confidence Archives

How Do I Learn To Love Myself?

November 29, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

A common truism you hear a lot about dating is “You have to learn to love yourself before you can love anyone else”. I’m bringing that up so I can tie dating to something I want to pick your brain on, which is about self-love.

I find the messaging around how one should feel about themselves to be confusing to navigate. One hand, it’s generally understood one should learn to be humble and self-critical, because the mind is naturally biased towards itself and will resist hearing negative things about itself. On the other hand, we warn about self-loathing and excessive self-criticism. A person having too much negative self-talk is a sign of depression.

To make this more personal, I’m one of those people prone to self-deprecating humor. It’s a habit I’ve had since middle school. I admit, it was definitely unhealthy back then when I would say things like I’m stupid or ugly, things I didn’t really believe but got laughs. Nowadays I try to be more realistic (I’m a knowledgeable person and I look okay when I dress well, I think) but I’ll still joke about how much of a loser I am occasionally. I see some criticism of self-deprecating humor and ironically it’s makes me defensive. I think, “Yeah, I’m making myself look bad, but at least I’m humbling myself. Better than being egotistical”.

And that’s what I want to know. How can I have confidence and practice self-love without becoming a narcissist? I see people online express love towards themselves in ways that I could never feel comfortable doing because I believe that if I said them, it would be arrogant. I could never say “I’m hot” or “I’m cool” because I just don’t believe those about myself. I’m not saying that people who do are arrogant, I’m just saying I don’t have the will to stand up for myself if I got push back for saying those things. And I just have a hard time relating to people who do.

And I mean, while lack of self-confidence can be harmful to one’s health and social life, arrogance does still exist right? Whenever we see someone gassing themselves up to an extreme level and acting like they’re the hottest shit in the room we all recognize that person as an asshole. I mean look at the Artist Formally Known as Kanye. Few people looked at that guy and thought “That man is an example of radical self-love”.

What makes the pressure to gain self-love worse for me is the political aspect of it. There are people who practice self-love not just for their mental health, but to push back against a society that devalues anyone who isn’t a cishet white male (What’s that phrase? “Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man”). I’m a POC so I understand the importance of that, but if I’m in a situation where I’m not being valued, I just can’t imagine getting away with responding with “You just don’t want to see a proud afro-latino thrive”.

Where I’m at is that I think I love myself as much as I would if I were a separate person, and that I could love myself more if I felt I’ve improved. I believe my humility is honest and not just a shield to make people comfortable. It might have been back in middle school, but I swear it isn’t anymore. Yet people make it sound like loving yourself is something anyone can learn to do no matter who they are and what state they are at. And if that’s true, then I have no idea what’s holding me back.

So what do you think? How does one gain self-love without feeling arrogant?

Love At Fifth Sight

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How To Break The Paradox of Confidence

September 15, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

If you suffer from low confidence and low self-esteem, you may be familiar with the an effect I refer to as the Paradox of Confidence. It’s a self-esteem Catch-22; you don’t feel confident because you have no accomplishments to feel confident about. However, without having that confidence in the first place, you aren’t able to achieve those accomplishments in the first place.

puzzled young man with cup of tea — “… ok look, could you at least wait until AFTER I’ve had my coffee to hit me with these, Doc?”

In case it wasn’t obvious, is a wonderful way to set yourself up for failure. After all, part of having confidence in the first place is being able to trust yourself and in your abilities. But how could you possibly be confident if all you have are failures, flaws and missed opportunities? But because you have no confidence in yourself or your abilities, you sabotage your best efforts; you take fewer chances, you don’t try as hard and you can’t rebound as quickly or easily from mistakes or failures. These experiences just go on to confirm that yes, you shouldn’t be confident, which causes you to further mistrust yourself and encourages you to just quit trying in the first place.

And if you did succeed… well, who’s to say that this was a genuine success and not some crazy black swan event, never likely to happen again? How do you build your confidence off of that? Especially if you aren’t able to accomplish that a second time?

You could be forgiven for thinking that confidence is just for other people — the gifted few who won the lottery at birth and had success handed to them on a silver platter. But you’d be wrong. The Paradox of Confidence is circular reasoning born out of misunderstanding of just what confidence is. Like validation, true confidence isn’t built from externalities; it comes from within yourself.

But rather than continuing the self-reinforcing cycle of negativity, let’s talk about the mistakes that shatter your confidence. Here’s how to break out of cycle, and develop true, bulletproof confidence.

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How To Talk To Women (And Get Them To Like You)

September 1, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Let’s talk about some common misconceptions when it comes to meeting women.

One of the most common questions I get from men is “where do I go to meet women?”

More often than not, the people who ask me this aren’t asking the right question. They see women all the time, throughout their day to day lives. The disconnect is that they don’t know what to do; they’ve absorbed so many conflicting ideas of when it is or isn’t appropriate to approach women or how to do so that they’re left feeling caught in a trap.

Two friends looking at a woman sitting on a park bench — “Go talk to her bro!”
“Dude, the wind is blowing in the wrong direction and the moon is in the wrong house. This is how you get canceled…”

If they don’t thread the needle of “right time/right place/right method” just so, they’re doomed to be accused of being a creeper. They’re terrified that they will screw up by accident and a good-faith attempt to talk to somebody will crash and burn in a spectacular fashion. Next thing you know, they’re in the final reels of Frankenstein, being chased by a torch-and-pitchfork wielding mob of faceless anti-creep vigilantes. In reality, the worst they’re likely to face is an awkward conversation that is easily forgotten as soon as they leave that person’s eye-line. However, our fears our rarely rational and logical.

The problem that they’re having isn’t that they’re not meeting women, it’s that they don’t know how to meet them. They’re seeing meeting women in terms of a cold-approach scenario, where they’re trying to approach a total stranger and impress her enough to make her consider starting a sexual or romantic relationship with them… and this doesn’t work. In fact, the scenarios most men imagine are almost perfectly designed to backfire in their faces for one very simple reason: women are tired of strangers trying to ‘pick them up’.

The men who are the best at meeting and dating awesome women understand this; they know how to connect with women in ways that bypass the feeling of “he’s just trying to pick me up” and create an immediate and powerful connection. You don’t need the gift of gab or to be a Hollywood celebrity. You simply have to know the right way to approach and talk to women.

Here’s how.

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The 5 Steps To Upgrading Your Life

April 28, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of talk about how this was an opportunity to do things differently. Now that everyone was in lockdown, they had absolutely nothing else to do but work on themselves.

Screenshot of a tweet that reads: "If you don’t come out of this quarantine with either: 1.) a new skill 2.) starting what you’ve been putting off like a new business 3.) more knowledge You didn’t ever lack the time, you lacked the discipline" — Sure chief, nothing like trying to develop a side-hustle when you’re busy trying to, y’know, not die…

Sure they had to balance work, relationships, trying to meet basic needs without catching the plague of the 21st century, possibly dealing with child-care or elder care, home-schooling and the crippling stress that came with living through one of the most psychologically and emotionally taxing periods in living memory… but they were going to make it happen, damn it!

Needless to say: trying to maintain your sanity — with or without the help of your robot friends — during a global crisis is going to take up most of your emotional bandwidth. The fact that you survived to this point is a victory worth celebrating, no matter what else you did or didn’t do during lockdown.

Now that more and more people are getting vaccinated and the tide of the pandemic is slowly starting to recede, we’re all starting to take those first, tentative, trembling steps back out into the world. We’re all in the same boat of trying to dust off those unused social skills and remember how to act like people instead of the feral beasts we’ve all become.

Image of Gollum with a perplexed expression on his face — Wait, this is how people smile, right? It’s been so long…

For a lot of folks, that time in isolation means that they’ve had time to take stock, look at their lives and decide that it’s time to do things differently. Plenty of people, after a year in semi- or complete isolation are ready to make significant — even life-altering — changes to their lives.

But the question becomes: how do you radically transform yourself? How can you become a new, better person? Just as importantly: how do you make those changes stick? Following these 5 steps will help you build your best life ever.

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Ask Dr. NerdLove: What Does Confidence Look Like in Dating?

April 23, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hi Doc!

I see a lot of advice about what confidence looks like in men (body language, especially), but I don’t know what confidence looks like for me as a woman. Most flirting behavior for women seems to be based on submission cues, but everyone says to be “confident” while flirting.

While I know submissive confidence is possible from BDSM experience, I think things might be different outside of that specific context. I’m very used to and comfortable with employing masculine confidence in my professional life as an engineer, but I have no idea how feminine confidence would work.

How is masculine vs feminine confidence the same or different, especially for flirting and dating?

— Show, Don’t Tell

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