Becoming More Confident and Genuine in Social Situations
Tuesday
Jan 1, 2008
Please note: This article itself was not written by Tyler Durden, but’s actually our notes from his excellent but long and somewhat unstructured post titled ‘Most spastic late night ramblings yet’. As all the ideas here are stolen directly from that post, it seems only right to credit him for it. Keep an eye out for his much anticipated book The Blueprint, coming soon.
Most people try subconsciously to portray a certain persona around other people. They want to be perceived in a certain way – normally one that doesn’t include the shortcomings they feel they have.
This puts them at a social disadvantage. People start to react emotionally when confronted with shortcomings, but also when their attempts to subtly manipulate others backfire. This tends to come out as outrage, defensiveness, and anger.
Reacting emotionally to other people gives them control over you – you’re accepting their ‘reality’ over your own. Hot girls will often try to get you to react emotionally to them to ascertain your ‘value’ – do you go to pieces if she tells you you’re too short/poor/ugly for her, or if she tells you to fuck off when you approach her?
It also eats away at your confidence. Will people accept the persona of yourself that you’re trying to project, or will they see through it? Will they realise you’re not the cool, successful guy you’re trying to show yourself as being? Will you be able to keep up the facade? Will you suffer the embarassment that comes from losing social value in the eyes of others?
Genuinely confident people have a strong reality that they draw other people in to. They can’t be easily shaken by other people questioning this reality. They’re not faking their persona, they’re just presenting themselves as they really are. This means they’re not bothered if other people question it in a way that makes the ‘trying to be cool’ guy go to pieces.
You can’t just decide one day to not put out a fake persona. These things are heavily ingrained in your mind. Plenty of guys try, however … and end up putting out a “I don’t care what other people think” fake persona – not an ideal result!
You have to starve your fake persona to death. It’s a gradual but ultimately essential process.
Every time you act in a way that reinforces the fake persona, you feed it, and every time you consciously don’t, and let your real self show, you starve it.
Every time you boast about your new car, or don’t approach a girl because you’re worried other people will see you crash and burn, or in any way try and manipulate the impression of you that other people have, you’re feeding and strengthening your fake persona, and chipping away at the foundations of your social confidence.
Every time you act from the inside, and do what you want, throwing social consequences to the wind, you starve it. Every time you resist the temptation to boast, every time you don’t try and put other people down at your expense, every time you don’t change how you act to try and make yourself look better in someone else’s eye, you starve it.
And when you’ve finally starved it to death, other people will feel it. Other people will assume success, assume high social value. It’s like when a circus lion loses its fear of its trainer – it goes from being a servantile animal back in to a powerful wild beast that can’t be easily stopped, and that commands respect.
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