How to be More Confident | 5 Ways to Increase Self-Confidence

[Music] The guy: All right, what's on the menu? Top five ways to increase confidence. Okay, all right, let's do this.

So, you might be wondering why I'm drinking coffee, even though I'm the guy who made a video about why you should stop drinking coffee or caffeine in general, how to quit caffeine, and why you might want to. Am I slightly hypocritical? Yes, but I also just finished exam season, and I was talking back coffee to have those peaks of energy to help me get through the papers, and it helped quite a bit. But now that I'm not on exams anymore, or doing exams anymore, I am tapering off.

So, I guarantee you if you follow these tips, you'll become much more confident of a person. And these tips are not quick fixes; these are strategies. Each thing on this list will take you a really long time to get straight, but once you actually do attain these, you'll notice that you will be a lot more confident of a person. These tips took me years to develop, and I'm still not perfect at them, but I can guarantee you they're life-changing.

So, the most important thing you need to do by far to increase your confidence is to create strong values and live according to them. If you were to get your values from today’s contemporary culture, your values would be like: look hot, get rich, have sex. They’re terrible values because they won’t make you happy. They may make you temporarily experience pleasure for a short amount of time, but if you live by those, who knows what...

So, how does one come up with better values? Okay, so I was editing this part of the video, and I thought I’d redo this whole section because I didn’t like it. So, if you have crappy values, you need to have better values, and you need to live by those better values. But saying just "have better values" is such a subjective thing, and I can't tell you what good values are; that's up to you. But you probably already have a good idea of what your higher values are.

When you perform an action or do anything that’s aligned with your higher values, you will feel empowered. You’ll feel good about yourself, and your self-confidence will improve. You know, things like telling the truth or sticking up for somebody or sacrificing what you want now for what you want most. You know, these things are often not easy to do, but once you do them, you feel really powerful, and you feel really good about yourself.

Things that go against your higher values may feel pretty good at the time, but they will disintegrate you. They'll make you feel worse about yourself. So just basically meditate and reflect on what your higher values are. What are those things that are higher truths to you, kind of your moral compass? Align your actions and your decisions based on those values and stick to them, no matter what.

Nothing is a bigger confidence killer than doing something that contradicts your values, whether it's for somebody else or whether it's just a moment of weakness, and you do it just, you know, to experience pleasure. You know, when you do something that you don’t really want to do, but you do it out of weakness, you don’t feel very good about yourself. Or if you do something that contradicts your values for an employer or somebody like that, you don’t feel very good about yourself; you feel really slimy, and that is a huge confidence killer. It ruins your opinion of yourself, and you just won't be that rock-solid confident dude that this video is trying to teach you how to be.

Okay, number two is to choose the few people whose opinion you care about and forget everyone else. If you listen to contemporary wisdom, you would read lots of books saying you shouldn’t care about what anyone thinks of you. I disagree with that for a lot of reasons. I think there are many benefits to actually caring what other people think of you, just not everybody. Most people, the majority of people you come across, you should not care about what they think of you.

So how do you figure out whose opinion does matter? Who will help you achieve your core values? Who will build you up as a person? What kinds of people will help you be the best version of yourself? These are the people whose opinion matters. Other people whose opinion you can care about are close friends, and if you're a value-based person, you will choose your friends according to who will help you stick to your values.

You're gonna choose friends who actually have something going on, have their life together, and are constantly, you know, improving themselves and building towards something and will help you build towards something. If you have deadbeat friends who are dragging you down, you don't have to care about them anymore as a human being. You know, check in with them, see how they're doing, but I have plenty of people in my life who if I was still hanging out with them, I would not be where I am today.

Finally, other people whose opinion you should care about are mentors. The nice thing about mentors is you can choose who your mentor is. You can choose your mentors; you can have several mentors. These can be spiritual mentors, professional mentors; these can be mentors at the gym who are more jacked than you, and you want to figure out how to be as jacked as them. These are people who are further along in certain aspects of life than you. You are the product of everyone you surround yourself with, so if you’re surrounded with people who are better than you, you have no choice but to get as good as those people.

So those are the people whose opinion you should care about. Forget everyone else. And that might not sound very practical; it’s like how do I stop thinking about what everyone thinks of me? Good question. You read the book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie, peeps. I was right, Dale Carnegie. It’s the same author of How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Another piece of advice that I have for you that will help you stop worrying about what other people think of you is realize how seldom they do. People are not thinking about you. You think that people are thinking about you because you’re all tied up in the social interactions you just had. No one’s thinking about you. It’s morbid. People think of you every once in a while if you do something really cool, if you make an impact on them positively, but by and large, people are thinking about themselves. It’s a sad reality, but everyone’s thinking about themselves. Realize that and you’ll have power.

Tip number three to increase your confidence is to affirm yourself. And this doesn’t mean that you have to talk to yourself in the mirror every morning before you brush your teeth; it just means that you should really watch the kind of self-talk that goes inside your head. When you mess up, are you the kind of person who berates yourself, or are you the kind of person who is sympathetic towards himself and you realize that you’re on your own side?

This was one of the most powerful techniques that helped me become more confident in every aspect of my life, watching how I responded to myself when I did something that either violated my values or if I messed up, you know, in a job or something like that. Did I put myself down, or was I realistic? Realize that I made a mistake and helped myself not make that mistake again because I loved myself. Your opinion of yourself is the cornerstone of confidence. If you know that you're human, you make mistakes and you’re allowed to make mistakes, you will worry a lot less about making them.

Tip number four: have a purpose. I can't tell you how to have a purpose. You don't need to figure out the meaning of life or anything like that. All I’m saying is you need to have a reason for waking up every morning. If you have a goal, say like a five-year plan—you want to get out of student debt, you want to start developing passive income so that you have the freedom to spend time with people that you care about—that is a purpose. And if you stick to that and you fully buy into that goal, then you have a rock-solid reason for waking up in the morning, and you have something that’ll help guide every action of your life, and that will inspire confidence.

This kind of purpose makes every interaction you have with every human being mean something. This guy who walks into a room, everyone shuts up; they look at him like a celebrity, right? They got mad clout; they walk around like they have a purpose. If you ask any successful person what he’s doing today or what he’s doing next week or what the overall plan is for the month, they will be able to tell you that. That’s in part why they’re so confident—they know exactly what they need to do, and they don’t really care about anyone who stands in the way of that.

So figure out what your purpose is, and you’ll instantly have way more confidence. Tip number five—this is the only kind of classic listicle tip I have on here—is act confident, even if you’re nervous. If you walk around like you’re going somewhere, it automatically, you know, releases testosterone and serotonin or something. I don’t know. Read your Peterson’s book. Rule number one in Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is stand up straight with your shoulders back.

Not just Jordan Peterson knowledge. If you look up—if you Google power posing—if you stand up... Okay, maybe I’m just gonna do it. All right, all right, that’s power posing. Your physiology is directly and intimately linked with your psychology. If you have a habit of having kind of a crappy posture and you walk around, and you know, you’re kind of walking around aimlessly, then you are gonna produce the brain chemicals that make you feel like a beta male, make you feel subhuman. You’re not gonna feel very good at all.

Whereas if you just adjust your posture, you breathe deep, and you act confidently, you will be more confident. So really be mindful of how you’re dressing, how you’re walking, how your posture is, how you present yourself on a physiological level because it directly influences your psychology and vice versa. Fake it until you make it is powerful. If you want to be confident, start pretending to be confident.

So by following this advice, you'll become the most confident person you know, the most confident person that anyone knows. When you walk into a room, people will stop talking; someone will work up the courage to ask you for your autograph. You’ll sign it there or whatever. They’re gonna look you up online; they’ll find nothing. It’s because you faked it and you made it.

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Thanks for watching and we'll catch you in the next video.