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Missed the first video in this series? Watch the video, “Comparison is the enemy of contentment,” here.
Welcome back to my video series. Last week I did something on comparison being enemy of contentment, looking at other people’s lives with envy, making ourselves less happy, sapping our own confidence because we’re unfairly comparing ourselves to others, which of course is not real. We don’t necessarily envy people’s reality, we envy the fantasy of what we think other people have.Today, I want to talk about confidence. This is a great dovetail. I want to acknowledge before we get into the whole thing that confidence is the most important quality that a man or a woman could have in a relationship. Confidence. It’s the big umbrella under which we’re doing everything here.I also want to acknowledge that confidence is sometimes hard to come by. Sounds great to say well, I’m just going to snap my fingers and switch the button on the back of my head and then I’m going to have confidence. It sounds great for me to say confidence 400 times in a video and to think that you’re going to magically have confidence.
Confidence is hard to come by because we don’t have success in our love lives. We have confidence in who we are as people. We think we’re nice and kind. We think we’re smart. We think we’re loyal. We’re good friends, we’re good family members. We’re confident at work. We derive our confidence from those things, but when it comes to love our confidence takes a bit of hit.
The good news about conifidence is that it’s not that far away. You can achieve this. It’s like your nose is pressed up against the glass and right on the other side you could see confidence. That’s how easy it is to have.
It’s also somewhat of an arbitrary thing. I could use, for example, guys with money. Think of a guy with money who does well with women. Why does he do well with women? The easy answer, the lazy answer would be to say “Well, he does well with women because he’s got money. Women are gold diggers and they like guys with money.”
I don’t think that’s the full story. In fact, I think women are confidence diggers. I think they like the guy who’s confident and the guy who’s confident derives his confidence, fairly or unfairly, from the fact that he has money. He achieves a measure of success. He carries himself in such a way that he assumes that people are going to like him and sure enough, people gravitate towards him. That’s why you see average guys with really beautiful women. It’s not just about the money, it’s about how he carries himself because he has money.
Let’s flip that thing around. Let’s look at it through a different lens and say, “What kind of confidence do men respond to?” because we do respond to confidence. It’s not going to be the confidence that you derive out of being a Harvard MBA. It’s not the kind of confidence that you derive from being wildly independent, or flying around the world for 30 weeks a year.
Men respond to your emotional intelligence. That’s the thing that we value the most. Do you like yourself enough to be a great girlfriend, a loving girlfriend, an attentive girlfriend. Do you have boundaries so that you’re not just a doormat and you’re putting up with bad behavior?
That’s one of the things that get sticky. Listen, I’m a dating coach for women, I see the most amazing women, the most impressive women in the world give up all their confidence and their self-esteem because they’re attracted to some guy. That’s unnecessary, it doesn’t work, guys don’t respect it and you’re not even happy when you carry yourself with low confidence.
I want you to have a new paradigm to view yourself and this is the one I’m going to give you today. It’s the thing that worked for me for 10 years when I was dating. I’m embarrassed to tell this but it never occurred to me that someone wasn’t going to like me. I know that’s embarrassing, but it’s true. It never occurred to me that I was going to go on a date and she’d be like, “I’m not interested in you.” I always assumed that the answer is yes. I assumed that the woman across the table did like me, was going to want to see me and all I had to determine was whether I want to see her again.
Whether that’s delusional or not, what it did was carry me for 10 years of ups and downs of online dating where I never really internalized rejection. Because I like myself, most of the people did like me and did want to see me again. That’s what I want to offer to you.
Assume the answer is yes. Assume that every single guy is attracted to you, wants to sleep with you, wants to commit to you and that it’s completely in your control what happens next. You decide whether you want to go out. You decide how far you go on a date. You decide if it’s been too long before he steps up to the plate to commit to be your boyfriend. You decide if you don’t like the way you’re being treated within the context of the relationship.
This is what I talk about being CEO of your own love life. These guys are the interns and you’re the boss. This is emotional intelligence. This is having boundaries. This is having true confidence. Not putting up with behavior that you don’t like. That’s what guys we’re attracted to and it works like a charm. I know it sounds weak because there is a little bit of fake it until you make it. How do you act that way? Sometimes you just start acting that way and you watch and reality gives you more confidence.
I want to tell you this one story, it’s a little bit off track but I think it’s relevant. I think you’re going to get a kick out of it. This is 10, 15 years ago or something like that. I was a single guy, I was at a party and I saw a woman that I recognized. An acquaintance, a friend of a friend who is 10 yards away. She was too far away for me to call her name so I just went like this, beckoning with my finger, “Come here.” She looked at me and she’s like “Me?” I said, “Yeah. Come here.” So she comes over and the second she gets in front of me I looked at her and she looks at me and I realized she has no idea who I am. I totally recognized her, she had no idea who I am.
I said, “Hi. I’m Evan. I’m friends with Jeff. Do you remember me?” “Oh yeah. Hi, Evan. It’s good to see you again.” I said, “Let me ask you a question. Is that how easy to get a girl to come over to you? All you have to do is that?” She goes, “Evidently, it is.”
I love that story because it really shows that she thought I was confident. I wasn’t. I wouldn’t have necessarily approached her, but just by beckoning with my finger because I thought I knew her, she assumed that I was confident. She responded to my confidence and she came over because I emanated that. It was the confidence of someone who was clueless.
There’s something to this idea of carrying yourself as if the answer is always yes, as if whoever you do that to is going to like you and there’s no consequences to it. The worst thing that happens if someone doesn’t respond to you, it’s their loss. Once you believe it’s their loss you don’t have to feel so bad about yourself when it comes to this dating process, which is fraught with danger. “Danger” meaning: it’s unpredictable. You never know where someone is in his life.
I’d like you guys to try on the idea of confidence. Just put it on like a sweater for the next week and carry yourself as if you assume the answer is yes. Assume that everybody likes you, everybody’s attracted to you, everyone wants you and see how people respond to you.
I’d love to hear your stories. Share your comments below. Share this video with your friends and next week, I’m going to give you a video that puts this all together, that shows you a step-by-step process on how to find love proactively instead of waiting for it to happen to you. I’m really excited to give it to you. I look forward to talking to you again.
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