Becoming a More Confident Person

Confidence (the honest sort, not the delusional kind) is something a healthy Stoic practice can give you in fairly short order. How short depends on how quickly you take on board what follows, so pay attention.

Where lack of confidence comes from

All lack of confidence comes from uncertainty about whether the way you're choosing to show up in the world is right, and whether it will meet with the approval of some valued authority. That authority might be friends, family, the state, a community you belong to, or any number of others whose approval you've learned to want. Marcus Aurelius caught himself doing exactly this and found it absurd:

"We love ourselves more than anyone else, yet we rate other people's opinions of us above our own" (Meditations 12.4).

So the first step is to internalise the belief that you are your own authority. Not the only authority that matters, but the authority of greatest import. If your own authority isn't regarded and satisfied first, you will only be pushed around by everyone else; you'll be in a permanent flux of grounding.

The second step is to work out what that authority demands, what it's based on, and why you should listen to it.

Superficially, the reason to listen is easy: you want to be more confident. Fine. Start there. But a deeper reason emerges with time: you hold your own rational faculty in the highest regard because it is the only authority that enables you to live in accord with Nature, and so in alignment with your purpose as a human being and your place in the Cosmos (this is the Stoic definition of the goal of life itself; see Diogenes Laertius 7.87).

It is how you, for lack of better phrasing, align with god. Remember that the God of Stoicism is Nature, this Cosmos as a single living entity, not a supernatural father figure who cares who you sleep with, how you vote, or what you wear in public. To believe in the Stoic god you only have to accept that the physical world exists, which seems like a pretty light lift.

To hold your own authority in highest regard is to say: I am not shaped by others, I am shaped by myself. My value is not appraised by others, it is appraised by me, and by me alone, because others have no access to my rational faculty. They cannot know why or how I choose what I choose, so they cannot have the full context required to judge me fairly or accurately.

A helpful syllogism to convince you logically

This first step is a choice. I can't make it for you and you can't fake it. This is the variable part of "in short order." But here's a syllogism to help you make the choice sooner:

Premise 1: A choice can only be judged rightly by the reasoning behind it, never by its outcome, its popularity, or how it felt.

Premise 2: To judge reasoning, you need access to it, and the full reasoning behind my choices exists in one place only: my own rational faculty.

Premise 3: No one else has direct access to my rational faculty. Others see my actions and my results; they cannot see my premises, my context, or my intent.

Conclusion 1: Therefore, no one else can judge my choices with complete accuracy. At best they judge a fragment.

Premise 4: An authority deserves regard in proportion to how accurately it can judge.

Conclusion 2: Therefore, my own rational faculty deserves the highest regard of any authority on the matter of my choices. Not because it is mine, but because it is the only one holding all the evidence.

Copy this out. Paste it in a notepad, print it, staple it to your forehead. Look at it every day, for as long as you need to, until you can recite it from memory, and until you believe it as much as you believe the sky is blue or that you need oxygen to survive. Make yourself assent to it. Make it part of your identity.

Once you've done that, you're ready to build the standard.

Building the standard

Epictetus tells his students to prescribe a character and a standard for themselves and then keep to it, alone or in company. I can't build yours for you in an article. I don't know you, I don't know your context, and a real standard takes both. (If you want that kind of individual help, coaching exists inside my community; details below. I'm not holding knowledge hostage, I just can't do this part for a stranger.) What I can do is give you three questions that produce a working beta version of a standard.

1. What can a choice you make never require of you?

2. How do you defend your choice not to choose, when every available option would require you to abandon your answer to the first question?

3. How do you defend and stand firm behind your choice when it aligns with your standard but brings personal loss, condemnation, or detriment to you?

Answer those three and you have the start of a standard. It won't give you everything you need when the most challenging scenarios arise, but it's a good enough place to start. Just because it's not bulletproof doesn't mean it isn't worth building. Don't be an all-or-nothing thinker; you'll never make any progress at all.

Adapted from episode 27 of Practical Stoicism, "How to become more confident." AI-generated syllogism wallpapers can be found here: desktop and phone.