Elvis Presley: How to manufacture confidence

Elvis Presley is extremely nervous. It’s 1954 in Memphis and it’s the eve of his first paid performance on stage. Elvis is opening for country singer Slim Whitman.

As Elvis starts singing on stage, his legs start twitching. His legs start uncontrollably jiggling out of pure anxiety. This jiggling makes him even more nervous. His performance is going horribly.

But instead of booing him, the young women in the crowd go wild and start screaming!

Elvis doesn’t really truly understand what’s happening in that performance. It’s only backstage where his manager makes it clear that the ladies went crazy for his rubber legs movement.

His rubber legs and hip swivel are a product of anxiety. But it makes him famous. It also makes him infamous when his dance moves are called vulgar for that day and age.

But it’s these rubber legs that give Elvis the confidence he needs to become the superstar.

Confidence is an illusion. A mental construct. A belief. There is nothing tangible behind confidence.

It’s your belief that you can deliver.

Your stupid brain interferes with this belief and creates anxiety. Why? Out of a need to protect you.

Your brain is a prediction machine run amok with hormones. When your brain anticipates harm or pain or rejection, it goes into overdrive. It creates a whole lot of nervous energy.

You don’t really have to create confidence. You just need to interrupt this process that creates nervousness and anxiety. This insecurity.

Your senses control your confidence

Researcher Amy Cuddy conducted an experiment. She calls candidates and tells them that the experiment is about placement of ECG electrodes.

Half the candidates are made to take a power pose and sit expansively: with feet on table and hands behind the head.

The other half were made to sit with arms held close and hands folded.

Would you be surprised to know that the first group felt more powerful and confident? But that’s not all. As part of their experiment, their saliva was tested after 2 minutes of them sitting in their pose. And the cortisol levels of the first group was on average 25% lower!

Your brain predicts that you will succeed based on your pose. And based on that prediction, it secretes the hormones.

So what happens when your brain predicts you are going to fail and your legs become wobbly? How can you fight this anxiety?

You do what Elvis did. You interrupt and confuse your brain. Because all you have to do is to make your brain feel that the next move will succeed.

Usually what would happen is Elvis would start to sing, he would feel nervous, and his legs would start shaking. If he asked his brain to stop shaking the legs, his brain would go into overdrive and his legs would shake even more.

But the accidental cheering helped Elvis change the narrative in his head.

Now when he started singing and felt nervous, and his legs started shaking - his thought changed to: shake more! Suddenly there was nothing that his brain had to fix!

His exaggeration of his legs shaking and his hips swiveling was born out of nervousness, but eventually ended up making him feel immensely confident!

The idea is always the same. Make your brain feel more certain.

3 reasons why the brain feels uncertain

1. Instability. When your brain senses that things are going erratic or unpredictable.
2. Friction. When your brain senses that action is getting stuck or slowing down.
3. Loss of agency. When your brain senses that things are happening to you, out of your control.

Interrupt this uncertainty.

1. Counter instability with steady rhythm. Use repetition (movement, chanting, rituals) and it’ll feel nothing is going erratic.
2. Counter friction with fluency. Make movement go faster. Make the immediate next action simple enough.
3. Counter loss of agency with deliberation. Choose the sensation or movement on purpose.

Elvis’s dance moves helped him achieve all 3. You would be surprised to know that Elvis never managed to eradicate his stage fright. Even till his last stage performance, he was always nervous before he went on the stage. But he became steady, fluent, and deliberate in his action. Which enabled him to feel extraordinarily confident at performing through stage fright!

Action Summary:

• Confidence is the feeling of not having to correct yourself.
• Don’t focus on creating confidence, focus on reducing insecurity.
• Knowledge and past success reduce insecurity because they give your brain evidence that things will probably go well. But you can also reduce insecurity by making your brain think that the next few seconds are under control.
• Rhythm, fluency, and deliberate action helps you convert nervous energy to confident action.