Don’t fake confidence. Have it.
Confidence is predictive. When we project confidence, others see us as confident.
Perhaps this is why so many self-help “gurus” tell us to “fake it till you make it.”
For me, however, faking things takes too much energy: stand straight, speak from the diaphragm, maintain eye contact, and don’t fidget. It just gives me cognitive overload.
I prefer to build actual confidence, so it improves the way I feel about myself, is reflected in my speech, and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Amy Alkon, the author of Unf*uckology, a Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence, gives us three skills to develop actual confidence, so it projects naturally.
Self-acceptance is being ok with your entire self. This starts with self-knowledge, recognizing your emotions as they happen, understanding your habitual thought patterns, and not being fused to your thoughts, so you recognize that your thoughts are not you. (If you are an ocean, your thoughts are just waves. If you are the sky, your thoughts are just clouds.)
Self-compassion is being kind to yourself, and treating yourself as you would any other human being you care about. It starts with the skill of not judging any aspect of yourself, by replacing evaluative language with observational language in the never-ending conversations inside your own head.
Self-assertiveness means speaking up, and standing up for yourself before you build anger and resentment. This is done with requests, asking for that which will get your needs met (and if you’re skilled at this, getting your needs met doesn’t have to come at the expense of other people not getting theirs met).
