Guide to Confidence
Confidence is a high degree of certainty about what you can and can't do. It isn't a personality trait you're born with. It is built through practice and repeated success.
Two kinds of confidence
- Positive confidence: knowing you can do something, like driving to the shops.
- Negative confidence: knowing you can't (yet), like solving a Rubik's cube.
Both are useful: one leads you toward success, the other keeps you away from failure. Most people mean the positive kind.
How it is built
Confidence comes from repeated results. Each success at something makes you more certain you can do it again. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work here, any more than you could fake fitness or chess skill. The work has to be done.
Repeated failures wear confidence down, even for top athletes and traders. Not caring too much about the outcome softens the blow, but the real fix is learning what's going wrong.
Why it's attractive
Faced with a challenge, a confident person shows calm instead of anxiety, action instead of indecision, and a plan instead of hesitation. Groups naturally follow that person, and that is a big part of why confidence attracts people. Confidence in one area of life also tends to spread to others.
Confidence with women
Approach anxiety often comes from setting goals far beyond your current confidence: talk, win her over, seduce and date, all at once. Break it down:
- Just talk. Aim for a comfortable two-minute conversation with anyone, men and women, starting in your own social circle. Then leave without trying to drag it out. Having no further agenda removes the "creepy" feeling.
- When that feels automatic, move on to the next goal (building attraction), and so on.
Measure success by how comfortable you were, not by the result. There will be failures along the way. That's normal.
Key takeaways
- Confidence is a skill: learn it, practise it.
- It comes from repeated success, so start with small, winnable goals.
- Raise the goal only when the current one feels easy.
See also
Summary of a post originally shared on Reddit's r/TheRedPill.