a few weeks ago I did the worst interview of my entire life from a Charisma perspective and I did it on the largest platform that I have ever been on I did it in front of millions of people and I want to share with you what went wrong what I think I could have done differently and how you can hopefully avoid making the same mistakes that I did so that you don't screw it up like me so I want to start with a photo this is going to tip it off what interview it was this
Diary of CEO this Bartlett awesome dude had a great time with him his team is amazing and after the interview they give me this incredible book that has all of these photos from the interview and unfortunately in all of them I'm making massive Charisma mistakes this photo right here I have three which I will detail but first I want to talk about how I wound up there making these egregious mistakes that I talk about and have talked about in almost all of my videos so a month or two ago I'm reached out to by the
diary of the CEO team they want to set up an interview when stepen is in Los Angela and I say yes I've seen their podcast I'm very excited to do it and they're so professional they do everything they can for me to make this interview a home run we have a pre-interview call which is actually rather rare and they talk about the topics they want to cover they ask me if there's things I want to do they see if I want to do a live Charisma breakdown which I say no to because it takes me
a long time to do those but we basically iron out the types of things we're going to be talking about and during this period I've sharing you know what's going on with friends and they're telling me that I should probably prepare for this and I sort of agree and I sit down to try to prepare for it and every time that I do something in me gets fidgety I'm like a kid who doesn't want to do his homework and so the week before I'm starting to review some of my old videos because I know there's
going to be questions from the past in there but even that is just feeling uncomfortable and next thing I know I'm in the car driving over and we're in the studio it's a 10 camera setup it's the most professional thing I've ever been to the team is incredibly friendly incredibly inviting do you want to water how can we make you comfortable Steph comes in we hang out and chat for 15 minutes which is a great way to settle people down pre- interiew for nerves and I'm actually feeling pretty comfortable during this entire interaction I'm excited
and then he goes starts and asks the question that I've been asked legitimately hundreds of times if you had to explain in your own words what it is that you're doing for those people in a simple way what would you how would you say that and the answer to this is written on my homepage I've said it hundreds of times it's we help people turn on their Charisma and confidence in the moments that matter the most I know this like I know my own name like I know my social security number and instead of saying
that what I do is I just start yapping I have no idea what I'm going to say but I'm just yapping in circles and I probably take no exaggeration not just on this question but in these introductory questions about 10 to 15 minutes of C ously sorting through what I do how many viewers we have Etc mercifully this is cut down tremendously in the final edit which is why the his team sort of saved me from this and it doesn't look like the worst interview I've ever done but it was abysmal had this been live
television people would have definitely tuned out and been like why is this guy teaching Charisma this is so uninteresting and confused and as I look back it's genuinely hard for me to watch the inter interv it took weeks before I could do it in fact friends asked me how it went and I was like it was a crash and burn situation but I just want to go to this photo and start to talk about the concrete mistakes that I made so you can see here the three that I'm referring to our first one crossed arms
forgivable it happens at times second one which is just utterly egregious on camera which is hands on face this is a this is something that I do and people do when they're nervous right we we we touch ourselves we PR ourselves and I did that in almost every photo in here has me with a hand on my face but the big one the one that I think led to a lot of this was my very poor collapsed posture and so when you have poor posture you see Stevens is quite nice here it's tougher to take
a deep breath it's tougher to calm down and this sends you up into your head where you start thinking a lot and like I was yapping I was not grounded in my body I wasn't connected either to the thing that I'd done 300 times nor deeply to the present moment to be able to respond in a slow powerful coherent way and So eventually what happened is a week and a half later after I texted Stephen and said hey did that go okay and he kindly assured me that he thought it would turn out great in
the edit and he had a good time which I did too uh there was a lot of moments in this interview that I felt very connected to Stephen and there was there was some beautiful moments in there as well particularly at the end but the interview drops and it was 2 hours and 10 minutes and we had shot for about 3 hours and 45 minutes so about an hour and a half got cut of this and it came out okay it came out pretty good even I hit the points that I've talked about in the
past there's moments of genuine connection between he and I which are on camera and captured so thank God for the 10 camera setup that allowed for such smooth editing between the pieces that I did wrong but like I said If This Were live television it would have been a huge issue so as I reflect now weeks later on what went wrong because it it would have tanked were this an interview or a job process I did not turn the Charisma on command on I'm trying to figure out why couldn't I follow my own advice why
couldn't I do big gestures why couldn't I get my hand off my face why couldn't I speak more clearly and confidently and most obviously have a clear answer to the questions I knew were coming this is a core tenant of what I teach in the Charisma University course why did I feel like a child with homework to avoid beforehand and what I'm I'm starting to realize is that I think that there are phases to learning anything there's an old phrase that first you must learn the rules before you can break them and when I look
at the last 10 or 15 years of Charisma on command it is me learning the rules it is me sharing with you the ideas and habits that I've been adding to myself move your hands like this make eye contact like this tell stories like this even the things Stephen asked me at one point what are the things that you should remove the things that make people dislike like you these are things that I'm adding these are ideas about things not to do so you're going into conversation with extra awareness don't put your hands in your
pockets don't talk about this topic in this particular way and that's the first stage of I guess any sort of art is you're adding to yourself you're emulating others and I do think that there needs to there needs to be and in fact I don't feel like there's a choice right now the way that my system reacted when I sat down there a period of time where you stop adding to yourself and you allow yourself to let go you subtract you forget all the rules about what your hand should do and how you should tell
the story and you drop into your gut and your heart and you just speak what is real in the moment and in my life with Charisma with every interaction that I'm having this is what's going on for me and it is a very very scary experience especially when the cameras are on because I feel ripped between the old way that I know works that I have done to achieve so many things that I wanted to achieve that I have taught other people that I'm on the record is saying this is the way to do it
as I've shared with you in so many videos in the past and there's a part of my system that just won't let me do it and if I try now I'm yapping now I'm speaking from this confused spun up heady place that is neither the old charismatic performative way of being nor is it this new grounded present way of being and so I guess what I wanted to do in this video is share with you that probably to come there's going to be things that sound contradictory to things that I've said in the past and
I don't think that they are I think that they're representative of different stages the first stage being learn the art learn the skills learn Le the rules and the second being let it go and be real be you be the carismatic person that you always are underneath all of the social conditioning and fear so that's what happened that's that was it was an incredibly anxious week of my life it was also a week of deep gratitude for the anxiety that my job sometimes creates in me as I show up in new uncomfortable ways ways and
then the weeks after the reactions that I got were so loving and kind and particularly as I mentioned before there was something that I shared at the end of the video that I've not talked about on the main channel that has to do with uh significant struggle of my past that has shaped me in my coping mechanisms in many ways so I will say if you'd like to check out the interview uh and see all of the things I talked about including now with a greater eye a lot of the cuts in the beginning hopefully
some of the more connected moment in the middle and that piece at the end I will put a link in the description here but between you and I it's okay to let go of the things that I've taught you in the past you don't have to come into every conversation and every interaction trying to improve and better yourself in fact I guess what I'm learning is that there is a time to just be so that's what I got for you today I appreciate you guys I'll see you in the next one
