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Becoming a more confident person can seem like an overwhelming mystery. Some people even believe you either have it or you don’t. After studying the psychology of self confidence for nearly two decades, I’ve decided that it’s no mystery at all, and anyone can learn to be more confident.

You don’t need to “fake it til you make it”, and you don’t need to repress uncomfortable emotions. You just need to learn how to adopt a specific set of behavioural traits and increase them over time. Any human brain is capable of adopting and developing these traits.

You will experience emotional discomfort and certain outcomes that you find unpleasant, but that is a small price to pay for becoming an unbreakable confident person.

This list will give you each of the 21 traits of confidence, with an explanation as to why the trait is important, what the opposite (insecure) trait looks like, and practical guidance on how to develop each trait.

Some of these are traits you already live by strongly. Others you’ve barely entertained. Look through the list and focus on the ones you feel are least present in your daily behaviour, while aiming also to double-down on the traits you already have a good handle on.

This war is won through tiny battles, not massive achievements. Think more about creating reasonable 1% sized improvements each day, rather than pressuring yourself to become a whole new person in a single act.

This first trait is the one I believe is generally the most important, and should be practiced every day regardless of who you are…

Courage and Bravery

Bravery is not the absence of fear, but the ability to move forward in spite of feeling reluctant to increase your fear sensations. Bravery is about accepting the fact that discomfort is the way forward, not a barrier that stops you or a warning to turn back.

Your potential is limited by fear. Fear is the outer boundary. Crossing the boundary is as simple and unpleasant as doing something that increases uncomfortable emotions inside you. This does not need to impress anyone else, it just needs to be something you’d rather not do.

Cowardice is the tendency to do what is familiar, “safe”, and comfortable emotionally. This comes at a catastrophic price, sacrificing long term quality of life for short term imagined rewards.

Building courage is simply about looking for the slightly more uncomfortable option and choosing it willingly. Resist the urge to take the familiar path of least resistance and do whatever it is that makes your heartrate increase, even just a little.

Shameless Radical Honesty

Shame is the belief that there is something wrong with you, which then must be hidden with some form of dishonesty, from outright lying through to subtle omission. Confident people say whatever they believe is true, if for no other reason than to validate themselves so they won’t need other people to do it for them.

Dishonesty not only continues the shame cycle, but it’s also an act of cowardice. For all our bullshit excuses, the only reason we’re ever dishonest is because we’re afraid of not getting our preferred outcomes. That’s it. Consistent honesty is courageous.

People pleasers, liars, and manipulators end up destroying their self-certainty. Their constant deviations from the truth make them lose sight of it. Most of my Nice Guy clients suffer from a total absence of identity after years of pretending to be someone else.

Stop before you speak, and think about what the truthful response is. You won’t always have the courage to say it, but at least begin with being honest with yourself about what you would say if you weren’t scared of the consequences. Then, whenever you’re bold enough, try choosing honesty over manipulation or avoidance.

Confrontational Assertiveness

The combination of courage and honesty is often manifested in confrontations: the uncomfortable boundary-enforcing conversations between people who disagree. Assertiveness is not the same as aggression, which is trying to dominate someone else; assertiveness is just stopping someone from dominating you.

If you don’t stand up for yourself, it’s a form of self-disrespect. You don’t have to win every battle, but if you want to be confident you have to at least state your preferences and refuse to willingly tolerate poor treatment (to the best of your ability).

Pushovers suffer immensely. It’s not just the abuse and bullying they attract, but their own frustration and shame that comes from not protecting or respecting themselves.

State your preferences in any given situation. You don’t have to get your way, but make sure what you wish was happening is known. Let people know what you don’t like and would rather instead.

Every. Single. Time.

Kindness, Empathy and Compassion

Kindness is the understanding that caring about others is not only best for society but for yourself, living by your values in that you treat others the way you wish you were treated. By focusing on giving rather than taking, you activate confident and secure parts of the brain rather than aggravating needy and scarce parts.

This leads to both internal and external rewards. Kind people feel better about themselves morally, reduce feelings of neediness and lack, and are seen as better and more attractive by others. It’s a win/win situation.

Selfish people will crush or harm others to get their instant gratification needs met, but this is both amoral and impractical. Even if you gain short term outcomes, you reinforce the scarcity neural pathways in your brain leading to more neediness rather than less, and you eventually create a reputation as a bad person.

When interacting with other people, rather than worrying what they think of you or what outcomes you’d prefer, try mentally putting yourself in their position to understand what it’s like to be them when interacting with you. Then ask yourself how you’d like to be treated if you were them.

Respect

“Live and let live” is the motto of respect. This means you will allow others to live however they see fit… so long as they don’t interfere with you living your life. That means they can do whatever they think is best unless it measurably harms you, your goals, or your loved ones.

When you allow others to make their own choices, they become stronger, more capable, and better decision makers. So you should leave them to it. However, you cannot tolerate disrespect, because it interferes with your life.

Disrespectful people either try to control others or destroy them. They cross boundaries and harm people. Their sense of power requires dominance. This stems from neediness, greed, and an insecure urge to control outcomes.

When choosing what to do, look for the least harmful way to move forward. When witnessing others doing their thing, leave them to it unless they cause you and/or your loved ones measurable harm. Someone being offended, disappointed, or frustrated with the way another is living does not count as being harmed… this goes both ways!

Humour

A sense of humour isn’t so much about comedy and laughter as it is about seeing the absurdity of life and not taking it too seriously. If you can’t accept and smile at the injustice and insanity of reality, you will not be able to enjoy life. Life will never be fair or make sense.

You find what you look for. If you look for the positives, the lighter side, and the humour in events, then you’ll see that. This optimistic perspective will give you a sense of relief from the drama and stress of normal existence.

Insecure people take everything seriously, overreact to things they should ignore, try to control things they can’t, and generally suffer much more than necessary.

I once heard a story of a girl who accidentally dropped a newly bought iced coffee all over the floor in a busy shopping mall. She rolled her eyes and said, “God I am so sick of being alive!” – that’s a sense of humour right there.

Responsibility

Confident people get their focus correct when it comes to the concept of control. Responsibility is taking control of what you can and should control, namely: your reactions and responses to the uncontrollable forces of life and the unpredictable thoughts and feelings that surface within you. In other words, doing your best to ensure your behaviour is on point with your core values.

Blaming others (and the world) for your suffering is not only pointless, but also inaccurate. While bad things will happen to you that are out of your control, like being born to toxic parents or having a selfish jerk cut you off on the highway, your reaction to these things is what really decides the amount you either suffer or thrive.

Most people play the victim/hero role, acting as if they are unfairly targeted by the universe, or reveling in a piteous identity like a Loser or Unloveable or The One Who Has Bad Luck. This only agitates resentment and misery, leading to even worse reactions, creating a feedback loop of disaster.

Whenever something happens to you, good or bad, make the first question you ask yourself, “How do I make the most of this situation?”

Acceptance

“This, too, shall pass.”

If responsibility is controlling what you can and should control, acceptance is letting go of all the rest. Nearly everything in the universe is beyond your control, and struggling against it is a waste of time and energy.

People will be assholes sometimes. Money will run out unexpectedly. Rain will fall when you had your big outdoor party planned. These setbacks are not exceptions, they are life! The quicker you come to terms with life not obeying your preferences, the easier it is to endure.

You’ll see fragile people thrash pointlessly against things they can’t control, like world politics, service quality in a restaurant, and the choices their children make. If you pay attention, you’ll notice how fruitless and ineffective this effort is, and how obviously they could better spend their energy.

When things don’t go your way, before you jump into resisting and fighting, ask yourself if it’s worth the battle. Is this the hill you wish to die on? Is this the best impact you can have on your life and the lives of your loved ones in your little corner of the world?

If not, brush yourself off and move onto the next thing you can control.

Focus and Presence

Regret is living in the past; worrying is living in the future. Both are fictions. These times only exist in your imagination.

Confidence lives in the present; the only place that exists. Focusing on the task at hand with the resources you’ve got, managing the opportunities and threats for which there is hard evidence, is the aim of confidence.

While learning from past mistakes and making light plans for the future can give you a sense of direction, regret and worry serve almost no purpose, at least none that is more helpful than just dealing with life as it is. If you focus on what is real and try to keep your attention in the here and now, you’ll make the most helpful decisions for the longer term anyway.

Too many people get to the end of their lives without having really lived. They spent so much time regretting and worrying that they experienced very little of anything real and present. Most of what we worry about never comes to pass, and even when it does, worrying didn’t prepare us adequately anyway.

Constantly catch yourself when your mind drifts into fantasizing about the past and future, whether those be pleasurable or painful fantasies. Focus your attention on what is actually happening, based on measurable evidence, and try to make decisions with this information.

Discipline and Drive

Ultimately, the simplest form of discipline is the ability to do what is right rather than what feels good (when those are not the same thing). Our drive for instant gratification and pleasurable comfort is an outdated evolutionary system that must be overridden to function well in the modern world.

Short term pleasure comes with longer term suffering, and vice versa. Generally speaking, the healthiest decisions for the best quality of life require a payment up front: an initial investment of discomfort to secure greater levels of long term satisfaction, like how the pain of lifting weights creates stronger muscles, or the boredom of low-risk investing creates a retirement fund.

If you watch closely, you’ll see a direct connection between a person’s suffering and short-sighted decisions they made to acquire instant gratification. The drinker’s hangover; the gambler’s debts; the cheater’s loneliness. There is a clear correlation between taking the easy way out and ending up in the hard life.

Behave as if you’re committed to your future self’s quality of life. Do what he/she needs you to do to be a person who’s confident, healthy and successful. You’ll often find it requires an up-front sacrifice; delayed gratification.

Humility

Not to be confused with narcissistic false modesty, humility is the realisation that your human brain is flawed and imperfect, and gets nearly everything at least a little bit wrong. It’s about always remembering that you don’t know far more than you do know, and that you’re not as special as your ego wishes you were.

By constantly being aware of your flaws and weaknesses, you’ll be more able to react quickly and effectively when they impact you. Instead of clinging to bad ideas, you’ll adapt. Instead of protecting incorrect beliefs, you’ll become wiser.

Arrogant people think of themselves as superior to others and they believe their minds say when. They feel they are always in the right. This leads them to invest in bad ideas, alienate their peers, get stuck trying to make ineffective strategies work, and miss out on the wonderful feeling of insight that comes from correcting a bad belief.

View yourself as just another ant in the colony, indistinguishable from the rest when viewed from a distance. Remind yourself that you will die one day. Get over yourself, and look for better answers and greater wisdom at every opportunity.

Critical Thinking

Skepticism is the ability to question what you’re being presented with as if it contains falsehoods, never taking for granted any evidence, and viewing with suspicion any sense of certainty. This contradicts most people’s views of confidence, in that they think confident people are always sure of themselves. Indeed, confident people are at peace with being unsure.

The human brain constantly tries to preserve mental energy by taking shortcuts, and this leads to massive oversights of what is true. With the simple act of questioning everything that comes toward you, you push your brain to put in a bit more effort to distinguish what is true from what just sounds good.

I see most people are only skeptical about things that don’t match their current beliefs, to the point where they’ll dismiss hard evidence, and yet they are unquestioning about the beliefs they’re already familiar with. This means when they’re wrong, they stay wrong.

Notice that everything you “feel” certain about is just a story in your head; an explanation for what is happening that comes from the darkness of your subconscious. Treat it your mind like the proven liar it is, and look for evidence to disprove what you feel certain about, and to prove what you don’t want to believe.

The truth will survive your skepticism, but lies will not.

Curiosity

To be curious is to welcome the emotional state of confusion. It’s to move away from trying to make something specific happen – a preferred outcome – in favour of allowing the truth to emerge unmolested. It’s about exploring the world to find its wonders.

In other words, stop trying to make things happen and learn to let things happen instead.

Learning lives or dies on curiosity. If you’re open and searching for new ideas, you’ll find them. If you shut down your curiosity, your brain will start to atrophy, and before long you’ll be out of date and incorrect on important issues.

People get to a certain age and just decide they know enough. Despite all the regrets we hear from elderly people about poor decisions and missed opportunities, we still assume we’ve got it all figured out in our twenties.

Always be learning about something. Make sure that education is a frequent occurrence in your day. This does not mean just bingeing on content that makes you feel good, but about actively seeking information and perspectives you don’t yet have.

Optimism

Not to be confused with false positivity (pretending everything is great), optimism is about accurately acknowledging the good, the opportunities, your own strengths, and what is going well for you. This leads you to focus on solutions rather than problems.

Optimistic people are empirically more successful, and this is easily confirmed with a mental experiment: imagine you only focused on exploiting your strengths, making the most of every opportunity, and measuring what you’re grateful for. How would your life compare to someone who focused only on their weaknesses, their problems and struggles, and what upsets them?

People worry about their weaknesses and the problems around them as if this focus is helpful and safe, and yet all this does is keep their attention on negative factors, leading to negative reactive behaviours. By focusing on the positive, you’re more likely to deal effectively with the negative threats and risks anyway.

As well as keeping a gratitude journal that measures only what you did, treat every situation as if it’s hiding a secret opportunity. Look for it, and more often than not you’ll find it, and then you’ll realise how often it’s there. You don’t need to fake this, just work with real evidence.

Self Awareness

When you see how obvious other people are to you – their strengths and weaknesses, wisdom and errors, healthy and unhealthy habits – you should realise that you have the ability to measure these things in yourself. The more you know, the better your decision making will be.

The benefit of knowing who you are should be obvious. Knowledge is power. You can’t hope to correct unhealthy patterns and habits or exploit your strengths and talents if you don’t know what they are. 

People are so worried about others’ opinions that they barely take the time to look in the mirror psychologically. They don’t realise they have been observing themselves every second of their life, and therefore somewhere in their mind is all the information they need. But they’re scared of looking for this information, for the horrible truths that they know they’ll find.

Journal every day as if you are an outsider giving someone feedback on their behaviour. List significant things you did that day, particularly how you reacted to events, and comment on how that aligns (or doesn’t) with your core values. Be bravely honest. Your behaviour will self-correct with consistent repeated acknowledgments of your wins and fails.

Ruthlessness

I use this word not in the selfish/harmful sense, but more in the infrequent but necessary moments where being hard and strong is the best way forward for everyone’s long term quality of life. There are times where compassion must be dialed down to zero for the protection of things more important than feelings or physical comfort.

Life is hard. From the moment you’re conceived the world is trying to kill you (entropy). Other people can be selfish, cruel and manipulative. Evil is possible and does happen.

The animal who can protect sheep from wolves is the sheepdog, another equally ruthless canine who’s willing to do the harm required to protect the flock.

Most people fold when forced to choose between being nice or feeling good and doing what’s right in hard situations. They enable poor choices, allow boundaries to be crossed, stand by as harmful acts are committed, and encourage repeated bad behaviour, when just a little ruthlessness would create a better life for everyone, including the one doing the harm. 

Don’t just set boundaries, enforce them. This doesn’t mean punishing people for bad behaviour, but rather doing what you can to make bad behaviour impossible. Remove privileges, attention, and access to your life in whatever way is necessary to show that disrespect will not be allowed.

Resourcefulness

A self-made millionaire who’s been bankrupted twice is much financially safer than a millionaire who inherited all their money. The ability to create something from nothing will give you far more confidence than relying on something external to protect you.

Humans are the greatest problem-solving machines in our known universe. You are one of these machines. The only way you’ll experience this superpower is to let go of your crutches and survive on your problem-solving alone.

Insecure people cling to resources rather than exercising their resourcefulness. They stockpile money and hoard possessions and become overly dependent on others. If you don’t use it you lose it. The more dependent you become, the less capable you are.

Seek out difficult situations, and deliberately put yourself in a position where you have to find a way out without much support. Force yourself to keep your resourcefulness sharp. This can be simulated – like going to an escape room – or you can take advantage of real life situations, like quitting a crappy job with nothing else lined up.

Stoic and Emotionally Stable

Emotions are never the problem, it’s how we perceive them and react to them that decides our quality of life. A confident person does not react quickly and thoughtlessly to feelings, but neither does he suppress them. He harnesses them like a team of sled-dogs and uses them to get to where he wants to go.

Emotions are life itself. But if you’re a victim to them, you will drown in suffering. If you suppress them, you will not experience life (an you’ll eventually implode or explode). You must ride them like a master surfer on a wave, making the most of them without being harmed or trying to control them.

Most people go through a roller coaster cycle of suppressing emotions and then finally exploding with built up pressure. They build up anger until they lash out at loved ones; they squash sadness until they get depressed; they avoid fear until they develop disorders.

Mind the gap. Notice that you can have a feeling without acting on it, and that you don’t need to squash it down. Just have the feeling without interpreting it as a command, like you can have the feeling of being hungry without needing to eat. And then decide on the best rational reaction to this situation.

Considered and Thoughtful

There’s the “right” amount of thinking in decision making, meaning that a certain amount of thinking is ideal for moving forward with as much success as possible. Confident people know when to think, how much to think, and when to stop thinking in favour of taking action.

If you don’t think enough, you’ll make unnecessary reckless errors that require correcting. If you think too much, you’ll freeze with indecision and not make progress.

The “right” amount of thinking is about first eliminating all obviously bad options, then choosing a single winner from the remaining good options, and deciding on the amount of action needed to safely test the idea.

Most people act impulsively on whatever thoughts or urges enter their heads, sometimes with accompanying justification and minimising of obvious counterarguments, and/or they overthink, re-analysing a decision without actually acting on it. 

Follow a basic decision making model: list 3-5 options of what you could do/say next; rank them from best to worst as much as you are capable, then choose a winner (flip a coin if it’s a tie). Then, decide on the minimum way you could act or speak to test how good that idea is. Act on that, and then measure the results.

Rinse and repeat.

Relentless

Good things do indeed take time, and knowing when something needs a long term consistent effort –  relentlessly smashing through the inevitable obstacles, setbacks and failures – is what confident people are good at.

The universe generally operates on an energy in = energy out principle. The more you invest into something, the more you get out of it. While not everything is worth investing in, many good things do take a lot of time and effort, like building a business, developing a relationship, learning a skill to mastery level, and basically anything else worth doing.

You’ll notice a lot of people bail out when the going gets tough. Some won’t even start if it doesn’t look like an easy win. They miss out on developing their core human abilities that only come with perseverance, commitment and relentless progress. Or they keep investing in something that obviously doesn’t work, like a relationship that’s been miserable for years.

Whenever you hit a difficult point in a process where progress slows down, stop and ask yourself if mastering this thing is aligned with your values. If so, keep going.

Action-Focused

When you study the psychology of confident people, you’ll see their thoughts and feelings very much take a backseat to action. Confident people realise that thoughts are just noises of the mind and emotions are just sensations in the body. 

Your life’s quality will be determined by what you do more than what you think or feel. Indeed, your actions control your beliefs, which determine your thoughts and feelings. Actions are the only things you can really control “consciously”, so there’s nothing more effective to focus on.

Too many people live inside their heads. They treat their thoughts as commands and truth, and they treat their feelings as overwhelming forces pushing them around. As a result, they procrastinate, engage in harmful impulsive behaviours, and avoid acknowledging the control they have available.

The only question that you should ever really be considering is “What would a confident person do in this situation?” Ask yourself this many times per day, and do your best to enact the answers.

Integral

Integrity is the state of being whole and consistent, combined with frequent honesty. It means you are the same person in all situations, your actions align with your core values, and what comes out of your mouth is as truthful as you can manage.

Knowing who you are and feeling proud of yourself and your behaviour is a matter of how much integrity you have. When everything you do strongly aligns with your core values, when you almost never disappoint yourself, then you can be assured of feeling confident.

Other people adapt to each situation with a neediness for comfort and preferred outcomes. They sacrifice who they are to avoid pain and loss. As a result, they suffer the painful loss of themselves.

Carefully reflect on your actions as often as possible, and be honest with yourself about how well they do or don’t align with your core values. Speak the truth as bravely as you can, and be willing to sacrifice short-term gains like comfort, approval, minor financial windfalls and other petty trappings in order to be a person you’re proud to present to the world as a role model of powerful confidence.