Nothing makes people behave more strangely than being told to “act natural”.
The moment it happens you immediately start acting like one of the Inbetweeners. Who can forget the fashion show scene. Peak cringe.
Confidence training does this to people all the time. Some poor unfortunate gets told to hold eye contact for three seconds, sit forward, pause before answering and drop their voice at the end of a sentence.
Then everyone wonders why they suddenly look like they’re desperate for the loo.
The problem isn’t the advice. The problem is having to think about it.
The second you start monitoring your own behaviour, you become weirdly aware of yourself. So you stop listening properly because half your attention is busy checking whether your face is doing confidence.
That’s why people who are trying to look confident often look much less confident than people who aren’t thinking about it at all.
This is also why I hate “fake it till you make it”.
It makes confidence sound like a performance.
It isn’t.
You practise a few behaviours until they become normal enough that you stop noticing them. Then your brain does something quite interesting and starts treating the behaviour as evidence about who you are. That’s self-perception. Which means confidence often turns up after the behaviour, not before it.
I go into that properly in the new Luxury Academy: Insights video.
Mainly because “just be yourself” is useless advice when yourself has suddenly forgotten what to do with its own hands.
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