How to look confident

Confidence is the key to victory. You may not have enough knowledge and experience, but you will get ahead of other people, being confident in your abilities or demonstrating the steadfastness of your views to others. That’s where the real power is! This is exactly what allows you to climb to the top of the social ladder.

How to become self-confident? It depends on your personality, self-esteem, and other factors; everything is individual here. But everyone can look confident in any situation, following this article’s advice.

5 ways to look confident

1. Control your body language

You can tell a lot about a person just by how they walk. Most find it difficult to maintain a confident gait even in calm moments, and when a stressful situation arises, they immediately crumble and show submission.

So to appear confident, watch your body language and be relaxed, even if you have a fire of anxiety or passion burning inside you. If you are ordered to do something, for example, as part of a workflow, take your time, and act calmly, without jerking. We are not talking about the fact that you need, like a teenager, to demonstrate rebellion or rejection of other people’s attitudes. Just do it your way so everyone can see that you do not take off at the first call, like a dog at the owner’s call.

If someone descends into aggression towards you, for example, by making hurtful comments, instead of being defensive, walk past without care and do not react to his or her attacks, or answer calmly and judiciously, as if it were a normal conversation. Keep cool in your movements, and show everyone with your body language that you are relaxed and nothing can piss you off.

2. Make eye contact

Only self-confident people can continuously look into the eyes of the interlocutor, which brings the latter to a feeling of discomfort. A cold, studying look causes a desire to turn away and sometimes even interrupt the conversation altogether and go away. This skill of gazing is not difficult to hone, and its payoff will be far greater than the effort expended.

Even if you don’t feel comfortable and inside you don’t feel confident, a careful look into other people’s eyes will help you “suppress” them and present yourself as a more strong-willed person. Most importantly, do not look down on people; otherwise, they will consider you a narcissist.

3. Include more humor and sarcasm

If someone “attacks” you and you start to defend yourself, this will only provoke the attacker. And by doing so, you acknowledge that the other person has control and power over you. Instead of being defensive or ridiculously attacking back like this, shift the focus away from insults or other attacks and look deeper. Attacks usually don’t come from a great mind, so you have a great way to regain power and confidence with simple humor or sarcasm.

It’s simple: a person “attacking” you expect a certain reaction, for example, humiliated acceptance. You, releasing jokes that are adequate to the situation, knock down his entire program, and he begins to feel insecure. Of course, this method does not work well with higher authorities, as it can be misunderstood, but with equals on the social ladder, this method is almost indispensable.

4. Formulate your options for any situation

What else unites most insecure people? The fact is that they do not control the situation and go with the flow. They have no options for action, and even more so, they cannot impose their options on other people, limiting their options.

When working through options, you are less likely to find yourself in a situation that unsettles you because you roughly imagine the consequences. Such elaboration of scenarios adds self-confidence, but this alone is not enough. It would help if you learned to set peculiar boundaries for other people, to give them a choice. And so that it seemed to them that they decide what to do. But in fact, you imposed the options and are ready for any of their choices.

5. Stop trying to impress

One of the main problems of insecure people is the constant attempts to impress someone in different ways. They don’t realize that they’re driving themselves into a vicious cycle of constantly seeking approval and trying to show their best side, even if they are openly disrespected or despised.

It’s not uncommon for people to encounter abusive behavior, especially in the service industry where you have to interact with customers. We are not saying that you must completely turn off your seduction mechanism. It’s about changing your mindset from “I work for this person” to a more realistic mindset. For example, “this person needs cooperation with me just as I need cooperation with him.”

The difference between these two kinds of thinking is huge, and the second will help you gain confidence and stop feeling like something everyone wants to use. In other words, you will stop feeling like a person constantly trying to impress, to show his importance.