It looks as if not everyone in this thread is talking about the same thing when it comes to confidence.
Some posters are treating it as courage. Others are talking about showing confidence, but not feeling it.
Feeling confidence is the state of being certain about something. I don’t believe that’s a worthwhile goal to strive for. I can understand the value of looking confident or having courage, but inner confidence isn’t necessary for both those things. I’m almost never confident about anything I do. However, a lack of confidence doesn’t stop me from doing something and pretending to be confident about it.
From the OP, it sounds like you’re treating confidence as a lack of uncertainty. Be careful when you treat it that way. You might misinterpret what it takes to accomplish certain goals (assuming you want to be confidence to accomplish something.) If you are waiting to feel good or confident about something before you do it, then you might never do it. Sometimes you have to feel terrible about something and do it anyway. Your feelings will catch up to you later.
**Kapri’s **book suggestion sounds like it can be helpful.
The converse is also true. At least as it applies to me. Maybe if I could go back and choose another set of parents I’d have a better idea.
As a child, if I ever did anything well, my mother would make a point of telling me not to get a big head about it. She was forever ‘taking me down a peg or two’, just in case.
This makes a lot of sense, but in my experience, it is often wrong.
I have worked with screamingly incompetent people who were so confident that management never noticed that they were driving the company straight into the ground. I have seen this type of person destroy departments, projects, marriages …
On the other hand, I have worked with and known people who view every success as evidence that they did not set the bar high enough. If they bring a project in on time and under budget, they think they screwed up planning the project. (About half the time they convince management they are incompetent, too. Management has a lot of idiots.)
This, in my experience, is the truth. People become what they pretend to be.
Study the body language and speech patterns of people who you perceive as confident, practice them, adapt them to yourself, and practice them a lot.
Furthermore, people view us as we present ourselves, so the presentation of confidence is a very important social and professional skill.
Have you ever tried high blood pressure medication? I got some for my first presentation, my honors thesis, and it relieved all the physical symptoms of stress, but doesn’t get you all spacey.
Of course, messing with your blood pressure can be dangerous, so you’ll want to get your doctor your doctor involved with this experiment.
Then, once you know the physical sensation of calm, you can use basic mediation techniques to induce it.
My social confidence came about after realising that every single person in this world is a bit weird in some way. I used to be quite shy in the presence of people with wealth, beauty and/or high educations (especially as I lack all three :D) but over the years I’ve found that such people are really just as dysfunctional as the rest of us.
What works for me is being ready and willing to admit when I don’t know about something, ready and willing to admit to flaws in my person (physical and psychological) and willing to take the piss out of myself. Once you start taking yourself and your abilities too seriously, you lose credibility with others. Confidence comes though when you accept that we’re all pretty much the same underneath.
This is really the biggest part to it. Once you learn that you can control your feelings by faking your way into them, confidence is easy. So is avoiding negative emotions or inducing happy ones. It’s why I hardly get dragged into emotional fights with the fiancee and why I can act with revelry at the drop of a hat, to the point that others may think I’ve been drinking (because of course they wouldn’t be that extroverted unless they were drunk).
But aside from that, here’s what I’d do:
Realize that you’re middle-of-the-pack in just about every way. Sure, I can play chess well, but there are thousands better than me and thousands worse than me. Since the extremes are so far away, I’m really just competing against myself.
Know your strengths and weaknesses. Use the former, admit the latter. I’m good at speaking, writing, learning, relating, and thinking. I’m bad at empathizing, sports, driving, and cleaning. And that’s OK with me.
Realize that no one can read your thoughts and no one noticed that little slip up from earlier. Everyone is human. They all have faults. They’ll likely forgive your faults, and most of the time, they don’t even notice you have them. If you act like it’s no big deal, they will to.
But seriously, the most important thing is to fake it until you make it. Put on your strong face and eventually the strong emotions will come.
Several people seem to think being thick-skinned is being self-confident. I would disagree with that. You’d be discarding sensitivity that is useful.
IMO you start by knowing yourself and what you want out of life. Figuratively list out the pluses and minuses. Compare those to the requirements of what you want to get out of life. Figure out whether it’s reasonable to get where you want to go with what assets and liabilities you have.
What helped me a ton was a huge amount of reading. Vicariously learning that “hey, other people have these issues too!”. And of course the more reading you do, the better you get it at, which is a nice reinforcer.
Play to your strengths. If you don’t have any, start working on getting some. If you’re not currently picking up a skill, find one that looks interesting and put time into it.
Self-esteem and confidence feed each other. The more you succeed at, the better you feel about yourself. The better you feel about yourself, the less doubts will interfere with success.
This isn’t a thing where you just throw a switch and you’re there. It takes a “lifetime” of work and most probably you won’t be confident in every situation.
Doing the thick-skinned thing is probably a quicker path, but IMO it costs too much.
It sounds cheesy, but visualization plays a big part of it for me as well. For example, right now I am an assistant teacher abroad. While usually out-going, I do sometimes suffer from the occasional episode of social anxiety. I find that before I enter the classroom, if I mentalize myself going in with a bold greeting and rocking the socks off the class, I find myself having a much easier time. I know I’m not alone on the mentalization/visualization technique. In fact I first learned it from maybe Cracked.com or somewhere. I don’t subscribe to the whole ‘visualize success and it will automatically be yours’ school of lunacy, but at least for self-confidence, a little bit of visualizing seems to go a long way.
This is what I came in to say. (Well, not the part about Architects and Fathers. You can substitute Engineer and Mother there. )
I’ve noticed that people who define or judge themselves against other people are frequently not as confident as those of us who judge ourselves against our own standards.
I’d think the first thing to do is decide “who is the person I want to be?” in all aspects of your life. Visualize that person as you go about your day, and strive to meet the mark.
That’s one thing I did, anyway.
[/QUOTE]
These posts sum it up for me. I’m a barrister. I’ve been appearing in courts for over 20 years. It’s freakin’ intimidating!
How did I learn to do it? by appearing confident, and knowing my stuff. The way you look and carry yourself doesn’t just influence others - it influences yourself. And if you’re always measuring yourself against others, you will always fall short.
I also found the internal pep talk to myself very helpful, just before going into court - not to recite all the things that I’ve done wrong or could go wrong, but all the things that I’ve done right.
It started out with: “Look, you’ve got a law degree and you’ve passed the bar - you can do this!” With experience, as the cases got harder and more significant to the client, the pep talk got longer, but that’s also because I’d been doing more cases and succeeding.
Remind yourself of your successes, not your failures. Or, if you did fail at something, remind yourself of how you learnt from it and got better the next time the same thing happened.
What other people do should not be your concern. Just worry about what you do.
I always hate the expression “fake it until you make it”. It’s a lot easier to be confident and competent with adequate preparation. And if you are prepared, it’s not really “faking”.
There are different kinds of confidence. Preparation might be adequate if you need the confidence to say, give a talk or presentation. However, what if you need confidence for a date or other social situation? You can’t really “prepare” for that beyond having experience. Which brings me to . . .
You said that confidence comes from achieving goals and ultimately realizing that your choices control your life. However, in order to achieve the initial few goals, you need confidence. It becomes a chicken-and-egg sort of situation, where you need confidence to gain confidence. “Faking it” can be a good starting point until you actually “make it.”
Or you can learn to do things without confidence. It’s a mistake to assume that you should be confident about something in order to do it. Confidence helps, but it isn’t necessary.
Treat others like you’d want to be treated. That’s a great start. Part of having confidence is not having regrets to weigh you down.
As mentioned before, think “What’s the worst (likely) thing that could happen?” Most things in day-to-day life don’t really matter that much, and even if something goes wrong if you just stay calm and rational it won’t be nearly as bad.
If you have doubts think about what you can do to minimize them. If you can’t do anything about the doubt, don’t worry about it. Think of something else.
Nobody is better than anyone else. That doesn’t mean you’re special, you’re no better or worse than the pope or the poorest beggar in some third-world country. Everyone has problems, everyone puts on a front to some extent.
Act like you know what you’re doing, and if you screw up be cool about it. If you need help and you think others would know, ask someone what they would suggest.
Look forward to good times. Even something as mundane as getting home and eating some ice cream. Humans seem to like having things to look forward to.
Try to accomplish something every day. It doesn’t have to be big. Clean off the coffee table. Throw away the newspapers that have been sitting in the corner for weeks. Pay your electric bill.
This, pretty much. Because of overconfidence bias, quite a lot of confidence out there is not due to objectively succeeding at difficult tasks, but comes from within - whether it’s an innate personality trait or a conscious decision to adopt that personality trait. In other words, don’t expect reality to give you rational reasons to be confident to the level you see in others; to a large extent you have to manufacture your own.
It’s helpful to keep in mind that, as recounted in this thread, many apparently confident people are not nearly as confident inside as they present themselves; there’s a lot of conscious and subconscious…“finesse” in how we all present ourselves, and a major bias is in the overconfident direction. (It’s also important to recognize that we’re pretty much hard-wired to give more credence to people who act confident, whether or not they deserve it. It’s worth compensating for this bias in your decision-making.)
“Cool” is mostly attitude, how you react to the world around you. As an example, there was two of us guys out hitting the bar scene one night, and somehow it got into a competition who was going home with this one hottie. Since I ended up going home alone, I guess people might say that HE won. Still, I wasn’t the one who came down with a dose of the clap.
“The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that the ordinary man considers everything as a blessing or a curse, while the warrior considers everything as a challenge.” Carlos Castaneda, “Don Juan; Tales of Power”
I know, it sounds simple but, granted, it’s hard. Work at it. Takes time, but the reward is worth it.
You can’t prepare for a date? How about researching some decent restaurants to take her to? Maybe think of a couple of activities she might enjoy?
Confidence comes from mastering the fundamentals of whatever activity first. Not the other way around. That’s one of the reasons athletes tend to be confident. You can’t “fake” having a jump shot or running a 4 minute mile.
Maybe that’s the reason so many people have so little or false confidence. It’s easy to “fake it til you make it” if you don’t have to actually prove anything.
Agreed. Just go out and do it. I’m surprised about how many people seem to lack confidence about such mundane things as joining a gym or going to a bar by themselves. Get over yourself. The rest of the world is not waiting around to judge you and fuckem if they are.
That’s why in my original post I mentioned being competent as also being important. Faking it won’t turn a zero into a hero, but it will make somebody who has the skills yet is somewhat unsure of themself eventually turn confident.
Short term action, calms the nerves but doesn’t affect your head.
)