I somewhat agree with what you're saying, merely tricking yourself won't increase your confidence or get you past fears or anxiety or whatnot. However, I disagr

I somewhat agree with what you're saying, merely tricking yourself won't increase your confidence or get you past fears or anxiety or whatnot. However, I disagree that outright dismissal of the technique, is the wrong answer. For a lot of situational fear, a core component of the fear is ignorance of the outcome. So tricking yourself into walking into the situation, doing the thing, whatever, is a great way to change the ignorance. After you've been in the situation, you now have evidence and real outcomes to weigh against your fears. It isn't easy, and it requires some introspection, but real evidence is a great tool for combatting vague fears and what-ifs. Take the invoice example, there are fears listed in the article and some other comments on this thread. A lot of them boil down to "will this make the customer reject my business" and "will the invoiced customer talk bad about me to other potential customers and hurt my business". These are real and valid fears. However, at the same time, everyone "knows" it's business, invoices are how money happens. So if you can trick yourself into sending some, you get some perspective to combat the fear in the future. You'll see that most people just pay, or quibble a bit, then pay. You probably will get some bad experiences, but usually this doesn't actually cause other people to stop using you. (Has anyone ever fired a business because "you billed my buddy's business per contract?".) When you have these actual experiences, ones you tricked yourself into having, you now have the evidence to combat the fears. Note, the fears don't generally just go away, hence terms like combat, walk through, etc that are applied to them. Getting past fear-based blocks is an active participation event. But with proper tools, a large one of which is evidence, you can get through them. So I guess what it boils down to, is it is a chicken and egg game, you need to have one or the other, and a good way to break the loop is faking one to get the other, and change a negative cycle to a positive one. I guess, I agree with the statement: self confidence is a little deeper than tricking one's mind and that any confidence gained by techniques like this would be superficial at best completely, I just disagree on how useful superficial confidence can be as a foothold to real confidence. A cliche that applies here: Fake it 'til you make it.