Today we’re going to talk about the things that make YOU awesome!
Aww, yeah!!
So, in my other life I’m also a private equity accountant and one of the things we studied in business school was the Johari window. Basically, there are AWESOME qualities about you that are both known/unknown to yourself, and also known/unknown to others:
You can tell I’m an accountant because I made this visual in Microsoft Excel
We’re mostly interested in Quadrant 2 – your strengths that are known to others but not known by you (yet!) There’s an easy way to find out what they are but it IS going to push you out of your comfort zone. You’ve been warned!
I’ve been reading a lot of self-books these days and it seems like many of them have a similar exercise–
(GOOD self-help books, I mean. Not those weird ones from other dating coaches with half-naked women on the cover, but reputable books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey or The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman).
Books like these ask you to imagine your own funeral and write a eulogy for yourself. What do you want people to say about you when they talk about you? What legacy would you like to leave behind when you’re no longer here?
I’m gonna be honest and say that I’ve been resisting doing this exercise whenever I read it. Yeah, I know I should, but…
…holy cow, what a depressing thing to think about…
After reading this one, two, three times though, I started to get curious. Maybe it was worth thinking about it if several different authors were independently saying the same thing.
Turns out, it highlights an important part of being confident around women.
One of the best ways to become confident is to live a meaningful life. And thinking about what you’d like people to say about you when you’re not around is a great way to do just that.
Maybe it’s a bit much to ask you to imagine your own funeral. I mean, I still haven’t done that exercise myself. Who am I to tell you to do it?
Another great way to start moving toward a meaningful life is to choose what I call your “Awesome Alternative”, and it goes like this—
Have you ever thought about how dangerous the modern world is?
You’re probably reading this email on your computer or phone right now. You would have had to plug in whatever device you’re reading this email on. If your fingers were just 1 or 2 centimeters off the mark, you could have fried yourself!
This could have killed you, ya know!
What an incredibly dangerous task! I’m sure you didn’t even think twice about pulling it off. That’s because you’ve already demonstrated to the part of your brain which controls confidence that you are capable of performing such a task.
The science behind where confidence comes from
That part of your brain is called the amygdala and it’s responsible for regulating your body’s emotional responses. One of those responses is fear and confidence. Its task is to keep you alive by making you feel unconfident around situations it believes you are not equipped to handle.
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of classic games using the NSO feature on the Nintendo Switch – you know, those old side-scrollers from the 80’s and 90’s.
When you play them on modern hardware, there’s often some Quality-of-Life improvements vs playing them on their original systems. For example, you can use ‘save states’ to reload at any time or even hold the trigger buttons together to rewind time on some games.
You can rewind time by holding the triggers like this…wait, why am I still playing Switch 1? Get the newest one you dinosaur!
I try not to use those features when I play because I’m trying to capture the feeling of playing those games from my childhood – and that includes the tension of not screwing up at the end of a level.
Think about that. Why would I feel nervous at the end of a level?
It’s simple: if I screw up, I got to restart the whole level again!
This perfectly highlights where confidence comes from, and what factors can increase or decrease how confident we feel.
The ABC Confidence Principle
Being confident involves three factors. This is what I call the “ABC Confidence Principle”, and it goes like this:
[Ability + Belief + Curiosity = Confidence]
Generally speaking, how confident we are at any given task is a combination of 1) Our Ability to do the task, 2) Our Belief that we can pull it off successfully, and 3) Having a positive curiosity about your successes/failures (there are a couple of exceptions, but we’ll cover that later). Being confident around women involves both knowing how to talk to her, and developing a positive Belief in our Ability to do so.
When I got married a couple years ago, one of the things that excited me was the idea of never having to go through the process of asking women out ever again. I wouldn’t have to put myself out there or face the fear of rejection anymore.
Turns out that’s not quite true. Even if I’m not asking women out romantically anymore, I’ve learned that having successful social and professional lives depends on your ability to ask people out. Asking your co-workers out to lunch, asking new friends out to grab drinks, or asking a potential professional networking contact out to coffee.
All of that involves overcoming that oh-so-familiar fear of rejection. Darn it.
So, how do you overcome that fear of rejection? How do you move past that nervousness and the “lemonade” feeling that always creeps up in your stomach when you’re talking to a woman you’re interested in?
Overcoming nervousness by focusing outside yourself
Back when I was single, talking to a woman I was interested in seemed like the scariest thing in the world. That and roller-coasters.
I still hate roller-coasters, by the way
Whenever I wanted to approach someone, my mind would start racing at a million miles per hour playing all the bad things that could possibly happen. For example,
“What if I look like a fool or embarrass myself in front of her?”
“If I ask her out, everything might become awkward between us.”
“How do I start a conversation with her that will lead in the right direction?”
Eventually, I found myself living the same story over and over again. I’d run into an interesting woman and find myself infatuated with her. I’d take forever to work up the nerve to ask her out. Invariably she’d turn me down, sometimes even telling me that she already had a boyfriend.
Of course, she did.
Every time this happened, I’d feel like a fool for even sticking my neck out in the first place. I felt less and less confident each time I got turned down until eventually I began to believe—unironically—that I was cursed.
Looking back, a lot of that nervousness and approach anxiety came from the fact that I was focusing on myself instead of herself. When I told myself, “What if I look like a fool or embarrass myself in front of her?”, I was focusing too much on making myself look good instead of focusing on brightening up her day.
Women can sense this, by the way.
Instead of telling myself all those things that I used to before, I learned to replace those thoughts with new ones such as…
“How can I brighten up her day?”
“How can I show her a good time?
“What can I talk to her about that she’d enjoy telling me?
Once I changed my mindset to focus more on herself instead of myself, I started to become more confident around women. Again, women can totally sense this and that’s why changing your mindset is at least (if not more) important than the actual words you use when talking to her!
The next time you’re talking to a woman you’re interested in (or any person you’d like to build a relationship with), try shifting your focus onto themselves instead of yourself. You might be surprised at what a difference this makes!
P.S. Okay, so what do you do if you end up making a fool of yourself in front of her? Well…chances are they’re not going to remember. Unless they like you. Which is a good thing!
Once upon a time, I lived in an apartment building for about 4 years. It was a great building: the location was good, the rent was reasonable, and the room had an amazing view of the lake!
If there was one thing that I thought was amiss about that building, though, it would be that the shower water was way too cold during the winter. It wasn’t that much of an issue anyway…it only happened during the winter, and a cold shower never killed anyone, right? So, I just kinda dealt with it for almost half a decade.
Well, I recently happened to run into the new tenant who moved into my old apartment. I asked him what he thought of the apartment. You know what he told me?
“It’s a great room but the shower water was a bit too cold when I moved in, so I asked the manager about it and he fixed it right up.”
You know, I used to be an unconfident socially anxious person in the past. I’d meet women that I wanted to talk to but I’d always be afraid to approach her. I’d see Meetup groups that looked super fun but I was afraid to go. Heck, I’d even be afraid to talk to my co-workers at work!
I was that guy who was always picked last in gym class. I was that guy who would hide in the bathroom and pretend to be playing on my phone at parties while everyone else was having fun. I was that guy who sat at the corner of the lunch table because nobody wanted to eat with me.
This is where you’d find me at a party
The worst part about being that guy is that – when you look around and see everyone else having fun, making friends, and getting into relationships – you begin to wonder if you’re the only one who doesn’t get it.
Yeah. It sucks to be that guy.
Of course, I didn’t want to be that guy. I’d always get advice from well-meaning relatives like…
“You should be more confident”
“Steven, you should speak up more”
“You should break out of your shell”
…and, I mean, I wanted to!! I desperately wanted to break out of my shell. To make friends and talk to people just as easily as everyone else did.
I even tried to break out of my shell a few times. I would ask my classmates if they wanted to grab lunch. I asked a few women that I liked out on dates. Invariably, they all turned me down. And eventually, I just started to wonder if it was because something was wrong with me. If it was because I was a bad person.
That was not an emotionally fun place to be.
If you’ve ever felt this way, then I’m not going to try and talk you out of it. Instead, I’ll just tell you what I wish I knew back then whenever I felt that way.
I’m perhaps one of the least confident people I know.
You’d think I’d be one of the most confident people out there. But I still get social anxiety when I’m around people.
This is me in my comfort zone…
And this is me outside of my comfort zone…
That’s me on the far right. It looks like I’m having a good time, right? I cracked a few jokes, told a few stories, and basically became the life of the party. But if you could look inside my head, you’d see that my emotions basically looked like this:
Life would be so much easier if you could take the part of your brain that feels anxiety and just…flip a switch so you don’t feel unconfident anymore, right?
Well, I haven’t found that switch yet. But until I do, here’s how I deal with those times I feel nervous or unconfident.
The holidays are coming! It’s the time of year when you start seeing Christmas lights and other festive decorations.
It’s also the time of year that used to stress me out the most.
You see, I always used to put a lot of pressure on myself to find a girlfriend in time for the holidays. It’s the time of year that you spend with people you love, and I always wanted to find a nice woman and take her home to meet my parents during the holiday season.
What I didn’t realize is that I was actually making it harder on myself by doing this. Since I was putting all these arbitrary deadlines around when I “had” to find a girlfriend, I was starting to come off as desperate to the women that I talked to. As I’ve written before, women don’t want a man whose cup of life is only half full.
After trying to talk to women and striking out a few times, I began to ask myself…
“How do I stop coming across as desperate when talking to women?”
…which was a good start, but it was still the wrong question. Eventually, I started having more luck talking to women when I stopped asking myself that question and started asking this one:
“How do I stop being desperate when talking to women?”
