For the past year and a half I've been reading a lot of inner game and self improvement books, and two of the main principles I see espoused in these parts are:

  1. If you don't have real confidence, fake it till you make it.
  2. Be yourself.

It doesn't take a genius to see how these two ideas contradict each other. Yet oddly enough, in their own way they both seem to make sense. With the former, if you aren't naturally a confident person, it totally makes sense to fake it; by doing so you'd act as if you had true confidence and force yourself to do things that naturally confident people do. In theory, this would eventually give you enough positive reference experiences that you build up real confidence and don't have to fake it anymore.

But I also hear a lot of people telling us to just fucking be ourselves, which also makes a lot of sense to me. In my experience, people have really good bullshit detectors, and can spot a fake from a mile away. Therefore it's best to just be yourself so you give off a naturally chilled back vibe and don't come across as a try-hard wannabe alpha.

And here's the problem, by faking confidence, you're not being yourself. You're acting how you believe confident people act, but really have little to base it off of because you don't really know what it feels like. Is there something I'm overlooking? How can I act more naturally confident without faking it?