Tl;Dr: Confidence is subjective, but universal.

Have you ever had a situation where you felt like THE MAN around women?

Maybe you had a job as a bartender, or you were an expert explaining something to a woman, or you were just around all your friends and feeling "ON".

What you experienced was something called situational confidence.

Internally we all have an image of ourselves and how we are allowed to act in certain situations. If you feel that you have enough "value" in a situation you are allowed to act in certain ways. You'll feel more free to express your opinions and thoughts, you'll be more comfortable physically, you'll talk louder, you'll feel like you can do whatever you want.

Now this can be a good thing and a bad thing.

It's good because it's gives you a glimpse of where you can ultimately be. However it can also be super frustrating if you can't reproduce it.

So what makes you situationally confident?

There are a few factors, I want to talk about today.

  • Social Proof. The more social proof you have the more comfortable you will become. In addition to causing attraction, social proof cements your status. If a lot of people who like you and think you are cool to around, you will feel more comfortable. That's why you can be one person around your best friends and another around random women.

  • Clothing. The more well dressed you feel, the more comfortable you will feel socially. This is why my first rule for day game is "Dress like you're going to approach." A lot of guys further miss out on doing approaches because they are not dressed well enough or so they think...

  • High Status Roles. This is a huge one. The more you feel that your role is more powerful or high status than other people's roles, the more confident you will feel. This is why the manager of a diner can have sex with ALL the attractive girls that work there, even if he's ugly, boring and lives at home. Hint, this is a major problem most guys have when they start doing approaches, they pick the wrong roles internally.

  • Alignment with your role. This is another big one. The alignment with your role is simply how much you seem to believe yourself. Have you ever wondered what makes people incongruent? It's the difference between what they're saying and what they're subcommunicating. You can give a guy the best, funniest lines in the world, but if he can't make eye contact or looks scared, they won't work. You have to believe in your role and what you're trying to project. This is what's known as congruence. Belief in yourself.

  • Lack of judgment. The more you feel judged or pressured to "be cool" or "fit in", the more likely you are to retreat into your head and become stilted. The more you care about other people's opinions, the more you will alter your behavior to get a "better" reaction. The more you feel that you're already accepted, the more emboldened you become to act confidently. As a quick exercise I want you the next time you're out at a club to imagine everybody approving of you and thinking you're the man. See if you can imagine the feeling.

So the next time you're preparing to go out think about what you can do that night to ensure you have enough social proof, you're dressed appropriately, you've picked a high status role for yourself that you're in alignment with, and you let go of your need to be judged.

Lessons Learned: Having high SMV is better than faking it.