Confidence with men is not something you either have or you do not. It shows up in very specific behaviors, and once you can see them you can change them.
I am Antia Boyd, founder and creator of the Magnetize Your Man method. Here are the six signs that you are lacking confidence with men, counting down to the one I see most often.
6. You Put Him On A Pedestal
I cannot tell you how many women I see who place a man somewhere above themselves. He is somehow superior. He has a better career. He is going to be the one who finally makes her happy.
Here is what I always say: the soulmate is real, but the pedestal you put him on is not.
We all have many different parts inside us. When you put a man on a pedestal, you project onto him what you want to see more of, and two things go wrong at once.
You amplify qualities in him that may not actually be there. You decide he is a great king and a great provider, and then you quietly delete every occasion when he was not, so you miss the real picture entirely.
And with the rose-coloured glasses on, you cannot see his genuine weak spots. He may be a strong worker and an honorable man, and still not be emotionally embodied at all. You will not notice, because you are not looking at him. You are looking at your projection of him.
Then there is the ending, which is always the same. Whatever goes up must come down. Anything you put on a pedestal eventually falls off it, and the disappointment and resentment that follow are unavoidable.
5. You Do Not Speak Up
This runs alongside the pedestal. Everything he says becomes important, and you outsource your authority to him.
I used to do this constantly. My internal question was always “well, who am I?” That was a core belief I picked up in childhood: who do you think you are?
If that dialogue is running inside you, you will not speak up and you will not disagree. You will not say “honestly, I respectfully disagree with that.”
When you have real confidence, you are not afraid of confrontation. I actually call it carefrontation, and I teach it in my program, because the point is not conflict, it is caring enough to be honest.
What lets you do that is knowing you have the internal resources to handle whatever comes next. You have a positive, affirming internal dialogue, so even if he does not agree with you afterward, you do not need his agreement to be okay. You are not purely other-focused. You have a healthy amount of self-focus too.
4. You Pretend To Be Someone You Are Not
I see this all the time. A woman who has no interest in sports suddenly knows everything about his team. A woman who does not cook is not only cooking but pronouncing everything in perfect French.
The internal conversation underneath is: I am not acceptable as I am, so I have to be someone else.
Confidence is what you think, what you say, and what you do being in alignment. When you think “I could not care less about the financial world” and then perform fascination with it, you are directly contradicting yourself. You are walking past your own conflict, and that is a large withdrawal from your confidence bank account.
Do the opposite. It is genuinely appealing to say, “actually, I do not care much about that, but I care a lot about this.” Bungee jumping. Writing. Personal development. Whatever is really yours.
That is what makes you charismatic, and it adds to your confidence rather than draining it.
3. You Forget Who You Are In His Presence
This one comes with a story I still find funny, about eleven years ago now.
I was interested in a man who looked wonderful on paper. He was a coach, and I wanted to be a coach and was not one yet. He was committed to spiritual growth. He meditated. He had a sailboat. He was attractive. In other words, plenty for me to project onto, which is the pedestal all over again.
But something worse happened. I forgot who I was. I could barely speak English around him. I was so nervous I could not put two words together.
Sometimes I said nothing at all, because I went completely blank, which is a freeze response. I was so worried about saying the wrong thing that I said nothing. Other times I spoke far too fast from an anxious place, mumbled, and made no sense, because my brain had gone on vacation.
That is a confidence sign, because you are so other-focused you have lost connection with yourself. If someone had asked me to feel my feet on the ground, I would have said, what feet?
Here is what helps. Future pace it. Before you see him, visualize the conversation and see yourself staying grounded. Picture your feet weighing a thousand pounds, pulling you down into the earth so you stay in your body. Then deliberately slow your speech down.
Athletes use this constantly when recovering from injury, watching themselves perform in their mind’s eye over and over, because the brain does not fully distinguish between vivid imagination and reality. Try it.
2. You Initiate The Conversations
When you are always the one reaching out, the message underneath is: I am not magnetic, I am not worthy of his attention, he will not focus on me unless I jump in front of the camera and say look at me.
You end up jumping through hoops, twisting yourself into a pretzel, making sure he is entertained. That is giving your power away, and it is performance.
When you feel genuinely worthy, your stance is different: the right man will reach out, the right man will pursue me, the right man will think about me.
And that last part is the practical reason this matters. You have to give someone the space to think of you. If you are always reaching out first, he never gets the room to wonder what he wants to say to you, or which meme to send you, or what to ask you. You never give him the chance to miss you.
1. You Stay Available Until The Last Minute
You know those Saturday nights. Sitting next to your phone, still with no confirmation from him.
A courteous man confirms at the latest 24 hours before a date. He should assume you have other things happening, because an evening plan genuinely shapes your whole day: whether you start work early, whether you get to the gym before or after.
What you do not want to do, and I remember doing this myself and watching my girlfriends do it, is keep yourself free right up until the last moment. An hour beforehand you should be busy. You have plans with your girlfriends. You are going out for cocktails or pickleball. You are done.
Do not hand him a resume for how to treat you like a doormat. Say instead, with your actions, that you have confidence and better things to do.
The reason women stay available is fear of missing out. And that fear comes from a mistaken idea about where the good thing is. He is not the drink. The date is not the drink. You are the drink.
Real confidence is knowing you are the life of the party and the source. Nothing you are about to walk into is the source of your happiness. You brought that with you.
Where To Start
Look back at the six and pick the one that made you wince. That is your starting point, and it is almost never the one you would have guessed.
If you want a clearer read on where your confidence with men actually sits right now, take our free quiz below.
Ladies, that is it for today. Much love, and I will talk with you soon.
