of tell each other what you do and then you check if I need your services or if you need my services Etc and the speaker at the time that was running the session said to all of us all right I want one of you to stand
up at a time and state your name and what you do that was all he asked us to do you know I was sitting there and my heart was oh my God I'm gonna have to stand up in the room I'm freaking out and I started freaking out because I was second to last in that room so I had about 18 people ahead of me so I had 18 people worth of time to feel anxious to start to get sick in my stomach and to to sweat profusely it was such an awful experience waiting until
it was my turn and then guess what happened when it was my turn I was so shy and so anxious that when I got up I said um my name is I'm a professional musician I said musician I didn't say magician I didn't even correct myself I sat back down and for the rest of that evening I basically had to pretend to be a professional musician you that night wasn't very fruitful for me I didn't get any new business out of it and I told a bunch of people a lie that I was a musician
but why am I telling you this story I'm telling you this simply because I understand what it's like to be shy I understand what it's like to be socially anxious I I get it I've been there so then the question really is what makes you shine and when I talk about this with my students and I ask them I say well what makes you shy they often say to me I'm not interesting enough no one's going to want to talk to me I'm not funny why would anyone want to engage with me what if I
forget what I'm gonna say halfway through talking they're going to think I'm stupid these are actually some things that my students have actually shared with me and what do all of them have in common it's all very me Centric isn't it I'm not this I'm not that me me me me me this is the biggest reason why we get shy it's when we're too self-centric I know this is a tough one to admit but if you really think about this this is one of the core reasons you hold back this is one of the core
reasons why you feel shy because you're thinking way too much about yourself when it comes to the journey of how we can move from being shy to confident people think we can just do it in one step but they don't realize that there's a step in between shy and confident and the step in between is that you don't just go from shy for 20 years of your life to immediately being confident in another step in the middle is not sounding shy and not looking shy let me tell you what I mean when I say not
looking shy and not sounding shy here's a here's a quick clip of me when I first started speaking and if you look at me on stage I may seem calm to you I may seem confident but in my head and I'm freaking out I'm wearing black so that it hides the sweat stains and I'm wearing a vest because I used to sweat through my shirts I'm wearing a black shirt and a black vest just so I can hide the sweat and I remember getting off stage at this particular event and I remember one person coming
up to me immediately and I just thought to myself oh God they saw through the facade they're just gonna they're just gonna tell me that I'm not fit to be a speaker and this lady walked up to me and said wow I can't believe that was one of the first times you were on stage with him because you seemed so confident yeah my head exploded after that experience I couldn't understand what was happening because on the inside I felt again I felt so nervous but she perceived maybe to be confident and in a really weird
way I started to feel more confident as people perceived me to be more confident this was a really strange situation that was starting to occur and then I know there are many things that make up self-confidence but one of them is how others perceive you because the way we see ourselves is made up partly of how others see us and as we improve the way others see us we improve the way we see ourselves the night pretty much went like this I walked off stage I didn't feel confident that first lady said wow you're confident
and I was like oh yeah yep yeah okay thanks and the next person said wow you seemed like a stage was your home you were so confident up there and I went yeah yes yes I did and then the final person that said it to me wow you were so confident I went yes damn it I am this is a great example of the theory that we become the things we most consistently practice I just practiced being shy my entire life and that evening for me was me practicing being more confident and the moment I
practiced being more confident I felt more confident now over the years of teaching communication skills I've learned a few things to help you battle shyness so I want to share with you five ways to make you less shy and to help you become more confident let's start with number one Craig can you can you give me can you give me a little bit more room I know you're editing but just a little bit more ah thank you the first thing it's about what you can do visually to help yourself feel more confident and help others
perceive you as being more confident the first thing is to improve your posture hold better posture the second thing is use more open body language and the third thing is give good eye contact number two things you can do vocally we've already covered things you can do visually because you want to look more confident but now we need to also hold on sorry now we also need to learn how to sound more confident not just to look more confident but sound more confident so here are three things you can do to sound more confident the
first thing is you want to use stronger levels of volume think about as having a scale from one to ten you don't want to be using out at least a five or a six let me give you an example if I drop to a three right now this is me just speaking at a level three what does that do to my level of confidence seems like I'm a little less confident a bit more shy right so strong levels of volume the next thing is you want to make sure you end your sentences on a lower
pitch because if you end your sentences on a higher pitch notice what happens is that everything I say sounds a bit like a question this makes you seem a little bit less confident whereas if I speak it with a lower pitch at the end all of a sudden I sound more confident and things don't seem like a question do they and the third thing what you could do with your voice is you could pause more posing more radiates confidence number three ah okay Craig I I get it that you have superiority when it comes to
editing but but you can you just move it up a little bit okay I guess not well look number three is to adopt a curious mindset get really curious about the person you're speaking to remember that one what are the main reasons why we're shy is because we're focusing too much inwardly focus on the other person this will help eliminate one of the main sources of shyness when the other person is talking ask more questions about them ask three follow-up questions about the thing they're talking about if they're talking about a new hobby like they
just got into archery ask them three follow-up questions you know how did you get into archery what sparked the passion what's the hardest thing about archery and who are your heroes in archery and just like that you take the focus away from you and put it on the other person which helps you become less shy and come across as being more confident okay Craig is that really necessary can I kind of oh thank you jeez far out mate look with the next one number four okay great now now you can't see me at all well
I I'm not playing your games correct not playing your games I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try I'm not gonna play your games they say the best way to to treat bullies is just to ignore them number four elaborate on your replies when someone asks you how your weekend was don't you say oh it was awesome and then that's it and then ask how theirs was of course it's important to be interested in the other person and to be curious about the other person but inevitably the other person is going to get interested and curious
in you too so elaborate on your replies when people ask you how was your weekend actually tell them what you did on the weekend thank you for bringing me back Craig one of these days I'm going to learn how to edit and fire your ass number five and can I have it on the other side I don't want it on this side I wanna much better number five have stories ready to share sharing stories is one of the fastest ways to build rapport and build self-confidence but the only way you're going to have stories to
share is if you start documenting the things that happen to you start building the habit of documenting stories and if you ever want to learn more about storytelling the formula for storytelling and how to document stories do check out the stage Academy my online course for communication skills these are the five tips that I have to be able to help you become less shy and more confident and as we end this video I want to show show you an example of one of my students and this example of one of my students you'll see them
just apply a few of these lessons you'll see a before and after before when they seem a little bit shy and then when they apply some of these tips after just experience how much more confident they seem and come across I really have found that I'm giving back to the world and I'm so thankful that I took that step and now that 75 dollars seems pretty well spent punchline punchline oh no yeah good and the punchline was the shoes what your life oh the shoes changed my life now that you saved your life Boom Big
Brother floors again that was great it was about a year and a half after I graduated from college I was working my first job as an engineer I was asking myself questions like what am I giving back to the world what is it all about what is the meaning of life you know totally normal questions that one asks oneself after you buy a pair of Footwear and yes I am still wearing that same pair of dirty stinky choco sandals starting to think that maybe that was a pretty good deal after all those shoes saved my
life wasn't that inspiring and as we pot ways before we end this week's video I just want to remind you that the reason you're shy now if you are feeling like you are shy it's because you practice being shy and you've practiced being shy so much that you've become so great at being shy that now you have to learn and practice new behaviors you have to practice being more confident it's going to take time don't be discouraged and don't be so attached to who you are right now in the present that you don't give the
future version of you a chance thanks for joining me for this week's video see you in the video next week and as always if you've got any questions if you've got any comments you'd like to make please do leave them in the comment section below because I want to use your comments and your questions to shape the content that I make moving forward into the future thanks everyone bye for now foreign [Music]
