Avery Hayden - Zero Fucks Given: The 21st Century Man’s Guide to Deep Self-Confidence

This is a book about self-confidence. Zero Fucks Given wont teach you the words that will make you sound confident, the body language that will make you appear confident, or the visualization exercises that will make you feel confident. Zero Fucks Given will teach you how to become confident.

Self-confidence isnt a quality that can be forced. The harder you try to appear confident, the less confident others will perceive you to be. Youve seen the guys who try a little too hard: to be dominant, to look as if theyre in charge, to act like they dont care what others think. In truth, these efforts are all symptoms of insecurity.

Most self-improvement advice feeds on and magnifies our insecurities: the techniques they teach us only serve to make us more self-conscious. While you try to open up your body language to look dominant, you are actively reminding yourself that you dont feel dominant enough to begin with.

Trying to be confident is much like trying to be funny. If someone says to you, Make me laugh, What happens? Because youre on the spot, you try to force humor. It doesnt work. Even if the words you say are funny, the words lose their power because you are trying too hard.

To build deep self-confidence: genuine confidence that attracts respect and admiration from others, you must understand that trying to appear confident is a doomed strategy. The more you try to appear confident, the more attention you will bring to your insecurities, which will in turn, make you feel insecure.

What other approach is there? How can you become more confident without trying to look more confident? First, you must become aware of the insecurities that you dont know you have. As soon as you become aware of these negative beliefs that are holding you back, you will be empowered to free yourself from them.

Secondly, you must get comfortable with making yourself emotionally vulnerable. You must take social risks that make you feel uncomfortable, through this, you will develop the emotional callouses of groundedness and self-belief. To do this, you will need to change your relationship with negative emotions; the following pages will show you how to accomplish exactly that.

The pages in this book will teach you a psychologically sound approach to developing confidence that isnt based on appearances, but on core self-belief. You will learn to care less about what others think, and in so doing, make others think more positively of you. You will learn to stop trying to be something, and in so doing, become the person that others desperately try to be.

Make no mistake, this isnt an easy process. Im not offering a panacea that will solve all your social difficulties without effort. Instead, youre going to learn how to invest your efforts in a way that produces worthwhile results.

This book isnt going to give you a hit of validation by telling you how awesome you are; and its not designed to give you a false sense of accomplishment simply by reading its pages. Instead, it will give you the real, no-bullshit insights that helped me transition from one of the most socially insecure people I know, to one of the most self-confident.

The following chapters contain an amalgam of concepts drawn from both scientific sources and personal experience. These pages are like a map and a compass, pointing you in the right direction. Without your own efforts, they are meaningless, but when used as tools, they can catalyze deep self-confidence.

This journey begins by looking at what self-confidence is, and what it is not.