Today, I want to talk about the three distinct types of confidence and how to build confidence in each area. Whether that’s at work, with your friends, in romantic life, amongst superiors, it doesn’t matter. If you want to know how to be more confident, you need to identify the area in which you are weakest and get to work.
So let’s start with the most common type:
Type 1: Experiential Confidence
In college, I was terrified of chatting up strangers, especially women. I had two serious crushes … who I obviously never attempted to talk to. The thought of walking up to them out of the blue was enough to make me sweat.
Nearly 10 years later, I have a hard time remembering what I was so worried about. Start a conversation with a stranger? I’m off before you can even dare me.
How? Well, a big reason is that I have experience. I pushed through those first excruciating conversations and have since spoken to thousands of people. It’s familiar now. I feel no pressure.
You’ve experienced the same in your own life. The first time you got on the highway, were you freaked out? The first time cars whizzed past me at 80mph, I gripped the wheel like a maniac. It got my heart beating like I’d been running wind sprints.
But after a while, we all adjust. It’s not that driving on the highway is necessarily any safer. Our bodies just learn that it won’t kill us.
The kind of confidence you feel in a specific environment, whether it’s driving your car, presenting at work, or talking to women is experiential confidence. We’ve all developed it in some aspect of our lives.
All you have to do to earn it is complete some task successfully. You even build that confidence when you fail. If (and this is important) you don’t treat failure as permanent.
So take little old college me for example. If I’d had an awkward encounter with a girl and afterwards I’d told myself, “You ALWAYS screw it up. You are such a weirdo!” I might not have built experiential confidence.
But I didn’t. My thought process was more like: “Well, that sucked. Hopefully you learned something. At least you’re still breathing!”
Admittedly, not the best self-talk, but good enough to gain experiential confidence from each failure. Be thankful for the learning opportunity, thankful that you are still alive, and your failures will contribute to your confidence.
So the recipe for experiential confidence is simple. Ask yourself “Statistically speaking, is this likely to lead to physical harm?” If the answer is “No, I probably won’t suffer physical injury,” do it. Even if you’re afraid. Because guess what? Doing something when you’re afraid, is the best way to build experiential confidence for next time.
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