Speaker A
A few weeks ago,
Charisma on Command reflects on his worst interview experience with Diary of a CEO, sharing key charisma mistakes and lessons learned.
Key Takeaways
- Preparation alone does not guarantee charisma under pressure; mindset and body language are crucial.
- Nervous habits like touching the face and poor posture undermine confidence and presence.
- Clear, concise communication is essential, especially when answering common questions.
- Charisma development involves both learning rules and eventually letting go to be authentic.
- Editing can salvage recorded content, but live situations require stronger real-time charisma skills.
Summary
- Charisma on Command discusses his worst interview from a charisma perspective on the Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett.
- Despite thorough preparation and a professional setup, he struggled with nervous habits like poor posture and hands on face.
- He spent excessive time rambling instead of delivering clear, confident answers to familiar questions.
- The interview was heavily edited to remove awkward moments, but live it would have been problematic.
- He identifies three main charisma mistakes: crossed arms, hands on face, and collapsed posture.
- Poor posture contributed to anxiety and disconnection from the present moment, affecting his performance.
- He reflects on the learning process of charisma as phases of adding rules and eventually subtracting them to be authentic.
- He emphasizes the importance of letting go of rigid rules and speaking from the heart for genuine connection.
- The experience highlights the challenge of applying charisma techniques under pressure despite expertise.
- He encourages viewers to learn from his mistakes to avoid similar pitfalls in high-stakes interviews.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
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.
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I did it in front of millions of people.
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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.
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So, I want to start with a photo.
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This is going to tip it off what interview it was. This is Diary of a CEO, this is Steven Bartlett.
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Awesome dude, had a great time with him, his team is amazing.
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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.
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This photo right here, I have three, which I will detail.
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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.
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So, a month or two ago,
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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.
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And I say yes.
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I've seen their podcast, I'm very excited to do it.
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And they're so professional, they do everything they can for me to make this interview a home run.
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We have a pre-interview call, which is actually rather rare.
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And they talk about the topics they want to cover.
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They ask me if there's things I want to do.
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They see if I want to do a live charisma breakdown.
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Which I say no to because it takes me a long time to do those.
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But we basically iron out the types of things we're going to be talking about.
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And during this period, I'm sharing, you know, what's going on with friends.
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And they're telling me that I should probably prepare for this.
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And I sort of agree, and I sit down to try to prepare for it.
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And every time that I do, something in me gets fidgety.
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I'm like a kid who doesn't want to do his homework.
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And so, the week before, I'm starting to review some of my old videos.
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Because I know there's going to be questions from the past in there.
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But even that is just feeling uncomfortable.
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And next thing I know, I'm in the car driving over.
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And we're in the studio.
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It's a 10-camera setup, it's the most professional thing I've ever been to.
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The team is incredibly friendly, incredibly inviting.
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Do you want a water? How can we make you comfortable?
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Steven comes in, we hang out and chat for 15 minutes.
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Which is a great way to settle people down pre-interview for nerves.
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And I'm actually feeling pretty comfortable during this entire interaction.
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I'm excited.
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And then he goes, starts and asks the question that I've been asked legitimately hundreds of times.
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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?
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And the answer to this is written on my homepage.
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I've said it hundreds of times.
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It's, we help people turn on their charisma and confidence in the moments that matter the most.
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I know this like I know my own name, like I know my social security number.
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And instead of saying that, what I do is I just start yapping.
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I have no idea what I'm going to say, but I'm just yapping in circles.
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And I probably take no exaggeration, not just on this question, but in these introductory questions,
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about 10 to 15 minutes of circuitously sorting through what I do,
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how many viewers we have, etcetera.
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Mercifully, this is cut down tremendously in the final edit.
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Which is why his team sort of saved me from this.
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And it doesn't look like the worst interview I've ever done.
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But it was abysmal.
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Had this been live television, people would have definitely tuned out.
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And been like, why is this guy teaching charisma? This is so uninteresting and confused.
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And as I look back, it's genuinely hard for me to watch the interview.
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It took weeks before I could do it.
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In fact, friends asked me how it went, and I was like, it was a crash and burn situation.
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But I just want to go to this photo and start to talk about the concrete mistakes that I made.
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So you can see here, the three that I'm referring to are, first one,
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crossed arms, forgivable, it happens at times.
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Second one, which is just utterly egregious on camera, which is hands on face.
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This is a, this is something that I do and people do when they're nervous, right?
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We, we touch ourselves, we preen ourselves.
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And I did that in almost every photo in here has me with a hand on my face.
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But the big one, the one that I think led to a lot of this, was my very poor collapsed posture.
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And so when you have poor posture, you see Steven's is quite nice here.
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It's tougher to take a deep breath, it's tougher to calm down.
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And this sends you up into your head where you start thinking a lot.
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And like I was, yapping.
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I was not grounded in my body, I wasn't connected either to the thing that I'd done 300 times,
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nor deeply to the present moment to be able to respond in a slow, powerful, coherent way.
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And so eventually what happened is a week and a half later,
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after I texted Steven and said, hey, did that go okay?
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And he kindly assured me that he thought it would turn out great in the edit and he had a good time.
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Which I did too, there was a lot of moments in this interview that I felt very connected to Steven.
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And there was, there was some beautiful moments in there as well, particularly at the end.
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But the interview drops and it was two hours and 10 minutes.
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And we had shot for about three hours and 45 minutes.
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So about an hour and a half got cut of this.
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And it came out okay.
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It came out pretty good even.
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I hit the points that I've talked about in the past.
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There's moments of genuine connection between he and I, which are on camera and captured.
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So thank God for the 10-camera setup that allowed for such smooth editing between the pieces that I did wrong.
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But like I said, if this were live television, it would have been a huge issue.
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So as I reflect now, weeks later on what went wrong,
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because it would have tanked where this an interview or a job process.
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I did not turn the charisma on command on.
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I'm trying to figure out why couldn't I follow my own advice?
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Why couldn't I do big gestures?
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Why couldn't I get my hand off my face?
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Why couldn't I speak more clearly and confidently and most obviously,
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have a clear answer to the questions I knew were coming.
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This is a core tenant of what I teach in the Charisma University course.
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Why did I feel like a child with homework to avoid beforehand?
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And what I'm starting to realize is that I think that there are phases to learning anything.
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There's an old phrase that first you must learn the rules before you can break them.
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And when I look at the last 10 or 15 years of charisma on command, it is me learning the rules.
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It is me sharing with you the ideas and habits that I've been adding to myself.
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Move your hands like this.
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Make eye contact like this.
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Tell stories like this.
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Even the things Steven asked me at one point, what are the things that you should remove?
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The things that make people dislike you.
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The things that make people dislike you.
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These are things that I'm adding.
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These are ideas about things not to do, so you're going into conversation with extra awareness.
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Don't put your hands in your pockets.
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Don't talk about this topic in this particular way.
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And that's the first stage of, I guess, any sort of art is you're adding to yourself, you're emulating others.
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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,
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the way that my system reacted when I sat down,
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a period of time where you stop adding to yourself and you allow yourself to let go.
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You subtract.
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You forget all the rules about what your hands should do and how you should tell the story.
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And you drop into your gut and your heart and you just speak what is real in the moment.
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And in my life, with charisma, with every interaction that I'm having, this is what's going on for me.
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And it is a very scary experience, especially when the cameras are on.
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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.
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As I've shared with you in so many videos in the past.
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And there's a part of my system that just won't let me do it.
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And if I try, now I'm yapping.
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Now I'm speaking from this confused, spun up, heady place.
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That is neither the old charismatic, performative way of being, nor is it this new grounded, present way of being.
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And so, I guess what I wanted to do in this video is share with you that,
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probably to come, there's going to be things that sound contradictory to things that I've said in the past.
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And I don't think that they are.
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I think that they're representative of different stages.
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The first stage being, learn the art, learn the skills, learn the rules.
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And the second being, let it go and be real.
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Be you.
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Be the charismatic person that you always are underneath all of the social conditioning and fear.
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So, that's what happened.
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That's,
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that was, it was an incredibly anxious week of my life.
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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.
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And then the weeks after, the reactions that I got were so loving and kind.
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And particularly, as I mentioned before, there was something that I shared at the end of the video.
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That I've not talked about on the main channel, that has to do with a significant struggle of my past.
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That has shaped me and my coping mechanisms in many ways.
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So, I will say, if you'd like to check out the interview,
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and see all of the things I talked about, including now with a greater eye, a lot of the cuts in the beginning,
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hopefully some of the more connected moments in the middle and that piece at the end.
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I will put a link in the description here.
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But,
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between you and I, it's okay to let go of the things that I've taught you in the past.
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You don't have to come into every conversation and every interaction trying to improve and better yourself.
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In fact, I guess what I'm learning is that there is a time to just be.
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So that's what I got for you today.
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I appreciate you guys.
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I'll see you in the next one.
Topics:Charisma on CommandDiary of a CEOSteven Bartlettinterview mistakescharisma tipsbody languageconfidencepublic speakingpersonal developmentcommunication skills
