Don’t Shave For A Week

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project. Today, I have a suggestion for you which you might notice I’ve got a little bit of facial hair going on here and that’s because I haven’t been shaving for about a week now. So I’ve got about a week-long growth.

If you want to make a big change in your life, one of the big ways to do that that’s pretty easy and dramatic is to make some change in your personal appearance. For instance, if you’ve never had a beard, well, try growing one. If you always have a beard, try shaving it off. If you’ve never had a mustache, try growing one of those. If you always have on, try shaving it off.

All these things can make a difference to the way that you look, and you’ll notice when you do them that other people start commenting in different ways. They may like what you’ve done, they may not like what you’ve done. Either way, you’re going to start being noticed by other people in a way that you haven’t been before.

I used to be so self-conscious about my appearance that if I went to work having forgotten to shave just for one day, I would be absolutely terrified about what other people were going to think. Now, what other people think is really not that important, but I was still afraid and the only way to get over that fear is to do something a little differently. And now I find actually not shaving for a few days is kind of fun, and it’s easier. I don’t need to shave all the time.

I was quite a late developer and I didn’t need to shave until I was in my early 20s, and at the time I was like “Oh, thank goodness”, like “I’m a man now, I get to shave”, you know. But now I recognize it’s just a big hassle and it’s actually easier when you don’t have to do it all the time.

The clean-shaven look is fairly conservative and often women tend to like guys that show a bit of stubble on the face, who have got a bit of a rough edge. And another thing that you can do, which is what I do now, is I have a stubble shaver. Rather than a regular shaver, it doesn’t shave clean down to the skin; you can set an adjustable length on it, and what happens is that whenever you shave you’re just having your hair down to that length that you’ve selected. So you’ll always end up with a neat stubble look which is kind of cool.

So if you do clean-shaven all the time, what I’m recommending is that you spend a week where you don’t shave and you just get used to other people’s reactions to your new funky, laid-back appearance. And just notice how much that boosts your self-confidence.