How To Build Confidence If You Feel Ugly

Blog Inner game
Joe Elvin
25 July 2022
2195

Discover how to build confidence if you feel ugly with these six expert tips.

If you worry you’re not good-looking enough to land a date or get a girlfriend, this guide is for you.

It features six steps for men who think they’re ugly to feel more confident about their looks…

1. Improve Your Appearance

This has to be said before anything else.

Anyone can dramatically improve their appearance by eating healthily and working out consistently.

When you lose weight and/or build muscle, you will look much better.

Work on your grooming and fashion as well to revolutionize your appearance.

There’s a popular acronym in the men’s self-development community; WINS.

It stands for:

Weights.
Image.
Nutrition.
Shut The Hell Up.

Write that down and get to work.

2. Sometimes, It Just Takes A Little Self-Love

There are guys who go to the gym every day, wear designer clothes, buy every male beauty product and still hate their appearance.

There are also plenty of models — people who are paid to be beautiful — who spend their whole lives feeling ugly.

Indeed, hating your appearance is sometimes a symptom of low self-esteem in general.

If you put in the work to feel better about who you are as a person, you’ll often find you appreciate your appearance more because of that.

My list of self-love hacks should come in handy here.

3. Perform A RAS Flip

Your reticular activation system (RAS) is the part of the brain which controls your selective focus.

Essentially, it decides what is important to notice and what isn’t. After all, there’s so much stimuli in this world that your mind can’t take it all in at once.

Did you know that warm fingers are a sign of good luck?* Until you read that sentence, you probably didn’t notice how warm your fingers were. That’s an example of the RAS in action.

Anyway, when you’re feeling good about yourself, your RAS will typically begin to notice all your attractive qualities when you look in the mirror. When you’re feeling despondent or insecure, it’ll notice all your flaws.

Thankfully, you can manually flip your RAS using the self-love exercises recommended earlier.

In the video below, you’ll see a particularly effective exercise, which involves staring in the mirror and obnoxiously boasting about how handsome you are.

For what it’s worth, the RAS also plays a huge role in other people finding you attractive.

When you’re having fun and giving women an enjoyable emotional rollercoaster, their RAS will focus on all your positive qualities and you’ll literally appear more handsome in their eyes.

This is why your mother honestly believes you’re the most beautiful boy to ever set foot on this earth.

On the flip side, it’s also why you look at photos of the ex who hurt you and wonder why you were ever attracted to them.

4. Go Out And Enjoy Your Life

When you’re happy and having fun, you’ll spend less time worrying about being ugly. You’ll be too busy enjoying the present moment to worry about what you look like!

Also, you’ll appear more attractive to other people. You’ll be laughing and smiling from cheek to cheek. The stress and heaviness will disappear from your face and body. Most importantly, you’ll have this fun energy surrounding you that attracts other people towards you.

Women will want to be around you. Their RAS will focus on how handsome you are, and so will yours.

My book The Thrill Of The Chase covers this phenomenon in more detail. It explains how I went from being unable to hold 5-minute conversations with women to dating the gorgeous babes I always desired.

If you’re a guy who hates dating and despises the single life, I’d highly recommend you click here to learn more about the book.

5. Cut Toxic Energy From Your Life

If you have friends who bring you down and make fun of your appearance, cut them out of your life. These are not your friends. They’re doing you no favours.

Also, stop consuming media that makes you feel worse about your appearance.

Do you follow social media accounts that make you feel insecure about your looks? It’s worth remembering that most of these are heavily edited — and that a lot of influencers spend their entire lives preparing their face and body to look good in Instagram photos.

Unfollow them all, anyway. Any benefit they bring to your life is most likely outweighed by the damage they do to your self-image.

And of course, stay away from ‘black pill’ content at all costs.

6. Delete Your Online Dating Accounts — And Start Approaching Women In Real Life

If you have online dating accounts and feel ugly, it’s fair to assume you’re not getting many matches.

The thing is: if you get no matches on Tinder, it doesn’t mean you’re ugly.

The top 80% of attractive women on Tinder only swipe right on the top 20% of attractive men. So, you could be an average-looking guy or even a slightly-above-average one — and still only get interest from incredibly unattractive women on dating apps.

So, you have two options.

You can continue to live in this virtual world which tells you that no women want you — and hope that one hottie somehow bucks the trend and agrees to meet you.
OR you can stop wasting your time on these apps and get outside in the real world, where you can actually use your personality to attract women.

The second option is my number one exercise for how to build confidence if you feel ugly.

Provided you have a fun personality and good game, you will always do better when meeting women in real life. Not only will you stand out for having the confidence to approach her in the real world, you’ll also put yourself to the front of the queue for her attention.

If you approach her in a bar or nightclub, there’s little stopping you from spending several hours together and maybe going home together that night. By developing that solid connection, (you’d hope) she’ll be more excited about meeting you again over some unknown stranger from Bumble.

Indeed, once you realize how important your personality is for attracting women, you’ll probably stop stressing so much about what you look like anyway.