Dr. Aziz explains a confidence technique called 'finish strong': ending situations positively boosts how you feel about yourself and what others remember. He uses personal stories to show how this works.
Welcome to the art of extraordinary confidence. I'm Dr. Aziz, and today's confidence tip is called finish strong. And this is something that really helps you shift out of a place of feeling down on yourself, discouraged, low confidence, low self esteem, anxiety, whatever, into a state of being much more confident in yourself. And you can do it much more quickly than you think. And I call it finish strong. So where this comes from is when I was younger, I was in high school, I ran cross country and we'd do these long runs and we'd be tired and, you know, so it'd be 8, 10 miles and we'd kind of be coming back to the campus to conclude the run, and you'd sort of be like kind of slumped over and chugging along, trying to make it to the end. And right before we got to the campus, the coach who was running with us the whole time said, guys, finish strong, finish strong. And he like, he kind of call you out to like, step up and like, hey, look, you've done this long run up stride into the campus, and we get in there, be like, like stallions. And so, like, you know, it doesn't matter how tired we're like, all of a sudden we get to the campus and we're like, you know, like any ladies watching and we had this like, strength in us that five minutes ago, I didn't think I had in me. And it's because of that decision of, like, I'm gonna finish strong. And this is exactly what you want to do, is you want to finish strong. No matter how something has gone for you, you want to finish strong. If it goes awesome, finish strong. If it feels like you didn't do how as good as you wanted, finish strong. If it feels like if it was a miserable failure, finish strong. So here's what I mean. You do a presentation. You're at a party, mix two things right there. Let's say you do a presentation at work and you're like, oh, my God, this is. I messed this up. This is not going very well. I don't think. Right. Finish strong. You steer the course the last two minutes of it. Nail your conclusion to the presentation. Or you tanked on the presentation, say, are there any questions? Don't say, like, oh, Jesus. So I'm just going to sit back down now because that was a failure. Or you say, are there any questions? I'm so sorry. No, it doesn't matter. Say you didn't do as well as you wanted the presentation and say, okay, are there any questions? As if you've been running that way the whole time. Do you get the point here? Or you're at a party and it didn't go the way you wanted it to. You're like, I didn't talk to anyone, I was the weirdo in the corner. Or I asked someone, I talked to a few people, I didn't have a very good time or whatever. You finish strong. So what does that look like at a party? Well, whatever it is for you, you walk around and you talk to a few more people. Hey, how are you doing tonight? Or on the way out, you say goodbye to a few people. Alright, I'll see you later. Whether you know them or not doesn't matter. Hey, I'll see you later, right? You finish strong. One little story about this. I had a guy that I was doing a weekend intensive with and we'd done a lot of exercises that day out. And if people do work with me in person, the weekend intensives, we don't just sit in the office and talk. I mean, we do some in depth session and powerful transformation work. But then we get out into the world because we gotta test this stuff out. That's how we break through, is through action. So we did all kinds of stuff. I mean, had him really pushing the edge of his comfort zone. And at the end, you know, it was like maybe three or four hours we were out there and he was like. And I was like, do you want to do any more? He's like, no, I feel pretty done for the day. And I was like, great, it makes sense, you've done a lot. So let's go back to the car. And so he's just like, okay. And he's like sort of shuffling back to the car. And I was like, wait a minute, you know, we'll just call him, call him Tom, it's not his name, but Tom, you gotta finish strong. I told him the story about cross country. So I was like, what would finishing strong look like for you? He's like, well, I guess on the way back to the car, I'd walk with my head upright. I'd say hi to people as I walked by to them. I'd just relax to greet people as I walked back to. Hey, how's it going? How you doing? So that's what he did. He walked back to the car and said hi to a bunch of people on the way back and he finished strong. And the power of this is you realize, you start to train yourself to realize like, no matter how bad something's going, I can turn it around. And I can finish strong. And then eventually you can start bringing that to the middle or even the beginning. I mean, I've had presentations where I get up there in the first 10 seconds, 20 seconds, my mind goes totally blank, and I'm nervous as shit. And I'm just like. But I've trained myself to be like, all right, we can switch this. And the more you start by finishing strong, and then on top of that, you is, people remember the last thing more than anything else. It's called the recency bias, I believe is what it's called. Maybe not call me out any social scientists, I'm sorry, but it's like they remember the most recent thing, the last thing, so you finish strong. They'll remember that. So it's incredible in terms of the impact it has on people, but also on your own confidence. So I encourage you this week, the next situation you're in, bring this with you. Finish strong until we speak again. May you have the courage to be who you are also. Subscribe below, Leave comments Give it a like and to know that you're awesome. I'll talk to you soon.
