The Transcript

No. 013 The Keys to Being Confident in Front of the Microphone

Jerod Morris: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Welcome to The Showrunner, where we have one goal: teach you how to develop, launch, and run a remarkable show. Ready?

Okay. Let’s do this. Sorry, I had something in my throat there. You know what, we’ve done so many of these, and it s always hard for me to start them, even though we do this casual opening part. I don’t know why. Like saying the first words — “Hey, welcome to episode 13 of The Showrunner” — I always hesitate, have to clear my throat, and get this moment of trepidation before I say it. Do you think that’ll ever go away?

Jonny Nastor: Probably not. I’ve never even had to do it.

Jerod Morris: Would you want to do it for this one?

Jonny Nastor: Hey, welcome to episode 13 of The Showrunner.

Jerod Morris: You are Jon Nastor, defender of humanity, serial entrepreneur, and serial hacker of entrepreneurs, and I am Jerod Morris.

Jonny Nastor: And cereal lover, as well.

Jerod Morris: Serial lover?

Jonny Nastor: Cornflakes.

Jerod Morris: Like S-E-R or C-E-R?

Jonny Nastor: Oh, C-E-R. Yeah, sorry. I don’t really love Serial, actually, the podcast. I love cereal.

Jerod Morris: Whoa. Wait a second. We may have to do … okay, change the thoughts on this episode.

Jonny Nastor: Bold statements.

Jerod Morris: What do you mean? You’re a podcaster. You have to love Serial and bow down at the altar of what it did and what it opened up for podcasters.

Jonny Nastor: Oh, of course, yeah, totally. But I don’t listen to it. I listened to about 72 percent of the first episode and my mind was just, I’m totally thinking of other stuff, don’t care, and I was bored.

Jerod Morris: Wow.

Jonny Nastor: No, I absolutely bow at altar of it for what it did open up for podcasters, absolutely, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it.

Jerod Morris: Hmm. Interesting.

Jonny Nastor: Maybe it’s my punk rock thing, but I don’t know like bands that everybody likes. I don’t like books that everybody likes. I try not to even do it intentionally, but it’s just something in my head. I go against the grain in that way.

I like unfound art. I like unfound books. I don’t know. It’s something about it. That’s probably had something to do with it when I was listening to Serial. I was like, Ugh, everyone is freaking out about it. I don’t want to join in that water cooler conversation.

Jerod Morris: That and you were probably thinking about cereal the food as soon as you heard the name of it.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, totally. I thought, This is about cornflakes. I totally thought this was about cornflakes, and I’m really upset now.

Jerod Morris: I thought this episode was supposed to be about confidence. I don’t know about you, but maybe we just used this as the intro because now we’re in it, and we re talking, and I was able to get over that initial trepidation I always have that, for some reason, I’m going to flub the opening line, even though it’s the same thing: Welcome to Showrunner episode 13.

But you did it so well. Here we are, so let’s just start talking about confidence. Because here’s the thing — and I want to get your thoughts on it as well, of course — I love nothing more than getting an email or some kind of message from a listener or someone in the course who tells us how what we’ve done has impacted them.

You and I got an incredible, incredible message this week from a listener. We’re not going to say this person’s name, but you know who you are. It was just incredible. It was long, and it was detailed, and it was just wonderful.

One of the things that this person talked about, and specifically about the course and something that she wished was in the course, was something about how to build the confidence in the first place to sit in front of a mic and speak on the air, how to believe that anybody will care.

Considering how much that email that meant to me, and I know how much it meant to you, the least we can do is cover that topic now. That’s why we want to talk about this idea of confidence.

Let me take it to you, Jon. Just your thoughts in general on getting that email and that kind of interaction with an audience member. And then maybe jump into, as you think back on your career as a podcaster, that first time you stepped behind the microphone, how did you get the confidence to do it in the first place?

How Jon Tricked Himself into Being Confident When He Started Hack the Entrepreneur and Then Actually Became Confident

Jonny Nastor: First of all, that email was amazing. I was still in bed, and I read the whole thing word by word on my phone — and that’s a terrible habit, but that’s what I did. Wow, talk about jumping out of bed after that. Ever since I left Ontario a couple of weeks ago and started the road trip, I’ve been meeting people who listen to Hack the Entrepreneur and who listen to The Showrunner and who are in the course for coffee. It’s blowing my mind. It’s amazing to get to meet people that I’ve reached through speaking into a microphone and putting it onto a website. It’s an amazing thing.

In that email, though, about confidence, it made me think about confidence and the way that it seems like I’m probably super confident. But when I started Hack the Entrepreneur less than a year ago now, I tricked myself into being confident. The story goes, I was out at a cottage with my family for the weekend, and I read it Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, and I literally closed the book and was like, “I’m starting a podcast on Tuesday when we get home.”

On Tuesday, I started booking interviews. I’d never done an interview in my life, and I literally used momentum and not allowing myself time to think about how freaked out I was going to be to actually get freaked out about it. I told myself, and I actually wrote it at the top of the sheet I keep on my desktop when I’m doing interviews, which has questions and the format that I’m trying to work with, and it says in giant, bold, red lettering, “To master anything, talk to the experts.”

My thing with an interview show was if I can interview 100 people, and I’m going to interview 100 as fast as I possibly can so I don’t have time to think about this and question my own confidence, which I do often, is that I will become an expert myself. It was amazing, because by episode 80, I found myself on Sirius XM with Randi Zuckerberg, and she was calling me an expert in business. It was amazing. I was like, “Wow.” It actually happened at episode 80, more than interviewing 100 people.

I’d literally just put my head down and went to work and not allowed myself to question it, to edit stuff out, to just worry about it. And I just confidently went into it, but confidently in a very non-confident sort of way when I go and think back to it.

I hope that’s a good answer, but I think it’s really important to point out that people who look the most confident — and I’ve gotten to speak to some amazing brilliant people now who have done amazing things that I would think are the most confident and then people talking to me about it — all of us go through the same struggles, the same issues, the same self-doubts, all of it. We just keep going. That’s really the trick. That’s the confidence. And it looks very confident from the outside, but inside, there’s these screaming voices of, “You can’t do this.” Okay, I don’t actually have screaming voices in my head, to clarify.

The way I did it was I found that trick. I used momentum and not allowing myself time to sit there and think about it for hours and listen back to myself and be like, “Oh, you sound shaky, voice.” Just like, “No. I know I’m going to suck, and I’m going to be good. By the time I get to 100, I’m going to be awesome at this.” It really is just that.

The confidence is different on the outside, I guess, than it is on the inside. It looks confident to everyone else, and often inside of us it’s not. So it’s not just you that feels this self-doubt. It really is all of us. I think if somebody tells you it isn’t, then they’re full of it. They’re just trying to tell you that. Or else they’ve been doing whatever it is you’re talking about, their expertise, for so long that it’s really second nature. Podcasting, to me, isn’t even second nature at this point. I can sound confident in it just because I’ve done it enough now, and I will continue to get better.

How Jerod Used Logic and Experience to Empower Himself to Stink Before He Had Any Real Confidence in His Ability to Podcast

Jerod Morris: Yeah. I think it’s similar for me in that when I first set out to podcast — and this was back in my Midwest Sports Fans days five or six years ago — I looked at it, and I was extremely nervous because I’d never done anything like that behind the microphone before.

But I just thought, You know, everything I’ve done in my life that I succeeded at, I started at some point where I hadn’t done it, and I either became good, or I at least tried and realized it wasn’t for me, but either way it was the right outcome. The worst-case scenario, if I tried, wasn’t as bad as not trying at all, because the worst-case scenario would be the regret of never having tried.

It empowered me to stink at the beginning, because I was, like you said, Well I’m going to anyway, but to only way to get good is to stink at the start. The first time I picked up a basketball when I was — however old I was — two or three, I didn’t know what to do with this orange thing in my hands. By the time I was in high school, I set a school record for three-point percentage.

The first time I blogged, I didn’t know how to write a blog post, how to promote a blog post, how to do any of those things, yet a site that I created was getting millions of page views a month. How did those things happen? Because you do it for the first time, and you allow yourself to stink, and you keep getting better through repetition and through attitude.

For me, thinking through it logically like that helped me have the confidence to step back and do it for the first time. Then you do it, and you realize, “Okay, maybe this is worse than I thought, maybe this is better than I thought,” whatever. But it’s your starting point, and then you always have that as your measuring stick, and you just try and keep getting better.

It’s like you said — you don’t want to be too self-critical at beginning, but you certainly can be later. I actually, just this morning, went back and was listening to some of the early episodes that I did for Midwest Sports Fans. They’re so bad. It’s so obvious I’m reading off a script. I’m talking softly. I’m talking too fast. It’s awful, but it was my starting point. And I’m proud of that, not because it’s good, but because I started and it led me to here.

You talk about how to build the confidence in the first place. I don’t know that you necessarily build the confidence in the first place. You just show up for the first time. However you get yourself to show up, you do it, even though you’re not confident, but then you build confidence by continuing to get better than that first time. If you have a big enough reason to do it and you’re learning new things so you’re improving, the confidence develops overtime. Thinking through it like that has always really helped me out.

Go ahead, Jon.

Tricks and Hacks You Can Use to Manufacture Confidence before You Really Have Any

Jonny Nastor: There are some tricks, though, if you want to call them that, or hacks perhaps.

Jerod Morris: Oh boy.

Jonny Nastor: Oh boy, here we go. They’re not going to work for everyone at all, but that’s what I decided with myself. I became confident enough in my non-confidence that I was okay with it, and then I just created some things, which was momentum: I’m just going to literally start and stop thinking about it. I have this sheet on my desktop of my computer with questions and a format, and it really added to my confidence of doing the first interviews that I ever did, and it still does, actually, to this day.

When the person is talking and I’m taking notes, I know that if they just stop talking that was my fear. They’re going to be giving me an answer, and then they’re going to just stop, and I’m not going to know where to go next, and it’s going to be really awkward. I was like, Well, I’ll just have questions below that under different formats or topics. If the topic goes there, I know that I can literally just look at my computer screen and be like, Oh, there’s a question. Now I’ll just segue it in, and we’ll just go to that. ” That made me way more confident. It was literally a trick that I did.

You can do these things. You have to figure out what will make you confident, and then don’t be afraid. Because Jon doesn’t do it or Jerod doesn’t do it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. If that makes you confident enough to go out there and do it, then by all means do it. You don’t then publicly tell everybody via podcast like I just did, but do these things, and do them confidently, knowing that that works for you. Perfect.

Jerod Morris: That idea is great. It’s having the self-awareness to know your moments when you’re really, really not confident, what can you do to help safeguard against those? That’s a great example. You’re doing an interview, and you’re scared that the spotlight is going to be back on you, and you don’t have anything to say. Build in a safeguard so that you have questions.

I did that exact same thing when I was doing interviews and still do that to this day. But understand that, whether it s having bullet points out. If you’re going to do a monologue the first time and you’re not going to have a script, at least have bullet points so that you don’t get lost.

For me, for some reason, I feel comfortable giving a presentation in front of 600