I’d like to discuss for a second what confidence is and how you obtain it. The word is thrown around a lot, so it's worth looking at what it actually is. Confidence is having the reasonable certainty in your ability to control the desired outcome of an event. If you don’t have much certainty of your ability to control the outcome, you lack confidence - as you should! The purpose of confidence is to help you avoid risky behaviors when your brain knows that the outcome is unpredictable and potentially dangerous. This prevented humans from doing all sorts of stupid things that would get us killed in nature.

We have different types of confidence. We have general confidence, which is our general attitude about all of our abilities and our ability to adapt to the unknown. We also have context specific confidence. Many people lack social confidence and have a low general confidence, but may be very confident at specific tasks like driving a car or playing the game of poker. How did they become confident at those activities? Experience and evidence. Experience has taught their brain how to predict the likely outcome of them driving a car or of playing poker. Their brain knows they are good at driving and good at poker. The brain has been given the evidence it needs to have confidence in these activities. When you lack confidence in a specific activity, it means that your brain has not been given sufficient evidence that it knows how to control the outcome of that activity.

You must give your brain evidence, repeatedly. You become confident with the piano because you put in the effort to learn piano. You started by making awful noises, you discovered a few patterns that worked, you learned some theory, you grew neurons that map your fingers and the keys, you drilled the lessons day after day. You’ve now given your brain the evidence it needs to have confidence in it’s ability to play piano.

It needs to be stressed that confidence is not just your outlook. When you learn to drive a car and when you learn to play the piano, new neural connections are formed in your brain that are dedicated to these tasks. Your brain is physically adapting to better handle these activities. There is no amount of motivation or self-affirmation that could psych you into knowing how to play piano if you've never had a lesson. Your confidence comes from your brain knowing that it has dedicated hardware to handle these tasks. When I learn to play piano, it is my job to do the lesson over and over again. But eventually that information gets permanently stored with new neural connections. When I play that song, it is effortless. That song is physically part of my brain now.

If you’re reading this, likely it is your social, sexual, and general confidence that you want to improve. General confidence is sort of an aggregate sum of all your context specific confidences. You can increase it by increasing the number of things you are confident in. The more types of different activities you gain experience and confidence in, the more confidence you will have about your general abilities. All of your confidence areas feed into one another. It sounds bizarre but having confidence in playing the piano will make you more confident in driving a race car. Having more confidence in lifting heavy weights will make you more confident at a job interview. You can put this fact into use by building your general confidence by adding new areas of certainty to your abilities.

Social and sexual confidence are going to be the result of repeated social and sexual experience. Right now your brain sees a bunch of unknowns around these activities and has a lot of uncertainty about how to control the outcome of such situations. Only after experience will your brain know enough about navigating those situations to feel secure about predicting safe outcomes and having confidence. We have a chicken and egg problem here. What do we do?

Think of your task as uploading enough information into your brain, to prove to it that the outcome of interacting with people and with women won’t be dangerous to it. That is all your brain is worried about - danger. In your interactions, don’t worry about controlling the outcome, worry about feeding new evidence to your brain. Your mistakes become a good thing. Your brain will learn what to avoid, that information will improve its confidence as much as the positive reinforcement will.

Confidence is just your brain’s risk assessment based on what it knows about how likely you are to mess up a situation. Without experience, your brain doesn’t trust you enough to let you put it in harms way. Gaining confidence is just training your brain by feeding it repeated experience of a type of activity till it has mapped out the risk level and determined that it can handle the situation reasonably well. Instead of trying to trick your brain into having confidence, give it what it needs, experience and evidence.