In order to become confident around women, you need experience with women. In order to get experience with women, you need to be confident around women. Right?

It’s a catch-22.

It’s like an entry-level job posting that says you need five years of work experience to apply. If they don’t give you the job, how are you supposed to get that work experience?

Telling a man to “just be confident” is about as useful as telling a freshly graduated jobseeker who never did internships to “just have prior work experience.”

What is confidence anyway?

At its fundamental level, confidence is simply about pattern recognition and prediction ability based on personal experience. You get it naturally through trial and error.

More importantly, you get it from the successes in those trials.

When it comes to everyday activities such as frying an egg, it’s easy to develop confidence because you can practice it over and over again. The success you experience from frying a perfectly sunny-side-up egg gives you confidence in egg-frying.

When it comes to approaching, dating, and seducing women, however, confidence itself appears to be a prerequisite to experience the success necessary to develop confidence.

Well, it’s not.

What if I told you that you don’t actually need to be confident in order to experience success with women? What if I told you that women can be attracted to you even if you have zero experience in dating?

First, ask yourself this: Why are women so drawn to confidence in men?

• Is it an evolutionary trigger that signals a better chance at survival and resourcefulness for successfully rearing offspring?
• Is it a hint that he’s able to satisfy her in bed? BDE?
• Is it a sign that other women have already given him approval, and is therefore a psychological heuristic that he possesses many other attractive traits?

Yes, yes, and yes. It’s probably all of the above.

A more important question, though, is: what does confidence functionally do?

Functionally, confidence signals a lack of desperation. If a man is confident, he is not worried about potential rejection.

He’s not worried about potential rejection because he knows the patterns to follow in order to achieve success. Those patterns are ingrained into his unconscious competence.

When women feel his lack of desperation and worry, they feel that he is confident. Then, they feel attracted to him.

If you don’t have confidence, you can emulate this same lack of desperation and worry with another tool: indifference.

When you were first learning how to fry an egg, did you care whether or not you fried it wrong or dropped a piece of the shell into the frying pan?

Not really. Even if you messed up so much that the egg ended up being inedible, you could always grab another egg and try again. It didn’t really affect your mood if you made a mistake.

You were indifferent to the outcome.

Show women that same indifference if you don’t yet have confidence.

From Chapter 13. The Confidence Substitute of Never Lonely:

Functionally, indifference signals a lack of desperation. If a man is indifferent to the outcome, he is not worried about potential rejection.

He’s not worried about potential rejection because he knows he is able to learn from his mistakes and just try again with someone else. And he is able to learn from his mistakes and try again with someone else because he doesn’t let his emotional attachments get in the way of his objectivity.

When women feel his lack of desperation and worry, they feel that he is confident. Then, they feel attracted to him.

Use indifference until you gain confidence. You can ditch the indifference then.

In fact, you will need to eventually ditch that indifference if you want to find yourself in healthy relationships based in empathy. Don’t worry about that if you’re not there yet, though. There are stages to this.

What about “fake it till you make it?”

Some guys try to take a “fake it till you make it” approach. Instead of being indifferent, they try to be something they’re not.

Fake confidence, aka arrogance, is actually a highly unreliable tool. Sure, it can work sometimes to trick immature women into feeling something for you, but it also has a high chance of turning many women off. Being arrogant is not an efficient strategy compared to a lot of other approaches.

Indifference doesn’t require any sort of inauthenticity like that. You can still “be yourself” through Zen-like detachment.

Being fake is tough. Being honest is easier. Less to keep track of.

Some of you have no issues with anxiety and over-worrying.

Simply realizing that you need to be indifferent is enough to make a change. Not everyone, though:

“What if I can’t get over the anxiety of potentially getting rejected or judged?”

I get it. “Just stop caring” is easier said than done. If you’ve programmed your brain with patterns of anxiety throughout your entire life, you can’t just flip a switch and turn off all that worry.

You can pay a bunch of money to a therapist to guide you through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in order to overcome such anxiety, but not all of us have that kind of cash. Fortunately, there are others who figured this stuff out before:

Some “pickup artist” companies back in the day had other solutions, such as instantly altering your psychological state with self-imposed overstimulation. They called it “getting in state,” and it was essentially becoming a hype man for both yourself and your wingmen.

Such short-term solutions don’t address the underlying long-term psychological programming you’ve subjected yourself to throughout your entire life. It only gets you as far as conscious competence in the stages of learning. Solutions such as CBT and meditation make it a lot easier for you in the long run via unconscious competence, allowing you to use indifference on autopilot.

When was the last time you did something without confidence, but with indifference? Let me know your reflections in the comments.

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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.

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