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How Do I Maintain My Confidence/Self-Esteem?

Ken

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
240
Hello,

For the past few years or so, I’ve been having difficulty maintaining my confidence. I find that it’s fleeting, it always comes and goes. It always ebbs and flows.

So here’s the question: How do I maintain my confidence/self-esteem consistently?
 

James D

Modern Human
Modern Human
Joined
Jul 23, 2017
Messages
745
I think no one is 100% confident all the time.

But there's a baseline confidence level or average confidence that you should try to keep reasonably high.

In your periods of low confidence, are you feeling unconfident about your performance in specific fields like picking up girls or business etc?

Or do you mean you internally think less of yourself in those moments?
 

Chase

Chieftan
Staff member
tribal-elder
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
Messages
6,352
Build wins into your schedule.

Confidence comes from how much winning you're doing versus how much losing.

Everyone has a streak of bad luck every now and then. When that happens and you realize your confidence has taken a drubbing, you need to sit down and ask yourself what you can build into your day that gets you more or less guaranteed wins -- actually satisfying wins that will build it back up again.

That's good for general confidence. Then you also have domain-specific confidence.

So like... if you've been sucking with girls and both overall confidence and girl confidence is low:

  • Pick a sport, hobby, exercise, or skill you want to be better at that you can work on on your own and do it for 30 minutes a day. Make note of your progress.

  • Pick some fundamentals you want to improve: clothes, hair, walk, posture, eye contact, etc. Work on that every day. Note your progress.

  • Find something you want to learn that's cool and useful: a new language, to draw, to write better, etc. Work on that 30 minutes a day. Make note of your progress.
Do that for 2 weeks straight and by the end of week 2 you'll be feeling like a champ.

Then you need domain-specific confidence. For that, just pick anything you know how to do with girls that you can be assured of reasonable success in, and start there. If that's just making eye contact and smiling at girls you pass on the street, start there. If it's making small talk with waitstaff, clerks, and the like, do that. Then start setting slightly more ambitious -- but still small and achievable -- goals. Go up from there.

By orienting your life around incremental victories, you start to win, win, win all the time, and your confidence starts going up and up, both in general, and in the specific domains you get your wins from.

See also:




Chase
 

TestY

Cro-Magnon Man
Cro-Magnon Man
Joined
Mar 7, 2023
Messages
74
Build wins into your schedule.

Confidence comes from how much winning you're doing versus how much losing.

...
Do that for 2 weeks straight and by the end of week 2 you'll be feeling like a champ.


Chase
Thanks for the great post!
 

HoofHearted

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
Sep 10, 2022
Messages
461
Hello,

For the past few years or so, I’ve been having difficulty maintaining my confidence. I find that it’s fleeting, it always comes and goes. It always ebbs and flows.

So here’s the question: How do I maintain my confidence/self-esteem consistently?

Do you have a specific example of what you mean? These aren't exactly concrete terms.
 

Ken

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
240
I think no one is 100% confident all the time.

But there's a baseline confidence level or average confidence that you should try to keep reasonably high.

In your periods of low confidence, are you feeling unconfident about your performance in specific fields like picking up girls or business etc?

Or do you mean you internally think less of yourself in those moments?
I think both feeling unconfident in specific fields and internally thinking less of myself.
 

SteelbookCollector

Space Monkey
space monkey
Joined
Oct 15, 2023
Messages
55
ya i've heard some people say, a mans value is supposed to come from his own life, not from women, but its okay for a womans value to come from men.
 

Ken

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
240
Do you have a specific example of what you mean? These aren't exactly concrete terms.
In addition to what I mentioned before, most of this is caused by porn addiction that I am trying to get over.
 

HoofHearted

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
Sep 10, 2022
Messages
461
In addition to what I mentioned before, most of this is caused by porn addiction that I am trying to get over.

Who knows. Beware though. Anybody who has ever told me they have a porn addiction doesn't actually seem to have one.

Oh, they look at porn too much, that's true. But they almost always have other bullshit going on that is the actual problem, not the poor innocent porn that catches all the blame.

They tend to blame the porn so they can continue being a shithead elsewhere, secretly and undercover.

I don't know you or your problems. Just a general reminder to all of us that we need to be a lil more real with ourselves sometimes.
 

Spyce D

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
Jul 9, 2019
Messages
778
Who knows. Beware though. Anybody who has ever told me they have a porn addiction doesn't actually seem to have one.

Oh, they look at porn too much, that's true. But they almost always have other bullshit going on that is the actual problem, not the poor innocent porn that catches all the blame.

They tend to blame the porn so they can continue being a shithead elsewhere, secretly and undercover.

I don't know you or your problems. Just a general reminder to all of us that we need to be a lil more real with ourselves sometimes.
I second this .

Sometimes , addiction can be a result of some issues in our life that we don't address and hence hide behind cheap pleasure to avoid pain .

Have dealt with a lot of b.s. this year .

And somehow emerged as far more confident cuz I was willing to confront it .
 
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