MyPUAJourney Forum

how can i build some confidence, self-confidence i think thats wat u call it? for some reason i figured that when i started this pick-up thing that i wud have enough confidence in myself, because i act in the theatre, and i perfrome in front of alot of audiences. and when im on stage im comfrotable and confident even when i mess up. but when im out picking-up girls, i cant. i cant even approach them or say hi to them.

Now im sitting here thinking im fucked up, or im wierd, because if i can act in front a crowd and not get scared. i figured i cud at least say hi to one gurl but i cant. so does anybody know how i can build confidence when im around women.

also i apologize if this does not make since to anybody, im being rushed.

Just say hi to everyone you see. If your more comfortable with certain groups of people, whether it be guys or older women or whatever, start just saying hi to them. Them progress to saying hi to everyone. Then into saying hi how are you. And just keep adding.

Just do it. No one can overcome your fear for you. Stop trying to do it and just do it.

Haha man I have the same problem. I have been in acting for 3 years and dont give a shit about anything when i'm on stage. But when it comes to girls It just does not happen. haha Working on it though!

Confidence is mental mindset, basically meaning you believe that you do something. The more confidence the more belief. This can be about anything, whether it is golf, whether you are attractive, etc.

Just because you have confidence, doesnt mean that you will be that great at golf, or an attractive person, or great with women. this comes down to competence, or being good at something. This takes experience, doing that thing, or being that person. Always improving, learning from your mistakes.

The thing is that increasing your competence, will increase your confidence. Cause you have evidence to back up you beliefs.

E.g. you may be confident at doing addition(in maths), but if you dont know how, then you will not be able to do it, no matter what.

Why is confidence so good - cause it displays a lot of other characteristics which are desirable. Such as - positivity, optimising, enthusiasm, persistance, inner secruity. if you can improve these you will grow in confidence.

Confidence is great to have, that belief or conviction that you have that you will be good at something, will help you acheive being good at that thing i.e. being able to attract women. Basically it is 80% of attraction, the 20% is the skills.

The really confident guys, dont show off the confidence. They know it for themselves and thats all that matters. it shows a sense of innner secruity. they show their confidence when it comes time to act, not talk.

if you want to gain more confidence - practice what you want to do, go and do it. Learn from you mistakes. Always reframe anything negative as a postive, always look at the bright side, always improve,

One thing that really increased my confidence was a complete change in mindset, or chaning my "frame" in PUA terms. Basically I used to go to a club or whatever thinking "I want to pick-up, I need to pick-up, I haven't picked-up in xxx days/weeks". So naturally I would completely fuck up the first approach and go back into my shell and get down on myself (as opposed to someone else doing it for me).

I went through a stage next of telling myself "I just want to have fun, no pressure, etc". All I was really doing was heaping pressure on myself because although I was telling myself these things but not actually believing them. So I went through a similair cycle to before.

Finally I completely changed my approaches/frame to "fuck it, I just want to have fun". To quote Dr Bob Kelso from Scrubs: "I don't spend much time around here worrying about other people's feelings, I just do whatever makes me happy". Great approach I think (in terms of PUA, not life). You don't owe anything to the girls you approach so don't worry about what they think. Obviously don't go around being a complete dick but I know that I used to worry about making everybody else happy, or making them like me, now I don't and enjoying shit more.

To truly beleive in Fuck it and don't care about the girls etc. you have to go trough the previous steps, that sucks but it's true. You have to be in your shell and go home after going out thinking wow I could've approached or whatever. But in the end,.. it's worth it it will get you laid and you'll be happy and you'll wonder how on earth it never happened before

I think one thing maybe worth adding is that when you're truly lacking confidence in an area, you can try to approximate confidence by faking it. Try to visualize in your mind how you would act, talk, posture yourself, etc. if you did have confidence and doing the task you're trying to accomplish. I think it's a good substitute while you're going through the process of learning the skills and building the experience to develop true inner confidence.

I remember a show (on Discovery Channel, I think) where they would take some average person and, in some ridiculously short amount of time, try to pass this person off as a top expert in some professional field such as interior design, (that's the only one I recall, but each episode was about faking a different profession). To win, the person had to be good enough to fool experts in the same field whose task it was to try to spot the fake. The show was called something like "Faking It"-- At the time I was starting out in a job where I felt pretty overwhelmed, and the show was somewhat of an inspiration to me until I got over the hurdle of actually being truly confident at what I was doing.

It's true. Try to visualize your role model and see how he acts, how he poses himself and his body language. If you mimic this people will actually think you're confident, until you display some non- confident behaviour

there's a lot of good advice alreay mentioned on here. confidence is definitely an odd thing in the sense that you're always hearing people say, "act more confident," "just be more confident," or "all you need is confidence." but what the hell is confidence you might wonder.

well, canibus describes it quite well. before reading the other posts i was gonna mention how confidence is built from competence and that's exactly what canibus was getting at.

just start off very slow by saying hello to people. the next advice i followed was simply walking around campus or the mall and being able to spot a girl walking toward me, make eye contact and hold it until she breaks it first. then after that i would begin holding eye contact, smiling and saying hi as they walked by.

start slow and once you get comfortable and competent at a small task, you can progress to more advanced steps such as asking questions and eventually trying to build attraction and closing.

Self confidence comes from self belief, and self belief comes from doing something that you know - or believe - that you are good at. The reason you're comfortable on stage is because you've done it before, you have a history of being on stage and performing, therefore, you have confidence that you can repeat that success.

Jaffy's advice is what I'd throw to you. You need to change the way you approach your pickups. if you currently (like most of us did or still do) approach picking up as outcome based (I'm going to go for a phone number/kiss/lay) then you may feel intimidated because even if you've done it before - you've not done it with this particular woman. Instead approach to have fun and see how that feels.

Sinn reframes his game by viewing every approach as either fun or boring (success = fun, getting blown out or meeting a dud = boring) as such, he's less intimidated and has some extra confidence.

Generally speaking though, try to make yourself as comfortable as possible with approaching / talking to strangers. Say hi to people while pumping gas for your car. talk to cashiers in stores, approach one woman a day with the intent of paying her a compliment and then walking away (if it turns into more, at this stage, great, but your goal is just to compliment and leave.) you get the idea. Act socially in situations that it would be normal for you to simply leave at any point in the interaction and you can deal with that discomfort. Become a social person via baby steps if that's the level of your discomfort with approaching. Then when really going for it, use the reframe trick to just see where it goes.

I've said before on these forums, until you've actually begun talking to a girl, you really don't know what you want from her anyway (you might think you do!). A lot of good looking girls are really boring (a lot never really had to try that hard and as such aren't very interesting!) and a lot may just have personalities that you don't like. The point is, until you've started talking to them, you just don't know, so to enter into the interaction any differently than Jaffy suggested is probably a bad headspace anyway. Relax your expectations on yourself and just have fun, if you have studied the methodologies to PU, you can use your knowledge to shape the interaction into whatever you want without going into it with a lot of undue pressure.

thanks everbody, this is really good advice, juss reading this gives me lil more confidence.

If you want a quick fix and see a lot of models as to how to behave download all the episodes of "Keys to the VIP" I think that's pretty helpfull. Especially S02E10 or 11 with Cajun.

It's a cool show, you'll see 48 different guys approach IRL and either succeed or get blown off.

THANKS MAN, IM WATCHIN THEM RIGHT NOW, AND SOME OF IT IS REALLY FUNNY. LOL