If you are a normal human being, you might sometimes wonder what you would be able to achieve if you were as confident as Tom Cruise or as a TikTok influencer. Well, to be perfectly honest, I am pretty sure even Tom Cruise finds TikTok influencers utterly (overly?) confident, and even I, a cocky Frenchy, concurs with Tom.

When I think about confidence and the lack of it, I can’t help but imagine all the projects, books, companies, etc that should have been created and would have helped society further if only some of us could have been more confident.

That’s the reason why I believe confidence is a very important topic. Of course, I could tell you that you need to hack your brain, learn how to be more focused, hit the gym every day, use affirmations and positive mantras, and wake up at 5 am in order to gain back control of your life and feel confident. I could, yes. But you know what? I feel like doing something different as after all, I believe you’re not reading my very presumptuous articles (such as the one explaining how to end suffering) just to be fed with the same kind of empty advice you can get by just scrolling on Twitter.

Lack of confidence and how does it affect your life?

I love to go on Instagram and find young osteopaths’ accounts. Why do I love that? Because that’s a freaking good way to see what lack of confidence looks like. How do I know? because I’ve been there of course! So let me describe what you will see if you go on a journey through those accounts :

• same clinic’s decoration (hello Ikea desks and pictures of stacked stones that are supposed to make you feel good for a reason I ignore)
• same scrubs
• specialized in treating babies, pregnant women, and people practicing sport
• videos to show you how to use a foam roller
• same color tones (light blue or beige) for their posts
• absolutely no fucking sense of humor can be found on their account because they have to be “professional”

By doing that, those youngsters don’t realize that they are telling the world they are interchangeable products. And that’s exactly the opposite of what confidence is about. Those people are not living their life. They are just imitating others because they believe this will save them from being criticized.

The same thing happens in pretty much every other part of society: we end up living in a world where barely anybody stands out. We all dress the same, we all travel to the same places, and we all watch the same movies.

Why? Because we are afraid to express who we are. And by constantly avoiding our true selves, we are denying the world our specificity. Our true identity is being held in a cage that we create and that we call our lack of confidence.

This means that many people don’t live the life they should be living. They have jobs they don’t like, in places they don’t like, and they live with partners they are not attracted to. They end up coming to see me because they have back pain, and hope I can crack their back to fix them. Spoiler alert: it might not be enough to solve theit issue.

Nothing good can come out of you not trusting yourself enough to live your life. You suffer from it, your environment suffers from it, the society and the world suffer from it.

What would happen if you were more confident?

I actually don’t want you to answer this question, but I needed a good title for this paragraph. Also, if this article makes you confident enough to become a TikTok influencer, then know that I have failed completely.

The truth is, I don’t know what would happen. I’m not trying to tell you that if you were more confident you’d be living in a huge mansion, driving a Lambo. But, I’m saying it would be your life, and the whole point would be for you to discover what would happen.

Here we go, the wait is over, let’s talk about 3 key elements to boost your confidence. The great thing is that they don’t require you to wake up at 4 am to dive into a frozen lake.

3 ways to become more confident

Just for you to know: I quote no authors but experience when I write. I do not talk about stuff I read somewhere. I’m talking about field-tested ideas. I hope it might help some of view to see things from a different angle.

1/ Act first, feel confident later

This is seriously a huge thing. We have this weird idea that we need to first feel confident before we start making moves. But I believe this is utterly wrong. It’s the other way around and has always been. We act first, and we gain confidence from those actions.

I remember seeing a patient treated by a colleague of mine. The patient told me that the osteopath kept on asking them to relax so they could apply a technique. It didn’t work well, the osteopath got upset, and the patient got scared. Not a great session. My point is, that in osteopathy, you don’t wait for your patient to relax first and then apply a technique. You apply a technique that leads the patient to relax. It’s the same thing for life: action precedes confidence. If you wait for confidence to miraculously appear, you can wait for a long time before something starts to change.

Imagine a baby who would need to first feel confident before they start walking: if that was true some people I know would still be crawling at the age of 40! Another example: How do you become confident enough to drive a car? You fucking start driving!

For most people, life works like that: first they set a goal, and then take action to achieve that goal. But my experience is that life is an ever-unfolding process. Being moved by the currents of life, your goal appears as a mere direction of where life is taking you. This means that the goal, the direction, appears when you are already going somewhere. Action first, thoughts later.

So what do you have to do? You just need to let things flow and do stuff. All kinds of stuff that you feel like doing. In my previous article, I talked to you about movement. And movement is a great way to start doing things at a smaller scale: explore movement that you feel like exploring. Explore sports, or any kind of activity, and see how your confidence is built through experience. Apply that to life.

On a side note, for osteopaths: you discover what you are going to do to the patient while doing it. Not before, not after. The session is a living process because you are treating living beings, not machines.

2/ Do not ask for people’s opinions about what you should be doing

I know, I’m using a lot of clickbait titles today. Obviously, you can ask some people about their opinion. Especially if they have gained an experience in a field you are interested to explore.

But, if you start to ask your friends, your family, etc., you will witness a very interesting phenomenon: you will start to see how people project their fears onto you. Some will support you of course and they are wonderful people, but some will tell you things like:

• You make money, don’t change your career!
• You live in a nice place, why would you like to leave?
• You can’t achieve that
• For osteopaths: You are not supposed to feel that.

I could keep on going but I’m sure you get what I mean. When you start to trust the process and do things, you start to be alive. Alive means that you are following the currents of life and can’t be put in a box that has your name on it. The thing is, people love boxes (they are like big cats when you think about it), especially people who believe they can’t trust life. Their fear of life, of the Shakti, the ever-changing process, is being triggered by your actions.

You do not need to ask for their opinion. But don’t worry, they will still tell you what they think, especially if you do not achieve your goal. After a while, you get used to it and start to actually use that as a compass. If people project their fear onto you, it probably means you are alive. Focus on doing things, and don’t ask for people’s opinions.

3/ Focus on doing things, forget about the goal

Now that you’ve started to do things, I would like to talk about something that might trigger many people. I have actually already been insulted by osteopaths because of this idea. My advice is for you to have no intention, no goal.

I know, I know, we live in a very goal-oriented world. I know people on Instagram tell you that you need to set an intention. They say that you need to know what you want to achieve this year, this month, and even today. I know all that. I also know that people are selling books for you to find out what’s your mission on earth. And don’t even get me started with the law of attraction. I have been visualizing a world with no law of attraction and it is still rampant, so it proves it doesn’t work!

Why do we want to control life so much? Do you need to control your heartbeat? Do you need to control your breath? Do you need to make a prayer for the sun to rise? If you can answer no to those questions, I would love for you to try living with no goal. Of course, at first, you don’t need to apply that to your life. You can start with simple things. What about walking?

Maybe you can focus on walking just for the sake of it. Not to go somewhere, not to be healthier, not to calm your mind. Just for the sick of it. Maybe you can fall in love with the process, and not with the outcomes. Same thing when it comes to running for example. Most people focus so much on the results and not on the running aspect itself. Maybe once in a while, we could just run without their wonderful Apple watch, and just check at the end how long we’ve been running. I’m pretty sure some people would be surprised by their results.

Why does it matter? Because by doing so, you give yourself enough space for your goals to change. And if they do change, you are okay with that. I’ve talked about how life is an ever-unfolding process, and not holding onto those goals will allow you to follow the currents of life. You might decide to learn Italian because your goal is to live in Italy. If you focus too much on your goal, you might not realize that maybe what is happening is that you will end up working for an Italian company in China or meeting an Italian partner. And that’s what this article is all about: being confident is about trusting the process of life, not achieving goals.

Summary: Becoming more confident

To sum up, my advice for you to become more confident is to actually change your approach to confidence:

• Become confident by doing things instead of doing things because you are confident
• Do not ask for people’s opinions that they will give you anyway
• Focus on the process, not on the goal

I know that we always believe confidence is something quite personal. But you do not lack confidence, you just don’t trust life enough to embrace the ever-ongoing process. We all tend to think that if we don’t harness life, nothing will happen. My experience says otherwise. The more you let life unfold, the more you will do things. The more you will do things, the more you will let life unfold. It’s a learning process that has to be experienced and felt. It can’t be discussed or imagined. That’s the core of my practice as an osteopath. And that’s what meditation is about, at least the kind of meditation I practice.

All right, now that you know how to become a cocky Frenchy, you can go and start your career on TikTok to make Tom Cruise jealous of you.

Take care

Jules

Do you want to learn meditation with me? Everything is written here

Bonus: How to feel less confident

How to become less confident:
• wait to feel more confident before you start acting
• focus on the result instead of doing things
• believe you can control life using the law of attraction or any new age kind of BS
• hack your brain & your body
• ask ppl for their opinion

— JULES RAMPAL (@julesrampal) August 30, 2022