How to Be Confident Part One: The Body

For most of my life I have not been very confident. When I asked my parents how to be confident they only shrugged their shoulders and told me I was special-what help they were. I asked my friends for advice but that’s was as useful as asking a blind man if he liked the color of my shirt. Finding no answers from my friends and family I turned to the Internet for help.

Looking to the internet for sage wisdom on how to get something everyone else seemed to have was a fool’s errand. Desperate for confidence I bought into the advice that dressing better was the key, as if confidence was embedded into cotton fabric, denim and leather shoes.

Got the clothes and nothing seemed to change. Looked better but felt just as bad as I did before. On the plus side I received more compliments from women but none of them wanted to sleep with me. What’s a compliment worth if she won’t sleep with you?

The majority advice you receive on the internet is the same hackneyed garbage that has been floating around since your parents were growing up. Take in, rinse, recycle and repeat is their motto. Worse of all is that their advice gets implanted in your head after a thousand or so times of hearing it.

Through trial and error I have figured out how to gain the ever so elusive trait called confidence. Since you can’t spell attraction without confidence I will tell you how-no credit card required.

Confidence does not stem from one single place, it’s a complete system. People are impatient when it comes to getting things. They want it NOW, NOW, NOW! This leads them to look for a quick fix and easily digestible cure. You will hear marketers promoting “do this ONE thing and you will get results,” but it doesn’t work that way with almost everything worth having in life. There is not one singular path to take, one exercise to do or program to buy-it’s a complete system.

There are three aspects to confidence:

*Body
*Mind
*Soul

Each aspect needs to be balanced in order to feel an intense level of confidence. You can’t focus solely on the body without working on the mind or soul. If you do so you will be strong in one area but lacking in the others and still not feel confident. It’s similar to getting an amazing exhaust system on your car but keeping a below average carburetor and wondering why your car runs the same as it always has.

This may be a surprise to some of you but how you treat your body will affect your moods. Eating a cheeseburger can feel good, eating ten in a row will make you feel sick and make your emotions take a turn for the worse.

How well you take care of your body will determine a lot (not all) of how good you feel at any given time. If you treat it with respect it will reward you in kind by pumping out feel good chemicals into your body. If on the other hand you are reckless with the one body that you have you will feel awful physically and emotionally.

I don’t expect you to be a boy scout when it comes to working out and eating right, God knows I’m not, but try your best to take care of your body. Here’s a list of things you can do to make your body and yourself feel better:

*Get proper sleep. If you are a club kid and go out 3 plus nights a week you need to learn to cut back. It may be fun for a while but all of the booze and sleepless nights will soon catch up to you. When that happens your body will simply crash.

Getting the right amount of sleep is something that the majority of people take for granted. Having sleep problems for all of my life (sleep walking, insomnia) I can attest to the issues that can arise from not getting a good nights rest.

I’ve noticed that most of the time the mind is extremely active when you are tired. The little voice inside your head that creates insecurities by telling you that you are worthless is stronger when your body desperately needs sleep.

This problem is easily solved by making sleep a priority. I know you have tasks that need to get done but getting good sleep should be high on that list. Without enough sleep all of your tasks will take longer and not be completed as well they could be.

Eating better

What you put into your body will affect your energy and your mood. Who knew right? Make the amount of junk food that you consume less than the healthy food you take in. If you do this you will have more energy. More energy on top of being awake from getting proper rest equals positive mood. Happy people have far greater success with women than miserable people do.

I suggest that you start taking multi-vitamins as well. You don’t need to be a body builder to be taking these oh so helpful little pills. They will give you the vitamins you need to be able to get through your day when eating one hundred percent healthy food isn’t possible.

Working Out

Do big, lean and cut muscles attract more women? Of course they do but this shouldn’t be your motivation for working out. The muscles attract women but the deeper level of attraction comes from what an in shape body represents. Working out shows women that you have high enough self esteem to want to take care of your body.

The truth is that working out is not fun..at first. For at least 3-6 months you will NOT enjoy going to workout. The first few times you will feel excited and highly motivated but that will fade. After your excitement is broken down by aching muscles discipline will get you through the rough patch. Check out this article written by one of my favorite bloggers/author’s Steve Pavlina on developing discipline:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/self-discipline/

Once discipline is set in place you will start to enjoy going to the gym. It will give you more energy throughout your day. This extra energy will make you feel better and much more pleasurable to be around. It won’t completely change your life but it will add another piece to discovering how to become confident.

The key to working out is your motivation and your goals. It’s important to not go to the gym attempting to become a model with abs of steel. Having that type of goal will result in a heap of disappointment and frustration. You won’t find pleasure in working out until you have reached your goal of having an amazing body.

When you have an unhealthy goal of looking like Brad Pit in Fight Club you will constantly look towards the future instead of how far you have come. “I’m not there yet…” will ring throughout your head if you are too future oriented. Every inch of progress will not be celebrated because you aren’t there yet. If you are too future oriented the amount of pressure and the daunting task at hand will become too overwhelming and you will just give up.

The key to being happy while still improving your life is to know where you want to be, congratulate yourself for the smallest improvement and forget your goal completely. I’m sure you have heard the saying “It’s not the destination but how you get there” it’s become a cliché but it’s still true. The goal will never be as sweet as you make it out to be. Even if you do reach your goal the sense of accomplishment will be short lived and disappointment will start to set in.

The same principles for working out apply to building confidence. Focus too much on your goals and the pressure to succeed will crush you. Thinking only of how far you have to go will overshadow every improvement. You will move one step in the right direction and be pulled back two steps in the wrong.

Never compare yourself to other people. This is an offshoot of the way people handle improvement by focusing on their goals a little too much. They see other people and how far ahead they are in the race only becoming increasingly frustrated.

Accept that there are people who are better than you. Accept that there are people who are worse off than you. None of this really matters in the long run. He’s more confident than you are, so what? He gets laid far more often than you do, who cares? Their level of success or lack of success doesn’t change where you are right now.

“I should be here” “I should be more confident than I am…” no you shouldn’t. You should be exactly where you are. If you were meant to be more confident than you would be but you aren’t, so get over it. Being upset over where you could be is time wasted that could be spent growing and improving.