Where do you get your confidence from? (Men of Reddit)

21 comments

1. Alcohol

2. I genuinely stopped caring about having shame in my actions and or statements.. Took so much stress off my shoulders.

3. Exercise, and doing the things I like to do without giving a care about what some person who doesn’t even know me would think.

   And most specifically, confidence with women comes from resigning myself to “if she’s interested in me, then it’ll work. If she’s not, then it won’t and I won’t ever have to worry about seeing her again anyway.”

4. Women. Every step of the way when I was insecure about something, a girl or woman in my life accepted me or made me feel less insecure about that thing. In high school it was my weight and my body hair. In college it was my dick size and how good I was in bed. In my early 20s it was my personality and how much people wanted to be around me. In my late 20s it was my worth as a person. It sucks I had to find validation from other people, but I’m happy I feel validated at all.

5. I just stopped giving a fuck what others think about me.

6. My father is a great man, and I am his son.

7. Recently a bunch of co workers started confiding in me about their insecurities, turns out everyone has anxiety just like i do. Now that i know, I’ve been much more confident.

8. It’s simple: I do things which I consider to be worthy of admiration.

   I meet or exceed my own expectations in my career, relationships and hobbies.

   It’s that simple.

9. A lifetime of choosing emotional growth over emotional comfort.

10. I just don’t care what people think of me

11. I don’t look for others people’s approval, I don’t care about other people’s criticism, do I guess it comes from knowing what I’m capable of

12. I was so insecure at one point that I reached this level of hating myself so much that I just stopped caring about myself and how others saw me. After that I had a total shift where I started to actually realize my own value and good qualities. I also stopped seeing my flaws as reasons why I’m just terrible, and started to see them as normal human issues that I could overcome if I gave it some effort.

13. I judge others by the same standards i judge myself, in a very complicated background.

14. I am 30 for context.

    When I was a child up to very recently I always mimicked what I saw in other men I perceived to be confident. Some things worked, some things didn’t, and I always found that whenever something worked, that confidence would always be fleeting. And the reason for that was because I wasn’t always in an ideal environment that was appropriate for whatever behavior would make me feel confident somewhere else.

    I learned that confidence, true confidence is created on the inside. Of learning, knowing and accepting oneself as you are. I don’t have to look or behave a specific way to be confident. It’s not in the way that I walk or talk. It’s not in the way that I dress or what I do for a living.

    It’s knowing who I am, what I am afraid of, what my faults are, and accepting and not trying to be different. I’m not saying don’t work on destructive behavior traits, but I am saying don’t try to change things about yourself because you think it will make people perceive you with more respect.

    Because at the end of the day it won’t be for you. It will be for them. And confident people are confident in *themselves*, they don’t fastidiously craft an image of themselves that they *hope* others will perceive as confidence.

15. All the little confidence I have is from a lack of caring.

16. [deleted]

17. Adversity

    Growing up in a third world country. I live in a developed western nation now where life is much easier, people are kind and rule of law is upheld. There is no situation you can put me in that scares me now.

    My friends who grew up here asked me a few weeks how I gathered the courage to ask a certain lady at the bar out. I remember telling them that it certainly wasn’t as scary as approaching the local gangster (back where I’m from). We all had a good laugh about it.

18. From improving my skills, from doing things that progress me on the path I want to be on, when some of these things result in successes and when I refuse to do things that are not in my interest (e.g. getting wasted on a tuesday morning because a buddy things that would be funny)

    **TL;DR**: When I act in my own best interest and know that “I have my own back”

19. I drink 🥛

20. I stopped listening to what others think about me and also I quit masturbating = a huge boost of confidence.

21. I buy it in bulk from Amazon. Unfortunately they’ve been out of stock for a while now.