The most common question that people ask about personal development (including dating and relationships) is how to be confident. Learning how to have confidence presents a major challenge: How can you be confident when you have pretty much nothing to feel confident about? Here are some examples in real life: How can you be confident at a sales job if you have never done sales before? How can you be confident at a social event when nobody has liked you before? How can you be confident in a romantic relationship if every single relationship that you’ve ever had was absolutely toxic? How can you be confident in wealth creation when you’ve never made any money before? It seems that confidence is an area where confident people become even more confident, while insecure people become more insecure. At the end of the day, if you have never had a successful relationship before, you don’t even have the reference points – you don’t know what a successful relationship looks like or feels like; you lack confidence in your new relationship, and then that lack of confidence will make your new partner think that you are strange or needy, so this will probably cause another terrible breakup. 

  • The confidence myth:

In theory, in order to be successful, you have to be confident first. Yet to be confident, you have to be successful. As a consequence, you may get stuck in a loop: no success no confidence no success.

It’s a Catch-22 situation.

Having said that, just because someone has lots of money, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are always confident in their own wealth at all times. In truth, a person’s confidence is actually rooted in this person’s perception of themselves – this has nothing to do with any tangible external stuff. It turns out that confidence is a state of mind – a perception that you lack absolutely nothing. 😊

dating and relationships

  • How to have solid confidence:

Many gurus would say something along the lines of, “Just tell yourself that you lack nothing. Use affirmations daily. Then you will be confident.”

Technically, that can work to some degree; nonetheless, there is a difference between hearing your daily affirmations and believing your daily affirmations.

Affirmations won’t work if you don’t believe them. Period.

Some gurus would say, “If you focus on self-improvement every day, you will become more confident.” Indeed, there are one million articles about 10 ways to become confident today and 20 things confident people do – you can read those articles and then take action accordingly, e.g., you go to the gym, wear better clothes, improve your body language, and so forth. Granted, this approach can work for a while, but realistically, it’s not a very sustainable approach because ultimately, this approach still focuses on getting validation from external sources. Sadly, deriving confidence from the external world isn’t the real solution, as anything external can be taken away from you. In other words, if you don’t have good clothes to wear, a fit body to impress your Instagram followers or a relationship to show off in public, can you still be confident?

In my view, the best way to be really confident is to be comfortable with what you don’t have.

It’s easy to be comfortable in what you achieve, but can you also be comfortable in what you don’t achieve? Interestingly, research shows that if you are comfortable with what you lack, it’s a bit easier for you to feel confident: no success comfort in failure confidence success.

Those who are confident in dating and relationships are truly confident simply because they are completely comfortable with rejection. They don’t fear rejection as they are very comfortable with people disliking them so long as they express themselves in an honest manner.

“Those who are confident in dating and relationships are confident merely because they are totally comfortable with getting hurt. They can be vulnerable and tell their partners their true feelings, thereby building strong emotional connections. They have clear boundaries and stick to their standards, even if that means ending an unhealthy relationship. By contrast, in terms of dating and relationships, the most common question that people who don’t feel confident ask is “Will I be hurt?” because they are not comfortable with getting hurt – unfortunately, that oftentimes creates a self-fulfilling prophecy!”