They LIED To You About Confidence

You’ve been lied to about confidence.

It is the most important thing for a young man to build, and yet we are never taught how.

All this wishy washy modern day body positivity bullshit just tells you to “love yourself” “you’re special and perfect just the way you are”, but young men feel less confident than ever.

I remember this one particular day just over a year ago, my class went on a school trip, where we like camped overnight and did some activities.

But we were split into random, different groups, and I ended up in a group with all the cool guys and the popular girls. Not one of my neeky Indian gamer friends was in this group.

And I was terrified.

Any time we’d do an activity, or we’d all get together as a group, I felt like hiding. My confidence was so low that I almost felt like I wasn’t good enough, like I wasn’t worthy of even talking to these guys.

I couldn’t even hold eye contact properly, I felt like there was this invisible wall between me and the rest of the group.

Then on one of the last days of the trip, all of the guys we were in a tent, in our sleeping bags. And the guy next to me says to his friend “did you see what I put on the groupchat?”

“what groupchat?”

“the one we made for our group on this trip!”

My confidence was so non-existent that they had made a group chat with everyone in our group except for me.

But of course I didn’t have the confidence to even tell them and let them know, I just turned away in my sleeping bag so they couldn’t see the tears that were starting to form in my eyes.

Having low confidence has got to be one of the worst things for a young man. You’re not even happy being yourself.

I often found myself daydreaming, imagining I was someone else, I was THAT guy in my class.

It’s so crushing to look at yourself in the mirror every day and wish that you weren’t yourself.

And then obviously in social situations this has a devastating effect. You feel like you’re not even worthy of talking to other people, you’re awkward, you hide away. You overthink every little part of your body language, your facial expressions, what you’re going to say.

But what a lot of people get wrong is that they think confidence is something you’re either born with, or you’re not.

That’s just not true.

I spent the next year and a bit rebuilding up and boosting my confidence in every way I could, and it has worked. Everywhere I go I feel like I deserve to be there, I can talk confidently to any one, guys or girls.

But the best thing is that I feel good and proud being myself. Hopefully I’m saying it correctly so that it hits in the right way.

I feel good being myself.

I don’t daydream about swapping places with this guy or that guy. I don’t wish I could be someone else. I look in the mirror in the morning, and I honestly wouldn’t swap places with anyone else on the planet.

Confidence in Social Situations

So the big concept you’ve got to realise is that confidence comes from competence.

Confidence comes from your capability to do something.

All this modern day body positivity feminist campaigns tell you “you’re perfect just the way you are” “you should feel good about being yourself-”

Bullshit. 

Confidence is simply how comfortable and capable you are. So if you don’t feel confident about yourself in any sort of ability, or in your ability to learn it, then it is simply because you haven’t earned the right to.

You haven’t earned your confidence.

Your brain will give you the level of confidence that it thinks you need or deserve. Because, Chris Williamson has a saying that I really like, confidence without competence is self-delusion.

Your brain knows that you haven’t achieved enough to be confident about your abilities.

Now straight away, you’re going to start coping. You’re going to say, “no, but I need confidence before I can talk to girls, before I start my YouTube channel, before I can go to the gym” – no you idiot.

Confidence comes from you doing these things. You can’t be confident about something you’ve never done before. What you are asking for is self-delusion.

So what you have to do to build confidence is to find the skill that you don’t feel confident in your ability to do them, and just relentlessly improve it. You’ve got to have a growth mindset, and realise that, yes, even though we all have different starting points and situations, through focussed effort and feedback, you can significantly improve any ability.

Let’s take social skills.

That’s probably the reason you clicked on this letter – you don’t feel confident in social situations. So practice and improve your social skills.

The more you put yourself out there and actually try to talk in these scenarios, the more you read books such as How To Win Friends And Influence People and actually go out and apply the principles one by one as you read them, that’s when you will build up your capability, your competence in those situations, and then with that comes confidence.

This is probably the only video about this topic you’ve seen where the person didn’t say “have confident body language”, telling you to walk around with invisible lat syndrome.

And I’m not saying body language and posture aren’t important, of course they are.

But this is something I’ve learnt from the book The Charisma Myth – you can’t control every single little aspect of your body language. Your body language, your facial expressions, they’re all simply reflections of your internal state.

So if inside you still feel like a loser, you feel awkward and uncomfortable in social situations, that is still going to be reflected and show up in your body language.

You think you can control it, but you can’t control every single tiny little muscle in your face. The other person subconsciously, through evolution, will be able to register even a tiny micro-expression, and will realise that something is off.

You have to build up that confidence in social situations by first building up your social skills.

I’ll give you a few extra tips. Have less of a filter. A lot of these guys who have low confidence, they overthink every single thing that they say. They think it has to be absolutely perfect, the funniest or smartest line.

Charlie Houpert from Charisma On Command (6 million+ subs) talks about this – a lot of shy, awkward guys think they have nothing to say, but I can guarantee you do.

There is some thought in your mind right now.

If you’re actually present in the moment, and not overthinking about what you’re going to say next, you have some thought in your mind about what the other person is saying. It’s just that you’ve set your filter so high that you think this thought is not good enough to be said.

Just say it.

You’ve got to stop worrying so much about offending other people.

Another aspect of having too much of a filter is not being loud enough. You have been conditioned by the school system to always stay quiet, no outdoor voices in the classroom.

The only way you could talk is if you whisper to the guy sitting next to you. So you probably speak waaay too quietly. That is not a sign of high confidence.

So right now, just shout.

If you actually tried to do it, it probably felt really awkward and weird. Even if there’s no one else in the house with you, you almost felt a bit wrong for doing it.

That’s your conditioning.

You probably felt that burst of adrenaline. It’s one of the best things you can do for your masculinity, as well as your confidence.

So just as you go about your day to day life, when you’re talking to other people, make a conscious effort to be louder. Obviously don’t go around shouting, don’t be a dick about it, but just raise your normal speaking voice by a few decibels.

Self-confidence

Now self-confidence is when you literally feel good just being yourself, when you know that with enough time and effort you can achieve success in literally any area.

Any area.

I honestly can say that I do. If I decided tomorrow that I wanted to become elite, top 1%, in computer programming, I know without a shadow of a doubt that I would be able to. It would take a lot of work, I know that, but I could.

This is why I have complete confidence that I will hit 1000 subscribers before December. That I will hit 10,000 before July next year. As I am writing this, there is not a shadow of doubt that I can do this.

Don’t you want this level of self-confidence?

This comes from being able to trust yourself. I have complete and utter trust in myself that I will go and achieve these goals, because I’ve proven trustworthy in the past.

Set yourself a goal. Whether it’s gain 5kg of muscle in the next 5 months. Or tell yourself you will read 10 pages every night before you go to bed.

Every time you tell yourself one of these things, and then you actually go and achieve them, you are proving yourself right. You are able to trust your ability to achieve the goals more.

You will have complete confidence, you will be 100% sure that when you say something, you can achieve it. You will be able to trust yourself when you say, “I have to go to the gym today.”

Because when you do the opposite, if you tell yourself you have to go to the gym today but then you pussy out and don’t go, then you lose trust for yourself. You know how shit, how low-confidence you feel after.

So set yourself a goal, and go and achieve it.

Impostor Syndrome

I’ve talked about how you have to earn your confidence, and this is true. However you might be struggling with a bit of something called impostor syndrome.

This is when you have competence without confidence. When you have achieved some success, but you feel like it was a fluke, you didn’t deserve it, or you’re not actually as good as everyone thinks you are.

This is something I used to struggle with.

My channel was doing quite well. I had guys telling me I’m going to hit 100k subs in 12 months, guys reaching out to me asking me for advice on how to grow on YouTube.

And whilst this is all great, I felt like I wasn’t even that special. That my success was somehow undeserved.

This is when you can start using techniques such as visualisation. This is something one of my football coaches told me a while back. When I was struggling with low confidence in matches, he would tell me before the match to close my eyes, and just visualise a moment of past success.

A match when I had played brilliantly, or an awards ceremony when I was walking out to pick up my POTS trophy. Just visualise it in as much detail as you can. What noises are there? What’s the weather like? What are people’s facial expressions when looking at you?

The body doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality, so it will release the same hormones and produce the same reaction, give you the same confidence that you felt before.

And if you can’t remember a moment like that, when you felt confident, then you haven’t earned your confidence quite yet, so go focus on the other two sections.

But if not, this is just reminding yourself that you have earned your confidence, now you just have to claim it.

Hope this helped you bro.

Until next time,

Yvan