How do I gain constant self confidence?

I hate to break it to you - but there’s no such thing as constant, unwavering confidence that lasts throughout your life.

Confidence varies depending on your skills, abilities, thoughts, and doubts.

At best, you can be very confident in some things, and lack confidence in others.

If, for example, you’ve practiced playing tennis for years, you’ll be quite confident that you’ll be able to hit that ball where it needs to go. If you haven’t - you’ll lack any confidence to perform that task.

You also noticed a distinct pattern that your confidence levels vary throughout the day.

That’s not a coincidence, and it’s because of your thoughts.

One of the most ubiquitous confidence-killers is self-doubt.

Self-doubt is caused by overthinking things and being in your head too much.

And guess what - a TON of people suffer from being in their heads too much. I know I do.

As soon as you start doing something - various thoughts like “What if this doesn’t work and I fail?”, “What if someone sees me fail and laughs at me?”, “What do I do next?”, “Am I doing everything right?” and so on and so forth start to creep in, which cause you to overthink things, imagining all of the negative outcomes.

And little by little, you start to lose confidence.

So how do you deal with it? How do you become confident at something?

There are some things you need to understand.

Well, the first thing you need to realize is that you can’t be confident ALL of the time, at EVERYTHING that you do.

Take Elon Musk, as an example. Admired and loved by millions, a Billionaire who has pretty much everything in life that people would want. You’d think he’d be in a state of constant and supreme confidence.

You’d be dead wrong.

He’s super confident in some things - the things that he excels at.

If he had to compete against me to build a model rocket, or write a certain program - he’d be confident that he’d completely dominate me in this task.

But what if, let’s say, he’d have to play a Quake match versus me for 100,000$.

I’d beat his ass faster than he can say “How do I rocket jump?” - and he’d lack any sort of confidence going into that match whatsoever. I’m far from the best at it - but I have years of experience from my youth and tournaments, as opposed to his little to none.

At best, he’d be confident in his ability to LEARN that skill - and eventually maybe beat me and become confident in his ability to do that. But he has other, arguably better interests and things to do with his life.

While he was doing this (learning to code and other stuff) - I was gaming and competing in tournaments.

In any case - He understands that he can’t be confident at everything he does, without investing considerable time and effort into it. That’s just part of life.

You become confident in something by mastering it - and then by preventing any negative, self-doubting thoughts from creeping into your mind while you’re performing said task.

And that’s the whole secret to confidence.

Mastery, competence, and positive core beliefs are the things that make you confident.

It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. You have to put effort into developing confidence.

And why are positive core beliefs and control of your thoughts important for competent people?

Because of A little thing called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

It’s where people who are actually incredibly competent at something are so wracked by self-doubt that they lose any sort of confidence in their ability to perform what’s required of them. As opposed to people who are incompetent but incredibly confident.

So in certain cases, mastery and competence can completely screw you up.

According to the scientists:

"Overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. While highly-skilled folks underestimate their ability to perform.”

So confident dumb people are also a thing.

Charles Darwin once said, 'Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge'

But true confidence can only be had with both mastery and control of your thoughts.

There’s one more exception - naturally gifted people. Mozart comes to mind - and his supreme confidence in his ability to create great music.

Cheers!