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We all know that confidence is one of those crucial things that will make or break your dating success.
When you’re meeting and dating women, feeling confident helps you to relax, have fun and enjoy the experience; as opposed to feeling nervous and awkward.
And when you ask her out or suggest on suggest a nightcap confidently, she’ll more likely take you up on your kind offer.
Yes, confidence with women clearly important. But what’s less obvious is where confidence with women comes from in the first place, or how it can be developed. I aim to shine a light on that for you.
A couple of helpful truths about confidence
Before we begin, let me share a couple of empowering truths with you, that will help you see confidence differently.
Truth #1: Confidence is Contextual
I often tell my clients that confidence is contextual; mainly to combat the prevailing opinion that just because you’re a generally confident guy, it means that you’ll automatically be confident with women too.
It doesn’t work like that. Confidence isn’t something that you can simply transfer from one area of your life to another. Just because you’re a confident driver doesn’t make you a confident public speaker, does it?
Similarly, you might feel confident having a beer with a few friends, but as soon as you’re on a first date, even in the same bar drinking the same kind of beer, you might feel altogether less confident. The surroundings might be identical but the context is entirely different.
Truth #2: Confidence is Earned
I also tell my clients that confidence with women has to be earned. Confidence doesn’t always come with experience, but with the right guidance and some deliberate practice, confidence often develops quickly.
For example, when you first learned to drive; you didn’t just jump behind the wheel and nonchalantly start rattling through maneuvers like 3-point turns and reverse parking.
No, someone sat next to you and talked you through what you needed to do, and what to look out for. They helped you stay calm and they guided your practice until the point where you could do it smoothly without even thinking about it.
Developing confidence with women follows a similar path. You won’t have an instructor sitting beside you talking you through each step. That would be weird! Nevertheless, your confidence will still develop in the same way.
You’ll mentally prepare yourself by better understanding what to expect, you’ll say and do things to calm your fear and nerves and then you’ll practice it until you become comfortable. This is when it will start to feel and look effortless.
Boom. That’s your roadmap to confidence with women in a nutshell.
And if you’d like a few more detailed directions on your journey to confidence, here are four of my favorite approaches for becoming more confident with women.
Focus on developing specific interpersonal skills and abilities.
Being good at driving means being competent across at a range of related, but distinct abilities, e.g. judging speed and distance, having a fast reaction time, having good peripheral vision and awareness, etc.
Being good at dating also requires a range of distinct skills and abilities, from the conversational to the emotional and sexual. And you can break each of these down and practice them as the separate skills that they are, just like you’d focus on reverse parking and practice it until you nailed it.
A few of the most common dating skills and abilities that guys typically get stuck on include:
- How to approach a woman and naturally strike up a conversation
- How (and when) to ask her out
- How to turn small talk into a meaningful and emotional conversation
- How to be flirting and being playful
- How to smoothly transition from conversation to kissing
- How to turn friendships with women into something more physical
You’ll find that as you become more competent at these specific interpersonal skills, you’ll feel more comfortable and confident at them, to the point where you just do them, automatically and without thinking.
Uproot and Rationalize Your Fears
When it comes to women, fear often cripples men into inaction.
When you’re in the heat of the moment and you’re about to ask her out, or go in for the kiss, fear kicks in like heavy knots in the pit of your stomach. You can feel it, it’s visceral and almost overwhelming.
What’s happening here is that your fears preys on your doubts and then blows them out of proportion, until they seem quite overwhelming and paralyzing.
What if she says no?
What if her friends see her reject me and laugh?
What if MY friends see me make a fool of myself?
But you can combat these fears in advance by identifying and uprooting your doubts or insecurities at their source, so that your fears have nothing to anchor onto in the heat of the moment.
Mentally rehearse the fearful situation and then ask yourself:
What’s the worst that could happen? Is it really that bad?
What do I need to do or what skill do I need to learn to avoid that bad outcome?
What’s the best that can happen?
In most cases, you’ll find that the worst-case scenarios are either not that bad, or can be completely avoided by doing something differently or by learning and practicing new interpersonal skill.
“If you really want something, you’ll find a way. Otherwise, you’ll find an excuse”
Jim Rohn
Overcome your Limiting Beliefs
You might not realize this, but your brain has a tremendous capacity for self-sabotage.
And ‘limiting beliefs’ are the insidious mental stowaways that drive this process.
Limiting beliefs are simply the ways that you think about yourself and talk about yourself, in your own head, which actually hold you back from achieving the result you deserve.
They expose themselves as those little statements that flicker across your mind when you’re doing something or you’re about to do something, such as:
“I can’t just go up to her and start talking to her”
“I always get nervous on dates”
“I have to say something clever, otherwise she won’t like me”
“I never know what to say on dates”
The real danger here is that these kinds of statements become self-fulfilling prophecies because you believe them and then you act them out.
So, guess what…
You don’t just go up to her and start talking to her;
You continue to always feel nervous on dates and
You put unnecessary pressure on yourself to say something clever and then feel like a failure and feel awkward because you can’t.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.” — Henry Ford
Limiting beliefs are like invisible walls which stop you from going where you want to get to, unless you can spot them and break through them.
So how exactly do you find these limiting beliefs and smash through them? Just like the introspective exercise that you did to unearth your hidden fears, you think about the same scary situations, but this time you pay close attention to the voices in your head, for example, “There’s no way I could do that!”
Then ask yourself:
“Why not?”
“Who else does it and how do they do it?”
“What if I approached it differently, or learned a specific skill, could I change the result?”
This mental line of questioning is a perfect way to lay an irrational belief open to rational examination, which often leads to breakthroughs.
So, don’t just accept your limiting beliefs without question. Explore them and challenge them. You might be end up being pleasantly surprised with what you’re capable of.
Be Authentic and Love Yourself
Nobody’s perfect. We each have our own strengths, flaws and life experiences. And these are precisely what makes each of us so unique and interesting.
There’s a tendency amongst some guys when they’re meeting women to try and act in a certain way, or to pretend to be someone that they’re not. My advice is don’t do that.
Instead, I advise my students to be authentic; meaning be true to who you are and what you stand for and don’t hold back. I even go so far as to say, ‘Embrace being you. And love yourself accordingly!’
When you’re being yourself and acting with integrity, it’s really liberating and empowering. You’re telling the world, “Hey, this is me! This is what’s important to me and this is how I roll – take it or leave it!”
This is a very strong stance to take and it does wonders for your confidence when you’re making your first impression with women.
“Stop hating yourself for everything you’re not. Start loving yourself for everything you already are.”
Unknown
Final Thoughts on Confidence
Next time you’re not feeling as confident as you want to be around women, give some thought to how your interpersonal abilities and self-belief may be holding you back. Because both of these are entirely within your control.
By better understanding confidence, and developing the components that build confidence, you can start feeling more comfortable and relaxed around women so that you can enjoy yourself a lot more. This will make you seem a lot more attractive too.
When you see a guy confidently approach a woman and start a spontaneous conversation, what you’re looking at is just the tip of the iceberg. The untrained eye often underappreciates the interpersonal skillset, the deliberate practice and the carefully cultivated mindset that makes such confidence possible.
The good news is that you too can earn the confidence that you’ve always wanted with women, through learning, practice and being mindful about what you tell yourself.
The reality of your confidence with women is that it’s limited only by your abilities and beliefs.
Be unlimited.
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Photo credit: Getty Images