Most self-confidence advice and little tips and tricks are baloney. Most of the content that I see about confidence on the internet or on YouTube goes like this, if you tell yourself, “I am confident” in the mirror 3 times a day and say that you love yourself even though you’re a piece of shit that doesn’t do anything with your life, eventually you’ll be confident. That’s bullshit.

The problem with that affirmation is that it’s ignoring an underlying belief that’s dug in deep, which is that you don’t trust yourself. Self- confidence isn’t about saying that you’re confident or feeling good about yourself.

Feeling good about yourself shouldn’t be something you’re trying to convince yourself of. Feeling good about yourself should come from overcoming challenges, embracing struggle, and building self-trust. That’s where real self-confidence comes from, self-trust.

Self-confidence is self-trust, and trust is built by knowing you can rely on yourself, knowing that if a challenge comes along that you can face it and embrace the suck and come out of the other side having learned something from it, growing from it or at least not being worse for it.

Confidence isn’t about feeling good. It’s about embracing the negative and using it as a tool to improve yourself, and feeling good is just a byproduct of that, not confidence in and of itself. How can you be confident in yourself if you run from adversity? You’re just proving to yourself that you can’t trust yourself to do what needs to be done.

Self-confidence isn’t going to the gym once and feeling good about yourself just because you showed up. Being self-confident is going even though it sucks and embracing the suck, loving the suck and knowing that you can trust yourself to still perform even though it’s going to suck. When you go through months of suffering and look in the mirror and see a hot bod, sure the body helps with confidence, but it’s the discipline and consistency that make the real difference in your level of confidence.

If you took a naturally good-looking person who has confidence because of the way that they look and suddenly stripped those looks away, what are you left with? A shallow shell of a human being, the confidence was stripped along with the looks because the confidence wasn’t founded on ability, on experience and adversity. If you took everything away from the person who built what they had by themselves, from the bottom to the top, you wouldn’t take their confidence.

Why? Because you can’t take away the experience that made them what they are. You can take away the stuff, but you can’t take away those days of digging deep, overcoming the struggle and suffering. That shit is for life. That’s your character, what’s on the inside is what makes you confident, not what’s on the outside.

That person isn’t defined by the stuff they have. They are defined by the struggle and suffering that they decided to face head-on. They didn’t become confident because of the material stuff they have; they didn’t become confident because they are happy. The confidence came from the negative, the pain, from knowing they can depend on themselves when the going gets tough.

In my humble opinion, people think too much about positivity and rainbow and happiness when it comes to self-confidence. Confidence has its roots in negativity. Not in thinking negative, but by accepting the negative and turning it into a positive. Confidence doesn’t come from ignoring the negative and acting like it isn’t there and repeating your affirmations in the mirror. Confidence comes from admitting to what’s wrong and then fixing it.

Self-confidence you might feel when you repeat those affirmations and do one good thing is fleeting, because it’s avoiding the underlying probelms. Thats where the real confidence comes from. Saying I have a problem and fixing it even though it royally sucks is not supposed to be fun, it’s not going to feel good until you’ve fixed that problem.

Saying you love yourself in the mirror and pretending you believe it when you’re a fat turd isn’t confidence. Getting your fat ass to the gym is loving yourself and after a few months of suffering you’ll start feeling confident. Self-confidence is results based. It’s not about feelings, it’s about actions you do when you feel shitty, and feeling good once you do what needs to be done is a byproduct of self-confidence, not confidence itself.

Getting to the gym when you’re tired doesn’t feel good. What feels good is going through months of feeling shitty until you get the results you want and looking in the mirror and thinking, I did that.

It’s not just the looks that give you the confidence, it’s that you did it. If someone waved a magic wand and magically gave you a rock-hard six-pack, you’d still be the same self-conscious turd underneath it. You didn’t earn it, and you’ll probably going to lose it because you’re still the same pathetic person underneath it. You didn’t grow, you didn’t change, you won’t have the confidence because you didn’t earn it.

Going up to that pretty girl you see at the checkout isn’t easy. It’s scary. Being confident comes from going up to those pretty girls and being afraid and feeling like you’re not good enough and getting rejected a million times until you succeed a couple of times and then you’re not afraid anymore, you’ve proved to yourself that you’re good enough, that you can do it.

If she’s not about it, it doesn’t bother you anymore because you’ve eaten the poop sandwich so many times that you know it’s not entirely about you, and you can walk away from rejection without falling to pieces. That kind of confidence comes from success, but its origins come from failure, feeling shitty and still doing it.

If I went up to those girls and was guaranteed to be successful every time, is that real confidence? What happens when I get my first rejection? Real confidence means knowing you can fail and still doing it anyways. If you’re looking for guaranteed success, you’re not looking for real confidence. Life don’t work that way, it’s not a fairy-tale. Be realistic.

Stop thinking that confidence is about feeling good. Positive feelings are a byproduct of going through the shit and coming out on top. Stop looking for get-confident-quick scams on the internet, stop ignoring the underlying problems that are the source of your lack of confidence and solve those problems because that’s how self-confidence is actually created.

Yeah, you need to have a positive attitude. That doesn’t mean ignoring the negative things in your life. Having a positive attitude means embracing the suck and not letting it get you down, it means viewing that negativity in a different light, as a vehicle for self-growth, something you can use to make yourself better and all of a sudden, it’s not so negative anymore, it’s easier to overcome and once you do you’ve developed a bit of self-trust, and as a result you become more confident.

What does it mean to tell someone something in confidence? It means you trust them not to tell anybody else. Well, that’s what self-confidence is; it’s the ability to trust yourself. If you can’t trust yourself not to fall apart when something bad happens to you, how can you have confidence in yourself?

The definition of self-confidence shouldn’t be feeling good about yourself. There’s no challenge in that, it’s unrealistic and the only way to prove confidence is to have it tested, and that means maintaining that self-reliance, that self-trust to get though the tough things that life throws at us.

Confidence isn’t about the feels; it’s about keeping it real.