Faking Your Way to Confidence
by PROexploit
When I was about 14 years old, I was one of the shyest kids in school. I had very few friends, would never raise my hand in class or speak in a group setting. I wasn’t too happy at the time and that’s when I first made a goal to be confident. I couldn’t just start being confident one day, because I didn’t feel it. At least that’s what I thought…
I finally started learning to be confident when I observed confident kids and mimicked their mannerisms. I acknowledged that I wasn’t confident and that I needed to improve. I forced myself to pretend I was confident until I felt it. It took years for me to truely feel confidence and no longer fear speaking to large groups, but it only took a couple of minutes for me to act it. I found that acting confident was the way to be confident.
Before you’re a confident person, you have very real fear of situations in which you are the center of attention. Things like giving a speech to a class, talking to the opposite sex and sticking up for your opinion even among friends can make a person very nervous and embarrassed. The underlying fear behind these feelings is that something bad will happen; someone will laugh at your speech, a girl will shut you down or your friends would yell at you. When you fake confidence, you’ll see firsthand that those things don’t actually happen often at all, and when they do, they aren’t terrible.
So what you need to do, is watch a confident person. Watch how they walk, listen to how they talk and try and replicate their actions. Pretend that you are them when you interact with others. Practice by forcing yourself to talk to absolute strangers. If you screw up or get to nervous, the worst possible thing that can happen is that you walk away and try again.
At first acting confident will feel strange. You know that it’s not what you really want to be doing and you’ll have nagging feelings of self doubt. If you’re serious about being confident, you’ll be able to give it try and try again until it starts to become a habit for you.
