Ep #3: How to Create Indomitable Self-Confidence

Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast, the only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha-mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here’s your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

What’s up guys? Welcome to the podcast. How’s everybody doing? I’m doing amazing. I’m having an amazing day and the reason why my day is so awesome is because today I get to talk to you guys about confidence.

I love teaching about confidence. I’m a confidence coach, I talk about it a lot, and today is the day I get to teach you guys about self-confidence. So let’s get right to it. Let’s start. Confidence is the bee’s knees, and I want to tell you guys probably the most amazing news about confidence. You may not know this in fact – if you didn’t know, this is going to blow your mind.

Confidence is not innate. It’s not something that you’re born with. Some people think that confidence is something you’re either born with or you’re not, and I’m going to tell you that that is not the case. Confidence is a skillset. It’s like learning a sport. It’s like learning to play basketball.

Nobody is born an amazing basketball player. LeBron James was not born an amazing basketball player. He worked hard. He practiced playing the sport of basketball to become an amazing basketball player. Now, he had some genetic potential in there, but he spent a lot of time practicing. He spent a lot of time with coaches, getting feedback, getting guidance, and he became this amazing basketball player.

Confidence is the same thing, guys. Confidence is something that you can practice, you can train it. And with guidance, with feedback, you can develop indomitable self-confidence, unbreakable self-confidence. And that is a very attractive and powerful tool of influence.

Now that you know that confidence is a skillset, now you know you can build up self-confidence, let’s talk about what self-confidence is. Self-confidence is three things. Self-confidence is your ability to trust yourself, number one, it’s knowing that you can experience any emotion, including failure without being physically harmed, number two, and it’s your overall opinion of yourself, number three.

I’m going to go into each one of these a little bit deeper so you guys really understand what each part of this self-confidence is. Your ability to trust yourself, that first piece, that’s really your relationship with yourself. Your ability to trust yourself means how strong is the relationship that you have with yourself.

Now, here’s the rub, guys. A lot of people don’t even know that they have a relationship with themselves. They think that a relationship must include something or someone else. In order to have a relationship, there must be you and this other thing that you are in relation to. But I’m here to tell you guys that your ability to trust yourself is built by having a strong relationship with yourself.

Because when you trust yourself, what you have is you have integrity with yourself. You have integrity with your word. You know that when you say you will do something, you will do it. And that follow through, that integrity, that is your relationship with yourself. It’s like telling yourself that you’re going to do something and then following through on it.

When you do that, you build up trust in yourself. You build up this relationship with yourself. When you hope or when you try to follow through on what you’ve committed to do or what you said you were going to do, that depletes trust in yourself and it depletes your confidence in yourself.

So pay attention to the way you say things, guys, because this is a teaching tool and this can actually start to be a piece of treatment for you. After you listen to this podcast, pay attention to how you talk to people. And if you say, “I’m hoping to do this later,” or, “I’ll try to make this happen,” when you say that, when you say that out loud, that’s your brain, right? That is the relationship that you have with yourself. So that’s your brain talking to yourself.

When you’re saying that to someone else, it’s really you’re saying it to yourself. If you say hope or if you say try, then there is that lack of commitment, there is that lack of trust. Be aware of it. Just be aware. Awareness alone is treatment in the beginning. This will help build your confidence in the beginning. It will help build your trust in yourself in the beginning just by being aware of you saying, “I hope this will work or I’ll try to make this work.”

And when you don’t trust yourself, when you can’t count on yourself, then you deplete your self-confidence. You feel out of control with yourself. You don’t feel like you can control your own life, that the external circumstances in your life are actually in control. That’s the way you feel when you don’t trust yourself.

So know that you weren’t born with confidence, know that confidence is something that you build, and you build it by having a great, solid, an amazing relationship with yourself. Let me give you an example real quick before we move on to the second part of confidence. I want to give you guys an example of this.

I used to be a fitness coach, and when I was a fitness coach, I would have people come to me and they would make an appointment with me for personal training. And a lot of times they would do this because they wanted accountability. They wanted the relationship that they had with me to keep them accountable to them doing what they wanted to do. In this case, workout, they had goals that they wanted to reach and it was the relationship they had with me that was going to keep them accountable to these goals.

Now, to build confidence, when you make an appointment to go to the gym after work, you make that appointment with yourself. And you show up to the gym and workout because it’s something that you said to yourself that you will do. That is the relationship that you have with yourself. That is the trust that you build with yourself.

The clients that I took on, in order for them to have the accountability, in order for them to show up, they lacked self-confidence, they needed another person, me, a personal trainer in this instance, to be the relationship that held them accountable because they didn’t have the relationship with themselves that was strong enough to keep them accountable. They needed a relationship with somebody else.

So when you trust yourself, you know that you will keep your word to yourself. Same as keeping the word to other people, but even stronger because you know you have that strong relationship with yourself.

The second part of building confidence is knowing that you can experience any emotion without feeling physical pain, without any physical harm coming to you. Now, here’s the thing with this, guys. The worst thing that can happen to you is an emotion. I’m talking to the guy who sees the beautiful woman in the grocery store and wants to introduce himself to her but doesn’t have the confidence, that’s afraid of that emotion of rejection or that fear of failure.

I’m talking to the guy who wants to start his own business on the side but is afraid of failure, is afraid of disappointment. And when you’re afraid of failure, when you’re afraid of rejection, when you’re afraid of disappointment, what you need to know to build your self-confidence, what you want to know is that the worst that can happen is that feeling, is that emotion.

So the development of self-confidence is knowing that emotion, physiological change in the body is the worst thing that can happen in a situation. Now again, like I’ve said, an emotion is a physiological change in the body. It’s a vibration in a body. It can come up as a temperature change in the body.

You guys right now as you listen to this podcast, think about what does anxiety feel like in your body. What does rejection feel like in your body? What does depression, what does fear feel like in your body? These are what we call negative or uncomfortable emotions.

And when we think about these emotions, when we feel these emotions, when we actually sit with them, what you’re going to find is that it’s really not that big of a deal. You’re really going to find that okay, so when I’m anxious, I’ve got the butterflies in my stomach, I’ve got maybe a little frog in my throat, as they say, or if I’m depressed, if I’m sad, I might get a welling up behind my eyes if I get tearful. My shoulders might get a little sense, I’m nervous, if I’m anxious.

But these are all just physiological changes, right? These are just minor variations that happen in the body due to a thought that creates the emotion. Let me put it to you another way, guys. Imagine that somebody who doesn’t have – doesn’t know what emotion is. Like an alien comes down from outer space and says, “Hey, I’ve heard about these emotions, I’ve heard about this thing that everybody’s so afraid of, heard about rejection, I’ve heard about disappointment, I’ve heard about failure, and everybody’s so afraid of feeling these things that they’d rather just not even try. They’d rather just not even give the effort.

So as an alien, as somebody that doesn’t know what fear feels like, that doesn’t know what rejection feels like, that doesn’t know what disappointment feels like, can you explain to me why everybody refuses to try just to avoid feeling this horrible thing? Can you explain to me how horrible this is?”

I mean, how would you explain it to the alien? It’d be a little silly to try to explain to the alien all the things I just mentioned to you. Oh well, it’s the welling up of the eyes, getting choked up in the throat, got a bit of a butterfly in my stomach, a little tenseness, maybe a little bit of shallow breathing.

This alien’s going to look at you like, really? This is the reason why you’re not going up to talk to that beautiful woman? That’s why you’re not possibly going to have the most amazing relationship you’ve ever had in your life? It’s because of this, this physiological change in your body that you’re not going to start this new business and create value in tons of people’s lives and create wealth in your own life? It’s because of a welling up in the throat or a tightening in the chest?

When we really recognize that the worst thing that can happen, the very worst thing that can happen to us in these situations as that emotion, is simply a vibration, simply a discomfort that happens in our organic machine, in our body. When we really know that, then we become flooded with self-confidence because then you know that you can go into any situation, any situation, whether it’s a situation with a beautiful woman, whether it’s a situation with starting a new business, whether it’s a situation with applying for a promotion at a different company, you can go into any situation and know that no matter what happens, you’re going to be alright. You’re going to be fine.

Because even if the result is not what you expected, hey, the worst that can happen is a vibration in the body, a physiological change. It’s not that big a deal. And it gives you that power to act. It gives you that self-confidence. So that’s number two. Knowing you can feel any emotion without being physically harmed.

The third part of self-confidence is your opinion of yourself. It’s just your thoughts about yourself. Now, where does self-confidence come from? Self-confidence is an emotion. Now, emotions come from thoughts. So what you think about yourself will generate or deplete self-confidence.

Like I said guys, confidence is not innate. It’s not something that you’re born with. It is something that you can create. You can create it right now, right in this very moment. As you listen to this podcast, you can create confidence, just by the way you think about yourself. But if you’ve gone a long time, if you’ve gone a whole lifetime with negative opinions of yourself, then you’re going to have a belief system that is depleting your confidence.

Now, I want to tell you guys also that there’s a misconception in the world that confidence comes from experience. In other words, that confidence and competence are kind of synonymous. Or that competence has to in some way precede confidence, that we have to be good at something before we can be confident about it.

And I want to tell you something. This is not the same. Your opinion of yourself does not depend on your abilities. A confident person is going to think that they are good, capable, and worthy. A confident person is going to think they are strong, they’re going to think that they’re competent. A confident person is going to think that they are capable.

Now, this doesn’t have to be proven. What happens as a result of an action does not have to happen perfectly to create the feeling of confidence because the feeling of confidence comes from a thought. It doesn’t come from the result. It doesn’t come from what happens in the world. It comes from the way you think.

So there are plenty of examples of people who have not achieved the result that they wanted but maintained their confidence in order to keep trying, in order to keep going, in order to create success. If these people had allowed their result, their non-success to determine how they felt about themselves, who allowed that result to deplete their confidence, then we would not have the things that we have today.

We would not have light bulbs. Thomas Edison did not create the light bulb on his first try. We would not have combustion engines. We would not have iPhones. Steve Jobs did not create the iPhone on his first try, guys.

So how you think about yourself does not come from your competence. It does not come from your ability. How you think about yourself comes from how you choose to think about yourself. So those are the three pillars of confidence. Your ability to trust yourself, knowing you can feel any emotion without being physically harmed, and your opinion of yourself.

Now guys, I want to really quickly talk about the difference between confidence and arrogance. This will be quick because it’s really very simple. Confidence is trusting yourself, fearlessness in feeling any emotion, having positive thoughts about yourself. Arrogance is thinking that you’re better than everybody else. That’s a long way from confidence. Arrogance manifests when a person tries to create a higher opinion of themselves. It’s like a comparison thing.

They do this in a lot of different ways. Put people down, they’ll brag about their accomplishments, they’ll lie, they’ll exaggerate about their abilities. When an arrogant person criticizes other people, it’s usually a projection. They’re projecting their own self-thoughts onto this other person. They’re compensation for their own lack of confidence by trying to make themselves feel better or by trying to prop themselves up better in the mind of somebody else.

An arrogant person will also deny faults because they can’t tolerate feeling any type of rejection. Arrogance is based in fear. Arrogance is based in scarcity. Confidence, guys, confidence is abundance. You’re going to hear me talk a lot about abundance because abundance is where you get your power from.

Confidence comes from abundance. Think about this: an arrogant person is in scarcity. They think that they is not enough. They think there’s a hierarchy, they think that there’s some way to compare better or worse. Human beings are on some sort of scale. A confident person knows that all human beings are awesome and all human beings are capable. And they are not afraid to feel any emotions. We talked about that.

So they’re not afraid to feel failure, they’re not going to prop themselves up or lie about who they are because they’re not afraid of what you think about them. All emotions are part of the human experience. A confident person knows this, they are not afraid to feel discomfort. They’re not afraid to feel that embarrassment, that rejection. Whereas the arrogant person refuses to feel that and will do anything they can to avoid feeling that.

So why don’t most people have self-confidence? Why are most people insecure? Guys, it’s because most people don’t trust themselves. That is the reason. Because most people don’t have a relationship with themselves. Most people don’t even know that they can have a relationship with themselves.

If you didn’t know that you can, it’s possible to have a relationship with yourself, don’t worry. It’s okay. You are not in the minority. Believe me. You are in the majority. Most people don’t know that they can have a relationship with themselves.

And even the people that do know that they can have a relationship with themselves, that relationship, it’s not so great. And most people don’t know how to manage their mind. That’s where the relationship with themselves comes in. Their relationship with themselves is a relationship with their thoughts, with their minds. And because people don’t know how to manage their minds, they feel out of control with their feelings and their actions.

Most people are afraid of feeling any negativity. They don’t want to feel rejection, they don’t want to feel fear, they don’t want to feel discomfort of any kind so they hide. Scared to do anything that has the risk of failure. So when we’re always doubting our ability because if we don’t perform correctly, we will feel a negative emotion, then this creates an opinion of ourselves that is very low.

And when we do this over and over and over again, we create a belief system about ourselves that is very low. So thoughts create our feelings and our belief systems create our state of being. A belief system is a thought or a group of thoughts that you have over and over and over and over again.

So if you’re always sort of hiding from the world, if you’re always not showing up because you’re afraid of this negative emotion or you don’t trust yourself, you have a poor relationship with yourself, then you’re going to have a belief system that lacks confidence. You’re going to have that insecure belief system.

There are a lot of those thoughts, there are a lot of these thoughts that create this insecure belief system. Belief system that lacks confidence. Here are just a few of the possible thoughts you might be having that’s depleting your confidence.

I don’t know how. Failure is weakness. Rejection is the worst thing that can happen. Other people’s opinions define me. So the way other people think about me is the way I think about me. That’s a thought that people have. The less risk I take the better. Confidence is something you have or you don’t. We talked about that. A lot of people believe that.

How I look, money, upbringing, or intelligence determine my confidence. So my physical features or my worldly attributes. Fear means you aren’t confident. Confident people are comfortable and don’t feel afraid. These are just a few of the thoughts that people have that deplete their self-confidence, guys.

Why is self-confidence important? So what if you have these thoughts? How are these thoughts hurting you? Why not remain with these familiar thoughts? I mean, these thoughts are comfortable, they’re there, they create a state of insecurity but they’re familiar to us, right? They’re comfortable. Why do something that is uncomfortable in order to create our confidence? Why go into that place of fear of rejection, why go into that place of potential embarrassment, potential disappointment?

Because by building your confidence, you’re going to build that emotion. And that confidence, that emotion drives massive action. Feelings drive actions, guys, and when you feel more confident, you will show up in that world and in your relationships much differently.

I’m not saying that confident people are loud and outgoing. You’re not going to change into this extroverted madman, crazy person. But I am going to tell you that confident people have no problem admitting when they’re wrong. When they don’t know something, they tell somebody. They don’t have an answer, they find it. They don’t care if they fail, right?

Failure is an opportunity for learning. The person with the most certainty and the most belief will influence the conversation. The person with the most confidence. Remember, confidence is a feeling that comes from a thought. It doesn’t come from an action or an ability. So don’t rely on your ability to do something. Rely on your belief that you can handle any situation because everything is just a feeling and you aren’t afraid to feel anything.

And you know where feelings come from. They come from your thoughts. Confidence is a wonderful feeling for you and the people around you. They will love being in your energy of abundance. Confidence is attractive. It is sexy and it will attract people to you.

Guys, when you have more self-confidence, when you feel this emotion, you’re going to set more goals, you’re going to take more risks, you’re going to take more action. You’re going to talk to more people, you’re going to achieve more, you’re going to believe beyond your current capability and capacity and you’re going to live into your future. These are the benefits, amazing benefits of more confidence.

Cultivating confidence, creating confidence comes from your thoughts, comes from the thoughts you have about yourself. Consider the possibility of what you can create in your future. The more certain you are of this possibility, the more confidence you will have moving towards it.

What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of failure? Are you afraid of disappointment? Are you afraid of rejection? Are you afraid of again, approaching that beautiful woman, are you afraid of starting that new business? Imagine your life if you were willing to feel all of these emotions without fear.

Your identity beliefs determine your state of being. And guess what? Your identity isn’t fixed. You create it daily. Each thought that you choose, the emotion that you feel and action that you take. Your brain does not produce confidence naturally. It doesn’t. It produces fear, worry, and doubt naturally.

You have to train your brain to work for you. Fear doesn’t prevent self-confidence. The unwillingness to feel fear prevents self-confidence. You have to be willing to feel discomfort consistently in order to create, develop this self-confidence.

A lot of times, guys, a lot of times we give up self-confidence for the illusion of safety, for the illusion of security, of consistency, but really the opposite happens. Really what happens is we just don’t show up. We choose not to show up in the world. We don’t trust ourselves, we’re afraid of failure, we’re afraid of rejection, we think negatively about ourselves, and we just don’t show up. We just don’t even try.

Here’s some thoughts you can practice thinking that will start to create this feeling of self-confidence. Now, you’ve got to think them often enough. That’s part of the thing. In order for this to become a belief system, you’ve got to think these thoughts often enough. But I’m just going to suggest a few of these to you.

Here’s just a few of these you can start to think about. What others think about me is 100% about them. That is true. What other people think about you is really just about them. I was made for this. That’s a big one. That’s a really powerful thought. Fear is no big deal. The worst that can happen is a feeling. I have my own back. That’s a trust one, guys. That’s how you build trust. That’s how you build that relationship with yourself. The thought, I have my own back.

My potential is limitless. What I make it mean is the worst that can happen. How about the better I fail, the more confident I am. Those are just a few thoughts that you guys can start to think, start to put in your minds when you get into situations where you start to feel that fear, put those thoughts in your mind. Start telling yourself that. Because again, it’s those thoughts that will cultivate, that will create immediate self-confidence.

On a final note, moving forward increases self-confidence. You can think about confidence all you want but moving forward, massive action helps increase it. Do the stuff you’re scared to do. Now again, it’s not the result that creates the confidence. But you got to take the action.

Approach that attractive lady at the bar or at the grocery store, or on the street. Take a meeting with your boss to ask for a raise. Start that new business in your spare time. Do it again, do it again, do it again. Repeat often. Make decisions. Honor your decisions. Build up that relationship with yourself.

Give up approval seeking from other people. Self-confidence comes from needing your own approval, from having your own approval. Learn by doing things. If you don’t know something, take action to find out. Don’t compare yourself to other people and don’t be offended ever. Let people judge you. Let people be wrong about you.

Again, what people think about you, that’s about them, guys. Let them judge you. Let them be wrong. Don’t live in fear of the haters. Haters exist. They’re there. Don’t live in fear of that. In the end, we’re all dead, right? We all go away. This is all we got. This is our life. It’s over before we know it.

Get out there, guys. Live your life, love your life. Build your confidence. You have the power to be as confident as you want. You have the power to approach any beautiful woman in the world. You have the power to create massive wealth in your life. You have the power to unlock your personal greatness. And guys, confidence is an amazing emotion to create that massive action, to create the life of your dreams.

Thank you so much for listening, guys. Please leave me a review on iTunes. Hit me with five stars. Go ahead and subscribe to the podcast. You’ll know when the next one comes up. And finally, leave me a comment. If you have a positive thought that will develop self-confidence, leave that in the comments. If you have a question about self-confidence, leave that in the comments and I will answer your questions.

As an added bonus and a thank you for leaving me a rating and review, I’m going to give away two free 30-minute coaching sessions to five members of my audience. For information on how to subscribe, rate, and review the show and for how to enter to get your free coaching sessions, go to thealphamalecoach.com/itunes.

Don’t forget, it is thealphamalecoach.com/itunes. Guys, have an awesome week. I will see you next week on the podcast. Until then, you’re amazing, you’re awesome humans, get out there, be the best version of yourselves. I love you, I will see you next week.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoy what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash Your Alpha – your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset – at thealphamalecoach.com/unleash.