Confidence is very difficult to tackle because of how blurry the entire concept is. It's often touted as some ethereal concept that you either have or don't have, or that if you just do this one quick thing you'll suddenly be confident. That's all bullshit. As someone who went from lacking it in many aspects of my life to being someone quite sure of themselves, I've weaved through a lot of the crap and stuck with what works and it's really quite simple.

Firstly, you have to understand what confidence is: Confidence ultimately comes down to ones perception of their own self in any particular scenario. How competently you view yourself to be at any given task will determine how much confidence you have in yourself. If you fancy yourself to be good at something, you'll have confidence, if you think you're terrible at it, you'll lack confidence.

Take driving for example, if you were driving a car for the first time you'd have zero self confidence in your ability. You'd be nervous, anxious and concerned that you may have an accident because you simply don't know how to do it. However, over time as you do it more and more, the more you practice, the better you'll become. After enough practice you'll be able to drive quite competently and the nervousness and anxiety will dissipate. Eventually you'll get behind the wheel and it will become a mindless task because you've done it so many times before successfully. This is confidence in your driving ability.

This is how your mind and confidence work and you can map it out onto almost anything. If you lack confidence talking to girls, or with your job, or with public speaking it's simply because you haven't practiced it enough or been successful at it enough to be sure of yourself. Your mind recognizes the novelty of it and becomes tentative. The only way to build confidence is to practice it repeatedly until you internalize that you're proficient at it. You need to practice talking to girls, your job or public speaking, become better at it and it and eventually it will become a mindless task the same way driving does, but it takes time.

Contrary to buzzfeed articles, there are no quick fixes and there are no shortcuts. Most people try something once or a couple times and then tell themselves they don't have no confidence and give up and that's fine, most people lack discipline. If you want to gain confidence you need to understand that the payoff is always gonna be way down the line, compound interest. You just need to have the patience and perseverance to get there. The human mind takes a long time to internalize change.

The last and most sobering realization is that you won't be able to have a high level of confidence with everything. You'll find somethings you have a knack for and it takes very little practice to become competent(and therefore confident) and there's other things that you can practice a whole lot and don't become very confident at all and this is fine. We're not all gonna be Michael Jordan's or Don Juan's, but you can become better at almost anything by practicing it repeatedly and with that comes more confidence.