Diary of a CEO: The WORST Interview of My Life

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 is Diary of a CEO, this is Steven 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 a CEO team, they want to set up an interview when Steven is in Los Angeles.

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'm 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 a water? How can we make you comfortable?

Steven comes in, we hang out and chat for 15 minutes.

Which is a great way to settle people down pre-interview 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 circuitously sorting through what I do,

how many viewers we have, etcetera.

Mercifully, this is cut down tremendously in the final edit.

Which is why 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 interview.

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 are, 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 touch ourselves, we preen 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 Steven's 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 Steven 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, there was a lot of moments in this interview that I felt very connected to Steven.

And there was, there was some beautiful moments in there as well, particularly at the end.

But the interview drops and it was two hours and 10 minutes.

And we had shot for about three 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 would have tanked where 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 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 Steven asked me at one point, what are the things that you should remove?

The things that make people dislike you.

The things that make people dislike 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,

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 hands 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 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 of 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 the rules.

And the second being, let it go and be real.

Be you.

Be the charismatic 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.

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 a significant struggle of my past.

That has shaped me and my coping mechanisms in many ways.

So, I will say, if you'd like to check out the interview,

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 moments 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.