Transcript: Elena Paweta interviews Fred Joyal

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

boldness, bold, exercises, business, relax, smile, employees, book, nervous, conversation, social skills, life, person

SPEAKERS

Fred Joyal, Elena Paweta

Elena Paweta  

Welcome to the next episode of IDEAS+LEADERS Podcast. Today I have a great guest it is Fred Joyal, he is number one Amazon Bestselling Author, he isa speaker, an entrepreneur and business advisor. And today we’re going to speak about a very interesting topic about becoming bold and overcoming shyness. Hi, Fred. It’s great to have you on IDEAS+LEADERS. 

Fred Joyal  

It’s great to be here. Thank you. 

Elena Paweta  

Your book Superbold is number one Amazon bestseller. Congratulations on this! Can you tell us a little bit about where did you get this idea to write this book? How did it all started? Tell us a little bit about your story.

Fred J0yal  

Well, I was a very shy person growing up and in my early stages of my life, and I gradually had to figure my way out of it because I kept missing opportunities and fun and relationships and everything. And it just frustrated me. And after a couple of really big misses. I said, I got to fix this. And I would see bold people. And I would wonder why they were that were they born this way? Why are they like this? Why don’t they process rejection like I do? And why don’t they embarrassed? Why? Why did why did they just go out and do stuff without worrying about it. And I gradually taught myself to do it. And then I was teaching some high school students many years later, and I would say, boldness is a superpower. This was part of a whole mentoring program. And I explained that, you know, the cure for a life of regrets is boldness. And they said, that’s great. How do we do it? So I made a commitment on stage, of course, which is makes you have to get it done to write a book about a systematic way to cultivate boldness. So then I worked on that for a couple of years. And that’s what this is, this is a book about actively changing and cultivating and increasing your confidence and boldness radically, so that you have it as a life skill. So that’s where it all came from. And it’s been really resonated with people, which makes me very happy. Yeah, so this is definitely a topic that we all need. And I think that we often look at those bold people and pursue will say, Wow, maybe I would like to be like him or like her. 

Elena Paweta  

So do you think that everyone can learn to be bold, even the most introvert and shy people? 

Fred Joyal  

Yeah, and the reason I say that is because I did it, because I’ll go, you know, experience by experience with people to say, Oh, you think you’re shy? Well, I can top that I did, I missed this, this happened to me, this happened. So I worked my way out of it. It didn’t change my personality, what it allowed was for me to bring my full personality into the world and offer it to everyone that I encounter. And I can meet anybody I want to meet, I can talk normally, to anyone, I can talk to 5000 people on stage, I can do a presentation to a marketing team, I can meet an athlete or a movie star, and have a great conversation with them or a billionaire. And anybody can do it. It’s just a life skill you develop almost like you would develop like you would get in shape. Or learn to sing or learn to play guitar, any one of those things, you can do it. And it just can happen a lot faster than you think you just don’t have a method for doing it, which is why I developed one.

Elena Paweta  

Yeah, so when we go to gym when we want to get fit, we have a trainer and the set of exercises that we have to do regularly. Is there something like this, if we want to get bald? Is there something that you can recommend to do regularly in order to build this muscle? 

Fred Joyal  

Well, yes, and that’s what the second part of the book is, is five levels of exercises that take you from very simple nonverbal exercises to start to get you more and more comfortable to expand your comfort zone on a gradual basis, so that you feel more and more confident in more and more situations and you develop the social skills, and also even the neural pathways that allow your default mode to become bold, rather than hesitant or shy or under confident. So the exercises are started simply as just smiling and everybody you meet, waiting for somebody not to smile back, your goal is to find somebody who won’t smile back to teach you that you don’t have to take that on that what they’re thinking what’s going on in their day. It’s got nothing to do with you. So let it go. And it takes practice to do that. It’s toughening yourself up in some ways, but also this insight that people you know, you don’t know what kind of headspace they’re in. And there’s no reason to take it on. If there’s only a small number of people whose opinion should really matter to you. And stop worrying about complete strangers and what they’re thinking of you. This is what bold people do. They never take that stuff on. And it’s just a shift in mindset. Because the truth is, those people don’t know you. So why would you worry about their opinion about you? But we do know that people are going to laugh, I always say, what people? Oh, well. I said, Do you know any of them? Do they know you? Would they be accurate? If they had an a judgement about you based on a snapshot of you? Well, no, okay, then don’t take it on, let it go. But we have this, you know, deep in our primal programming, that we need to fit in, we don’t want to get kicked out of the tribe, because 100,000 years ago, you got kicked out of the tribe you died, you needed the tribe to stay alive. So we have this strong need to fit in. And Boldness is about overcoming that to actually chase your dreams. Now, of course, as a business person, it takes boldness to say, I’m going to start this business. Now, when I started my business many years ago, one 800 dentist, everyone told me it wouldn’t work. That’s a terrible idea. That’s never been done before. It’s not going to work. You don’t know how to do it. They had all these reasons. So I had to be bold enough to say, it doesn’t matter what they think it matters what I think because I think I can do it. And my partner and I did it. Now we could have easily taken the discouragement as good advice. But you have to summon the boldness to say, No, I will figure out how to do it, I will I will do something that hasn’t been done before. Because and we need that we need bold people making a difference in the world. We need entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, are the ones making the world a better place. 

Elena Paweta  

We have a lot of entrepreneurs listening to us. And it is great that you’re touching on this topic. So you definitely need to be bald to start your own business. But also you need something more. So what would you recommend to our listeners who are looking for this perfect moment to start or maybe they started and they are not feeling very secure? What would you recommend to them, based on your great experience, what is the most important, especially in the beginning of running your business?

Fred Joyal  

There’s a lot of people that they use perfectionism as a way to not be bold. They say I’m going to get it really right, first, I’m going to get this business really good. And then I’m going to launch it, I’m going to perfect all of these things. That’s just a way of saying, I don’t want to fail. So I’m just going to keep tinkering with it. I’m going to keep adjusting it. What all successful entrepreneurs, basically create a minimum viable product, launch it and fix it as you go. Because you don’t know what the market wants until you push it out there. You could have to pivot four times in the course of the first year of the business or the first five years of the business. And they may only care about one of the five things you offer. You have to be bold enough to go out and try it. To be bold enough to sell it and pitch it bold enough to raise money to do it to believe in yourself and say no, no, I’m going to make this work, I will make your money it to five times that money that all of that takes boldness. You can’t just be an inventor or an engineer you, you can be a creator, but you got to be bold enough to launch to sell to raise money. And you got to be bold enough to take feedback. We hate feedback. We hate criticism. We like Praise, praise, feels great, has no information whatsoever. Makes you feel good criticism. It’s all information. Now you can weigh how important it is. But take it all on I use the example when I lecture is like I know a bunch of people love the lecture, I thought it was great and change their life, whatever the heck they’re going to say to me. I want to talk to the guy who thought I was an idiot, thought I was full of it. I want him to tell me why I didn’t get through to him or why I was wrong, or what was wrong about my presentation. You know, I had one guy come up to saying after the lecture, he said you shouldn’t use curse words in your lecture. It really offends people. And I thought, did I curse? Because I don’t remember. I know generally when I curse, I said “shit” in the lecture to him that was cursing. Right? And it was this great moment of like, wow, to some people. That’s not a casual word that they stopped listening because I said that. So I don’t need to say I can say crap. I could say junk, I could say trash, right? So that feedback, it takes the boldness to say, What’s What did I do wrong? It takes boldness to watch a video of yourself. And you know, as podcasters, right, we watch our podcasts and we go like, What the heck are we doing? Why are we you know, why are we saying that? What’s with the facial expressions, you know, and all of that. And, and we get better, because we’re willing to painfully watch the video is this we become afraid of making mistakes. And this is both entrepreneurs, you can’t be afraid of making mistakes, because that’s how you that’s how everything is built. 

Elena Paweta  

Absolutely I can totally agree with you that it is so important to just act and just go there to the market. And you definitely need to be bold for that. So you mentioned that in order to become bolder, to become more courageous, we can do certain exercises, for example, we can smile and look for people who are not smiling back. What else can we do to become more courageous, especially for people who are introverts, and for some people, it is really hard to just smile and to look people in the eye. So what would you recommend to such people?

Fred Joyal  

Well, a lot of what I talked about in the book are these social skills that people don’t teach you how to make someone feel like the most important person in the room. This is this is a life skill that you should learn how to do. And mostly it’s about listening and paying attention. But I go into much more detail about it. But there’s all of these exercises are, are meant to make you comfortable. Like the next step would be to just whenever you’re in a Starbucks or a coffee line, or somewhere where you’re lined up with people start a conversation with the person in front of you. And the easiest way to do it is just by complimenting that, say, oh, that you know that outfit looks great on you. That was a great choice. It really goes great with your hair. Oh, thank you very much. The trick is to make sure you have no agenda. That if you if you project that you have a motive, you want to meet them, you want to sell them something you want to give them your business got any of these things that people do by accident because they think they’re networking, what they’re doing is repelling people. What you want to do is invite people in by offering them a gift, which is a generous act of appreciation, a compliment, and then just leave it there. Now it could turn into a whole conversation. But what you’re going to do is make a habit of doing that so that occasionally it turns into a conversation. I’ve had it I’ll give you an example. I was in the Starbucks line. The there was a flight attendant in front of me I was at the airport. And when she went up to pay I just said to the cashier I said, you know, Can I can I pay For her coffee, she has such a wonderful smile. I just wanted to show my appreciation for Can I buy her coffee? Now, some guys with that think that’s a pickup line, except I didn’t turn and try to ask her name and get to know her. And so she just was beaming with appreciation. She says, Oh, that’s so sweet that you would say that, thank you so much. And then I let her walk away. Now, when we were both picking up our coffee, we had another quick exchange, we had a human interaction. But it was because I had no agenda, that interaction occurred. And that’s, that’s it’s such an important life skill. Another thing like I have you doing all sorts of crazy exercises, like, if you see a sign that says employees only go in, if it’s not locked, go in. You know why? You’ll figure out what bold people know, which is that 99% of the time, nothing bad happens. But we’re constantly telling ourselves of what could happen, oh, people are going to yell at me, they’re going to kick me out, nobody’s going to beat you to death, nobody’s going to arrest you for going in an employee’s only. Broom, the sign is the only thing keeping you up. If you go in, people are going to assume you belong there. And if they tell you to leave, you’re going to leave because you’re not an employee there. But you what you’re doing is you’re building up your boldness muscle by realizing, wow, I don’t have to label that as bad. I was walking in there knowing I wasn’t an employee. Or you’re walking in the back of a supermarket where it says employees only somebody is going to say, Can I help you? They’re not going to say get the heck out of here. What are you doing? You know, I’m calling the police, they’re not going to do that. But we build this stuff up in our mind. And we do this with everything. Under confident people are masters at coming up with the worst case scenario, or a dozen worst case scenarios. And bold, people don’t do that. They act and deal with whatever happens. And they don’t label anything as bad. They don’t label anything as a failure. It’s a mistake to learn from it’s a, it’s a new experience to learn from. That’s all the end. So what they do is they just keep getting stronger and moving up and moving up. They don’t get discouraged. They just learn. And they and they don’t take it on. They don’t take the most severe criticism on as anything but information to get better. Because they believe in themselves. It’s a really powerful shift when you realize you are worthy. Because we’re constantly telling ourselves, we’re not worthy. We’re not worthy to talk to this person, we’re not worthy to meet this person. We’re not worthy to try this thing. People don’t want to buy our stuff. Only these new people would want to buy our stuff. We don’t know that. Why don’t you find out by talking to everybody who would actually want to buy your stuff. And then decide who your audience is, rather than try to pre decide. So you don’t embarrass yourself because you’re so worried about rejection, that you shrink your audience, your potential customer base down so tiny that you can’t make a living.

Elena Paweta  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this employees only sign I find this hilarious. It is such an amazing analogy to what we actually do to ourselves in our minds. Because this sign is something that we put on everything that we are afraid of doing. I’ll do it later, I’m not ready, I don’t want to do it – we are putting labels on things and making excuses. For example, even looking at the my podcast, sometimes I’m inviting a person who is amazing and I know that they would be they would speak about very interesting things and concepts. And they are great when we speak off camera but when I am asking them to be on my podcast they get stressed and say “oh, maybe let’s do it next month because this month I have something…” and they come up with all sorts of excuses. Why not now and I think that this this employees only sign is something that we put on a lot a lot of things for ourselves in our lives, and we just need to go there and just start doing this. 

What else can we do? We can smile, we can complement people. What else can help us on a regular basis to become more confident, more bold?

Fred Joyal  

The goal is to do something every single day to do a boldness exercise, and analyze what happened. What could I have done differently? You can go a little crazier you could be in let’s say, you’re in Starbucks, you see somebody sitting alone, you say, do you mind if I sit with you? They’re gonna probably saying, Yes, I do mind. But in your mind, they think that’s like 99% of people are gonna say that I have found that it’s about 10% That actually say that. The rest of them just go, oh, yeah, sure. And you sit and you leave them alone. So you reinforced that it was okay to let you sit. So they relax. You know what happens? They start talking to you. And all of a sudden, I have I’ve had hour long conversations with people that I’ve done that. Why? Because I was ready for them that they had every option to say no. And it was ridiculous that I was asking, in my mind, like part of the way back in my brain. This is ridiculous. Why are you asking this? Because I’m expecting them to say no, and I’m not going to take it on. If they say no, because it’s their right to say no, I’d rather sit alone. I’m busy. I’m working on something and making a private phone call whatever the heck it is. That’s all right. But I’m just asking to sit. They could say, well, there’s a bunch of empty tables. Why don’t you go sit at one of them? And you just go Oh, yeah. Thank you. And you don’t take any of it on? It. It’s just it’s an experiment. It’s social interaction. And then they can just do like, stuff that you go, Oh, I shouldn’t do that. And there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it. You’re at the movies. At the end of the movie. You there was a great movie, stand up and yell. “I love this movie”. You know what? Nothing’s bad’s gonna happen. A bunch of people are gonna go “I didn’t like it that much”. Or, “yeah, I feel that way too”. Or some people are gonna clap. So gonna go “Oh, yeah, I loved it”. You can do the same walk into a candy store and yell, “I love chocolate”. Or an ice cream shop. Just yell it. Nothing bad will happen to you. You’re in a place where people are eating ice cream. They love ice cream. You give me a clue. They feel exactly about it like you do. They’re just not yelling it. So they look at you like you’re weird. Or they go, “Yeah, I love ice cream too”. I’m, I actually feel exactly how he feels about ice cream. He’s just happens to be expressing. You do that sort of stuff. And you realize you don’t die. Right? You realize there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. And that some people will find it interesting. Some people will find you weird. And so what? When you can say so what to all of these stupid things that you’re telling yourself in your head? You can make a giant leap forward.

Elena Paweta  

Yeah. And what what kind of leap can we make in terms of our careers or in terms of business opportunities? Do you see that people who become more bold, they, it actually reflects in their business life in their private life.

Fred Joyal  

It affects every part of your life. Because you say what’s on your mind, you get better because you’re comfortable making mistakes, inviting feedback, trying stuff, the only guarantee of failure is not trying. That’s is when you know, you will not succeed. Everything else has some margin of potential for success. And every bit of failure has information that leads you towards that success. Now, it could be that, you know, some people say no, I’m confident most of the time and I say Yeah, except when it really matters, right? And they say, yeah, like if I really want to meet somebody, like I see an actor that I really want to talk to, I can’t talk to them. Or I see a really attractive man across the room. I want to go talk to him. But you know, I’m afraid he’s gonna think I’m coming on to him and I just really want to meet him but I have a little optimism that he might be an interesting person to date or whatever. And the woman stops themselves. And then they watch some other woman walk up and talk to the guy and they go “why did that happen”? And the guys do the same thing, obviously. But bold people don’t do that. So when you what you’re doing is practicing to be bold when it doesn’t matter. So that your bold is muscle is strong. long enough, when it does matter, I’ve met amazing people just because I was able to calmly walk up to them and talk to them and have a normal conversation. If you’re anxious, and nervous, you’re going to project a certain weirdness, and you’re going to have trouble with your processing chips, right? You’re not going to say what you want to say, your tongue is not going to work. Well, you have and part of what I teach in the book is how do you relax yourself? Before something important like that there are techniques for very quickly relaxing yourself.

Elena Paweta  

So what should we do to relax ourselves, especially when we’re in a situation like, for example, we need to speak in public, I think that those are the most common situations when we get super nervous, and we don’t know what to say we forget everything, when we need to present something when we have maybe presented the conference or even in the small conference room. So what are what do you recommend? How can we relax ourselves in the moment?

Fred Joyal  

The very basic techniques are and there’s two steps to it. The first is to check your physiology, what are you doing, that’s tensing you up, like when we’re nervous, we tend to, like, fold our arms or tighten ourselves up, put our shoulders up. Yeah, you know, will even stop breathing will get so anxious that we’ll stop breathing. Because we’ve done this, we perceive psychological danger. So the body says danger. That’s one category, I know what to do. Tense up, stop breathing, pump, these threes are flight, chemicals in our body, which slows your cognitive skills down and depletes your memory, it’s about saving yourself, it’s about defending yourself, it’s not about being your creative, open self. So you have to shake that off, literally, physically catch yourself doing it and go, and then it’ll shake off it like you can’t stay like this, if you say, I’m just gonna shake my shoulders down and move my neck around and rattle my body a little bit, shake it off. Animals do this all the time, you see a dog that’s had a stressful moment, they’ll just do it. We have trouble doing that as human beings, but it’s really effective. To do the same thing. 

The other thing is focus on your breath, take three deep breaths, it’s amazingly calming. And when you start to relax yourself, you realize you can relax yourself, so it drives it down, you go, I am in control of my state. The other if you’re really anxious, or you feel it really rising, you can actually make a sound to vibrate the vagus nerve that runs down the center of your body. It’s called the vagus breath. Vag us not Vegas, like the breath you have from staying out all night in Las Vegas. But the the, the breathing, making this sound, you take a deep breath and then you go let this out very slowly a go you do that as long as you can you do that three times. You’ll be astounded. You’ll feel it, relax you and then you can say, Okay, I’m more relaxed now. And then you can run with it. And most of the time, the only anxious part of everything is starting. And once you start once you get you know, it’s public speaking classic for that people get all anxious, and then once they end in the first five minutes, they’re they’re nervous and they’re incoherent maybe or something like that here and all of a sudden they sort of find a groove and away they go. Or they never get off the nervousness but most of the time it’s the front end that’s really hard or something goes wrong once you’ve built your bowl this muscle anything can go wrong on stage, and you’ll just use it I’ve had the power go out while I was on stage and just keep right on going emergency lights come on and I just I have no more projector I got no more bike. I’m still going and and or I’ve gone out and I’ve had like my shirt half on tucked because the sound got put the wire for the mic under me and didn’t and I didn’t I was such a hurry to get back on stage the wires hanging out my shirt, and I didn’t notice it for 10 minutes. And as when I noticed it, I make a comment and everybody laughs You know what happens? I become human to that. Now I could be humiliated. Right or I could just go, Yep, I probably should have dressed for the occasion. And they’ll just laugh at me. And I said, like, the sound guy touched me inappropriately, I could say any number of things. Because I’ve decided not to take it on as embarrassment, I have chosen not to be embarrassed. And that’s when you realize that’s a choice. That’s really powerful. And when you start to execute that, you realize you’re invincible, that nothing can go wrong, because you don’t have to label it that way. You can roll with it. Because you’re relaxed and calm enough to say, how do I make this fun or funny, or, or let it let everybody and when everybody sees that it rolls off you. They say, Wow, she’s really comfortable on stage. Wow, nothing that you know, you break your heel, and you go, here I go again, you know, I’m going to have to spend more than $30 on shoes from now on. And they will just die laughing, right that you said something like that. And, and you go, guess the rest of the show, I’m doing it barefoot, and you kick off your shoes, they will love you. Because you embraced it, you didn’t crumble, you stepped up and they did and they will, they will just admire you. That’s why what i The final part of my book is from under confident to charismatic charisma is just when you’re confident everywhere you feel like you belong, wherever you are, whatever happens when people see that they are drawn to you magnetically, and you can learn to do that.

Elena Paweta  

Yeah, great tips. Thank you so much. I actually remember one of my “best” moments when I lost my voice on stage, I was speaking in front of a very big audience, and I lost my voice in the middle of my presentation, of my speech. And then I, I had to finish. And I finished whispering. And after this, you know, nothing happened. I didn’t die. People listened to my whispering for some time. And after this, when speaking in public, I’m like, what, what worse can happen, then this?

Fred Joyal  

Yeah, that’s really hard to come up with it not being able to make sounds anymore.

Elena Paweta  

Yes, the more uncomfortable we get, the more uncomfortable situations we are exposed to, the more confident we are in the next situation. So I think that this is really a great tip. Thank you very much, Fred, for speaking about being bold about being courageous. It was such a pleasure. So summing up, what is the biggest advice, that you can leave our listeners with, what they should do every day, in order to get bolder and bolder?

Fred Joyal  

Well, I always like to point out this very important thing is that the only person you need permission from to have the life you want is you. Nobody else you don’t need permission from anybody else. So you have to decide that you are worthy of the life you want. And you are you just have to acknowledge that and act and boldness will become a life skill that will transform every aspect of your life. And anybody can develop it. And that is how you’re going to chase your dreams. That is how you’re going to have a satisfying, fulfilling life. So cultivate it, do it, start doing it, do something bold every day. And I can lay out how you’re going to do that in the book. 

Elena Paweta  

Thank you so much. You’re so inspiring. I’m already inspired to be even more bold every day. Where can we contact you if we want to reach out to buy your book to ask you some additional questions?

Fred Joyal  

So the book is available on Amazon. It’s in hardcover. It’s in audible, and it’s me reading it, and it is on Kindle it is in ebook form. So there’s three ways you can get the book. If you do it in a digital form. You’re going to want the exercises in a physical form. So you can go to fredjoyal.com and you can download a PDF of the exercises because you’re gonna want to physically have them so you can download them. You can also download the first chapter of the book at Fredjoyal.com and get a sense of if it’s something you want and also if you want a half hour conversation with me because I do keynotes I do executive coaching and I’ll just but I’ll help anybody if you want to book a half hour conversation with me because you just say, Look, I I don’t know how I’m ever going to get out of this under confidence this shyness box I’m in or whatever, get jumpstart me help me out what? I do shy, I can’t do it. I’ll get you out of the house. I’ll get you doing stuff. Give me a half an hour. So you can just book that on my website.

Elena Paweta  

Perfect. Thank you so much, Fred. It was a pleasure speaking to you today.

Fred Joyal  

Thank you very much. I hope this was valuable for everybody. Get out there and be bold.