Fake it Til You Slay it: The Power of Confidence and Self-Belief
updated: Jan. 2026
Everything is an act. I act confident. I act as if the world revolves around me. I act as if I know what I’m doing. Eventually the acting turns into reality and you forget that you once had to rely on a “false narrative”.
I don’t like the idea that an act of confidence is a false narrative, hence the quotations around the phrase, but it’s to prove a point that what was once “false” turned into truth.
Personal Experience/Background
In my last year of my undergraduate, I took a class, The Science of Happiness. I took it with a grain of salt, though; I entered the class and our professor was a bit cuckoo (non-derogatory). She was silly and I honestly wasn’t the most open-minded when I first stepped foot into the class.
Believe it or not, I was a very facts and figures type of girl. The class was labeled as “science” so I needed all of the research presented to me in scientific ways. Different studies were presented, but nothing was recent (within the last 10-20 years) and the demographic of the participants didn’t vary, so it didn’t feel right to make such generalizations and conclude that this was scientific.
I wanted to get an A in the class by fully participating and having an open mind, so I did just that. So, there you had it, me, an active participant, fully engrossed in the course, and learning about the science of happiness.
Words are powerful
There’s a lot we can unpack from that class, but for the sake of this piece, let’s focus on one of the lessons that had the biggest impact: self-talk, specifically positive self-talk.
The words that we speak and internalize hold a lot of power. Our brains don’t necessarily understand reality, but it understands what we see and what we say to ourselves, which is why positive self-talk is so important. Neuroscience supports me on this and you’ll just have to take my word for it. If you don’t, then you can also learn from my own experience.
Morning affirmations
With self-talk, we also had to understand automatic negative thoughts, or ANTs, and how we easily allow ourselves to have negative thoughts and tend to spiral into them. Whereas on the flip side, we tend to struggle to spiral into positive thoughts.
That was a huge lesson for me because I never noticed that I did that myself. With this, I devoted myself to have positive self-talk, which later manifested itself into morning affirmations.
As mentioned before, the brain doesn’t fully have a grasp on reality, but solely what’s presented and what is said. To fully commit to my act of confidence and that everything always works out in my favor, I started a morning ritual.
Every morning, without fail, I stare myself down in the mirror and tell myself that “I’m so lucky, and everything always works out in my favor”. I repeat it at least five times to really seal it into my subconscious.
I’ve even conditioned myself to repeat that line if something “negative” happens to me. I refuse to be caught in the negative, so I genuinely have rewired my brain into thinking that I’m lucky, confident, beautiful, intelligent, and that everything always works out in my favor. This could be false, but I tell myself otherwise, so it actually must be true.
In brain rot terms: yes, I am delusional. However, everything has always worked out in my favor every time. I’m quite literally living the life I dreamt of and it still feels like a dream. I told myself it would happen and it did.
Concluding thoughts
I’m confident because I say so. I’m lucky because I say so. Everyone is in love with me because I say so. Everything always works out in my favor because I say so. The world revolves around me because I say so.
I just know that everything will work out, so it does. This all probably sounds crazy, or you could call me a witch, but I honestly don’t care because everything truly always works out in my favor and I always have trust that it does. Why wouldn’t I?
Fake it til you make it because, soon enough, you won’t be faking it anymore.
xoxo,
kaels
too bad ain’t me<3
