Building confidence

Reading about confidence and actually having it are very different issues. You can read about it your entire life, but you won't have it until you make a move to achieve it. It's not something that comes easily either. You will make mistakes along the way towards building confidence and this should be expected. Just like riding a horse or a bike, you'll fall and scrape your knees a few times, but then you have to get back up there and go for it.

Just get on the saddle and do it
One fine day, you're going to have to do it. Watching and reading about it won't do any good at all if you want to have confidence in life. The real deal is that you're going to have to get on the saddle and start to paddle. Why, you say? Confidence is not theory. Confidence is a feeling and state of mind. Therefore, it's not completely possible for any one to build confidence without having to do something about it. So, go on and start doing whatever it is that you want to have confidence in.

Do the right things and confidence will come almost too-naturally to you.

Experience builds confidence
Money and gold won't buy you confidence. They don't come in a nice packaging off the shelves. Pharmacies don't carry them. And physicians can't hand you 'confidence' in a bottle marked 'take three times a day'. The only person who can give you or prescribe you confidence is.... sadly, yourself.

The reason why we say 'get on with it and do it' is because we want you to have experience. You see, the more times you do something (it doesn't matter whether you fail more times at it than you succeed), the better you get at it (slowly but surely). The better you get at it, the more confidence you will have. It's impossible to see it right now but you have indeed improved. You've made progress, you can't see it, but you are! And the more experience you have, the more confident you will become.

How confident you want to become depends on yourself. You're steering the boat so, you decide when you're confident enough. But ultimately, like they always say.... practice makes perfect!

Faking confidence
Fake it enough, you'll soon realize that you don't even need to fake it. Wear the right clothes, behave in a certain way (without going overboard) and one day, you won't even have to make an effort to appear or behave confidently. Start talking confidently without stammering. No 'uh' and no 'ah' makes you sound confident. And the behavior and feelings become so real and so natural that you are confident by default!

While you cannot fake confidence in your game of tennis (because actions speak louder than words), you can behave confidently when you lose. When that is the case, your feelings and whatever it is in your mind becomes real. And like they say, whatever that is in your mind will one day transform into something real.