Defeloping self-confidence is an essential part to a happy life.
Let’s say that for some reason you don’t feel confident. You feel uneasy with certain things. Maybe with sexual relations, maybe with the opposite sex, job interviews or with being in crowds.
So you develop crutches. The crutches actually stop you from improving your self-confidence. Here’s why.
Some people feel confident only when playing their guitar. They have social anxiety with women so they use the guitar to attract women. But in situations when they don’t have the guitar, they suck. This is what I used to do back in university. I sucked at social situations so I used the guitar to get the girls interested.
Did it work? Yes and no. It did draw certain girls to me, but at the same time it did nothing to increase my true confidence level. Why? Because there are two distinct types of confidence: situational confidence and core confidence. Being good at one thing and using it to boost your confidence is a form of situational confidence. Core confidence comes to you when you don’t need any external situation to create it.
A magician might be confident, but only when he’s doing magic tricks. The bartender can have massive confidence in his job, but be totally hopeless in other situations. In the bar or club, he is the center of attention, women are looking to him, he’s in his element. But put him in a different social setting, like a stuffy, rich wedding-ceremony, and he doesn’t know how to communicate.
Some people need alcohol in order to be able to socialize. They can’t meet people without drinking. They are using alcohol to cover their lack of core confidence.
Perhaps the stupidest crutch of all is to rely on credentials. What a great job you have, how good you are at one thing, etc… This is a form of bragging. Bragging is one of the pinnacles of stupidity. Most people can see right through it. It is yet another crutch to cover up one’s lack of core confidence.
Learn how not to lean on your crutches.
As you let go of your crutches more and more, your core confidence will increase. You won’t need them anymore.
You have to take a look at yourself. You have to identify the crutches you use to get you through the situations that sap your core confidence. The more you put yourself out there without inferior substitutes for true confidence, the more you will grow and change for the better. You have to peel away the useless layers of bullshit around yourself.
Nowadays, I have pretty good social skills, but it wasn’t always like that. My social skills improved when I began to throw all my crutches out the window and put myself out there for all to see.
It is essential that you make the distinction between situational and core confidence and then let go of all the superfluous crap you use as a substitute for core confidence.
This is the only way forward.
Here’s a little exercise:
When you go into a situation that you don’t feel confident about, see it as a video game. As though you were entering the matrix. It’s a metaphor, but a useful one.
Let’s suppose you have social anxiety. What to do? Well, first of all, make a decision not to use any crutches. Secondly, go out and put yourself into social situations. Choose varying places. If you change venues often, people won’t see you again anyways. In the end, who cares what other people think? Opinions shouldn’t matter to you.
Take a friend and go to a club. Try different things. See what works. Then, later, you can look back and analyze what you did right or wrong.
Then just repeat the process. Each time you will get better and eventually true self-confidence will appear, as your skill increases.
It might sound simple, but I did it for years and it works great.
