Confidence is something you do, not something you are.

There is an old adage that goes, "courage is not the absence of fear, but the strength to act despite it." The same is true of confidence. Confidence looks, from the outside, like someone able to remain unflustered in the face of anxiety inducing situations. From the inside (remember this is coming from personal experience) it is experiencing that anxiety over many such situations until a higher than average tolerance is developed. While the non-confident (this is a misnomer to be cleared up later) person is held back by their internal struggle with anxiety, the confident person is willing to move that one step further to know if the anxiety is well founded.


Imagine you like a person you are frequently exposed to and want to start a dating relationship. If you practice the act of confidence, you may make yourself a bit vulnerable, even though it is anxiety inducing, by making a legitimate attempt to initiate a closer relationship. Then you get rejected. The tension is broken and you have your answer. The interest eventually fades and you go about your life, eventually finding out that you also don't see quite as many commonalities as your unrequited infatuation had you believing.

If you don't practice the act of confidence, you instead may find yourself obsessing about that person and imagining hundreds of ways in which you will be rejected, thus extending the anxiety for years possibly. To keep with the analogy to courage, a soldier can risk death by exposing himself in order to take a shot. Or he can endure the uncertainty of leaving that encounter entirely in the hands of his counterpart in the other side to act in some way that could still kill him, just in far more creative ways. Courage and confidence are both actions that involve a controlled level of vulnerability in order to avoid a much longer period of fear/anxiety and lack of control over circumstances.


This is the core of my advice, that confident is not something you are. It is something you do. If you struggle with uncertainty of outcome in some aspect of your life and it paralyses you with tension and anxiety, it is better to get a definite rejection with a risk of approval than to allow your mind to hypothetically reject you ad infinitum. The act of taking that next step is what confidence is made of. You can be confident in a single act and if you add enough acts like that together, your threshold for how much tension you can endure and still act goes up. Before you know it, everyone on the outside will imagine you to be an unflappable pillar of confidence, while you know the effort you give life, which is the real thing. Go act!

When you describe yourself as "losing confidence" what you are saying is "I have decided that my sense of anxiety for a given situation is going to stop me from taking some action." When you say, "I am not confident," you are saying "my fear is stronger than my resolve." We all have fear, tension, anxiety, trepidation, etc. Look around. The people you consider confident are also making themselves vulnerable. If you can't imagine yourself behaving like them, it's because you can imagine the fear you would have in that situation holding you back. It isn't that they don't feel it. They have either one of two circumstances internally.
A. Done it enough to feel more comfortable by feeling the fears first and working through them.
B. They are doing it for the first few times and still feel the fears that you would expect, but are acting anyway.
This is not dating advice. This is everything you'll ever do in life. Nobody is truly good at something the first several times they try it. The Dunning-Kruger effect also applies and there will come a period of massive overconfidence followed soon by a sharp decline as you learn enough about something to realize you have a long way to go toward mastery and start comparing yourself to peers with a more educated eye. This is also true of the skill of confidence.

Confidence is not a personality trait but a behavior you too can practice.