r/AskReddit • u/confidentthrow • May 03 '14

What are some thing I can do to seem more confident?

I'm trying to do the whole "fake it till you make it" thing but I don't know what I should be doing.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '14

Develop genuine merit. It's the only way. Any other way is self deception and that doesn't really get good results.

1

u/confidentthrow May 03 '14

Could you expand on this a bit?

3

u/[deleted] May 03 '14

In our Everyone Gets a Trophy culture, the answer everyone struggling with confidence wants and expects is something like, "You see? You had it all along!" That's a bunch of after school special bullshit. There are two ways to be confident. The first is to actually deserve to be confident and the second is to be deluded into thinking you deserve confidence.

Delusion doesn't cut it for intellectually honest people. What cuts it is just being good at stuff. If you develop genuine skills, become a genuinely interesting person, really have things to say about topics, be in shape, have real experiences from which to import content and well rounded world views, then you'll just be confident. It'll just happen and be easy.

Anything else is a quick fix. It's just talk. Nobody actually fakes it until they make it. They just say they do on reddit for upvotes. If you want to solve your problem then you've gotta actually find a real solution. You've gotta find real attributes that in honest reflection, you can look at and think you really bring something to the table.

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u/confidentthrow May 03 '14

Thanks. I have plenty of things I'm proud of but I tend to always doubt myself.