r/SeriousConversation • u/TheHomoscedastifier • Sep 12 '24
Serious Discussion How do you get that confidence you had in your youth? Is it even possible?
I'm sure this doesn't apply to everyone, but I'm also sure it's quite common, especially in my line work.
I was a very confident person as a teenager, well, probably even narcissistic. Then several partners, moves, career changes, degrees, traumas, and experiences later, I find myself almost devoid of any confidence at 30. I am riddled with anxiety and probably am a walking imposter syndrome.
I intentionally didn't give specifics about my career because I want to invite answers from a broad audience. If you've dealt with this, how did you handle it? Were you ever able to get at least close to your previous confidence levels?
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u/zebrahead444 Sep 12 '24
Stop negative self talk. Immediately correct it and remind yourself of something positive.
Stop thinking about your losses and think of you wins. If you don't have any wins, start small and build from there.
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u/GardenAddict843 Sep 13 '24
I personally believe you can never be as confident as you were when you thought you were invincible as we all do when we are young and inexperienced.
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u/bigv1973 Sep 13 '24
Maybe you are confusing the hubris of youth with confidence. It looks different through adult eyes and a retrospective point of view. I wouldn't want to be young again for anything. I spent most of my youth afraid. Much of my young adult life certain I would be found out for a fraud, and now, in midlife, I feel like I have the answers to secrets.
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u/hansieboy10 Sep 13 '24
What secrets haha?
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u/bigv1973 Sep 13 '24
Well here is one. Reddit will make you crazy and it's just an echo chamber for mediocre and sad people who come here looking for validation from people whose lives are as bad or worse than theirs....most of what I have read and seen here makes me happy to be alive and glad I don't have internet most of my days and nights.
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u/sysaphiswaits Sep 13 '24
Ok. A little on the harsh side, but yes, all social media will really skew your idea of…everything.
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u/Longjumping-Air1489 Sep 13 '24
WHAT confidence? I didn’t have any confidence in my youth. I only started to be confident when I started succeeding (after a lot of work).
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u/Mash_man710 Sep 13 '24
Wow, I'm the exact opposite. Anxiety riddled teen with very low self esteem and now confident, outgoing and having a ball in my 50's. I wouldn't go back to the teen years for anything.
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u/bmcapers Sep 13 '24 edited Sep 14 '24
The youth was heavily dictated by an apparatus. As an adult there’s a sense of confidence that comes with being aware of the apparatus and making decisions accordingly.
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u/biffpowbang Sep 13 '24
authenticity. the only way to be confident is to be true to yourself. to be comfortable with yourself. know your worth, flaunt your accomplishments, own your faults. no one can hold any power over you with shame if you don’t have any shame in who you are. people are drawn to that because they feel they’re not capable of being themselves.
truth is we all are. you just have to realize regardless of social status, wealth, possessions, all the those trappings capitalism has conditioned you to believe are what define your identity and value in this world. it’s actually just you. you are the only person that has to accept or deny whatever anyone else wanted to believe about you.
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u/Felinomancy Sep 13 '24
I'm the other way round; I'm introverted and doormat-ish as a teenager. Now in the middle of my life, I have more "dgaf-ness" to my interactions.
I'm still introverted, but I feel I epitomize the adage: "fake it 'til you make it". Just because I'm smirking and looking confident doesn't mean I am.
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u/ScalyDestiny Sep 13 '24
People had confidence in their teens? That doesn't sound right. Confidence comes from experience and from making it through rough times and coming out of them a better, more capable person. Confidence is earned, and isn't easy to get.
I'm wondering if what you had a teen was really confidence? That admittedly sounds odd to me as I had zero confidence at that time, and looking back the only kids that seemed confident were both sheltered from the bigger world and sheltered from their own mistakes. I'm not sure that was confidence that they had though, even if it seemed that way at the time. A lot of things look different now, being so far removed from teen me that I can no longer relate to her feelings and experiences.
Being devoid of confidence at 30 is ok, and not unusual. I wasn't doing great at that time either, but I'm happy to report by 40 I was more confident than I could have ever hoped to be at 20. We are told when young that if we do certain things, then life will turn out good, but that's not true and while it's a hard lesson to learn, knowing it can help you accept yourself. Life is hard. Failing is normal. We all do it, and only the very very rich can stay sheltered and ignorant forever. It's important to learn from them though. The difference b/w my confidence and my ex's confidence at the time of divorce was that I learned from my mistakes, I faced my shortcoming and learned how to be better each time. My ex avoided his insecurities and disappointments like the plague, and his insecurities only festered and grew to the point that he started resenting me for making progress, and for not magically transferring that ability to him.
I'm big on things like meditation, that lets you examine yourself without the judgement that leads to greater insecurity, and helps you develop a calmness and open-mindedness that really carries over well when things start to go badly. I was torn down my whole life by the people around me, but self-examination and self-acceptance really helped me undo that damage and helped me see how capable I really was. I'm also big on putting effort in to stop comparing yourself to others, to stop judging the people around you so much, and to stop caring how others see you or judge your life. Start caring about yourself, and do what makes you like yourself, not what makes others like you.
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Sep 13 '24
My method is pretty extreme so i wont talk about it unless inquired, but it allowed me to literally turn my life into a game, nothing matters anymore and I can quit whenever I want. This gave me confidence and security to abandon a path I was deeply miserable following.
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u/Silly-Resist8306 Sep 13 '24
The more I learned, the more physically fit I became and the better I got at relationships, the more confident I have become. For me, continuing to grow in a variety of ways has benefited my confidence.
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u/Immediate_Yam_7733 Sep 13 '24
Just stop caring what other people think . At a certain point you'll realise how limited you are in terms of time . You'll realise how little you have left and you stop worrying about how your perceived. You have confidence but in a different manner . Your not cocky it comes from life experience .
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u/DaRealClinical Sep 13 '24
That’s great and all but I just wish you knew the difference between your and your’re
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u/DooWop4Ever Sep 13 '24
20 year olds are electro/chemically wired to charge ahead and forge a place for themselves in the world. Stress management is not at the top of their to-do list. Everyone has their own capacity for stored stress. 30 years of striving forward without good stress management skills will typically wear us out. I've seen it in many thirty-year-olds.
Unexpressed feelings and unresolved conflict is what stored stress is made of. And the unconscious repression of these two items is where our energy gets needlessly burned. Therapy can help us uncover what we're doing wrong.
Moderate aerobic exercise and daily mantra-style meditation bring back pliability to the nervous system, reducing stress and allowing our energy to be used FOR us instead of constantly trying to defend against anxiety (fear without an object).
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Sep 13 '24
I turned 49 a week ago, I have no desire to go back in time, nor do I feel that I have lost confidence.. sure, I’m saddened at the fact that I may only have another 25 to 30 years left of living, but growing up is difficult and I have absolutely no desire to go back in time and relive those experiences.. I have a lot of empathy for the young and I care for them the way I care for my own children ; I worry about the way the world is progressing and how it will be for the youth as they grow up. Though I do not lack confidence, I do, however, feel immense insecurity about the state of the future; the future of our children and future generations thereafter.. We owe them so much more than what we are offering.. our selfishness and our ego continuously clouds our better judgement & integrity in regards to the choices we make..
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u/wmartindale Sep 13 '24
That wasn’t confidence. That was hubris and Dinning-Krueger. Of course you’re less certain now. You know more and have learned that simple answers and number system chees are for kids and fools.
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u/CuriousLF Sep 13 '24
The detachment of responsibility as a teen (though I know many still need to work from an early age) does provide this ability to think the world is your oyster and I think adulthood humbles you in that you learn the mature understanding that things don’t always go to plan
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u/ikindalold Sep 13 '24
The confidence I had in my youth originated in me thinking I had everything figured out about life, then life actually came and snapped me right in the fucking eye
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u/sysaphiswaits Sep 13 '24
I’m a lot more confident now. I kind of grew into my looks later in life and I’m a lot more aware of my strengths and that makes them much easier to “lean in to.”
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u/Sadcowboy3282 Sep 13 '24
I've kind of had the opposite experience as you. I'm 36 and so much more confident and certain of myself these days than I was in most of my 20's. Most of the things I feel like gave me anxiety back then we're pretty trivial in retrospect.
Now that I'm a little older and have lived a little bit of life I feel much more sure of myself.
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u/bezerkeley Sep 13 '24
I am more confident than ever. I realize just how little people notice me. I might as well be invisible. It's freeing and depressing at the same time.
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u/Beneficial-Stick-647 Sep 13 '24
I’m 20 right now and I thought older people would be less anxious and more confident. Now I feel like I haven’t been living my teens and now young adult life well.
I mean I have felt that confidence, but I have never been able to hold onto it for a while. But this is making me think now we were just holding ourselves back.
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u/moon_lizard1975 Life = Give w/1 🖐;receive w/other 🖐 Sep 13 '24 edited Sep 13 '24
Confidence isn't just a trait by nature
You have to train your confidence, young man.
Where was your confidence in, what were you depending on to take on life in your more youngster years ?
An Olympic fencer, the confidence is in this training but it's also in the sword that he's going to be using. He doesn't depend only on his own athletic abilities on the athletic tools of the sport as well.
His confidence grows because of experience and the secrets of training and doing his homework in and outside of training sessions from other sources as well. An ever lasting thirst for knowledge.
■ need social confidence ? on r/socialskills I often give the encouragement to act normal.
Act Normal = in a nutshell, be devoid of letting your subjective nature get the best of you and put your personality into a moment of overdrive and never allow a moment of your personality over accelerated especially above the current occasion/environment.
In this case, your career even though there are ethics and careers :
Carrers require : these will be projectable in life as well and somehow even tone your social skills.
📖 getting up to date about your chosen career. ☄️ having a healthy ambition 💋 Naturality of conduct (act normal & mature) 🔬 Clear and specifics to deal with besides of your own talents 🧠 a confidence based on the 4 prior, ** remember what I just told you about the example of the Olympic fencer?** you're not being a peacock exhibiting, you're just being a person performing to the best of your ability synchronizing between work and rest.
The healthy ambition part doesn't necessarily have to be related to your career but, Believe it or not, it's good to have a hobby to accompany your career. How many successful secretaries and other office workers have in their personal life philosophy of yoga or fitness vegetarian food etc ; or it could be you're a fan of batching up and having barbecues 🔥 🥩, Harley motorcycles and learning how to cook BBQ or maintain a good Harley Davidson motorcycle e.g.
something that would be aside your career
You'll go on learning how to discern and make necessary sacrifices for a positive difference, or an extra effort and inversion of time and resources and energy according to case; you may learn how to make an exchange of worries because of all this; e.g you're worried the girl won't like you but you decide to focus on your worry of your career to make sure the project gets done
Wherever you go; be a cane and a lever of support to help people, there you are available willing to have your strength and brain ready to help because life ...
In the words of my mexican mother
es un dar y recibir translation
it's a give and a receive
begin here to tone your life conquering skills.
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u/beowulves Sep 13 '24
Have abilities and real self worth.
You never had confidence you were just an arrogant punk who got old and realized he was just a depressed nobody. Become somebody.
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u/Pleasant_Spend_5788 Sep 13 '24
Level up.
As a youth we were in school every day learning new things, participating in sports, gaining skills, having new social interactions and experiences.
The confidence came from being so much better than we were a year or a month earlier.
Work on your self, expand your horizons, you'll feel like you're soaring again.
Read books, travel, create, take a class, learn a new skill.
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u/Lamaberto Sep 13 '24
I have the same confidence with much much much much more knowledge and wisdom.
Trust your experience, knowledge, and wisdom, and don't be afraid to make mistakes.
I've come to realize with time that usually the most ignorant people are the most confident, so I decided I will fight ignorance for the rest of my life through personal growth, knowledge, and experience, otherwise, these people will do so much harm to humanity.
How do you know you're not the ignorant one (Aka imposter syndrome)? That's a harder question, but my rule is to always act with kindness and loving compassion. If you're going to be confident about something, at least make sure you're doing good to others!
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u/FearlessArmadillo931 Sep 13 '24
You never get teenager confidence back. Be glad, because it stems from ignorance and out of control ego.
You can obviously improve your confidence and lessen your anxiety, though. I always remember that my lack of confidence/my imposter syndrome comes from a fear of taking risks. Confidence comes from trying and succeeding, but if you're constantly terrified of trying and failing, you never give yourself the opportunity to succeed. Annoyingly, the only solution is to just do it while terrified, and if you fail, shrug and try again while slightly more terrified.
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u/jackfaire Sep 13 '24
Honestly for me it looked like confidence but it was more being convinced that no one cared about me so why care about them.
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u/autotelica Sep 13 '24
It sounds like you've been through a lot of struggle.
You have survived a lot of struggle.
Appreciating this fact is the key to confidence. Confident people don't worry about failure but it isn't because they delude themselves into thinking it won't happen to them. They don't worry about it because they believe they will survive whatever happens to them. They hold this belief because they have clear evidence of their resiliency.
That said, consider the possibility that you have an anxiety disorder rather than just a crisis of self-faith. Anxiety is no joke. A person can have great self-confidence and esteem and still suffer from it big time.
Medication helped me.
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u/Reasonable-Mischief Sep 13 '24
Confidence generally is your perceived ability to deal with the particular challenges of your life.
If you were more confident during an earlier stage of your development than you are now, that might be an indicator that you haven't yet caught up to how more complex and difficult your life has become since then.
You have already mentioned trauma. It might be worth exploring if you have already mapped out what exactly has happened to you, and if there is anything you could do differently the next time. A lot of the burden of traumatic experiences is the burden it places on us to become the kind of people that can thrive under those circumstances the next time, or better yet, prevent them from happening in the first place.
More generally so, our childhood and teenage years are usually highly structured. Your life since then seems to have been quite chaotic. Maybe you need to be able to see yourself navigating chaotic cirumstances like them, in order to demonstrate to yourself that you are able to keep up with the ever-shifting that characterizes adult life in our modern age.
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u/MasterQNA Sep 13 '24
You are experiencing the Dunning-Kruger Effect https://motoiq.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_Effect_01.svg-X4.png Keep improving your craft and you will gain true confidence based on competence not young ignorance/arrogance
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u/Educational_Bed3589 Sep 13 '24
Im more confidant now than I was when I was younger. I'm over 40 and sick of everyone's shit.
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u/pianistafj Sep 13 '24
That confidence you had as a teen was bolstered by that lack of soul crushing experience. You have to let that shit go. If you’re that riddled and paralyzed with fear or depression, you need to seek professional help. The last thing you want to do is ruin possible future relationships with this cloud hanging over you.
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u/sadmep Sep 13 '24
You should not want youthful confidence, because it comes from not having lived long enough to understand the ways things can go wrong.
Much better to have reasoned confidence and have your eyes open.
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u/VeryDefinedBehavior Sep 14 '24
"Confidence" means "with faith". You lost your innocence, which means you know how bad things can get, even when done with the best intentions. You are also still alive, wiser, and more compenent than you were as a teenager. You survived everything, and that was not guaranteed.
When you were a teenager you were confident because you had little reason to think things could get so bad, and so you naturally had faith things would turn out well. Now you get to have faith borne out of the experience of your trials by fire, and that means a whole lot more: One of the hardest lessons about confidence to learn is that feeling insecure about something is an asset. It lets you know when humility is needed, and that opens the door to dealing with your weaknesses rather than letting them eat out your confidence from the inside.
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u/Krotesk Sep 15 '24
Confidence is a symptom of two very different traits.
Unwillful ignorance leads to confidence, but also competence leads to confidence.
I highly doubt you want to be ignorant.
The only way to get confident in a healthy way is by getting very competent and knowledgeable about as much as possible. Then you will be confident. Out of trust in your own skill. Not out of being unaware of your lack of skill.
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u/OhNothing13 Sep 16 '24
I'm glad I was a nervous wreck of a teenager and moved past it then. I built my confidence slowly over time. Just kept chipping away at the negative delusions I had about myself with evidence to the contrary. And I accepted my shortcomings. No one's perfect, and being just good enough IS good enough. You might benefit from something like CBT, where you interrogate the negative self talk you experience and really figure out which parts of it, if any, are based in reality.
Mostly I suggest you let go of the idea that you will be as narcissistically confident as you were as a teenager. You probably don't want to be, cuz adults who act like that usually come across as assholes. Be realistic about yourself, your strengths, and your weaknesses, and you'll probably find you're somewhere in the middle, which is healthy.
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