Quote Originally Posted by jackvance View Post
That's such a vague statement that it's pretty meaningless imo. Confidence is used as a short-cut for someone's skill, if you see someone being very confident about something we assume that they know what they're doing. But confidence alone is not sustainable without the skill to back it up.

Let's say there's this average guy, a random made up person to illustrate my point. He has poor social skills. Often he'll come off as arrogant when trying to act aloof. When trying to be friendly he'll sometimes come off as needy. When trying to be funny and tease people, he's usually just insulting people without realizing it. He never really connects with people, because, again without being aware of it, he's very selfish and assumes that whatever he has in his mind is interesting to everyone else, lacking the empathy needed to communicate with people in ways that they can relate to. He also sucks at recognizing social relationships that other people have with each-other, and will often speak in ways that are out of line with social dynamics, like openly trying to hit on a girl that is clearly paired off with someone else or trying to randomly belittle the dominant person in the group. And so on.

Now, this guy can act all confident, but it's not going to do him much good. It might help him to impress people he just met but they'll soon get annoyed by him and want to avoid him. The people that know him, shun him and don't care for him. He might tell stories to a new girl he just met which make him seem popular with other people, but when she sees how other people actually treat him, the illusion is quickly dispelled. I would argue that in his case being confident about himself is actually a downside. It would work out better for him if he was less confident. Then atleast he'd keep quiet instead of pissing people off and others would be more keen to be nice to him.

What our emotional system does in such situations is exactly that. If nothing is ever working out for you socially, your emotions will torpedo your confidence, and this makes that confidence is often a very good indicator of how skilled someone really is at whatever he is doing. In practice when someone gets more confident about himself (socially or about something in particular, like being good at dancing, football or minesweeper), this almost always follows from either increasing his skills, or changing external situations that make him perform better.
You make some good points, but I think they're different than what I was getting at

Make a list of all the things women like. Three brought up in this thread are (1) super confidence, (2) smooth talking, and (3) a great body. Jack Sawyer made that point that the first two are all you need, and my point was that if you have the latter you don't need the first two. Both of those are true

Furthermore, I would argue that when all things are reasonable, changing body composition has the biggest effect on attraction for women. As long as you have a decent level of style, manners, intelligence, status, etc, you'll get the most bang for your buck in improving your body. You could argue that women are just as attracted to the physical as men. If they're not, it's still really close.


In my personal life, I've always been a smooth talker and have a great personality, but I've noticed a pretty substantial difference is womens' attraction to me just on how my body changes. Back when I was a ripped 190, I didn't have to work for any attention at all, but as I gained weight and got up to 240, they treat me like if I want to be close to them, I have to work for it.