Introduction

The first time I remember feeling confident was the day my dad built me a treehouse.

It was small, slanted, and hard to climb. But to me it was a castle in the sky. Standing there with my toy sword in one hand and a stuffed teddy in the other, looking out over the backyard of my childhood home, I felt untouchable. The master of my own little world.

It’s one of my earliest memories, and I’m glad it’s filled with confidence. If you asked that little boy if he’d feel this way forever, he would have boldly told you yes. Confidence was obviously his destiny.

But he was wrong.

The first time I remember feeling insecure was the day I fell out of the treehouse.

Hitting my stomach on the rough bark on the way down, I ran inside bleeding and screaming, and the castle in the sky was never the same again.

Confidence came easily when I was a kid, but the older I got the less I felt it, until one day the only confidence I could find was buried in memories like this one.

It’s easy to imagine how good life would be with more confidence. To be the kind of person who knows exactly what to do in any situation, and can handle whatever life throws at you.

It seems like the secret to making all our dreams come true. But it’s more than that.

Think about what you want more than anything in the world. This isn’t a test, and no one is listening. You can be honest.

Does it have something to do with wealth or status? Or is it love, health, and happiness you want? Maybe it’s a little bit of everything?

It might seem like we all want something different, but dig deep enough and you’ll find all answers lead to one place. That everyone, everywhere, is trying to achieve the exact same thing in life.

No matter what your dream is, whether it’s becoming the richest person on Earth or living alone in a cute cabin in the woods, at the heart of it is a simple feeling. A feeling that everything is going to be okay, that nothing can make you feel bad, or hurt you anymore. Because you’re the master of your own world, and you are confident there.

You want the same thing as everyone reading this book, and all the people who never will. We’re all searching for confidence. And we’re all struggling to find it.

When we don’t believe in ourselves, we don’t get far. Nothing holds us back more than insecurity. We need confidence if we want to succeed. We need it to meet people and form connections. And we need it to push ourselves to try new things. Without confidence, we stay in our comfort zones. And do you know what happens in comfort zones? The same thing that happened there yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that… which is almost the same thing as nothing happening at all. Yet, the most dangerous thing about comfort zones is that they shrink.

Slowly but surely, if you don’t push back against them, you’ll start finding more and more things are crossing over the line and becoming uncomfortable. The world around you, with all its wonder, opportunity, and yes, even danger, will slowly drift out of reach.

Deep down we all know this, which is why most of us spend huge amounts of time trying to build more confidence, even if we don’t realise that’s what we’re doing.

Exercise, diets, dates, careers, hobbies, mindfulness… you name it. We don’t do any of it to actually better ourselves. We do it to feel better about ourselves.

And this stuff does work. For a while.

Self-improvement can lead to peaks in confidence and self-esteem. But as any self-improvement junkie can tell you, it’s not enough. Being a better version of yourself doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly start liking yourself.

With billions of people all over the world trying to achieve this one simple thing, how come we still don’t know how to do it? Why is it so hard to hold onto that feeling of confidence? Surely we should be doing better by now. We’ve split the atom and built supercomputers that can calculate a quintillion calculations per second. Yet we can’t wake up in the morning and just feel good about who we are?

Something is wrong. Something is broken.

This book is about that something, and exactly what you can do about it.

I talk about many other great books and studies as I go, and you can find all the information about them at the end if you’re interested in learning more.

If you’re wondering who I am and why I’ve written a book about confidence in the first place, the truth is, I’m just like you. A person who’s fought and lost many times to overcome my own insecurity. It led me to study psychology at university, and eventually into building communities for some of the largest Co-living buildings on Earth.

But through it all, I never lost sight of what I really wanted.

This book is about how I pursued confidence in my own life, and about how you can too.

Because I know you want it just as much as I do.