This is the biggest confidence-related insight I had in 2025, and I want to share it with you guys. This is a fucking game changer:

A powerfully practical way to think about being confident is to explore what it means to be “non-defensive”.

I was inspired to think about this when a comedian – who does not on first impression appear to be conventionally attractive – was described as highly enticing by thousands of female followers. When asked why they liked him, the answer kept coming through: He never gets defensive.

WHAT IS DEFENSIVENESS?

This is a key question you must explore, especially when it comes to making confidence-building a practical journey.

Defensiveness is a package of feelings and thoughts (narratives) that lead to reactionary behaviour. The theme of this package is protecting yourself from a perceived threat.

It’s all about control. To defend yourself is to try to influence factors outside yourself; manipulating the outside world (usually this means controlling other people’s opinions) to protect yourself from apparent danger.

It starts as feelings that are uncomfortable to bear – fear and anxiety, anger and outrage, confusion, offense, disgust, embarrassment, and awkwardness.

These feelings immediately trigger off narratives that transform physical sensations into a story about being threatened, e.g. “He’s trying to hurt me” or “If I don’t say something, everyone will think I’m stupid” or “If she says no, I’ll be rejected, and that means I’m a bad person”.

These narratives compel us into behaviours designed to reduce the threat: pleasing and placating; avoidance, hiding and running away; aggressiveness (counter attack); distraction and deception; begging/pleading/apologizing. And sometimes it doesn’t appear obvious to anyone else, like quietly dying of embarrassment without saying a word

A confident person is rarely defensive because he sees the truth: there are very few real threats. An unconfident person, on the other hand, sees threats everywhere, and is in a near-constant fight or flight response, i.e. they’re often defensive.

A confident person may experience the same initial emotional reactions, but he doesn’t attach or buy into the narrative explaining them as a threat. He cuts off the process before it gets anywhere near a change in his behaviour.

To outsiders, most of the time, he appears to do nothing at all in response to these “threats”. He instead often appears relaxed, open, shameless, and humorous, like he’s got nothing to prove and nothing to hide.

Go much deeper on this with my podcast episode about how to stop caring what others think here.

WHY DO WE GET DEFENSIVE?

It may appear that I’ve already answered this question – i.e. we are swept away by narratives that convince us to react with defensive behaviour. But the problem is more specific than that:

We BELIEVE the narratives.

This is the make-or-break moment. When your brain says, “They’re trying to hurt you” or “Tell them the truth to correct them, now!”, we fail to challenge these impulsive suggestions. We just obey.

We have a deeper reason for getting defensive: limiting beliefs in the subconscious interpret completely neutral events as threats. We lack the critical thinking to correct our brain’s assumption that something is “dangerous”.

By my observation, this manifests in two time-based forms: short-term, and long-term.

Short-term, we perceive threats as anything that might cause immediately uncomfortable emotions: hurt, upset, anger, embarrassment etc., in ourselves or in others (in relation to us). We feel compelled to prevent these feelings as if the emotions themselves are objectively harmful on their own.

Then we usually have a narrative that implies that these feelings are harbingers of greater harm – through a process called “catastrophizing” – where we start predicting a dismal future. It isn’t just embarrassment when the girl rejects you, it’s also predicted to be followed by total social ostracism and a lifetime of loneliness.

This is the long-term threat: the harm to our reputation and quality of life. Our brain takes a short-term discomfort and turns it into a story of doom and gloom that makes it seem so much bigger than the present moment.

Your boss being upset leads to homelessness because your career is destroyed. Your family never speaks to you again because you didn’t agree with their political views. That guy who cut you off in traffic becomes a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the world.

Your brain sells you a story about how HUGE this thing is, and therefore why it’s justified – necessary, in fact – to defend yourself from this massive threat.

IT’S ALL BULLSHIT

What confident people know is that all of this thinking is total crap.

We are intelligent primates, top of the food chain. You’ve survived everything “bad” that’s ever happened to you. Your problem-solving skills are the best in the animal kingdom. There are very few actual threats you need to defend yourself from, and almost none of them are social.

The simple fact is that if you’re resourceful and determined, you can be hated on by nearly everyone and still create a high quality of life.

If people misunderstand you, it doesn’t actually matter. No one truly understands you anyway – that’s never happened. So every one of us has been unfairly misunderstood our entire lives, and yet we’re fine.

The only pain that comes from these perceived threats is the defensiveness itself! Other people judging and disliking you does no damage unless you turn it into a big deal in your head.

Sure, there are some exceptions, like racists lynching people, but how often does something like that actually happen to you? I’m guessing less than once every 10 years, at most. How many other things did you get defensive about that were NOT genuinely a threat to your wellbeing?

Your boss being mad at you is probably just a brief moment, with no repercussions. And even if he’s a vindictive asshole, you can just change career paths and pivot to something that’s probably even more enjoyable. You can’t lose in the long run.

If someone unfairly thinks badly of you, and spreads that negativity to other people in a way that you can’t control, it doesn’t actually matter. Nothing will really come of it. You can just live your life and you’ll barely even notice that it’s happening. It will only limit your social opportunities with people you don’t like anyway. What kind of person listens to gossip and believes it without critical thinking? Why would you want a friend like that?

THE BACKFIRE

The worst truth about defensiveness is that it’s simply ineffective. It aggravates and even causes the very problems it’s trying to solve.

When you get defensive, you entice and provoke bullies. You escalate conflicts that would have burned out if left alone. You cause pity and disrespect, even from decent people, because there’s nothing more uncomfortable for us to witness socially than someone else getting defensive.

Defensiveness sends a clear message: I NEED defending.

This makes people suspicious. If someone playfully accuses you of watching sick porn and then you get defensive, they’ll now assume you actually do watch stuff like that. If instead you were to double down and say, “You don’t know the half of it mate, I’m a total perv”, they’d actually be less suspicious.

The more victim-minded a person is, the more defensive they are. They’re easily offended, often reactive, and sensitive to teasing… and everyone who sees it happen knows what they’re seeing. So when you get defensive, you’re broadcasting that you’re a victim, which incites malicious people to abuse you, while causing decent people to feel disgust or pity.

Conflicts are often just a small spark – they need petrol poured on in order to become something. Defensiveness is petrol. When someone throws provocation at you, your response is required for this thing to grow. Without your response, it has no fuel. Think of internet comments – they only go viral when there are arguments back and forth. If ignored, they quickly disappear and have no impact.

Your instincts tell you to react quickly, but these instincts are simply WRONG. Your operating system cannot accurately identify true threats. The best reaction is often nothing at all. But this will make you feel like you’re vulnerable. You have to realise it’s overreacting that makes you vulnerable – they can’t hurt you in a game you refuse to play.

THE BELIEF CHANGE NEEDED

Even if rationally you understand and believe that people having bad thoughts or feelings about you is not actually harmful to you, you might still take it personally. You might believe that you have an obligation to make sure they are perceiving you more accurately.

Here’s the problem: they can’t perceive you accurately. Their beliefs, thoughts, feelings and – ultimately – behaviour towards you has absolutely nothing to do with you!

Sure, they appear to react to you, but it’s not really “you” they’re reacting to.

Imagine how much information someone would need to really know you for who you truly are. They’d need to know all your core beliefs, your most important preferences, your patterns of behaviour, and your long-term identity. They’d need to spend hours investigating you from a detached and curious perspective.

Now compare that with the last person who judged you. Notice anything?

That’s right – they knew fuck-all about you. Whatever it was they were judging and reacting to wasn’t you.

It was some fiction in their head. A straw man – an imagined version of you that they projected onto you and didn’t bother to fact-check or think critically about their assumptions.

Why would you defend yourself when yourself isn’t even the one they’re talking about?

They are talking about a person who doesn’t exist and has never existed. It’s probably a compilation of people they’ve met in the past who remind them of you, and they’ve just cut ‘n pasted those past memories onto your face.

You can’t make them see you accurately – they’ve already committed to a false version of you. You can’t protect that straw man, he’s already their enemy.

And if you really do believe in correcting them, there’s a much more practical way to do it that doesn’t require any defensiveness. In fact, being non-defensive is the most powerful way to disrupt their inner narrative, and make them think, “Huh? That’s not what I was expecting!”

When you don’t react the way they assume you will – i.e. defensive, because they think that they’re attacking your character accurately – their brain will short-circuit and realise they must have gotten something wrong.

So no matter what your reasons are for wanting to change their perspective of you, defending yourself is NOT the way to do it.

There is a better way…

PRACTICAL NON-DEFENSIVENESS

The simplest definition of non-defensiveness is this: never try to convince people of ANYTHING.

One client of mine realised that his road rage often came with a narrative about “Teaching them a lesson”. He felt like he had to convince the other drivers that they were doing it “wrong”. He felt like he was doing a public service when he smashed his horn and screamed at people.

This is often what’s happening during defensiveness. We’re trying to make another person change their mind about us or about the way they do things. But here’s the thing: we don’t need to, and it’s pointless anyway.

If someone wants to learn from you, they’ll come to you. They’ll ask, with curiosity and humility. If this isn’t happening, then any attempt on your part to educate them – what’s known as unsolicited advice – will only trigger their own defensive reaction! Now you’re two people being defensive in reaction to each others’ defensiveness. Mental.

If you want to try some more advanced techniques, here are two that are my favourite, and it’s best when they’re combined: humour, and doubling down. In other words, playfully agree with them.

Humour simply means treating everything as a joke. Doubling down means the opposite of defensive resistance – you not only agree with them, but you make it even bigger. If they say you’re bad, you claim that you’re even worse.

Take whatever accusation or hate has come your way, and just roll with it as if your best friend is teasing you. Even if you know for certain that the person wants to hurt your feelings, respond as if they love you and you have a history of teasing each other.

Some examples:

Someone calls you fat and boring: “Hey, I might be fat, and I might be boring, but at least I’m not… wait, what was the other thing again?”

Someone accuses you of never paying attention: “Sorry, what? I missed that”.

A girl says she has a boyfriend: “Does he treat you well? He does? Oh that’s good, because I wouldn’t”.

Someone accuses you of farting: “Actually I shit myself, get it right!”

I also love sarcasm, especially when I’m alone. For example, if someone cuts me off in traffic, I will go on a big rant about how they’re not only the best driver in the world, but indeed also the most important person in human history, and how blessed I am to have had them cross my path. I do this playfully, not in an angry way.

Being ridiculously childish (without trying to win the argument) is also a great way to show yourself and others that you don’t take this seriously. Like in the Ali G movie, when he’s challenged about a number of his weaknesses, he responds with, “That’s not a very nice way to talk about… your mum”. Or you allow someone to have a big rant about everything wrong with you, and then respond with, “Hang on, I tuned out there, can you please repeat the things you said about the stuff?”

And if you prefer a more serious response (e.g. you don’t trust yourself to try banter and humour without getting into conflict), just always keep things at the lowest possible level. Be unreactive, as if the other person is just obviously wrong but you’ll tolerate them because they have some kind of mental weakness that isn’t worth addressing. Which is true – nasty people are cognitively deficient.

I use the “dementia frame”. Act as if they have dementia and they say random things that can’t be taken seriously. You’re calm and patient because they’re ill and can’t help themselves. You just acknowledge calmly and keep going as if they didn’t speak at all.

If someone cuts you off in traffic, just slow down and keep driving. If someone claims that you’re full of shit in the team meeting, just say “That’s always a possibility” and then keep speaking your mind. If someone asks skeptically why you’re asking them out, you can say “I don’t know the true motives behind anything I do” and then wait for them to give you their number.

And never fail to be humble and honest. I remember a journalist getting called out. He said to his guest something like, “What do you say to the people who think you’re a fraud?” The interviewee responded with, “Who said that?” The journalist just laughed and said, “Yeah no one, I made that up”.

Remember, whatever response you employ, the key here is you’re NOT trying to change their mind. Let them be wrong about you. Or right about you (in a way you wish wasn’t true). Just let them have whatever opinions they want.

They. Can’t. Hurt. You.

A Serious Invitation to Coaching

If this post resonated with you, there’s a reason.

Most men who end up working with me aren’t looking for motivation, hacks, or surface-level confidence. They’re tired of circling the same problems with information overwhelm but not implementing successful changes.

They know what they should do. They’re just not consistently doing it.

Coaching is not for everyone. It’s not therapy, it’s not cheerleading, and it’s not about “fixing” you. 

It’s a structured, honest working relationship focused on behaviour change, taking responsibility for yourself, and improving the way you make decisions—especially the ones you keep avoiding.

This work is for you if:

• You’re functional and capable, but something fundamental still isn’t working.
• You’re done with intellectualizing your patterns and want them to actually change.
• You’re willing to be challenged, not reassured.
• You’re prepared to take responsibility for your choices instead of waiting to feel ready.

I’ve spent years making these mistakes myself and over a decade helping others stop repeating them. The difference coaching makes is not insight—it’s traction.

What working together looks like

• Clear diagnosis of where you’re self-sabotaging (not just why)
• Practical, uncomfortable actions that build real confidence
• Direct feedback when you drift back into old patterns
• A focus on integrity, not image or performance

If we work together, it will be because it makes sense—not because you were persuaded.

A no-pressure first session

I offer a free initial trial coaching session with no obligation to continue.

You can use it to see how I work, ask hard questions, and decide whether this is something you want to commit to.

If it’s not a fit, that’s fine. If it is, we’ll be clear about what comes next.

👉 Apply for an initial coaching session here

I only work with 8 clients at a time, and only with those prepared to take this seriously. I have 5 intro session spaces available each month – you may need to go onto a waitlist.

Dan Munro

If you’re looking for reassurance of your victim-story, this isn’t it. If you’re ready to change how you actually live, let’s stop messing around.