CHAPTER 1: BUILD SELF-CONFIDENCE

Confidence doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a result of something… hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication.

—Roger Staubach

How can I become more confident?” is by far the most common question we get asked, whether it’s about approaching women, dating them, or just having sex. For the unconfident among you, it all feels like a terrifyingly uncertain nightmare, and as a result, you worry about practically everything.

What do I say? What do I do? Where do I take her? What if she doesn’t like me? What if she says no? What if I’m not good at it? What if I throw up on her dog like Tucker did? What if, what if, what if…

The problem you have right now with confidence is the same one Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart had with obscenity in 1964: you know it when you see it, but you can’t for the life of you seem to define it for yourself. You are not alone. Almost nobody understands confidence at a deep level, so the advice you get about how to fix it is almost always bad. It’s usually some kind of self-help platitude like “just believe in yourself” or “fake it till you make it” or “nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Thanks, Mom, but that shit doesn’t work.

Fortunately, in the last twenty years researchers have gained a lot of new insights into the origins and nature of confidence, and they allow us, finally, to explain exactly what it is:

Confidence is the realistic expectation you have of being successful at something, given (a) your competence at it and (b) the risk involved with doing it.

Take driving, for example. When you were sixteen, your confidence behind the wheel was probably pretty low because you hadn’t developed enough experience to have a realistic expectation of being good at driving, and the risk involved was disproportionately high since a car under the control of an inexperienced driver becomes a two-ton metal projectile of speeding death.

At twenty-six, however, your confidence is much higher because you’ve had ten or more years of experience on the road without smashing into parked cars and running over children. When you get behind the wheel now, you understand all the unseen risks and thus have a very high expectation of getting where you intend to go safe and sound.

That is confidence in a nutshell. Given competence, you anticipate success, so you’re willing to take the risk—whether it’s driving a car, climbing a mountain, or saying hi to a pretty woman. It applies essentially the same way across all domains of life—including mating.

CONFIDENCE REFLECTS COMPETENCE

Don’t think confidence is some kind of modern phenomenon though, just because people today don’t shut up about it. Confidence has been a thing for a long time. In fact, confidence is part of your genetic makeup; it evolved over thousands of generations as a mental tool to guide our decision-making around risk.

To understand why Paleolithic man evolved confidence, take this example:

You’re a young early man, out on the savannah with a couple other guys from your clan, on one of your first hunts. You’re camped at the mouth of a cave on the last night, guarding your kill before you make the final push back to your tribe in the morning. Somewhere out in the darkness you hear a number of menacing growls. Your instinct is to get the hell out of there (fight or flight), but one of the other men stops you. He’s a little older and has been on a number of hunts just like this one. He grabs the meat and buries it, then grabs you and hunkers down to hide. This is the smart move—he knows from experience.

Sure, it’s a risk because whatever is out there in the darkness sounds pretty hungry and keeps getting closer, but your fellow clan member doesn’t seem overly worried about it. The feeling in your gut in that moment was guiding your choice because you had no experienced-based knowledge to take its place. If you had, your reaction would more likely have been calm and cool like your buddy, and you would have been the one to make the smart choice. He had confidence because he’d successfully navigated similar situations in the past. Had he not been there, you would probably have done the dumb thing and ended up losing your tribe’s next meal, possibly becoming a meal yourself.

True confidence is not about hoping that you can take this risk (that’s called courage) and overcome this challenge (that’s perseverance); it’s about realistically expecting that you can do it, based on previously demonstrated performance.

A confident guy expects the woman to engage him in conversation when he goes up to say hi and introduce himself. He expects her to give him her number when he asks for it. He doesn’t think he deserves it or she owes it to him (unless he is also an entitled douchebag, which is entirely possible)—he just expects that he’s going to get it, even before he says a word. Why? Because he’s done this dozens if not hundreds of times, with enough success to accurately predict the likely outcome.

How can you realistically judge the likelihood of your success in a unique moment like that—or in any domain of life? Your brain does it by unconsciously integrating a bunch of data from your memory and your current state. It adds up your past training, experiences, and successes, plus your present capabilities, to guide your decisions. Your brain is like a mushy three–pound sportsbook between your ears, setting the line and shifting the odds on your immediate future.

The most annoying thing about confidence, though, is that 90 percent of the time it’s dormant (or at least it should be). It should only become an issue when you’re actively facing a risky challenge, not when you’re eating dinner or sitting at home trying to choose between watching football or Netflix. Nobody walks around all day vacillating between confident and unconfident. That would be exhausting and pointless.

When a challenge does arise—like texting a new match on Tinder or having sex with a woman for the first time—your confidence system immediately switches on and delivers its verdict: what confidence level you should feel in this situation, given its rewards and risks in relation to your competence level.

For example, if your Tinder game is tight, and you’ve had good dates from it, your confidence is probably high. If you have a history of striking out with women and a reputation as a two-pump chump with new ones, your confidence is going to be low.

There is pretty much no way around this dynamic. Evolution forced us to develop confidence levels that accurately tracked our competencies. It’s hard to fake true confidence now, effectively anyway, because the humans who could fake it quickly died out. They took stupid risks that they couldn’t handle, and they won prehistoric “Darwin Awards” as a result—death through idiotic overconfidence. Imagine if our Paleolithic man was bigger and more blustery than his older, more experienced friend:

“Don’t worry about those lions crouched in the grass out there. We’ll be fine. I bet they can’t even smell this meat. Besides, it’s totally dark, how are they going to find us? And I could whip them anyway… Boy, they sure look fast when they sprint with their ears back like that.”

There are some who would tell you that our prehistoric friend was being confident—he just guessed wrong. After all, confidence is not a guarantee of success. And those people would be right about the last part. Confidence is no guarantee of success.

But where they are wrong is in their evaluation of our friend’s state of mind. If you totally believe in yourself like he did, but you haven’t learned or accomplished anything yet, like he hadn’t, you’re not being confidently optimistic; you’re being dangerously, arrogantly delusional. And natural selection—perched on the pointy ends of Mr. and Mrs. Lion’s claws and teeth—will turn you into breakfast.

This is the deep evolutionary reason why you can’t “fake it till you make it.” To build real confidence you must boost real competence.

BUILD CONFIDENCE THROUGH DEMONSTRATED PERFORMANCE

So let’s talk about building confidence. First thing’s first: there are no shortcuts.

Anyone who tries to sell you their “Ten Tricks to Get Confident with Women” is selling bullshit. If they, like The Secret, tell you the key is just to visualize your success, then the actual secret is that they’re charlatans taking your money.

Yes, you can absolutely hack your momentum-based confidence a little bit by jump-starting your mating success and launching yourself onto that upward spiral (we’ll get to this in a minute), but that’s just messing around at the margins of confidence. It’s not addressing the core issue.

The only effective strategy for gaining real confidence is to develop skills and demonstrate performance of those skills.

Developing realistic self-confidence is truly that simple. All you have to do is get good at the things you want to feel confident about and then demonstrate those skills, to yourself and others. This means learning, practicing, and then consistently performing under real-life conditions, with real stakes, when real people are watching. Once you do that, confidence in that skill is almost automatic.

Go back to driving as an example. The first year or so, you learned how to drive in school or from your parents. You practiced on familiar roads, driving relatively short distances to and from school, running errands for your mom, going to your part-time job. You developed a little bit of confidence but nothing too crazy—like you were Dale Jr. or something, just enough to feel comfortable about getting behind the wheel. Then one weekend you took a girl to a movie theater you’d never been to before, and that night there was a driving rainstorm. That was your “oh shit” moment.

When you walked out of the theater with your date and sideways rain hit you in the face, you could have turned into a puddle of nerves who white-knuckles it all the way home at five miles per hour with your hazards flashing. But you made sure you were both buckled up and your wipers were going before you pulled out of your parking spot. You took a deep breath and then drove home at a normal-but-reduced rate of speed.

At seventeen or eighteen years old, getting your date home, having had a great time, with her being completely unaware of your lack of confidence, like you were driving Miss Daisy, will send your driving confidence through the roof. You didn’t just survive the ordeal, you took the skills you’d developed over time and demonstrated your competence at them when it counted. Yes, this is a small thing, but confidence is a monument to consistent performance and built with thousands of small bricks of experience, not carved from one huge stone.

Situations like this are where real, true confidence is built. Confidence requires that you go through the anxiety of trying something like this long before you feel ready. In any domain, you have to go through the valley of genuinely low confidence before you can reach the peak of genuinely high confidence.

But don’t misunderstand: the low confidence you feel in the moment before you decide how you are going to handle a situation is not underconfidence or neurosis or irrationality (though your ultimate decision might be). It’s deep, ancient, and adaptive. It’s how human learning works. The best thing you can do is accept that this is the process and develop a mature perspective.

Yes, this is totally fucking terrifying. I have no idea what I’m doing. I have zero confidence that I can get us home without killing us both. But that’s OK. That’s exactly what I should be feeling, since I’ve never done this shit before.

This perspective can give you a kind of metaconfidence: you’re confident that you will be able to improve your competence at any skill if you work at it and that will lead to demonstrated performance and real confidence as a result.

The real magic happens at this metaconfidence level. The more skills you learn, the more domains you master and traits you cultivate, the more experienced you’ll get at pushing through the low-confidence barrier… and the more confidence you will build.

CONFIDENCE IS USUALLY DOMAIN-SPECIFIC

You might now be highly confident about driving, thanks to lots of practice and a lashing rainstorm, but that doesn’t mean you’re now automatically confident about talking to the beautiful woman in the passenger seat next to you. You might also be confident about driving automatic transmissions but not stick shifts. And all that makes complete sense, because they are totally different things.

You don’t have just one overall confidence level that covers every aspect of life, because that would be stupid and maladaptive. If your odds of success in one domain don’t predict your odds of success in another domain, why then should confidence in one spill over into confidence in the other?

The answer is, it shouldn’t. As in the case of our hypothetical and now-dead prehistoric friend, the confidence he rightly had in his hunting ability should not have spilled over into his confidence in being hunted. If it hadn’t, he (and his bloodline) might have survived.

You can appreciate how confidence reflects competence in particular domains when you think about mental abilities and personality traits that differ between people. More intelligent people tend to be more intellectually confident because they have more competence (developed skill and displayed performance) in learning abstract new ideas and skills. More extroverted people tend to be more socially confident because they have more competence at interacting with new people and groups. More promiscuous people tend to be more sexually confident because they have more experience hooking up with new people.

To some degree, genetic differences shape these personality differences, which in turn shape the upper and lower bounds of your confidence in these domains. But within each domain, you still have a lot of freedom to improve your confidence by building your competencies—whatever your personality. So if you’re reading this right now and feel like a dumb, antisocial sex klutz, don’t get too down on yourself. The only direction to go is up, and there’s plenty of headroom.

MATING CONFIDENCE ADDS UP ACROSS THE DOMAINS THAT MATTER TO WOMEN

Women instinctively assess everything about you that might be important to them in a serious sexual relationship. And since women are judging your competence in each of these domains, your confidence across them automatically feeds into your overall mating confidence. The sportsbook in your mind understands this as it sets the odds on your mating future. It goes up if you have awesome strengths—such as playing sports, making money, cracking jokes, selecting wines, or going down on a woman—and it stays down if you have any embarrassing weaknesses.

Mating confidence is the sum of every specific kind of confidence you feel about every domain of competence that matters to women.

If we have been clear up to this point and you have been paying attention, right about now you should be saying, “Holy shit, this changes everything!” Because what we’ve just told you, if you take it to heart, can have profound implications for the rest of your mating life.

The only way to build true confidence around women is to build the competencies they desire. This means you must learn what women really want and then become a guy that has those traits. Build it and she will come (hopefully, more than once).

That’s this whole book: a systematic way to boost your true mating confidence through boosting the mating-related skills that women care about and respond to.

CONFIDENCE IS ALSO ABOUT MOMENTUM

If you’ve had no sex with any women in the last year, you’re less likely to attract women—even if you have attractive traits—because you are more likely to put off an asexual loser vibe. Women can see your late-night Google search history in your eyes.

Conversely, if you’ve had sex with ten women in the last month, despite having serious weaknesses as a mate, you’re likely to give off some mysterious sex confidence that attracts even more women. There is a “Matthew Effect” at work in human mating:

Whoever gets some success will gain even more success and enjoy abundance; whoever has little success will gain even less after that and suffer misery.

—Book of Matthew
(the Apostle, not McConaughey), 13:12

In other words, sexual success is a positive feedback loop (sex begets sex); whereas sexual failure is a downward spiral (less sex begets no sex begets Pornhub).

In human psychology, this is called “mate choice copying”—women tend to choose men who have already been chosen by other women. It’s like a customer seeing that a product is the top seller on Amazon; it might not seem like the ideal product, but if all these other customers are into it, there’s got to be something there.

The result is that mating confidence creates a lot of momentum—either forward momentum, like a penis-shaped express train, or static momentum, like a lonely blue-balled boulder stuck at the bottom of a hill. If only you could just push that boulder far enough up the hill that it reached the tipping point of mating success, it would turn into a rock-hard runaway train. Like Sisyphus, you’ve probably tried dozens of times already, without much success. It’s like trying to overcome deep depression through sheer force of will. It’s highly unlikely. You need some momentum.

This momentum effect in confidence is related to a cool idea in social psychology called the “sociometer theory.” The idea is that humans evolved to keep track of our social popularity, status, and prestige through a kind of “social meter” in the brain that represents how well we’ve been getting along recently with our family, friends, and mates. The sociometer did not evolve to make us feel good or bad. It evolved to help our highly social species manage social relationships adaptively. It tells us where we stand socially so we can act accordingly.

If everybody likes and respects us, our “sociometer” goes up—which feels like increased self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. If everybody hates and avoids us, the sociometer goes down like a gas gauge approaching empty—and it feels like decreased confidence.

If the sociometer reads high, we tend to approach new friends and mates and seek new opportunities for status, capitalizing on our recent success and popularity. If the sociometer reads low, we tend to avoid strangers, withdraw from public interactions, display shame and contrition, repair damaged relationships, and try to make ourselves more useful to the group.

Modern versions of sociometer theory argue that there’s not just one overall sociometer analogous to overall social confidence or status. Rather, there are different sociometers to track each domain of social life—including mating life.

According to this theory, your mating sociometer reflects how well you’ve been doing with women over the last few weeks or months, and that mating momentum effect, along with your actual mating competencies, determines your mating confidence.

PUSH THROUGH LOW CONFIDENCE AND DEPRESSION WITH A GROWTH MINDSET

You might be thinking, This all sounds great, but how do I even start to develop competence if I’m so depressed and unconfident that I can hardly move? How do I start to develop metaconfidence if I’ve never mastered any domain before? How do I push through a low-confidence barrier that’s so severe I can’t imagine taking action?

In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, there is a saying: “In practice, there is no losing. There is only winning and learning. The only way to lose is to not practice.”

We’ll talk more about overcoming depression later, in the chapter on mental health, but for now let’s just acknowledge that it is not uncommon to find oneself on a downward spiral of low confidence, passivity, failure, and shame. It’s easy for us to say “build competence and the confidence will come,” but in reality, once you get stuck in this spiral, it can be very hard to break out of it.

Here are some clues that you’re stuck in the downward spiral:

• harsh self-judgments (“I’ll suck at everything forever.”)

• lack of experience (“I’ve never done anything like this, so why start now?”)

• rehashing old failures (“I failed at that, and that, and that…”)

• preoccupations with fear (“I feel terrified to even try, and that fear feels valid.”)

• predictions of disaster (“If I try that, the result will be a humiliating catastrophe.”)

• ruminating about obstacles (“There’s no time and no money or mentors to help me.”)

• adverse comparisons to others (“I’ll never be as good as _________.”)

• unrealistic expectations (“I should be a happily married billionaire by now.”)

• perfectionism (“If I can’t be the best in the world, I shouldn’t even try.”)

• impostor syndrome (“Even if I seem to be succeeding, I’m really just a fake.”)

The first step off this downward spiral is to acknowledge these bad feelings as natural.

When women feel this way, our society has sympathy, and Oprah gives them cars. But when men feel this way, our society demonizes these feelings as signs of weakness, amplifying the shame and self-judgment, repeating the macho advice to “suck it up” and “get over it.”

This bullshit makes the problem worse. It’s impossible to pull yourself out of depression by your bootstraps when all you want to do is hang yourself with them. Bad advice can’t fix bad feelings, and neither can ignoring those feelings. Don’t try to push them away or pretend they’re not there. These feelings evolved to protect us from harm, like our fight-or-flight responses.

Of course, it doesn’t help that in Hollywood movies the hero’s journey out of low competence and low confidence is always compressed into a four-minute montage of epic self-improvement, guided by a wise but stern mentor, in a picturesque setting, with an inspiring soundtrack. Thank you very much, Rocky I, II, III, IV, V. The real-life despair and self-doubt of the advanced beginner who finally realizes just how hard the skill is and how far he is from mastery is rarely featured. Nor is the fact that it’s normal to feel fear, anxiety, self-doubt, and low confidence when faced with learning a new skill or improving a trait.

Another crucial element in moving your brain from panic to logic is to cultivate the emotional intelligence to wrap words around those feelings. Research shows that when people identify their own emotions consciously, using accurate words—“afraid,” “angry,” “anxious”—the amygdala, that little biological threat sensor in the brain, calms down almost instantly. At the same time, a smarter part of the prefrontal cortex goes to work inhibiting emotional over-reactions so you can think coolly about what’s happening.

Though the research is new, this is not a new insight. It has been taught by Buddhists in the East and philosophers in the West for 2,500 years. You can tame your negative emotions to some degree just by calling them their true names. And then, for our purposes, you can move on with learning the competencies that build confidence in all the domains that matter.

The big leap out of the low-self-esteem spiral, though, is to adopt a “growth mindset”—a concept developed by psychologist Carol Dweck. In a growth mindset, people only need to believe two things: (1) that their abilities can be improved through dedication and hard work rather than remain limited by their genes, backgrounds, or current situations (that is called a “fixed mindset”); and (2) that failures and setbacks can help you learn how to get better.

A growth mindset sparks a love of learning and resilience in the face of obstacles that are essential for great accomplishment. People who embrace a growth mindset actually do learn more (and more quickly) and they view challenges and failures as valuable signals to improve their skills rather than as signals that they should quit. They’re like a bunch of Mr. Miyagis.

Study after study shows that almost all high-achieving people, now and in the past, had a growth mindset and consistently outperformed those with fixed mindsets. The growth mindset simply works better in life.

Whether you make the leap and do the work is up to you. We’re totally confident that you can build your mating confidence if you take charge of your mating life. Eventually, you won’t even have to worry about confidence anymore. You’ll remember that distant, murky time in the past when you lacked confidence, and you’ll be grateful that you believed in yourself enough to fix your mindset and take action.

The next step is to get out of your head—your own anxieties and insecurities—and get inside the heads of the opposite sex.

Takeaways

• Sexual confidence is a paradox because confidence reflects demonstrated performance, but it’s hard to find success until you have confidence—which is what women are attracted to. The way to cut through the Gordian knot of this confidence/success paradox is to cultivate the skills and abilities that women want in a man.

• Confidence is domain-specific—being good at one thing doesn’t give you confidence in something else. Domain-specific competencies do accumulate, however, and automatically raise your overall mating confidence.

• As you attract more women with your new competencies, the momentum effect kicks in, and your mating confidence will become a self-sustaining cycle of attractiveness and sex.

• The best way to get off the downward spiral of low confidence is to acknowledge the negative feelings, accept them and name them, and adopt a “growth mindset.”