When my nephew was younger, I'd hang out with him and be the cool uncle by showing him killer soccer moves. Growing up in Mexico, football wasn't really a thing, but “futbol” was, and I played at a competitive level throughout high school. Unfortunately, by the time he was a teenager—right after the Seahawk's first Superbowl win—all he cared about was football. Instead of soccer, he'd want to gear up and play a little football with me. Perhaps I could keep up with him as a six‐year‐old, but as the star wide receiver in high school, he could easily out‐pass, out‐rush, and out‐tackle me. Being in my forties, the idea of a friendly “turkey bowl” game against him was enough for me to feign a knee injury. But get me out on the soccer field, and Uncle Mike can still teach those kids a thing or two.

Here's my point. When you increase your skills, you increase your confidence. I'm confident with soccer because I have some skills. Not MLS level, but enough to know what I'm doing. I lack confidence with football because I lack skills there.

In the Introduction, I distinguish between false confidence and true confidence. Alcohol is sometimes called “liquid courage” because it lowers inhibitions and makes you think you can do something, but that doesn't mean you actually can. This book isn't a shot of “speaking vodka”; we've been developing true confidence by focusing on each of its three sources: identity, message, and skills. Using the sailing analogy, I've said that identity is like the boat itself, message is the cargo, and skills are what it takes to handle the boat. Speaking with confidence requires all three. You may have the best boat in the world and be carrying precious cargo, but without sufficient sailing skills, you could still end up stranded on a reef.

Humility and Confidence

Imagine the skipper of an Alaskan crabbing boat who thinks nothing of going out into conditions that would terrify any sane person. He knows his boat, he knows his cargo, he knows his skills until he steps onto a three‐masted schooner. It doesn't matter how well he knows his own boat; he's not going to feel confident on the schooner until he's picked up some new skills. His mastery of the crabbing boat could actually work against him if he's unwilling to let some college intern teach him how to work the schooner's sails.

I say this to remind all of us—myself included—that mastery in one area is not mastery in all. Without humility, we'll never be able to learn the necessary skills in a new area, and without those skills, we'll lack real confidence. It's easy to imagine that proud skipper experiencing insecurity on the schooner but hiding it behind a persona of confidence (Chapter 2).

Developing your confidence in speaking, therefore, requires humble awareness of when you need to develop a new set of skills. This awareness may come either from self‐realization or someone else pointing it out—sometimes with the tact of a preschooler pointing out a “pregnant” person. Regardless of how the news is delivered, we've all had that sinking feeling of realizing that we aren't as good at something as we thought. What we do after that awareness is far more important than the awareness itself.

Awareness and Practice

Saint James once wrote that someone who hear the truth but doesn't do anything about it is like a person that looks into a mirror but then forget what they saw as soon as they walk away.¹ It's kind of a funny mental image—seeing a big piece of lettuce between your teeth but doing nothing about it. But ignoring it does not make it disappear; everyone else still sees the lettuce. You start with awareness, and then you move to practice. Without practice, awareness is worthless, but you can't practice until you know what needs to be fixed. Throughout the rest of this section, you'll see sections labeled “Awareness,” “Practice,” and “Awareness and Practice” that provide practical tools for you.

Without practice, awareness is worthless.

In Chapter 12, I compared systems to katas in karate and said that by developing “mental memory,” you'll be able to respond the right way at the right time. The same is true of skills. They require practice. Just as you wouldn't walk down a dark alley right after learning your first kata, you shouldn't rush out on stage to try a new skill.

I have a friend who first learned to drive an automatic car and then bought one with a manual transmission. Initially, learning to drive stick shift made him feel like a worse driver. The same is true of new skills. At first, it may feel like you've gone backward, which is why I tell my clients again and again, “You need to practice offstage to perform on stage.” Without that practice, the new skill will feel awkward and appear affected to the audience. One of my clients wrote, “Breathe!” on his notes, but when he did, it was so “scripted” that it looked very unnatural. He needed to practice that off stage until he was ready to perform it on stage.

You need to practice off stage to perform on stage.

Even with a simple skill, like the correct way of breathing, you must get into the habit of doing it the right way off stage because you can't magically switch over to doing it correctly while you speak. Case in point: I was recently doing more research on breathing and came across an author who said not to take a deep breath before speaking. That contradicts everything I've learned and teach, so I dug deeper. What he was describing applied to deep breaths from the chest. That will cause your shoulders to tense and your voice to tighten. But the deep “belly breaths” that I teach allow your body to relax and ease your anxieties. If you don't practice deep belly breathing off stage, you'll do shallow chest breathing on stage.

This also demonstrates another key truth. Make sure you're learning the new skills correctly. In high school, I had a friend on the basketball team who was really, really good. A lot of us thought we'd see him playing in college someday. But there was a problem. He'd taught himself some skills incorrectly, and they capped his ability to grow. It was something about the way he threw the ball. It worked fine at the high school level but couldn't carry him much further than that. However, his style was so ingrained—and his identity was so dependent on his success—that he was unwilling to humble himself enough to learn proper technique. His career in basketball ended after the twelfth grade. Let's be humble and take the time to learn new skills, the right way. Use YouTube, learn from more experienced speakers, hire a coach.

Lifetime Learner

Over the rest of this section, I'll give you some skills that will really help you speak with confidence, but there are obviously many, many more. Speaking is multifaceted, and each different type requires different skills, new tools added to your belt. The American philosopher Abraham Kaplan wrote, “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”² If all you know how to do is give sales presentations, your motivational speeches will sound like a sales pitch. So, I want you to become a student of communication. There will always be more skills to learn—the only limit to how far you go is your interest and need.

Here are my five suggestions for how to add more tools to your belt:

1. Read books and articles about communication.
2. Study other great communicators (such as comedians, politicians, and preachers).
3. Join Toastmasters (an international speaking club).
4. Sign up for my Public Speaking School (use the discount code “SWC” at https://enroll.stepstoadvance.com for an exclusive discount on the Bundle which guides students through all three sources).
5. Volunteer to speak at events.

As I've said, I can't teach you everything. I chose the four skills in the following chapters because they have proven themselves to be immediately helpful to my clients and aren't included in any of my other books.