Evan Carmichael breaks down confidence into four pillars: belief in your passion and team, optimism that attracts supporters, sharing vulnerability to build authenticity, and shifting from selling to genuinely helping. He shares how this mindset change worked when pitching Microsoft early in his career.
The next question is how to be more confident around people.
Yeah, wow. So I, you know, I think this is sometimes overdone. I think that the essence is belief. Belief in your passion, belief in your product, belief in your customers, belief in your people, and inner confidence. The other thing that's really important is optimism. You know, again, people just tend to gravitate to people like this guy because they've got eternal optimism, belief, sense of purpose, and, and it does create a volunteer army where people come together behind a mission. Now we'll talk about— I think it's really good to share some vulnerabilities because you can't be always on all the time, and sometimes you have bad days. So it's kind of how do you pick yourself up? And I think you go back to your team, your mentors, sometimes your customers, and actually share those vulnerabilities. Just that we're all human. Sometimes we have bad days. And you find when you share a few vulnerabilities and you haven't got all the answers, people really stand up and become true champions and give you inspiration to carry on.
Yeah, hard for me to argue with Believe. I'm a fan, obviously. I think what I would add to that is just knowing that you can, you can help. When I first started working with brands, as an example, Microsoft was one of my first clients. And I thought, Microsoft, wow, why would Microsoft want to talk to me? How can I help Microsoft? Huge company. They have all this money. Why? How could I even help them? And so that really lowered my confidence. And then I realized by talking to them that, oh, these guys need my help. And so it just made me way more confident in being able to go in. So knowing that that what you have can make them better, make their lives better, I feel just helps me be a lot more confident. It's not like a fake confidence, not me like, fuck yeah, I'm going to be amazing and I'm going to— it's like, you could do it, Evan, you could do it, right? It's not that. It's just knowing in my heart that I can actually provide value to these people, that I'm not selling them, I'm just trying to help them. That gives me the confidence to go out and do what I do.
Yeah. And you know, all of it, you can go and get life coaches, you can go on YouTube, watch loads of videos. But the best thing to do is just practice. If there's anything in life, like as a teenager, I didn't like walking into big groups of people. I could have completely melted away and kind of run a mile. But the more you do it, the more you get used to it. And the other thing, you shouldn't fear anything. Evan says, yeah, I'm a CEO and stuff like that, but I'm just a normal guy. People like me, great CEOs I know, they never forget where they came from. And they're very approachable. They love talking to customers. You know, they're absolutely the essence of just normal people you want to go for a beer with. So when you think about that, you know that they're okay guys. So anybody out there is approachable. If you've got something special, you've got a great idea, you've got a great product, you kind of got a responsibility to share that with the world.
