Can You Fake It (Confidence) Until You Make It?
If you struggle with your confidence, you’ve probably asked yourself this question more than once:
Can I really fake my way into confidence?
It’s advice that gets repeated constantly by friends, family, coworkers, and even well-meaning professionals. If you’re shy, nervous, awkward, or anxious around people, you’re often told to just pretend to be confident. To push yourself out of your comfort zone.
But for many people, this advice doesn’t land well. Instead of feeling empowering, it can feel empty. It feels like you’re putting on an act that will never stick.
Why “Fake It Till You Make It” Feels So Frustrating
A common experience with social anxiety looks like this:
You force yourself into social situations.
You act confident.
You get through it.
And then… nothing changes.
The next time you go out, you feel just as anxious, embarrassed, and self-conscious as before. It can feel like you have to fake it every single time, which naturally leads to an important question:
If I have to fake it forever, is this actually helping?
For most people, faking confidence doesn’t build confidence, it builds exhaustion and confusion.
Acting Confident vs. Feeling Confident
A major problem with the “fake it till you make it” mindset is that it focuses almost entirely on behavior, while ignoring what’s happening internally.
Social anxiety isn’t just about what you do, it’s about how you feel while you’re doing it.
When you feel anxious, scared, or embarrassed in social situations your mind shuts down any possibility of authenticity, because it believes authenticity is danger. We believe that if we acted ourselves, we would get humiliated. Deep down we are ashamed of who we are so we believe we must cover it up. So, we are already wearing a mask. We wear the mask that makes us feel safe. We say the thing we think the other people will accept or like rather than saying what we truly feel. Or perhaps we don’t know what we want so say because we are so overwhelmed with anxiety.
This is why it feels fake. We already feel fake inside. We know we are putting on a mask. So simply puffing out our chest and holding eye contact won’t make us feel and more confident about who we are and how we are coming across. You may look confident on the outside but feeling deeply anxious on the inside and you feel you have learned nothing new about yourself… because it wasn’t “you” to begin with.
“If I’m Not Me, How Do I Learn to Accept Myself?”
Now you start to question your identity. If confidence requires you to become someone else, where does self-acceptance fit in?
If I have to put on an act every time I go out, I’m not really being myself.
Instead of learning confidence, you learn to monitor yourself and to perform for others. That’s not confidence, that’s survival.
When Fake It Till You Make It Can Work
Here’s the nuance that often gets missed:
Feeling uncomfortable does not automatically mean you’re faking it.
When you try something new, especially something far outside your comfort zone, it will feel unnatural at first. That doesn’t mean it’s fake. It means it’s unfamiliar.
Think about learning a new skill. If you sat down at a piano for the first time and were asked to perform in front of an audience, you’d feel terrified. You’d feel like an imposter. That wouldn’t mean you could never become a pianist, it would just mean you’re new.
Social confidence works the same way.
Discomfort Is Not the Same as Inauthenticity
One of the most important distinctions for social anxiety is this:
Uncomfortable ≠ fake
If you:
Feel nervous starting conversations
Feel awkward making eye contact
Feel afraid to speak your mind
That doesn’t mean those behaviors are fake. It means they’re new. Let’s be honest, if you struggle with your confidence, you probably don’t speak up much, so when you do it doesn’t feel like something “you would do.” But we don’t know what “you would do” because we don’t know who you are yet. Confidence develops when our behavior is aligned with who you would be without anxiety, not who you think you’re supposed to be.
A Better Question to Ask Yourself
Instead of asking:
How do I act confident?
Try asking:
Who would I be if I didn’t have anxiety?
This may be hard at first. You may not be able to conceive of a version of you that isn’t anxious, but sit with it for a minute. Ask yourself:
What would I talk about?
What do I actually find funny?
What interests would you share with the world?
If we can answer these questions we get a sense of who you are and who you want to be. No more faking. We’re not trying to be someone else. We’re not stealing lines from movies. We’re getting a sense of our ideal self and now we just have to put it into action. That is not faking, that is growing into who you actually are and letting others see it. So, we will “fake” being ourselves while it feels uncomfortable, until eventually it will feel comfortable.
