The Weird Experiment That Helped Me Feel More Confident

Most of the time, most people aren’t looking at you. They’re too busy worrying that you’re looking at them.

Photo by Andre Mouton on Unsplash

Pants Swap

I’m going to tell you about a weird experiment that my friend and I did in a bar in Brooklyn about fifteen years ago. I’m not recommending that you try it, but just thinking about it might help you feel more confident.

I was with a group of friends having drinks on a Thursday night. We were all in our post college years and had an aggressively average look. Clever t-shirts, bandanas, silver jewelry from a music festival, crippling college debt, you get the idea. We were too poor to drink very much, so we were basically sober.

I was talking with my good friend Forrest, as we ordered a second round of beers. Looking back, I’m not sure the exact flow of conversation, but somehow, we ended up doing something unusual that helped me build an unshakable sense of self-confidence.

We traded pants.

We were about the same size, and being young and nimble, it only took us a few seconds. I was wearing a pair of green chinos from the Gap and he had on a pair of Levis.

Without any fanfare or drama, right at the bar, we simultaneously unbuttoned and unzipped our pants, dropped them to the…