By now you’ve probably been given some vague advice by your friends and family members about how you can rebuild your confidence. Of course, no one wants to offer specifics on how you do it.
I remember being frustrated when I ran into the same problem after my first breakup. My confidence had been shattered into a million pieces, and I had no idea how to put myself back together.
The “ex-girlfriend recovery” scheme websites gave plenty of general advice, but again, there was no step-by-step blueprint to rebuilding your confidence. I ended up struggling, and I made my fair share of mistakes.
Today, I’m going to help you avoid wasting the same amount of time I did, and I’m going to tell you exactly how you rebuild your confidence with specifics on the hows!
Confidence is ALL mental. If you’re good enough, you can just fake it till you make it. While I’ve always loved that approach for women, there’s a formula for building lasting confidence after a breakup, and I’m going to give it to you below.
Best of all, I’m not going to charge you anything. Take that, ex-girlfriend recovery sites.
1: Stay AWAY From Your Ex-girlfriend At All Costs
Your first step to rebuilding your confidence is to stay the fuck away from your ex-girlfriend, whatever it takes. This is a fundamental step that everyone seems to miss.
When you’re highly emotional after a breakup, texting her back and forth or seeing her on social media is going to make you feel like crap. It’s so easy for people to make it appear like they’re having the time of their lives from afar.
It’s also just as easy for you to compare yourself to what she’s doing, and comparison is the death of joy.
In order for you to rebuild your confidence, you need to get yourself out of the highly reactive state that your ex brings. You’ll need to distance yourself from the emotions you have attached to her.
This period where you’re highly reactive is called survival mode. If you want to win your ex-girlfriend back, you need to focus on self-care as I talk about in my complete guide to getting your ex-girlfriend back which is linked above.
The only way to do that is to go no-contact. Cutting off contact with your ex will keep you from obsessing over what she’s doing. It will also prevent you from comparing what she does after the breakup to what you’re doing.
Here’s what you do:
- Read my complete guide on how to go no-contact.
- Don’t contact her for any reason
- Don’t reply to her texts
- Avoid social media
- Stay away from her mutual friends
- Stay away from places that you know she’ll be at
If you can follow these 6 simple steps, you’ll already be 100% better off.
The one exception to this rule is if you have already recovered from the breakup and you are about to meet her for the first time.
2: Take the time to be honest with yourself about your feelings
Your thoughts alone can control your emotions.
This can either be the key to your salvation after your breakup, or your undoing.
Let me explain. A study of depressed individuals led to the discovery that dysfunctional attitudes and negatively framed thoughts were the root cause of feelings of sadness. This toxic combo left these individuals with a negative view of themselves, their world, and their future.
You are probably feeling some combination of sadness and anger right now. While you might think that these emotions are caused by your girlfriend breaking up with you (an external event), they are actually caused by what YOU think of the situation and your underlying beliefs about yourself.
In other words, you aren’t sad because your girlfriend broke up with you. You’re sad because you have a negative belief about yourself, and you’re allowing that to take shape in your thoughts.
If you want to regain your confidence after a breakup, you need to challenge your negative beliefs, which is where emotional honesty comes in.
Examine the root cause of your sadness. You’re probably sad about your ex-girlfriend because you have a limiting belief like:
- No one else will like me
- She’s the only one for me
- I’ll never find someone better
- She was perfect for me
Each of these is an irrational belief that you’ll need to challenge with logic in order to overcome it.
- Belief: No one else will like me
- Rational: There are billions of women in the world, statistically someone else will like me
- Belief: She’s the only one for me
- Rational: I’ve dated women before her, and I’ve seen plenty of women I think are hot. I can find another girl, even if it’s not right this second.
- Belief: I’ll never find someone better
- Rational: My ex-girlfriend isn’t the pinnacle of humanity. I didn’t like that she always nagged me and didn’t go to the gym. I can find someone who does, and is a better fit for me.
- Belief: She was perfect for me
- Rational: If she really was perfect for me, why did we break up? She must not have felt the same way, which means we weren’t perfect for each other. I deserve someone better.
You get the idea. It’s through challenging these negative beliefs that you can change how you react to a situation. Doing this will help you outwardly manifest confidence by making you less reactive to extremes of emotion.
Inwardly it will help you regain your sense of self worth, as you realize that your negative feelings aren’t actually caused by something being wrong with you, but by a completely irrational belief that you took action to squash.
People spend their entire lives at the mercy of their emotions. You don’t have to. A confident man is in the driver’s seat with his feelings.
3: Get into the gym
In the gym you’ll do more than just build your body. You’ll build your mind, and you’ll build your confidence.
See, the gym is great because it’ll boost your confidence in two ways. For one, going to the gym will boost your testosterone, especially if you’re currently overweight. Testosterone is very closely linked to focus and confidence in men. To maximize the benefits of your workouts, however, you’ll also have to continuously make them more difficult, which leads to the second benefit.
Everyone seems to think that going to the gym builds confidence because of the external validation you get from others. Yeah, it’s great when a woman sees your abs and goes completely red in the face, but that alone won’t build lasting confidence. It’ll help you sleep with more women, which we’ll get to later, but not much else.
What will boost your confidence is challenging yourself day in and day out As you hit and exceed your limits you’ll also test yourself mentally, to see what you’re really made of. Plus, hitting a massive lift gives you extreme confidence in yourself.
Back when I was in college and still early in my lifting journey after I was dumped by my first girlfriend. At this point I was still a pretty meek guy, and had 315 loaded on the bar for a deadlift max attempt. I ended up ripping that shit off the floor so quickly, that I went all the way up to 340 that day.
When I dropped the 340 down, I was a different person. Buoyed by the confidence I felt, I later walked right up to a girl in the gym I had my eye on, and asked for her number.
It didn’t end up going anywhere because I didn’t know how to execute, but you get the point. I had NEVER done that before. That one lift gave me the mental toughness to break through my fear of approach. I’ve not had trouble going up to women since then.
The more you push, the more you define who you are. You know exactly where you stand with the iron, and you also know exactly what you’ll have to do to take it to the next level. Being able to work towards that WILL give you lasting confidence.
I’ll see you in the squat rack.
Read More: Why You Should Be Lifting Weights After The Breakup
4: Set a goal – and actually achieve it
Notice how I said set a goal, not set goals?
People who set too many goals are far less likely to achieve any of them, and I don’t want that to be you.
Confidence comes from a feeling of well-being and contentment, both of which are linked to progress. We just looked at how progress can help you in the gym. Progress in life works by the same principle.
The more you push for it, the more you define who you are.
Much like in the gym, you’ll want a blueprint for how to do it. Your goal is your blueprint. Knowing what you’re going after is going to make you more focused. Now, I don’t consider myself an expert in goal setting but what I can tell you is that any goal you pick should be:
- Personally relevant: You want to pick a goal that actually has meaning to you. For myself, after I went through my first breakup I wanted to start a business. I had always dreamed about what it would be like to own a business, so it was natural for me to choose building a business as my goal. Only choose something YOU genuinely want. Don’t set a goal for something someone else wants for you, and definitely don’t pick a goal just because you think that your ex-girlfriend will like it.
- Specific: Once you have an idea for your goal, you need to whittle it down until it becomes clearly exactly what you’re looking for. In my business example, I wanted to build an Amazon business that was worth 3k a month selling shoes.
- Time sensitive: You want to have a timeline for accomplishing your goal. Think of it as a due date. Having a date when your accomplishment is due to be completed will make you more diligent in working towards it.
- Built with a step-by-step process: This is my unheralded secret to success in goal setting. Once you know what your specific goal is, make a list of every single step you’re going to need to take in order to accomplish your goal. Try to put them in order, until you have an ordered list with sequential tasks. If there are things you don’t know, don’t sweat it. Your steps can include learning the skills that you’ll need to accomplish your goal. For instance, my business goal had around 70 steps in order.
- An obsession: In the words of the immortal CT Fletcher “If you don’t have the mental capacity to be that obsessed about what you’re trying to get… then motherfucker you ain’t never gonna have it.”
It’s working towards achieving the goal that will build your confidence, because your brain craves progress. To feel like you’re getting closer to something you really want will build up who you are, and give you something that you can define yourself on.
Working towards my shoe business changed me from a dude who had just gotten his heartbroken to a budding young entrepreneur. To this day I still see myself the same way, and my confidence has blossomed into something I could never have imagined as a kid sitting in his dorm trying to mend his broken heart.
Give yourself a goal, and go get it.
5: Crush your fear of failure by taking risks
The bane of confidence is fear. In my observation it’s almost always the fear of the unknown undoing otherwise confident men.
After a breakup, it’s easy to be afraid of being alone, even though it’s far from the truth.
As we established earlier, fear is caused by an irrational belief which you can change by examining it with rational thought. However it’s far easier to crush your fear by just doing what you’re afraid of.
I used to be deathly afraid of approaching women, fearing that they would angrily reject me and cause a scene. You can imagine what this did to my confidence. I was timid around women, and wouldn’t take risks that could’ve led to otherwise unimaginable rewards.
A funny thing happened when I eventually forced myself to approach. It wasn’t as bad as I had thought. Yes, I still was rejected plenty. But it turned out that my fear of a scene was completely irrational. Although I understood this on a rational level, it took me actually doing it before it was internalized.
A huge part of being confident is not fearing the unknown. It’s the ability to be put in a new situation and have the confidence to persevere. While confidence can be faked, it’s better to have experiential confidence.
So how do you go about it? Well, the best place to crush fear of failure is through goal setting as we’ve talked about before.
However I don’t think that’s necessary for most people.
Take a step back and think about what you want out of your life. What fears are you holding within yourself that are holding you back from doing what you want with your life?
For many of you it may be a fear of rejection. It also could be a fear of a specific thing, like public speaking. Make a list of everything you can think of that’s holding you back from success.
Then, make it a point to do those things. You want want to, but forcing yourself to do it anyway will build lasting confidence. Remember, confidence isn’t an external thing. Confidence is your thought process. If you’ve conquered many fears, nothing you’ll ever want to do will seem too great.
6: Sleep with new women
You can’t build confidence around women without spending time with them, no matter what you do. That’s why you see successful men get taken for a ride by women all the time.
Confidence around women is learned, not given.
If you want to build it, you’re going to have to get over your fear of failure and put yourself out there. Each time you succeed in seducing a woman all the way through sleeping with her, your confidence in your own skills will grow.
To get started, you’ll need to learn how to date after a breakup correctly. Read this article here to get an idea of what you should and shouldn’t be doing.
Afterward, you’ll need to figure out how you want to meet women. Personally, I’ve used a mix of online dating (Tinder, Hinge, Bumble) and direct approach in person to get my sexual needs met. You’ll need to figure out what system works for you. It’s a trial and error process. I’ll give you mine in brief, and will definitely cover the entire thing in a future article.
- Install Tinder and Hinge
- Get 5-6 good pictures of yourself. Ideally you’ll want a mix of pictures. 1-2 of you doing cool shit, at least 1 with some other hot women, and then a few good shots of you in clothes that fit well and make you look attractive.
- Once your profile is set up, sit down and do batches of swipes. Set aside an hour and swipe until you run out of likes.
- Afterwards, if you get any matches, message them first. Don’t overthink your message. She’s not going to go out with you based on the quality of your opener. It’s your pictures and profile that will do the selling.
- Keep the conversation short, with your intention of getting her phone number. Don’t exchange more than 10 messages back and forth.
- Once you have the number, your job is to get her to agree to a date quickly. If your brave, you can call her. This might scare some women, but it’ll make you stand out.
- Get her to agree to a date that’s reasonably close to your place.
- Keep the date short, and during the date focus on letting her talk, touching her (kino), and otherwise having a good time.
- After a few days have passed, set the second date at your place. Tell her you want to cook dinner together. Some girls won’t agree to this, these are generally the ones who are unsure of you.
- Pick up where you left off by escalating the physical contact. Be patient, and don’t force anything on her. She’ll reward you if you.
- Enjoy the just desserts for your hard work
This dramatically simplifies the entire equation, but as a repeatable process, it will get you laid.
As I’ve said before, the more sex you have had, the more sex you’ll be having in the future. It’ll also be much easier to get to sex.
Do this consistently, and you’ll have your choice of women. Having the ability to easily get new women and understanding the entire process will give you the confidence to not have to worry about what any one woman does. It gives you abundance, which is the root of confidence.
8: Be consistent and follow through on the promises you’ve made to yourself
Confidence and consistency go hand in hand. You are what you do frequently. While understanding the habits that build confidence is the first step, you’ll need to be consistent in your application of them.
For instance, you won’t achieve your goal if you only work at it once or twice. You need to work at it constantly. The same is true of your progress in the gym. If you’re not lifting every week, you’re not getting stronger.
With confidence, it’s a matter of repetition. Repeating these habits day after day is what will strengthen them.
That’s why it’s important to go through the motions, even when you aren’t feeling like it. You have to build the habit of being consistent, just like you build your confidence.
So on days where you don’t want to lift, go to the gym anyway. Work on your goal even if you don’t want to. It’s not going to be automatic at first, so keep at it and don’t let yourself fall prey to excuses.
So take these tips and run with them. Build your confidence to previously unseen levels and enjoy the many rewards that come to centered, confident men.
Talk soon my friend,
Coach Jack
PS: Got a burning question about your ex-girlfriend or your unique situation that you want my expert advice on? Click here to learn how I can help you.