Confidence Hack – Sometimes You’ve Got To Fake It

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “Fake It ‘Till You Make It”. It’s most often used in the context of entrepreneurship and entertainment. The idea is to act like you’re a big deal and great success until you actually are.

While it may sound odd at first, it turns out that faking it actually works. It makes you pay attention to what the people that have already made it in your chosen business or career, do on a daily basis. How do they act, talk, dress, and what are their habits? You have to first start to pay attention and figure those things out, and then you start to model or copy them.

In the end, you start to develop some of the same habits successful people have and as a result you yourself will hopefully become more successful. Of course being perceived as a big deal by those around you doesn't hurt either.

Here’s where things get interesting for us. It turns out that faking confidence works to make us actually feel more confident. Let me repeat that. Faking confidence makes you more confident. That’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? That’s why it’s today’s confidence hack. Here are a few ideas on how we can tap into this idea and use it to our advantage.

The basic idea is to simply start acting confident. Stand up tall, and go for it. Keep pretending to be self-confident until you start to feel it for real. Ask yourself what the confident and courageous version of yourself would do and then do it.

If you don’t feel very confident at the beginning stop and ask yourself what you would do if you were more confident. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you’re at a social gathering where you don’t know anyone but you should be mingling and meeting new people. The shy version of yourself wants to go hide in the corner and fade into the background. What would a confident person do? He or she would walk in there tall with a big smile and start making small talk.

That’s exactly what you’ll be doing. Pretend you’re confident. If this seems hard, or intimidating, make yourself fake confidence for five minutes. You can do this. After those five minutes, you’ve talked to at least one person. That may be just what you need to get comfortable in this new situation and no matter what happens, you’ll start to feel more comfortable and confident after this little exercise.

The surprising thing is that once you get in the habit of faking confidence, you will start to feel more self-confident for real. I encourage you to give it a try and to start implementing today's confidence hack of faking it until you make it. Before long you’ll be more self-confident and courageous in anything you decide to tackle and that’s a great thing.

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