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You can’t think your way to confidence.

Confidence isn’t a feeling either. And waiting to be confident is absolute stupidity. Confidence definitely isn’t a personality trait or something you’re born with.

The mystery around what real confidence is messes people up for decades. Most never learn the secret to real confidence before they die.

The way confidence works is far simpler.

It’s based on psychology and neuroscience. And once you understand how true confidence works, your life will never be the same again. You will do things you never thought you could do (even if you’re shy or an introvert).

Give me 4 mins. This will change your life.

A Stanford psychologist accidentally shared how to become dangerously confident

Psychologists have spent decades studying differences between confident and unconfident people. None of them could accurately figure it out.

That was until psychologist Albert Bandura became obsessed with figuring it out. And what he found out is incredible. Anyone can become confident if they’re willing to make one small change. You need to understand the background first though.

Albert did 100s of experiments with confident and unconfident people. Then he wrote down why some people were insanely confident and have aura, while other people were ignored and perceived as worthless. He also looked at why some people crave doing hard things while others avoid doing them, made excuses, or just stood still.

One huge finding stood out.

Confident people don’t magically f*cking avoid doubt. He found confident people had just as much doubt as everyone else. What gave confident people extreme confidence was what he labelled self-efficacy.

To understand it, let me share an experiment he ran. Albert split a room of people with similar skills and experience into two groups. He then gave them a difficult task. Before they could work on the task, he told Group 1 they had nailed tasks like this before and should do well. He told Group 2 they sucked at tasks like this in the past.

The results were shocking.

Group 1 performed insanely well and recovered from failure, rejection, and embarrassment much faster. Group 2 gave up much sooner even though they had the same skills and experience. Tragic.

Here’s what this means for you…

Your brain doesn’t gain confidence from BS, woo-woo positive thinking – or even affirmations – because you can’t think your way to confidence. No.

Your brain generates confidence from a proven track record of doing hard things and surviving. Each tiny win creates more momentum and leads to more confidence.

Every time you smash through feelings of doubt or uncertainty, instead of hoping it’ll go away, your brain makes a note. It logs the event as evidence.

Every time you give the speech in public, start the business, publish the essay, ask the guy/gal out, or take the promotion… every time you do the hard, uncomfortable thing instead of avoiding it, your brain is freaking paying attention like an FBI agent. And each time your brain updates its algorithm and prediction on what you might be able to achieve.

Insanely confident people are no different from you.

They’ve just repeatedly given their brain a lot of evidence that they can do hard, uncomfortable things more than you have. It’s not more complicated than that, which means you can quickly become more confident if you want. Like, right now.

It’s taken me 40 years to realize that confidence is the cheat code to life

I have never been a confident person.

In school I got bullied, hard. I never went to university. Women ignored me for most of my adult life (maybe it was the big ears). But I was even less confident than you might think. When I faced extreme mental illness 5+ years ago, things got even darker.

I didn’t just have rock bottom confidence. My lack of confidence was sabotaging my every move. All I had was a brain full of evidence that everything would go wrong.

I became so anxious I didn’t have the confidence to sit in a meeting room with the door closed because I didn’t trust myself not to vomit.

This may sound like a small thing, but it wasn’t.

I couldn’t do job interviews. I couldn’t have meetings with a boss. I couldn’t even go to the doctor. By the end, I couldn’t even sit in a chair and get my hair cut, so I was forced to have long hair. The boys called me Barbie because of my long, blonde, girly hair and would greet me with “Hey, babe.”

It was hell.

It got even worse. All the anxiety turned into an eating disorder. Every birthday celebration I’d eat my birthday dinner at a restaurant with my family, then vomit it all up in the bathroom about halfway through.

Do you know what that does to your confidence?

Well, you have negative confidence. You start to not even trust the ground you walk on. That was me. So in case you think you lack confidence, you’re probably nowhere near as bad as I was.

But I accidentally learned this little brain hack by myself.

I decided one day to see if I could produce evidence that was the opposite. I wrote down a list of every fear I had. Things such as flying on planes, giving a speech, sitting in a meeting room, and going on a date with a girl.

Then I committed to tackling just one item on the list.

I chose what I thought was the easiest one: going up a few floors in an elevator. I chose the Sofitel building in downtown Melbourne, Australia.

I got into the elevator hoping I’d be alone in case anything went wrong or I shat myself. Just as the door was closing, a husband and wife entered the elevator. My palms started sweating.

I went as white as a ghost.

Instead of panic, I turned it into a video game. I thought to myself, “How cool would it be if I could somehow pull this off?” After a few minutes the elevator stopped and I jumped out. I’d made it! I was so excited I jumped back in the elevator a few minutes later and went back down. I got a high from it. I became addicted.

I went back to the list and picked another item: flying on a plane for 2 hours. I booked a ticket to Sydney. I got on the plane. I was terrified but also thrilled.

The stakes here were higher because if my anxiety took over there was no asking the pilot to land the plane mid-air. I once again turned it into a video game.

I imagined defying the odds and winning. And I accepted the downside of a full-blown panic attack with the flight attendants having to resuscitate me mid-air. Things didn’t go to plan.

Once again I was unlucky.

The most popular kid from my high school happened to be on the same plane. He recognised me and said hello. Then he sat right near me. I now had a witness. The embarrassment factor skyrocketed. But again, I just disconnected from the outcome and thought about what winning would do.

And I won. Again. No issues.

For the next few years, I worked my way through every item on the list. I did job interviews for the hell of it. I asked for promotions. I started doing public speaking at Toastmasters. By the end of the experiment I was…

• Giving speeches at the Toastmasters State Championships, and giving talks to rooms full of 100s of my banking colleagues