"When you make the commitment to becoming great at what you do, and becoming so good that they can't ignore you, that in itself builds confidence."

Master of magic and communications, Vinh Giang shares 7 Tips on how to increase confidence. Vinh combines humor, misdirection (one of his “magic” tricks) and years of experience working with audiences and teams to bring thought leadership to his methodology of becoming more confident. Watch the video and learn more! Don’t forget to watch to see how many fingers he’s holding up!

Tip # 1:
BE PHILMATIC.
Definition: When you take something philosophical and also make it pragmatic. With this first point, this is the point of wisdom. You see, people don't see you through their eyes, they see you through your eyes. As you improve the way you see yourself, it improves the way that I see you.

Can you see how this is a little bit philosophical but at the same time, it can be extremely pragmatic? We often think that, “if I want to change the way other people see me, I'm going to have to change things about them.” Whereas, in actual reality, to change the way people see you, you have to change the way you see yourself. There are many ways in which you can do this – read the next tips and learn more.

Tip # 2:
MAKE THE COMMITMENT TO BECOME GREAT AT WHAT YOU DO.
There's a great quote by Steve Martin who says, “Be So Good They Can't Ignore You.” I love this quote so much, because when you make the commitment to becoming great at what you do, and becoming so good that they can't ignore you, that in itself builds confidence.

Let me explain why. When you become exceptional at what you do, ultimately what that means is that you have more impact – in your family, your work life, your community and in the world. And as you have more impact, you will begin to feel more confident within yourself. And, you know what else? You're going to feel an incredible amount of joy, fulfillment and purpose. These are such important ingredients when you're putting together the cocktail of confidence.

Tip # 3:
MAKE THE COMMITMENT TO IMPROVE YOUR COMMUNICATION SKILLS
The reason why communication skills are so important is because you are able to:

• articulate your thoughts with clarity and precision
• bring your vision to life
• inspire an influence with the way you communicate

These things allow you to feel heard, seen and to no longer feel invisible.

When people experience feelings like, “what I say doesn't matter and what I do doesn't matter” – you feel really insignificant and, even worse, invisible.

Tip # 4:
START FACING YOUR FEARS
One of the reasons why this is so important is because, as we face our fears, we build a bank of evidence to prove to ourselves that we are becoming more courageous.

One of the things that scared me more than anything in this world – even though I'm a keynote speaker and do public speaking for a living – is stand-up comedy. Nothing scares me more than a room filled with less than 10 people who are sitting there with the expectation that you're going to make them laugh. Gives me the heebie jeebies!

So, a couple of years ago I made the decision to face this fear. And I jumped on stage for a five-minute set – this was one of the scariest things I've done in my life. But the moment I did it, and the moment I faced that fear, I started to add to the bank of evidence that I am a courageous person.

And just by doing this, I now fear stand-up comedy even more. JUST KIDDING! I'm no longer scared of it – it doesn't frighten me as much. Before I was 10 out of 10 fearful. Now I'm about a six out of 10. It's just not as scary anymore.

The more you start to do things like this, the more you start to build that bank of evidence that you are someone that's courageous, and as you start to get those badges and put them on yourself, you will start to feel more confident.

Tip # 5:
Just how many fingers was he holding up, anyway? 🤔

Tip # 6:
DO SOMETHING NICE FOR SOMEBODY ELSE
Be kind, be compassionate, do something for somebody else. The act of contribution is amazing. It does amazing things for your self-esteem, it does amazing things for your level of happiness, and I know self-esteem and happiness definitely contribute to self-confidence.

I'll give you an example. The other day I was walking through the city in South Australia, and I saw a Japanese band playing. Watching them play, they were smiling, having a good time and just seemed to be living life to the fullest in that moment. I remembered when I used to do close-up magic, busking in the city for some money. When somebody contributed a little bit of money to me, it made me feel amazing.

I took this opportunity to do an act of kindness – I wanted to contribute to their passion and encourage them to continue their passion, so I gave them a tip. Next, I jumped onto Instagram and left them a comment to inspire them to continue and pursue what they love. They commented back with gratitude, which filled me with joy – it made me feel good about myself. And guess what? All of these things lead to me feeling more confident in who I am as a person.

Tip # 7:
FOCUS ON THE THINGS YOU CAN CONTROL
The final one is a simple, yet brilliant one by a man named Coach John Wooden, who says, “If you focus on the things you can't control. You soon lose control of the things you can control.” This is great wisdom.
If you want to be more confident, focus just on the things you can control and let go of the things you can't control.

Is it important to become more confident? The answer is yes – when you are more confident you become a better parent, son or daughter to your parents, a better partner, a better leader and a can be a better teammate to your colleagues. Increasing confidence transforms how we relate to everyone in our life and how we relate in our world.

Ask yourself right now, which beliefs do you currently carry around with you, that are no longer serving you, that are negative beliefs?

Vinh Giang uses humor and magic to highlight how misdirection is used in his magic tricks and how misdirection also negatively impacts our assumptions/beliefs in our professional and private lives.  

Understanding how misdirection causes negative beliefs and communications to continue in your life, Vinh shares thoughts on how we need to recognize and challenge these negative perceptions in ourselves and transform them into positive beliefs that build us up to our greatest potential. 

VIDEO TRANSLATION

I'd love to show you one of the first pieces of magic that I ever learned as a young magician. Now I want you to watch this coin very closely. If I take this coin here and I squeeze it hard enough, what you will see is the following — if I just snap my fingers, I can make the coin completely vanish and disappear. That’s amazing, right?

The reason you find it amazing is because you've made a false assumption. You've been misdirected. And, the false assumption that you made was that I took the coin and put it into this hand. Whereas in actual reality, what happened was, the coin never left this hand.

So, I'll show you exactly how I did this. What I did was, I pretended to take the coin. But again, the coin stays in this hand. But, the assumption you made was it went into this hand. Again, misdirection has occurred.

When you fall for a magician's misdirection, it's fun, and dare I say, amazing. But, here's the dilemma — misdirection doesn't just happen with magicians. You experience misdirection every day in your personal life and your professional life and it limits your potential.

I want you to think about this, especially in your workplace right now, and in your life personally. How many false assumptions have you made? I mean, I can tell you now in my life, I made the assumptions in the past that I'm not credible enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. I'm not good looking enough. And, when you start repeating these assumptions to yourself over and over again, they gradually become beliefs.

And that right there, my friends, is when you've misdirected yourself. Every single thing we do in our life is grounded in our past history of assumptions. We need to continually have the courage to question our assumptions, and especially have the courage to challenge our existing negative beliefs.

Ask yourself right now, which beliefs do you currently carry around with you, that are no longer serving you, that are negative beliefs? I challenge you to question those beliefs because they may be standing on some pretty darn weak and silly assumptions.

Look, in closing, allow magicians to continually misdirect you — have fun with magic. We all need a little bit of magic in our lives. We all need a bit of astonishment.

But, stop playing tricks on yourself. Stop fooling yourself into believing that you're not good enough. You're not capable and you're not worthy. These are not real assumptions. These are false. You are good enough. You are capable and you are worthy.

Let me leave you with one last quote by Albert Einstein, who says “assumptions are made and most assumptions are wrong.”

You are the direct reflection of the top 5 people you spend time with.
This means you are in your customer's top 5 as well.

Magicians have to learn linguistic and visual influence techniques to be able to entertain and astonish people on stage. Vinh Giang, both magician and influential keynote speaker, unpacks how he uses magic to illustrate the power of influence, which has two benefits: empowerment and inspiration to others, including your customers and clients.

Vinh shares a powerful lesson about the power of influence in a magic demonstration he often uses with his audience, both in-person and virtually. He gives a coin to a person and then asks them to decide which hand to place the coin in. The first time he says, put the coin in the hand that feels right and leave the hand that’s left empty. He repeats this for three more times with the person, all the while providing subtle and hilarious cues to suggest which hand to put the coin in. Each time the person puts the coin in the suggested hand and each time Vinh guesses accurately.

Vinh goes on to explain that the reason why he demonstrates this lesson to his audience, in-person and virtually, is simply to highlight that you are the direct reflection of the top 5 people you spend time with. This means you are in your customer’s top 5 as well. Why does this empower you? Because that means you can decide who you will become in the future by deciding who you spend time with right now. As you improve and become more inspired, you will inspire and bring more value to your customers lives as well.

What skills and what attributes do you need to possess right now to get you to the future you want to be at? For example, if you wanted to improve being a top performer in your company, you could connect and bring into your top 5 someone who is a top performer. Bring someone who has the skill or attribute into your top 5 and you can slowly craft yourself into the leader you want to become.

Nothing happens until something moves — Einstein

Making the Impossible, Possible.

World-Class speaker and magician, Vinh Giang shares how he teaches others to communicate better by using his 5 core communication foundations and that they are actually quite simple.

A key principle, Vinh shares, is your voice mastery and learning to amplify
yourself, among other techniques. He also teaches strategies on storytelling,
body language and much more.

So how do magic and communication relate for Vinh?

Magic is about illusion, the illusion makes the trick feel impossibly complex.

However, when how the illusion works is revealed, the process is actually quite simple. Communication is the same – it can be easily learned by following simple principles and applying them with confidence.

Vinh teaches his core foundations of communication to audiences around the world in his keynote: Mastering the Leader's Instrument.

Communication is as simple as magic. Learn more.

Vinh Giang curates a Communications Masterclass that improves collaboration and creates innovation within your team.

These deep dive Masterclass sessions will take your participants on a journey of communications training unlike any they've ever experienced before. Choosing from a few or all 6 sessions, this training enhances communications skillset, improves collaboration and creates innovation that inspires deep connection within your team.

Training sessions can include:

• 5 Foundations of Communication
• Vocal Archetypes / Storytelling
• More on Storytelling
• Body Language / Hand Gestures
• Rehearse / Dealing with Fear
• Presentations / Written vs Spoken
• BONUS - Participants will learn the secrets behind Vinh's magic to heighten their 'impact' skillset

What I mean by Technical SKE, is it stands for Skill, Knowledge and Experience. And again, this is a false belief, and I'll show you why in a moment. But magicians believed that for us to become extremely successful in our careers, we need to have great technical knowledge, great technical skill, and great technical experience. And look, this is true. But it's not the complete picture. There's another ingredient you need.

However, because of this belief, magicians spend thousands of hours working on their sleight of hand. So if you join me on another camera for a moment, I'm going to give you a bit of an experience of what sleight of hand and technical ability alone looks like.

If you were here, I'd love to allow you to inspect these cards, and you could shuffle them yourselves. But unfortunately, you're not here. So I'm going to have to shuffle them on your behalf. Now, one of the most difficult things to do sleight of hand wise is to locate all the aces in the pack. So in a shuffled pack, you'll notice there's an ace there, there's an ace, towards the middle, there's an ace to kind of towards the front. And then there's another one somewhere that I have didn't happen to see. But there are four aces. And the idea of this is you give the packet of cards to somebody else, they shuffle it, they give it back to you, you have to locate them in an extremely difficult piece of sleight of hand. So just with technical skill, I will show you what that looks like.

Just like this, this is just technical skill alone, nothing else. And with this, what you have to take away from that is hopefully you can already see that technical skill, technical knowledge, technical experience alone is not enough, especially in the world of magic. And I'm going to relate it to your world in just a moment. But let me prove it to you that this is not enough.

Just having this ingredient is not enough. It's still missing one more ingredient and I'll prove it to you with the following analogy. You see, you may be a 10 out of 10 at what you do technically. However, if your ability to communicate is a 2 out of 10, do you think people then perceive you to be a 10 out of 10? Or just a two out of 10? The reality is you are only as good as you can communicate.

So what that means is you may be an expert. You may have all the value trapped inside of you. But if you cannot communicate that with clarity across to another human being, they will not be able to see your value.

Vinh Giang has completely redesigned and reimagined what a Virtual experience can be. Whether you are looking for - An Inspirational Virtual Keynote Experience - or- A Virtual Masterclass Experience Teaching World - Class Communication Skills - Vinh has you covered. NOW at a discounted rate! Watch a clip from a recent virtual session and contact us for pricing.

“I loved every minute of it and was 100% engaged the entire time, which is NOT something I can say of usual trainings or webinars. He is one of the best speakers I've ever listened to."

- SHI Virtual Presentation Attendee

Learn about Vinh's virtual sessions and watch more clips from his talks!

In this world where electronic communication is seemingly taking over, effective communication skills have become more important than ever. Have you ever asked yourself, “How much is the way I am communicating, or not communicating, costing me?” That’s the question Vinh Giang helps to answer for influential leadership professionals around the globe.

Interview with Ty Bennett and Vinh Giang

Ty: Why the focus on communication and what led you down this road?

Vinh: I think a lot of the times when we do the things we do, it's probably because of the impact it's had on our life. For me for a long time in my life. One of the things I do in my workshop is I show my students a video of me from about seven years ago. I freak out every time I look at it again. I can't believe that's how I used to communicate. What is really cool is I used to not want to show the students because out of, you know, pride but by showing the students, they kind of go “wow, you used to be really crap”. 

It's cool because I didn't know that inspires them. For me, it changed my life in that I wasn't able to communicate to my parents effectively. I wasn't able to communicate to those I was working with, I wasn't able to express my value to love interest. Not being able to communicate well held me back so much as a magician as well. I lacked the ability to communicate well. I didn't realize how much I was missing out on. Only in hindsight, is that so painfully clear. Every time I play that video, there's a moment in the workshop I'm kind of inspiring myself to teach even more because of how much I realized. Now having the luxury of having students and the videos that they send me, you know, a year down the track or two years down the track, I go back and I dig up the old videos. It just inspires me so much to do what I do know, because seeing that transition is unreal.

Ty: Yeah, I think it affects all of us, right? Communication is such a universal skill to develop. I often find that people think it should be natural, right? You have a young son and I've got kids, and it’s not a natural skill. You have to develop that. You have to have to work on that. One of the great points that I've heard you make before that I think is maybe a good way to kind of kick this off is, is, regardless of how good you are, how proficient you are at what you do, let's say that you're a great leader, and you have the knowledge, the skills, the competency, that the way that you're perceived will be in direct proportion to the ability you have to communicate that value. Do you want to speak to that a little bit?

Vinh: The way I summarize that is: you may be a 10 out of 10 at what you do. But if your ability to communicate is a 2 out of 10, people don't perceive you to be a 10 out of 10. People perceive you to be a 2 out of 10 and you're only as good as you can communicate. Just like you said, I think in a lot of organizations, as we travel and speak Ty, we both know as speakers that we see so much potential out there in the audience. That potential is not being realized, because the audience hasn't been taught how to improve their ability to communicate. So as we look out into the audience, there's plenty of people who are sitting at a 9 out of 10, 8 out of 10, 10 out of 10. But because their ability to communicate is at 2 or 3 out of 10, the potential is not being realized. As they improve their ability to communicate, they renew their potential. 

How many people are sitting there in boardroom meetings, not voicing their thoughts, their opinions and their ideas? How many people in team meetings are not sharing their thoughts on how things could be better? Not because they don't know how things could be better, but rather because they're either either afraid to voice their thoughts and feelings or they don't know how. Maybe the last time they tried to voice an idea they couldn't do it properly. I didn't know how to do it well and then got shut down because of it. So to me when people talk about, oh, there's so much potential here, I think the pragmatic version is literally what we just spoke about. That as we improve their ability to communicate, we improve their ability to collaborate, share ideas, and to help improve the business.

Listen to the full episode here!

Communication skills are near and dear to my heart. Why? Because they quite literally changed my life. At an early age, I decided to invest in my future by building an online company that could teach magic tricks. I also wanted to become a professional magician. Mom and Dad were thoroughly disappointed that I did NOT become a doctor or an accountant as you can imagine.

Up until this point, I believed, like many magicians, that if we become technically brilliant at something, we become wildly successful. It wasn’t until I learned to couple technical dexterity with powerful communication skills that I was able to fully expand and realize my potential. 

All of a sudden I was winning awards for my magic, and for entrepreneurship. I felt a level of success I hadn’t felt before -- and (this is the good part) -- I found LOVE.  

When I met my wife, I saw her in a bar and I decided to talk to her. I used technical skills - I had a pack of cards with me. I walked over to her and am about to speak when I lose all my confidence. In a terrible, strangled voice I said, “Hello. Would you be impressed if I transform this King of Hearts into the Queen of Hearts like you?”

And she says, “I'd be more impressed if you transformed yourself into a real man and had a conversation with me.”

Communication Skills NOT Technical Abilities are Important

Message received. No, thank you. It's five weeks later and I remember communication skills are key. Not technical abilities. I go to the same bar every Friday just to try to see her again. Months later she was there. So this time I changed my approach. I said, “Hi. Would you be impressed if I transform myself into a real man this time and took you out for a coffee?”

What is lovely about that is I married that girl. So now you can see, the reason why communication is so dear to my heart, is that it's fundamentally changed my life. I've decided to dedicate my life to teaching people to be better at communication skills. I teach leaders how to use their voice. I teach everyone how to use their voice. In whatever you do, you have to know that you are the power behind the power. Do not feel fear when it comes to exploring how to use your voice or when it comes to learning how to use this instrument. As you learn how to use this instrument, your voice will grow and you will expand your potential. I hope that by the end of all of your lives, you'll play many beautiful songs so that you live full, and you die completely empty with no music left.