How to Gain Self Confidence

Well hello there, insecurity, my old friend. Good to see you again.

Let’s revisit. Just about everyone has had battles with insecurity— be they acute and situational or chronic and life long. If you think about it, that’s not a bad thing from an evolutionary perspective. Let’s go to the graph above!

If you didn’t have some modicum of doubt, you’d be in that upper left corner — what psychologists refer to as Dunning Kruger or The Dunning Kruger effect. It’s not a great place to be for survival and social reasons. “I can jump from this tree top to that far away tree!” isn’t conducive to passing on your genes, especially when you never have tried something like this before. Nor is talking a big game as a first year law firm associate to a senior partner, for that matter. You’ll quickly be ostracized and soon after fired if you keep it up. No body likes a jerk.

Unfortunately, the far right corner is just as bad. If you think you absolutely can not do something, you’ve probably failed already. Even worse, you may not even try. There’s a million quotes of the version of ‘missing 100% of the shots you don’t take’ but I’ll go to something my dad one day posted on my wall when I was a child:

…who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his  place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Basically you do nothing.

That sweet spot in the graph above is pretty narrow, isn’t it? I can attest to that. I have had both Dunning Kruger — which often presents to me in simply believing I can talk my way into anything, say for example getting Oprah Winfrey to come on my podcast (which I tried here), to deep insecurities. My insecurities were so deep at times in high school I was convinced Tom Cruise was going on swoop in and run off with my girlfriend. I could go on and on.

I’ve come a long way. Most days I’m not jumping from tree to distant tree, nor worried about Cruise. I have essentially eliminated the feeling of rejection entirely out of my mind. “All life is an experiment, the more experiments the better” said Emerson. And that is a great way to live life.

But, for whatever reason, today wasn’t a great early start for me. I had to have a completely cold meeting, meaning I had to go into an office without the doctor I needed to see for a jaw condition knowing me or that I was coming. This usually would worry me 0%, but I was off my game and couldn’t get out of my head. 

So what was the solution for me — and more generally — for acute (like me today) or long- term insecurity?

For starters, if possible just do it. This is called “exposure therapy” and it so often works. I did go into two offices this morning and no one kicked me out. Quite the opposite, they were compassionate and helpful. Which means not only did I shake this bout of insecurity off, I’m writing this article with a decent combination of confidence and hopefully humility. “It may help some,” is the genesis to this all and on my mind right now.

What else works?

Self-Compassion

I mentioned above. We are, by far, our own worst critics. So don’t be, get rid of the “our own” part. This means try talking to yourself the way you would a friend or loved one in the same situation. I didn’t quite do this, but I easily could have taken out my phone this morning and turned on my voice memo and gave someone else advice that I needed; “it’s their job to see you, you have a strong enough EQ you aren’t going to walk in there like a bulldozer and you’re quite the sharp dresser.” Just go for it, there’s no downside.” The key to these self talks is they have to be sincere (so I’d need to delete the sharp dresser part).

Take Care of Yourself.

Quite frankly this should sit right at the top because these little things matter. Get enough sleep. Try to exercise each day. Get outside and ideally in nature. Learn. Everything I just mentioned I do every day. Which if I had to guess is the foundation for which my insecurities have mostly been diminished or all together replaced with a strong dose of self-esteem.

Stay Connected

The worst thing you can do if you feel insecurity is bottle it up and/or isolate. These things grow in the dark and die in the light. I told a friend this morning I was weirdly feeling awkward about my cold meeting. That itself was helpful. Talk. Your. Challenges. Out. Not with a stranger but with someone trusted. I can’t stress this enough, not just about self-confidence but about anything troubling you.

Celebrate your successes. 

We tend to over remember our failures and forget our successes. I spoke about an experiment I did right before podcasting with one of the world’s foremost psychologists, Dr. Guy Winch (here). I jotted down every memory I had of me asking someone out on a date. I thought the “no column” would be about 70% heavy and the “yes” would add up to 30% of the responses. It was, as minimum, the exact opposite. Here I was walking around in life thinking this pretty significant negative thought about me that was objectively not true. Simply because I only remembered the “no.” I’m certainly no Ryan Reynolds or whatever, but what the heck kind of thoughts have been in my head? Learn to take compliments. Journal your strengths and accolades. Write down how many people you care about and care about you. These are all wins! It can turn your day around and they, if necessary, just go back the next day. As much as I hate absolutes I know one thing: we need not be as insecure as we at times are — we don’t deserve it because it’s not true.

Let me end on double clicking on this final point. Ever notice that often the person who should be the least insecure is the most insecure (incidentally this isn’t their fault it comes from childhood trauma, either those with a capital “T’or an accrual of seemingly innocuous lower case “t’s”)? I’m thinking of someone I used to know right now. Smart, charming, kind, a great friend and probably, if this even matters which it shouldn’t, attractive to 90% of us. Yet they believed absolutely none of the things I just mentioned. How did this manifest? Sadly — that without someone telling them the above, they were capable of believing it. And back to that Tom Cruise/Ryan Renolds type examples, do people even tell them every day how attractive they might be? Of course not. You need to believe this things internally there is no amount of external validation that will stick.

Which is why, as an end note, those in the wellbeing field always talk about putting yourself first. Your insecurities, those can melt away if you prioritize yourself. They can become all but extinct. I know this because I was reminded of this today. That feeling I had, it was a painful but distant memory. I hope you turn these feelings into long ago memories too, just as I have — because thinking back to how insecure I was so often in my teens, I am living proof of just how doable this can be.

Mike Spivey 

We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.