How to be Confident like Frank Abagnale (understanding the Mind of a Con Artist)
Understanding how to be confident warrants watching this scene from the film ‘Catch Me If You Can’ where Carl (Tom Hanks) is about to bust Frank Abagnale (Leonardo Dicaprio) for the very first time!
When Carl bashes into the room and points a gun at Frank, Frank immediately begins to impersonate a new character to fool Carl with the level of confidence you don’t get to witness often.
But I developed a deep interest in the scene not because of its entertainment value, but because of the incredible confidence, Frank displays here! This got me hooked to identifying the root of where Frank gets this level of control and how to be confident in your own life?
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I went back to this scene at ‘14 minutes: 30 seconds’ where Frank’s father is teaching him about believably conning people.
Then I went to this scene at ‘18 minutes: 30 seconds’ where Frank’s father subconsciously feeds him about how high he’s supposed to fly in life.
Then I went to ‘19 minutes: 30 seconds’ where Frank steps into a classroom as a student but somebody calls out to him as a substitute teacher because of his appearance and within seconds! Frank transits into the mind of a teacher and begins to con the whole classroom.
This scene embodies everything that Frank’s father fed to his mind subconsciously and this embodiment is yet again on the display when Carl almost busts Frank, but Frank finds a way out and makes it look so easy that you can imagine yourself standing in Frank’s shoes and making a fool out of anybody you want.
What’s equally interesting is there’s a breaking point when it comes to Frank’s confidence, manipulating these situations to his advantage. Whenever there are emotional stakes on the line, Frank decides not to deal with them and avoid them altogether.
The scene where Frank’s parents are getting divorced which he thought was impossible, Frank is given the choice to either stay with his father or his mother. He cares deeply about both of them, so which one should he choose?
Instead of his mind working out a genius way to get his parents to staying together, Frank decides not to deal with it and run away from home. This tendency of running away was still on display with emotional stakes on the line where Frank is once again about to be busted by Carl, but this time he doesn’t just decide to run away by himself, instead he persuades his fiancé to come away with him.
Now I got immensely interested in searching out any clues in the movie as to why Frank is so irrational when it comes to these emotional moments in his life.
There was a scene when Frank sees his parents dancing together and he envisions an inseparable happy family. But when his parents get divorced, he doesn’t know how to deal with this reality because he doesn’t want any other reality.
The emotional side of him gets further damaged when Frank finds his mother has married someone else and settled down into a life of her own. This is the part where Frank realizes how his way of life isn’t worth it anymore and what’s really interesting is he wants his father to ask him to stop his conning business, but not to my surprise, Frank’s father with a complexed mind of his own, doesn’t ask Frank to stop! Instead, he further motivates Frank to fly even higher by any means necessary.
This matter reaches its maximum level of complexity when Frank finds out his father has passed away and now Frank doesn’t really know what to think about life anymore. But fortunately for Frank, Carl was there to watch his back and guide him back into having a new purpose in life.
Now instead of Frank playing the con game, he’s now going to work with the FBI to fight against the con game.
Now I understand how the divorce scene messed up Frank’s mind when it comes to dealing emotionally challenging moments and so he gets this level of confidence when his mind knows there are no emotional stakes on the line.
The scene where Carl almost busts Frank, if there was an emotional connection between the two, then Frank would have never been able to outsmart Carl, but it is only by the end of the movie these two build a close friendship organically and smoothly work together.
‘Catch Me If You Can’ is a memorable film with an incredibly confident character, so if you’re looking to understand “how to be confident” I would highly recommend looking into the mind of Frank Abagnale Jr.
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