Progressive Overload & Directing Growth to Get Better at Anything e.g. Gaining Confidence to Talk To Anyone

Ever since you were born you were designed for growth. Your body went through discomfort to grow. Teething issues to give way for teeth. You learned the alphabet to learn words that turned into sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters. The same way spiders, snakes and so many other animals shed their skins and shells to get new ones. Lobsters undergo so much stress when they can’t fit into their shells and the good thing is they don’t have doctors to give them a quick solution or they wouldn’t grow.

So this is the pattern of our life. We grow, we upgrade, we go through dips but we still grow even if it is in a negative sense. And these are the principles we can use to grow in any area of our lives. Just remember that what gets tracked gets managed so you are going to track your progress with excel sheets or notes or just plain pen and paper.

A lot of successful people will tell you that their greatest growth came after a big setback or failure so keep in mind that it is darkest before dawn.

As an example, the next video will show you how to get better at talking to people to gain more confidence in interactions. If you’d like me to make more videos on specific things you want to grow in, please send me a message or leave a comment.

9 Practices to Help you Get Better at Anything:
1 – Decide on a target and don’t worry about a deadline for now. You can start doing that when you’re used to practicing this process.

2 – You can dip your toes in testing the waters (e.g. learning times tables) or dive right in the middle and figure out a way to swim (e.g. going from primary to highschool). If you dive right in you’ll know you’ve bitten off more than you can chew and you can gradually chunk the steps down to more edible pieces so to speak. If you decide to dip your toes in to push your boundaries then you’ll know when it gets too easy for you and can add more pressure.

3 – Block out regular time to do this work on yourself. Say everyday you are going to walk and you will start for 5 minutes until you get to an hour. What helped me when I didn’t feel like working out was that I made sure I still went to the gym and read a book, had the free coffees and teas and then after people watching I was motivated enough to do some kind of workout. So all you have to do is keep inching forward in small enough step that it is impossible for you to fail. The success will make you confident and motivate you enough to want to do more. And there you have the success/confidence cycle.

4 – Write it down or take progress pictures. You will find it to be a very big motivator.

5 – Enjoy the discomfort or pain. Even a rose bud feels pain before it explodes and blossoms into a flower. If the butterfly did not go through the struggle of coming out of the cocoon and was helped, it would not survive because it didn’t make itself strong enough to even leave home. You can connect some kind of pleasure to the pain. Eg. If you want to start running, reward yourself with a foot massager so you can use it after your run.

6 – Be realistic and don’t push yourself to a point of burnout. Say you want to be a great speaking like Tony Robbins. It is a good idea to have that as a target but keep in mind you can’t just achieve that overnight. If Tony Robbins is on the 50th step of speaking and you are on step 3 then you need to find inspiration and advice from people who are 5 and 10 on the steps. Or even 4 if you want to take each step in to the fullest.

7 – Don’t be too hard on yourself, take breaks but don’t give up. If you were not successful in one method figure out how others got to where you want to be. There is always someone out there who has been through the same hurdles for you to finish the race. When I wanted to get better at speaking on the phone, I dove into it and failed lots of times because I wasn’t speaking to the people about things I cared about. Now I manage a store where I speak to people all the time about a store I’ve put my blood, sweat and tears into. I’ve shifted from going through anxiety hours before I made a call to wanting to be the first one to takes the call.

8 – Which brings me to the company you keep. It is known that when a cyclists or any sports people want to get better they do it in a group because when training alone the results are not as good. So if you want to get better at speaking, be around people who are already good at holding a crowd, see what makes them good. Join a toastmasters and get feedback from the pros. If you want to lose weight, diet better or be more physically fit, there is no point hanging out with so called experts who don’t look or act the part.

9 – Finally don’t compare yourself to others, it is a waste of what you are. The only person you can compare yourself to is the old you. I call that person Yester-Me. That is the only person I want to be better than.

Growth is inevitable. You decide where you want to grow. Do you want to grow on the couch, do you want to grow your skills in being lazy, do you want to grow your skills in not taking ownership, making excuses and hiding? Or do you want to grow into the best version of yourself.

How have you decided to be better than yester-you?

5 Tips for Gaining Confidence to Talk to Anyone

You can skip ahead in the video depending on how far you are in conversation skills and confidence.

1 – First thing you are going to start is just exchanging on sentence with someone you don’t know. Say you take the bus everyday, you see so many people that you wouldn’t regularly see. Or it could be a shopping mall. Don’t over think it just go straight to any person even a friendly security guard or janitor. You find a person and just asked them what the time is. Questions make the other person do the talking. They tell you the time, you say thank you and thats it. Now repeat that everyday until you’re you feel you can take it up a notch. Someone I was helping felt a setback when the person told them how come they don’t check their mobile as it has the time. In this case you can say I’m asking because I wanted to confirm my mobile has the right time or you could just say ‘duh, I didn’t even think of that, thank you’. You can also use self-deprecation or humour like you’ve not had your morning coffee or ‘looks like it’s time for me to get a coffee’.

2 – Next you are either going to increase your number of sentences or you are going to pick a group of 2 or more people. If you increase the number of sentences I’d suggest doing it at a cafe where you get something regularly. Ask for your usual and then ask about what their popular pastry is or what is in a particular sandwich as it looks interesting. Keep going in and increase your number of questions. If you decide to talk to a group of more than 2 you can ask for directions to an obvious place. For your own peace of mind you could pick on a group that is a family or friendly looking mixed group. Women are very social and helpful.

3 – Now that you are comfortable talking to your cafe person or groups you can introduce ping. Something I love! It is when a conversation flows between 2 people. It would look like A asking a question, B answering with a statement and then either asking a related question or moving that same thread with another statement that A could munch on and ping back. E.g.
A – what is in that sandwich, looks interesting.
B – it’s got chicken, avocado and mayonnaise. People love it for the Turkish bread. Would you like to try it?
A – I do love avocado but I’ll give it a go the next time as I need to be in a meeting like 5 minutes ago.
So the next time you have something to talk about and the time after that you can ping more about the how they were right about the bread or even break rapport and talking about what a messy eating experience it was. Note, breaking rapport is part of advanced conversation so I wont get into that unless there is interest. Think of it and as a beautiful string of interaction you are creating with others by just adding a bit more thread to.

4- NAMES! This is my favourite, after several interactions with anyone that I know I’ll see regularly I will ask them their name and joke about how it is nice to be formally introduced. With the number of customers at the store I manage it can get hard so I try to use mnemonics to remember different people. Say I have a few Michael’s coming into the store. They are pretty easy to remember but just to be safe I’ll imagine them doing a moonwalk or slam-dunking a Space Jam character etc. Start using their names at the start or end of interactions. ‘Hey Michael, I was just wondering if you were coming in today, you’re late! See you next time Micheal.’

5 – Volume and speed. One of my personal pet peeves is when I say something and the other person says ‘what?’ or ‘huh?’. Indicating to me that I’ve not spoken loud and clear enough. Remember that your voice is coming out of your head so it sounds much clearer especially since you understand what you’re saying before you’ve said it. I might even be the accent. I can’t count how many people I’ve given this advice to… speak louder and slower so that you don’t have to repeat yourself a 3rd time. I will repeat way way way louder than needed. If the person talking to you doesn’t speak clearly you could either repeat what you think they said or ask them to repeat as you didn’t understand clearly. ”Sorry did you want to chicken and cheese or a chilli and cheese?” “I didn’t hear you clearly, could you repeat your order please?”

There is no limit to where you can grow from here. Entertaining a crowd, speaking in different settings, making and breaking rapport to get more intimacy, phone conversation, public speaking, etc. If you have any questions please feel free to ask in a message or comment below and if there is enough interest I’ll make a video on it too.

I highly recommend this resource on talking to anyone – 3 Book Summaries on How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes, Larry King and Toastmasters