Can you ACT confident?

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I think one of my achilles heals is lacking confidence. (My other being my trouble finding the right words in a conversation.) So, chicks and dudes alike, constructive advice is welcome. What works for you?

PS: PLEASE, I beg you, don't turn this into a battle of the genders. Please, please, I cannot take it anymore. We're all just trying to live successfully. Please don't fight. If you have something nasty to say about the other gender, you have the whole rest of the board to do it. Please be respectful.

You can but I think I can spot it. And if I can spot it...well..

Before I had confidence I would just go with my uncarved block straightforwardness. At some point I had confidence. I dont know how or why I developed it.

I am supremely confident: in the boardroom of a public company, talking to a reporter from Forbes, pitching a stock to a NY hedge fund portfolio manager, accepting an award from the Wall Street Journal, etc.

Am I confident in ANY social situation?

No f*cking way.

You take the good with the bad, I've got strengths but relationships ain't one of them...

Confidence is an after-thought. The main asset is to be capable of asserting yourself in your social interactions. In doing so to avoid being overtly aggressive or unneccesarily passive in your expressions.

How do you go about this? It requires a shift in the way you percieve your inner self and the means by which you externalise your self to the outside world and to other people.

Basically, don't try faking it. You need to make an investment in your self esteem first in order to see benefits. No instant results.

Preparation and Practice.

Have conversations with yourself. Imagine numerous different scenarios and what you may say to someone if they said different things to you. Practice these responses, make them sound the way you think they should sound. Opportunities will arise in real life to apply what you've practiced in private. Use these opportunities to see what needs more work. Keep at it. Just prepare and practice. You'll become confident because you will have rehearsed these situations and know how to act. You'll still be nervous. This will still be stressful. You'll still rather not be in the situation at all. You'll still wish you had some natural ability to always be able to say the right thing spontaneously. But you'll make it through better and better every time you practice.

While I certainly wouldn't argue with this, I always thought in the case of many Aspies the neurological mechanism by which their inner state is communicated non-verbally (eg by facial expression, posture) is mechanically impaired.

Couple this with the Aspie's inability to understand the way they are perceived by others and it results in a substantial deficit which can't be "wished" away.

In other words, an Aspie could be supremely self-assured and happy, but does not have the neurological functioning necessary to communicate this fact to others in the usual way.

That's why most people (Aspies included) prefer NTs: they look the way they are "supposed" to.

I will not turn it a gender thing. I will express my opinion without using gender at all.

Confidence is just the idea that you believe that you can succeed regardless of your faults or strengths. If you believe that you can date someone and have a relationship with them, then the confidence will come without faking it.

Believing in yourself doesn't mean believing that you will succeed, but realizing that you will have failures and can recover from them. Instead of saying its impossible, you look at what went wrong and learn from it. What you learn might make the next date a little less of a failure. Maybe what you learn is wrong, and the next date is terrible. You then revise what you learn and try again. Because you believe in yourself and learning along the way,the confidence will come.

It may take a week, years or in my case decades to get to the point that dating is easy. But if you believe in yourself then it will happen at some point. The next thing you know you will be married, having a strong relationship with your partner and wonder why you ever thought it was such a big deal.

Thank you all so much for your kind, insightful responses. I was worried I would walk in on a flame war when I came back. I agree with all of them at least to an extent. I especially agree that there's no silver bullet, that it takes time. I also agree that confidence can be applied to different situations like Grisham said. It's just that I'm gun shy. I date sometimes, but it's never been easy for me. I wish you all luck in your own endeavours too!

And more responses? Anybody?

I can be confident.... in theater acting, when my role is supposed to be confident, with enough rehearsal...

Your welcome You might be gun shy, but do not worry about that. Take it at the pace you feel comfortable with. Just because someone can go out and ask anyone for date and go through with the date, doesn't mean you have to do the same thing. If you have the patience to wait for yourself then it will go smoother for you.

Do not believe that confidence and believe in yourself makes the fears go away. The fear will always be with you, the confidence and belief just counters those fears so you can ask someone for a date and enjoy the date.

I've found that most people measure confidence by how long you keep eye contact. I cannot fake this for very long, and I've noticed the old I get the worse I get at making eye contact.

As for suggestions for you, OP, I really have no suggestions other then what Laz said already.

I can't keep up eye contact for long, so I just look at their eye brows. Seems to simulate it well.

I look at the eyebrows, too. Pretty much everything but their eyes. Lately, though, just looking anywhere on someone's face is too much beyond a few glances here and there. I usually end up looking at something behind them and slightly off to the side.

Thats true about eye contact, but it can have a harmful effect if done for too long. When I first try to force myself to make eye contact I would do it for too long. Some people interrupted this extended eye contact as me being too intense.

I usually try to look in the direction of the person I'm talking or listening too. If they can see my face then it is a good subsitute for leeping eye contact.

Just do not look down or at the floor when talking. That will ruin any chance of having the person believe your confident. Looking down is a sign of submission or your not sure of what you are saying.

I've been like that lately, myself. I just busy myself with something thay requires my eyes so they'll think that is why I'm not giving them eye contact. Thankfully nothing's come up that's required full eye contact.

That's gotten me in trouble. I'm almost too comfortable looking people dead in the eyes. I stare so hard it freaks em out, but I don't mean anything by it. I had to train myself to look away periodically.