Build Your Confidence

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Everyone will tell you: “Confidence is sexy.” This is all well and good, but that murky self-help language doesn’t really do anything to tell you how to build confidence, does it? Sure, it’s fine to just tell someone “hey, be more confident and the women will just start flocking to you”, but as many of you know, just saying the words doesn’t actually progress towards undoing years of reinforcing your own negative beliefs about yourself.

Everybody will tell you “Just be more confident!”, as though confidence was something you could just acquire, rather than something that you develop over time. They’re wrong. Confidence takes time and effort. If it were as simple as the self-help gurus would have you believe, nobody out there would have low self-esteem, therapists would lose half their clientele base and I would be out of a job.

So if you’re finding that your self-worth is lower than a snake’s ass in a drainage ditch, it’s time to start making progress down the path that will help you develop the confidence and self-assurance you need in order to make yourself more attractive to women.

What Is Confidence?

What is confidence? How do you know the difference between confidence and arrogance? And just why is confidence sexy, anyway?

Confidence is, at it’s simplest, the belief that one is equal to the task or situation at hand; it’s the certainty of of the correctness of one’s worth, course of action or ability. The line between confidence and arrogance or hubris is relatively thin; it’s phenomenally easy for confidence to turn into self-importance when it’s not tempered by humility and self-awareness. Arrogance is untested or undeserved confidence; confidence is a belief confirmed by experience. A confident person doesn’t necessarily believe that they can’t fail, but they do believe they can succeed.

Confidence is sexy because of what it says about you; it says that not only are you comfortable in your own skin and secure in yourself, but that you’ve been tested before and you’ve passed. Confident men exude strength. Confidence implies skill and bravery. On a primal level, this is attractive to women because it says that the confident man is someone who has the skills and experience to survive; he can provide for her and their children, protect her against predators. In this day and age when we’re not hunting mammoths or trying to ward off terror birds and Smilodonts, confidence means that a guy has his life together; he’s not going to break down at the first sign of trouble.

But how do you build that confidence?

Fake Until You Make it

It takes time to build up true confidence… which doesn’t do you any good now. You may be willing to devote the time and effort in order to climb out of that whole of self-reinforcing negativity you’ve found yourself in, but what do you do when you want to be more attractive now?

You fake that shit, son. And amazingly, that will actually help you build true confidence.

You see, your brain is directly influenced by your physicality.  In the ’70s and ’80s, psychologists discovered that adopting the physical posture of an emotional state will actually trick your brain into thinking that it’s actually experiencing that emotion. People who force themselves to smile – a real smile, one that reaches the eyes – find themselves actually feeling happier. Men who slouch and keep their eyes downcast will feel more ashamed.

And men who act confident will feel more confident.

Watch interviews with George Clooney and you’ll see what confidence looks like. The man simply oozes charisma and self-assurance.

Watch his body language; his shoulders are back, his back is straight and his head is level. He moves in slow, deliberate motions. He makes strong, lingering eye-contact with whomever he’s talking to, he speaks with low, measured tones and he has that large, toothy grin. Watching Clooney, you will see a man who looks as though that no matter what’s going on, he’s not just secure in his own awesomeness, but that he’s having the time of his life.

Bad posture, shifting your weight from side to side, quick sharp gestures… you need to eliminate these from your physical lexicon. They project insecurity and nervousness, and they will ultimately infect your own self-perception. Adopt the body language of a confident person and you will find yourself starting to feel more confident. And that will be your first step down the road towards true confidence.

Accentuate The Positive

I have long noticed that nerds are almost universally negative when it comes to their own lives. In their own minds, the rules of the universe dictate that they will always ultimately fail and that nothing good can possibly last. They’re defeated before they even start; the girl they like will reject them – or find someone they like better, nobody will like them, they will be humiliated in front of everyone and that everything they do will just end badly. Their successes and achievements mean nothing in the long run… either they’re flukes and random chance, or they’re meaningless in the grand scheme of things. They count for nothing,especially when weighted against all of their failures, both past and future.

It’s no wonder that they suffer from a lack of confidence… they’re too busy sabotaging their own progress and locking themselves into a vicious cycle of failure and self-recrimination.

A confident man, on the other hand, is a man who embraces the good about himself. He’s not just aware of his strengths, he’s proud of them. He has his faults to be sure, but that is just part of what makes him human… but his gifts are what make him awesome.

If you want to become more confident, you have to learn to end the negative, self-limiting beliefs that hold you back. You need to learn to recognize and acknowledge your strong points and the successes you’ve had. Make a list of them and add to it regularly. If you have a hard time coming up with them, enlist a friend to help you. Read it out loud, daily; the repetition will help embed them in your psyche.

Get in the habit of being thinking positive about yourself. Yes, thinking positively is a habit, and you’ll need to cultivate it in order to help break the cycle of self-reinforcing negativity. If you don’t think well of yourself, nobody else will either.

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