confidence
Men aren’t born, they’re built!
You may or may not think of yourself as a “confident guy”.
When we think of the stereotypical confident guy, we might imagine the well-dressed, well-groomed, fit, strong, and assertive dude who seems to be able to effortlessly gain the affections of everyone he meets.
Maybe you think you’ve got a touch of this, or perhaps you think you’re on the complete opposite end of the spectrum… either way, it doesn’t matter because this isn’t the vision of confidence that I’m talking about, nor is what we need to develop as men.
Being willing to expose ourselves to failure requires the type of confidence that can change our lives and those around us.
Confidence can only be developed through exposure. Once we’ve had enough experience with a thing, learnt how it works and how we can best use it, we feel confident in this area.
The main problem that I think many men face today is that as they’ve gotten older, they’ve stopped trying new things and opened themselves up to the possibility of failure.
Think about it.
Confidence
Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.
Theodore Roosevelt
Men aren’t born, they’re built!
“We get comfortable in the life we’ve created for ourselves”
As we were growing up, everything we experienced was new, and chances are we were absolutely rubbish at each of these things the first time we tried them! There was a time in your life when you couldn’t walk, or when you couldn’t tie your shoes, or when you didn’t know how to put a condom on! Each of those moments likely came with failures that caused embarrassment or frustration at the time, but you got through them just fine, and now you’re confident in your ability to do those things, and your life has improved.
But for most men, there seems to be a moment in our lives where trying new things that might make us look like a fool becomes unacceptable. It happens right around the time we get to a stage in our lives where our career path is laid out for us, and we can at the very least provide for ourselves and our family.
Many men seem to get to this stage, settle in, and stop trying to learn new things. We get comfortable in the life we’ve created for ourselves. Without consistent exposure to new challenges or a focus on the things we wish we were better at, we lose faith in ourselves to be able to do anything outside of our little bubble.
This is what keeps a lot of us stuck in said little bubble. But not doing something we know we need to do until we have confidence in our ability is like putting the cart before the horse. Most of the things we need to get good at to improve the critical areas of our lives (health, relationships, professional success) require a lot of trying before we really know what we’re doing. Once we know, we feel confident in these areas.
So you might be thinking, ok, well, how does that help then? If I need the confidence to start, and I’m not going to feel confident until I’m well into the process, how do I get the confidence to start?
Try this:
Next time you think about doing something new or taking action in an area you don’t feel confident in, ask yourself: “What is going to happen if I screw this up?”.
If your answer is something like: “There’s a high probability of death or severe injury” or “I’ll lose all my life savings, and my family will be out on the street in a week,” you may reconsider taking that action… You’ll need a lot of confidence in yourself to take risks like that!
“I might get rejected”
But most of the time, our answer is something like: “I’ll look like a dickhead”, or “It might not be worth the money”, or “I might get rejected”. Are any of those things actually going to hurt you? Nope. Are you or anyone else going to care about these outcomes a week later? Probably not.
The confidence that we need to develop if we want to build a life that we’re happy with is the confidence that we’ll be ok no matter what happens. If you’re able to remind yourself of that and that failure is a necessary part of the process, then you’ll have all the confidence you need to begin making any change you want to make in your life.
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