2 Simple Steps to Become Truly Confident

AVAlexander Volchek

First of all, when we talk about a person's confidence in themselves, genuine confidence is directly connected to their ability to truly know and perceive themselves. Confidence isn't about how much money you have. Confidence isn't about how many years you've lived together with your wife. Confidence isn't about how many videos you can record without a break. Confidence isn't about how many friends you have. Confidence isn't measured by any parameters. There isn't a single social parameter for measuring confidence. A person's knowledge of themselves, getting to know yourself, is an absolutely endless process. The more a person knows themselves, the more they perceive the space around them, the more they perceive cause-and-effect relationships, the more they develop a quality, a set of qualities and states that form that inner backbone and state of confidence. That backbone and state of confidence aren't some descriptive characteristic you can express in one word. And express confidence in what? Confidence that I'm a great gardener? Confidence that I'm a great businessman? Confidence that today will be good or bad? Confidence in what? What confidence are we measuring?

What confidence of my own are we measuring? Suppose someone starts comparing confidence with success. They bring up Marilyn Monroe, for example: she was very successful but lacked confidence in herself. Of course, there are plenty of businesspeople like that, politicians, creative people—pianists, painters—or ordinary people who've achieved a certain success in something. One person considers them successful; another doesn't. These indicators and parameters are completely unrelated, absolutely unrelated to each other. They have no connection. A person's success has no connection at all, because success is always measured by particular parameters, somewhere, in something. Success as a father: how many children you have, your wife, how many years you've lived together, and other external parameters. Success as an employee: how much money you earn and how long you've worked for the company. Success as a sales manager: how many clients you've brought in, how you've met your incentive targets, and so on. Success as a business owner: how much money you've earned, how you're growing from year to year, and so on. Success as a gardener: how many flowers you've planted, how much you've done. Success as a doctor: how many clients you've seen, how many clients haven't died after being treated by you, and so on.

It's measured by a certain number of parameters and indicators. What does that have to do with confidence? Someone says, “Look, because I'm a successful father, I'm a confident father.” But no, not at all. It's a known fact that the more children a normal, sensible person has, the more they realize how individually different all children are, and the more they start recognizing that they don't know how to raise children. I know this for certain: I have four children. With each child, I consciously saw that you know less and less. On the one hand, you understand many good things; you really do have experience. Someone looking from the outside could even call me a successful dad at a certain point, right? Single out a particular point and call me that in society. But confidence, the root of confidence here, is somewhere else entirely. I know an enormous number of people with lots of children. They're incredibly insecure as fathers. They worry all the time, say they have huge problems, and don't know what to do with these children. They don't know how to build relationships with them. They understand that the relationships will only deteriorate.

They see that they're a bad husband or that their wife is bad. They're completely unsure of their home life. They're becoming less confident, not more. The cause of confidence lies somewhere else entirely. Other people say the opposite: “We're confident because we've become successful by outward standards.” You have to examine that and see what the confidence is based on. Is it real confidence, or is it ego? That brings us to the question: what is confidence when we truly assess it? Is it confidence after all, or ego? What's the difference? Genuine confidence is what creates an incredible calm within you. It's what expands your observation. It's where you aren't afraid to lose anything. Confidence isn't connected to acquisition. Genuine confidence means you can easily, without any trouble, part with everything around you, including confidence itself. If someone has achieved success and is now confident, but is afraid of losing that success; if someone has an incredibly impressive company but is afraid of losing it, of it going completely bankrupt a year from now, and their confidence is shaken by that, then they have no confidence at all. That's ego.

It's simply a state created externally through certain structures. It isn't confidence. Confidence here, of course, is knowing precisely that if you lose something, you won't experience any negative states. And even if you do experience those negative states, you'll calmly look at them and observe. Or you'll be glad to observe them calmly. Even if you aren't calm while observing, you'll try to observe, you'll want to observe, you'll be ready to acknowledge it. That's what creates genuine confidence in absolutely anyone. Once again, confidence isn't connected to a set of particular parameters, so it can't be measured. And as for measuring confidence, success certainly isn't the measure—not success at all. There are many different things involved, different combinations of things. That brings us to different kinds of confidence. There's confidence in your health, confidence in relationships, confidence in family relationships with your wife, confidence in your relationship with your parents, confidence in your parents, confidence in friends, confidence in the political system, confidence in the economic system. There's confidence in the weather. There are many different kinds of confidence. Can I be confident at work but not at home with my wife—unsure of my wife?

Can I be confident at work and unsure of my wife? Probably, right? In theory. But if we look at it and recognize that this is real life and I'm one person, then confidence and insecurity are both present within me at the same time. That means confidence and insecurity are also present in every event in my life, whether it involves my wife or my work. The question is how extreme the state is. It means there's no such thing as a complete absence of confidence or one hundred percent confidence. When we study self-confidence, the first thing you need to do for yourself personally—something that will save your entire life ahead if you grasp it—is recognize that there's no such thing as one hundred percent confidence, just as there's no such thing as zero percent confidence. There's no such thing as a person having zero confidence in themselves at work. It doesn't happen. Just as there's no such thing as someone being one hundred percent confident at work. It doesn't happen! Confidence at work always contains confidence in you, in yourself simply as a person. And confidence in yourself as a person consists of an enormous number of factors, including confidence at work. Someone might think this is just some theory they don't need.

This is a psychological trauma: a person focuses on confidence being finite, or on confidence having some zero state. They say, “I'm a completely insecure person.” It's like people saying—I love this—“He's a Pisces, that's why he's that way. He's a Scorpio, that's why he's like that.” So there are twelve types of people, and that's it. No others exist. Twelve types. According to all these people, there are twelve types of people. That's an abstract division, completely abstract, not real. When a person says, “I'm unsure of something,” they need to look at it and describe to themselves what they're actually discussing. What am I talking about? Have I always lacked confidence in myself as a professional or a businessperson? Or is it a newly acquired quality? What do you think: my son is four years old. Is he insecure as a businessman? He doesn't even know what that is. That means confidence or insecurity as a businessperson is a socially formed concept, simply a concept that's been formed. What's more, it manifests differently depending on the circumstances. So when we talk about genuine confidence, it isn't something defined by parameters; it's expressed through your awareness of life. When we talk about social confidence, all right, define it through certain parameters.

But it isn't true. If anyone wants to switch off the video now or say that isn't so, that there is a clear, normal sense of confidence within the family—no, not at all. I know women who have no man in their life, who are forty, and who have no insecurity about themselves as women. They have no insecurity in relationships at all. It simply doesn't exist. That energy doesn't exist. They simply don't have it in this life. The problem isn't there. And there's a sixteen-year-old girl who is extremely insecure. What does that bring us to? To insecurity being an energy. I know a child. When he was little, his parents were told they needed to praise him all the time, because for practically his whole life this child would be insecure.

This child will be insecure for practically his whole life. There is an energy present that transmits insecurity about himself to this child. You can't overcome that energy, because its cause doesn't lie in this person's awareness. It's the energy of this spiritual being; this insecurity is transmitted from the energy worlds. So his parents were told, “Your task is to praise this child all the time, no matter what. The more you praise him, the more you'll neutralize that energy of insecurity.” You can't overpraise this child. At the same time, we all understand the other side: there are children who, if you praise them endlessly, will become complete egotists. We're talking about a very serious level here. It shows how deeply you need to perceive things to work with something like this. And it really is that way. Anyone who thinks everything can be solved easily is an idiot. They don't want to truly understand their own life, truly see causes and effects. It's that simple. Just look at it. People say everything can be proved through physics. Really? Really? Then use your physics to prove to me, right now, why anxiety appeared in you. Prove it right now. For no reason—for no reason at all.

Prove to me through physics why that neighbor's wife died yesterday and this one's didn't. Prove it through physics. Just like that, right now. When I say confidence is your ability to be aware of life, your ability to understand life's causes and effects, to know what's actually happening, what's really happening, the question is how to come to that knowledge, how to expand it. The more of life you perceive, the more confidence you have. Then the question is: how do you perceive more of life? To perceive more, we can probably divide this into two areas. On the one hand, you need to acquire more knowledge, external knowledge: what's happening in life, what a human being is. On the other, you need to live a great deal of life, take many actions, and work on yourself. My whole channel is devoted to this: personal development and scaling up as a person. My whole channel is devoted to helping people develop the quality of perception and observation. The more a person perceives, the more they observe, the more confident they are. We're used to—people in society are used to this; I certainly am not—sensing people's confidence from a video they've recorded, from external attributes, how they behave and what they do, rather than what's really happening beneath that.

A person simply can't truly sense someone on the inside. Often there's a kind of dissonance. Some people are very sensitive and can perceive energies. They say, “But this person feels bad. Why are they projecting confidence outwardly? They feel bad. They're in a state of tragedy inside. Why are they in that state? What's happening?” It's easy to project confidence outwardly without being in a state of confidence. Look, external social confidence is a simple thing, very easy. Have a bunch of children. Take great pictures: there's confidence. Professionally, create a sort of manufactured facade around yourself. You're creating outward confidence. Now there are lots of models—Sora from OpenAI, Veo 2 from Google, Chinese models—that let you generate videos. Generate a video and create the impression that everything is going damn well for you. You can already generate music and say you created it yourself, make pictures and say you made them yourself. Creating outward circumstances that suggest confidence is easy. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are full of confidence or its opposite: someone whining, whining. This is very interesting in life and in marketing. People say, “You need to keep it real.” And keeping it real always means showing people your problems.

Why do these marketers and the whole world of YouTube, Instagram, and everything else talk about this? Because people project confidence through external indicators rather than by keeping it real. You say, “Wait, I'm telling you what's real.” They say, “No. Show what's really happening.” You say, “That really is what's happening.” Let's go through the chain again. Confidence is awareness of your own life and understanding the causes and effects of what's happening. It isn't a high-quality life. It isn't a good life. It isn't impressive events. It isn't endless joy. It isn't some incredibly exalted environment. Confidence doesn't come from living in California, in one of the richest cities in the world, or from having a particular view. Confidence doesn't come from that. Confidence comes with a genuine understanding of causes and effects, genuine observation in life. Then there's also the question of focusing on genuine observation and what's happening in life. Confidence unrelated to that is ego-based confidence. Just admit to yourself, “All right, I need confidence as a social thing. I need to be a confident woman because I've been told men only like confident women. So I'll be confident today when I go on a date.” Fine.

Can you behave that way in certain situations? Go ahead. But don't deceive yourself. Understand that it's a particular kind of confidence you need. We've been told we need to be confident at a job interview. If I'm confident at the interview, I'll get hired as a sales manager, because that company only wants confident salespeople. Notice that this is complete nonsense, because many companies need salespeople who are very insecure. In the same way, many people need employees with a huge amount of childhood trauma, not the opposite. And others need employees without childhood trauma, not the opposite. Very different people are needed. The question is what they project. An insecure person can easily project insecurity onto the other side. Sales often requires insecurity on the other side, which makes it easy to press on the other person's pain and insecurity. Some salespeople don't need to press on pain. When you go to Chanel to buy a jacket, no one presses on your pain. The salesperson will never press on your pain. They'll work on your confidence, not your pain. They'll tell you different kinds of things.

That employee needs to be as confident as possible, not insecure. So if you're applying for a sales job at Chanel, you probably shouldn't turn up saying, “I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not confident in myself as a woman. I don't know that I'm beautiful. I'm not confident in myself as a man. Or I'm not even sure people are decent beings. I'm not sure that beauty and art will save the world. And anyway, that isn't what it's about.” And you start sinking inward. Different parameters exist everywhere, but this isn't genuine confidence. These are simply social aspects, social expressions, very often false, very often not real, completely absurd. If you want genuine confidence, this is what genuine confidence is about: knowing yourself, truly knowing yourself as a human being. Knowing yourself as a human being is a person's main task. The more a person knows themselves, the stronger they become. The stronger they become, the more confident they are. Of course—what else? Regardless of the circumstances that happen.

What else would it mean? Did everyone whose home burned down last week, in these past few days in Los Angeles, suddenly lose confidence in their life? Not at all. An enormous number of houses burned down, worth tens of billions of dollars in all, because the houses burning were worth ten million, twenty million, thirty million. One person's house burned down and they didn't bat an eye. Another person's house burned down and they lost their entire life because a little pendant their grandmother had given them when they were young burned with it. That's it! Everything was swept out from under them. For someone else, nothing happened. They thought, “Life is interesting. This is a reset in my life. I couldn't even imagine this was possible. I dreamed of serious things happening in my life. I surrendered to that and devoted my life to being in a state of living through whatever comes. Life brought this tragedy to my family and the people around me. I'm shaking all over. I'm in a tragedy, in the tragedy of living through these circumstances. But this is what I was moving toward.” A person like that can have a confidence in themselves as a human being, a foundation, that we can't even imagine.

That's the paradox. We come to listen to people talk about business, people we've labeled confident, and often there's deception and illusion there. What we receive isn't confidence but fear. Fear! They project fear. We come to listen to people explain how to build family relationships, but they're just following scripts they're caught up in themselves. They're utterly insecure beings who don't know themselves, yet they project confidence around them. We receive fear, and we receive false premises for our own lives. Knowing and understanding your own confidence, understanding what it is, what confidence actually is, lets you assess what's happening around you as well, without falling into illusion and delusion.