# Authentic confidence - does it exist?

By [Tilhi](https://paragraph.com/@tilhi) · 2022-08-29

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We all would like to be more confident than we currently are, but is there a sort of end state of confidence, authentic confidence if you would, where one does not really care anymore about other people’s opinions but is not arrogant either? And if this sort of state exists, how could one tap into it?

I believe authentic confidence, which is not to be mixed with arrogance, is a skill that takes time to build. And it does not happen by sitting on a sofa watching Netflix either. It requires addressing all the problems in one’s life that might make one unconfident. Confidence is just an absence of insecurity and fear of rejection. Once one has addressed the low confidence yielded by all the insecurities, authentic confidence comes to take its place.

However, as was mentioned earlier, building authentic confidence takes time and effort. To be authentically confident, one has to have prior positive and affirming experiences so if there happens to be a social conflict of any sort or any threatening situation, be it an actual physical threat or just general social anxiety, one can revert to those positive experiences and tap into the confident state of mind. The more positive experiences one has, the faster and more automatic this tapping to the confident state is.

Positive experiences come from acquiring discipline first and foremost. And it directly follows, that one has to take responsibility for everything in one’s own life. This might be trivial at first, like cleaning a room, as Jordan Peterson might say, but this in return works as a basis to take on more challenging tasks in the future. These completed tasks are marked as positive experiences and they build authentic confidence over time with compounding interest.

The reason this all might seem pretty trivial but also something that is not talked about too much is that cured cases never return. Authentically confident people are so satisfied and fulfilled with their own lives that they don’t really feel the need to “share their secrets” with everyone. And even if they did, they are talking in a different language than people who think that authentic confidence does not exist.

Most people don’t have the lives they want to live due to a lack of discipline and vision. Life is really about dropping one’s ego to replace it with authentic confidence. This is seen when someone is insulting an authentically confident person and they either ignore the insult or go along with it. There is no ego impulsively reacting to any threat that it might be encountering. Same thing with rejection. Getting rejected by a company when applying for a job or by a potential dating prospect on the street does not hurt an authentically confident person since they know that they are not missing out on anything. But the party who rejected them is.

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*Originally published on [Tilhi](https://paragraph.com/@tilhi/authentic-confidence-does-it-exist)*