“Just be confident,” people say.
Just do it with confidence, and it’ll take care of itself.
And that’s fantastic advice. It’s useful and it will fix a lot of problems in your life. But it’s also really hard advice to take. Because… what does that even mean? What does it look and feel like to do something with confidence? Is the confidence fake, or is it real?
No thanks, I don’t drink — and I’m happy anyway
For a while after I stopped drinking (it’s been ten years this week, amazingly), I faced the inevitable: people still asked me to go out, to drink, to party. And I had to come up with a way to say no that wasn’t painful and awkward for me.
And I also had to come up with a way to say no that meant no. Most people who don’t have drinking or drug problems simply don’t get it. “Just have one,” they’ll say. “I’ll take your keys.”
The problem isn’t my keys, friend. The problem is me, drinking. There’s no such thing as one. It’s zero or way too fucking many.
I had to find a way to say no thanks without insulting anybody, without feeling sheepish, and without inviting further commentary. So I tried a few different ways. I had some awkward conversations about my past, and struggled to justify my behavior to other people. Because I didn’t know how to say it confidently. Because I wasn’t confident.
What I landed on eventually was this:
I must say it happily — I’m still going to have a good time.
I must say it unapologetically, as a simple fact.
And I must show that I don’t need their approval; I already have my own approval.
If I can manage to squeeze these three things together in my response, people rarely have anything to say other than “oh yea man, no worries” or “good for you.”
Sometimes they’ll ask why. And of course I don’t mind telling my story. But they rarely ever question my decision, because I own it completely and happily. They take a cue from me, because I’m giving a strong cue.
That’s the key. I have a lot more power to give cues than I realized. And so do you.
Imagine you’re at a social gathering and you’re a little unsure of yourself. What is it that you’re doing?
You’re looking around the room, paying attention for cues from other people. You’re watching the people who are leading things, to see where they’re taking things. And you’re watching the people who are following things, to see what they’re seeing.
You have the power to give your own cues. Because guess what everyone else is doing? Watching for yours. To see what you’re up to. When you’re a wallflower, you feel like you’re simply part of the environment. You’re a passive observer and you’re not giving any inputs of your own. You are at the mercy of what everyone else is up to — you’re flapping in the wind and having a bad time.
But you don’t have to be wallflower. If you give your own cues, other people will follow your lead. Not lead as in “leader,” because that’s a lot of pressure. But lead as in “independent and active.”
You look around and see other personalities that are honest and unapologetic. You have to give yourself permission to do that with your own personality. When other people see you giving real, honest cues… they take them. They take your cues. You have a lot more power to do that than you think you do.
Most social interactions are determined not by status or by particular character traits, but by the exchanging of strong and honest cues. Cues like body language and truthful speech and real humor. If you’re being honest, people will be drawn to you like a magnet. They will stop and listen to what you’re saying. They will recognize themselves as part of your environment, instead of you being relegated to being part of theirs.
People have as much respect for you as you have for yourself.
Give me that, it’s mine
Don’t give someone a scared, timid back rub. Give it like you mean it. Squeeze and pull at their meat like it’s yours to play with.
All of the best massages I’ve ever gotten had one thing in common: they were unafraid. The person was completely unafraid to do what they thought would feel good to my body.
What they thought would feel good. Most things in life aren’t about a right answer or a correct way of doing things. They’re about finding the way that is honest and sensible for you. A good back rub isn’t about this technique or that technique — it’s just honest. It’s about giving what you’d like to receive. And with a massage, that means genuine, unafraid attention. It means treating their body like it’s yours to take care of.
At your job, sometimes you’ll encounter a bad team habit or a profoundly stupid way of doing things. A bad process that makes everyone’s day ten times harder than it ought to be. And if you’re like most people, you’ll just bitch about it until you find a new job. You’ll wonder violently how things ever got to be so stupid around here, and then you’ll do exactly nothing about it.
But you could just do something about it.
You could just walk into your boss’s office one day and say “hey I noticed that this process over here could really use this other step to make it more clear and efficient. I’ll start doing that, or I’ll show the new guy how to do it.”
9 out of 10 times, your boss will be happy. Not angry, not offended, not insulted. Just happy that someone is finally doing something about it. Because your boss isn’t stupid, he’s just lazy like the rest of these fucking people. Who knows, you might even get a raise. I mean, not while the economy is going into a recession, but maybe one day.
It didn’t require a hard conversation and it didn’t require you timidly avoiding “stepping above your pay grade.” You didn’t have to beat around the bush. All it required was someone to have enough backbone to say “I’m going to take ownership of this and fix it.”
Imagine if everyone did that. I bet we’d all hate our jobs quite a bit less.
You get to decide who you are
One time I worked with a lady who painted. She was a brilliant painter. I noticed her showing her newest work to one of our coworkers one time. And then she talked to me about it, and asked if I’d like to see more of her stuff. I said yea, that’d be very cool.
I thought about it later that night. And I thought of something I’d never thought of before. She was going to ask my opinion about her paintings. What kind of art critic and friend was I going to be?
Well, I decided… I might as well be one worth impressing. I don’t want to do that goofy shit where you give someone exaggerated praise that’s dripping-wet with fake enthusiasm. I didn’t want to say “Oh my God, these are amazing.” Even if they were. Because that’s not even fun. And if they weren’t amazing, it wasn’t honest either.
So I decided, right then and there… I’m going to be somebody worth impressing. I’m going to enjoy it when she shows me her paintings, and I’m going to tell her that they’re very nice, and I’m going to ask questions. And that’s it. No fake enthusiasm, no schmoozing. Nothing but real connection with her and her art.
But is that honest, really? Wasn’t it kind of fake of me, to go with a premeditated game plan? Well no, because I don’t actually feel that much enthusiasm. What would have been fake would have been to do that other shit. All I did was give myself permission to be real. And that freed me. It allowed me to look at her paintings and ask questions without having to do any extra nonsense to please her.
And she responded very well to it. All of a sudden, I was someone worth impressing. She showed me her newest paintings for months after that, until she got a new job. She always wanted my opinion, she always wanted me to see what she was doing. She cared what I thought.
It’s funny how that works. I will never forget how funny, and freeing, it felt to give myself permission to do that. To be the person I decided to be, instead of the person I felt like I was obligated to be.
Confidence is about giving yourself permission. It’s about truth. It’s about having your own approval, and therefore earning the approval of others. You cannot have it from others until you have it from yourself — and if you spend your life making sure you have it from others, you’ll never have it from yourself.
Mark Manson taught me that being vulnerable is not about being weak, or being at the mercy of the opinions of others. It’s not about flapping in the wind. It’s about showing who you really are and what you’re really up to, and accepting it fully when you find out who really does and doesn’t like you. Not everyone is going to like you anyway, so you might as well find out who really does for who you really are.
And sometimes you’ll do something wrong, or push the wrong boundary, or your boss will say no. That’s life. That’s not something to be afraid of. What you should be afraid of is never giving yourself permission to be.
Drink some water, with the utmost confidence
JDR
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” - Robert Hughes
beautiful.