The most confident person is I know is my friend Sammy, and I can tell you exactly why he is confident: he is a fucking moron.

Sammy did a lot of things that scared the shit out of me but the scariest was the night we went to a nightclub and a giant bodybuilder-looking guy cut Sammy in the line for the bar and stepped on his shoes. Sammy, who weighed 150 pounds soaking wet and could not throw a punch to save his life, looked the guy right in his eyes and said “next time you step on my shoes, I’ll have you singin’ the blues.”

For some reason, the guy backed down (maybe Sammy’s threat was so absurd he thought it was funny), but I was angry. “Why the fuck would you talk shit like that if you can’t back it up?” I yelled at him later that night. “You know you can’t fight and that guy probably had a bunch of meatheads behind him. You could have gotten both of us killed.” Sammy just shrugged his shoulders like a kid wearing a helmet on the short bus. Like most challenges in his life, he just expected his confidence to carry him through it, and this time it did.

Sammy was a broke drug dealer who floated through life by lying, scamming and manipulating people. Most people need to be humble and realistic to succeed in life, but in Sammy’s underworld of drug dealing and scamming, humility is more a vice than a virtue, so Sammy created a fake persona where he was the most badass, rich, successful, smart, spiritually deep, alpha male in the world. In conversations, he wove elaborate tales of doing business with important people, hanging out with celebrities, and of course, beating anybody’s ass who crossed him. He sometimes FaceTimed me at 3 in the morning just so he could show me his stacks of money. I think Sammy genuinely believed his own lies, which is why he constantly got himself into dangerous situations, which he barely escaped because his confidence was so bulletproof. Sammy also successfully convinced other trashy idiots this persona was real and many attractive women fell in love with him, only to leave once they realized he was really a loser.

Sammy’s house was eventually raided by federal agents for drug trafficking, and according to Sammy, the first thing he said was “I can’t do anything until I have my morning coffee, so if you want me to cooperate, I need you to brew me a pot.” Standing in his kitchen in his underwear with guns pointed at him, Sammy then patiently waited for a federal agent to make him coffee. The agent complied and Sammy got his coffee, but he ended up spending five years in jail anyway. (FYI, I was not there so Sammy might be lying about this story as well).

People like Sammy are why girls like “bad boys,” drug dealers, pimps, narcissists, and psychopaths. No real man is good at everything, so no man has the confidence of the archetypal alpha male, but low life losers often successfully pretend to be the alpha because they do not worry about grounding their persona in reality. While psychologically healthy men try to align their confidence with their actual abilities, people like Sammy do not give a shit and will do and say any crazy, extreme, irrational thing they think they need to look alpha, and unfortunately, it sometimes works on women. As Jordan Peterson observed, young women with little life experience are often attracted to guys with the “dark triad” traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) because those guys trick women into thinking they are competent, confident, and successful.

At the same time, many actually successful and impressive men fail with women because they are too humble and self-critical. These guys often have real confidence based on actual accomplishments, but women do not want the limited, finite confidence of a real man, no matter how swell the guy is. Women want the total, all-encompassing, insane, over-the-top, extreme confidence of the archetypal alpha male, something no real man naturally has or should have. Every real man has weaknesses, so if he does not have irrational, delusional confidence of the alpha, the woman will eventually find a chink in his armor with her neuroticism and shit tests.

Women often know the bad boys they obsess over are losers and ultimately dead ends, but they cannot help subconsciously feeling positive emotions when the guy feels alpha, so they often confabulate positive thoughts and rationalizations to excuse the guy’s shitty, loserish behavior. The spell is usually only broken after the guy does something so pathetic and loserish that her subconscious mind cannot help but put him back into the beta category. Because most “bad boys” do not understand game, or even how to read, their relationships with high quality women often end once they blow it and look beta.

When I tell my clients they need to project the delusional, insane confidence of the archetypal alpha male they are often reluctant to do so, usually because they consciously or subconsciously fear they will become like Sammy. My clients are often somewhat successful life in real life, and they know their success came from being humble, realistic, and self-critical, and they worry that if they delude themselves they will be consume arrogant and delusional and their lives will take a negative turn.

This is a legitimate fear - many great men have come to ruin because they believed their own narcissistic delusions. For example, to many people the famous rapper Tupac Shakur was the epitome of the badass alpha male gangster that every man wanted to be and every woman wanted to be with. Tupac, however, was never a gangster in real life, but he nevertheless started to believe his own bullshit and attacked a guy named Orlando Anderson after a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas because Anderson had snatched his friend’s chain. Unlike Tupac, however, Anderson was a real gangster from the Southside Compton Crips with multiple murders to his name, and after getting beat up Anderson hunted down Tupac, found him hanging out of a car on the Las Vegas strip talking to girls, and shot him to death. Tupac’s tough guy alpha male persona made him one of the most loved rappers of all time, but Tupac’s belief that his persona was real ended up getting him killed.

So how does one project the confidence of the archetypal alpha male while maintaining one’s sanity and not devolving into a prison of narcissistic delusion and thinking you can fight cops? The simple answer is this: you must create a fake character that you know is fake and only exists to counteract womens’ negativity and shit tests.

First, you must understand that no man can be the archetypal alpha male, so most of your confidence must be fake and based on nothing. If you can ground some of your confidence in your real abilities and successes, more power to you, but your real merits by themself will never be able to create the bulletproof, indestructible, complete and all-encompassing confidence women want from the archetypal alpha male. Therefore, to some degree you are always “acting” and constructing a fictional character.

Second, you must realize that this character’s actions are fictions you create to counteract her neuroticism. Womens’ can create almost infinite ways to test your confidence, so you must be immediately able to generate a response to any kind of shit test she creates. Sometimes womens’ shit tests will focus on your actual weaknesses and vulnerabilities, so you must even be able to pretend that even your weaknesses are strengths. As the rapper Biggie smalls famously said “Heartthrob? Never. Black and ugly as ever. However…”

Third, you must understand that the three elements of confidence - thought, action, emotion – mutually reinforce each other. If you act confidently, you feel confident, which will cause you to generate confident thoughts, which in turn will cause you to act confidently again. On the other hand, if you act anxiously, your subconscious brain will register you as a beta, which will cause you to feel anxious, which will cause you to confabulate beta thoughts, which will cause you to want to act anxious. Your success with women is largely determined by whether you get stuck in a positive or vicious cycle of actions-feelings-thoughts.

Once you understand that most confidence is fake, and the three elements of confidence reinforce each other, you can “hack” the individual elements of confidence with fakeness to get the positive cycle going. For example, if you feel anxious and your subconscious mind keeps confabulating negative thoughts, you can generate positive thoughts to counteract those negative thoughts. If you are at a high-end cocktail lounge with upscale, sophisticated women, your subconscious mind might think: “these girls just want a guy with money.” You can then counteract that thought by telling yourself “I just sold a tech company for $10 billion dollars and have more money than all the guys in here combined” or “these women have no idea how much money I have, if I act like a rich guy they will never know I have $3.50 in my bank account.”

When you create irrational, delusional, crazy, overly positive thoughts, you do not need to actually believe them or even verbalize them. These are just thoughts to get you moving again and acting right when your anxiety tries to cripple you. For example, if your subconscious mind tries to stop you from approaching a woman by saying “she might have a boyfriend who might appear out of nowhere and punch me in the face” you can subconsciously think “if her boyfriend comes and tries to fight me, I can beat the shit out of him and his whole crew.” But obviously, if she actually did have a boyfriend who wanted to fight you, you would run away because “I’m gonna beat her boyfriend’s ass” is just a lie to motivate yourself to approach her, not a mission statement. As long as you separate your thoughts, emotions, and actions from reality, you will be able to generate supernatural, cosmic confidence.

The hardest element of confidence to hack is the emotion because your subconscious mind did not evolve to be easily fooled. Standing in front of a mirror and saying “I am the hottest guy in the world” 50 times will not make you feel confident, any more than standing in front of a mirror and saying “I can punch cops and get away with it” will make you feel like you can safely punch cops. Lots of guys try to make themselves feel confident through meditation, prayer, affirmations, reading inspirational shit, or listening to music that pumps you up, and that may work to an extent, but I generally do not even bother trying to hack my emotions.

The best way to feel confident is by acting confidently. If you act the way a confident man would act, you will feel more confident, which in turn will cause you to generate more confident thoughts, which in turn will cause to want to act confidently the next time. Obviously, if you act confidently and succeed, you will feel more confident, but even if you act confidently and fail your subconscious brain will register that you are acting like the alpha male and will cause you to feel more confident going forward. The subconscious brain is a strange thing, and you often need to act confidently a long time before you will actually start seeing success.

Acting confidently when you are feeling anxious is very hard. Most peoples’ words, actions, and body language are automatic manifestations of their subconscious emotions, so if they feel confident they naturally act confidently without thinking about it and vice versa. But to act confidently when you are feeling anxious, you must force yourself to think about what you are doing and emulate the behaviors of a confident man even if it feels weird and unnatural. For example, you must force yourself to make eye contact and speak in a firm, domineering tone even if your emotions are screaming at you to do the opposite. This will require a long period of practice and discomfort, but once you perfect this ability you can just turn your confidence on whenever you want.

When things are going well, you normally do not need to think about being confident. You will just naturally act confident because you feel confident. But if you ever fall into a slump and finding yourself feeling anxious or having negative thoughts, you can take a second and remember to hack your thoughts, emotions, and actions. Make up some positive thoughts and trudge ahead and act confidently even though it feels terrible.

My website: http://www.woujo.com