Panza

First off... grats on not dying. Time to build up that confidence, descends are a matter of experience and control.

You can practice handling, you'd be surprised how much some cones in an empty parking lot can help you. Some simple maneuverability courses and slaloms can be really fun as well as rewarding to your handling.

Overall tips about initiating a proper turn riding down hills and cornering ... get your hands in the drops to lower your center of gravity giving you more control. You can turn in tighter and more confidently. Make sure your inside leg is up (knee bent) and your outside leg extended-- put your weight on this outside leg, it will help balance you while you lean.

Look at the turn, now that you're looking where you're going, begin your braking. You look where you're going so you know how much to brake. As you become more experienced you will look, brake, turn, keep on looking and pedal after your turn. As you turn, shift your weight more to your handlebars to add more traction to your front wheel. Keep on riding, get your bike checked if you're truly worried about its braking and performance.

Panza

If you want to learn cornering the way I did you'll probably hurt yourself. Keep on taking the same downhill + turn go faster each time. If you fell, you went too fast.
You can test your traction by gripping your brakes until your tire skids. This will let you know how much traction you have on this surface. Test on different surfaces, get "the feel".

Cookiemonsta

I really think there are just two parts to the answer

-Confidence in the bike, and making sure that it is in excellent working order
-Confidence and experience yourself. You get this from spending time on the bike, not just in descents but in general.

When I started cycling (I was a teenager) I thought roadbikes were pretty scary, especially in descents and when cornering without losing speed. But overtime you lose that. You find your comfortable positions on the bike, find out how to balance the bike, and it becomes almost like a part of yourself where you stop thinking about it.

I would advise against doing things that make you uncomfortable. Make sure that you are in control. If your descents are slower, fine, you can increase the speed as you get more experience and confidence. Do not force yourself to go faster than you feel like you can handle.

Darth Steele

lol, I hate people like you,all of you.. all of my hard work climbing some hill but only to see you zipping past me with a big ass smile on your face and giving me a stupid nod. And then showing off your fancy technique...arrggghh

CommuteCommando

I upgraded from my aluminum entry level road bike to a 105 equipped bike with a lugged Reynolds 525 frame. The biggest difference I felt was in the descents. I had once hit 40 on the Al bike. Going down another on the steel bike, it felt much more stable, and I was blown away after looking at my Garmin track that I had hit 52.

nuke_diver

This is a good read for me too. I'm not a good descender On a given hill I can be top 1/3 up and bottom 1/3 down almost always. I have a neck issue which makes stay tucked in the drops harder and I am never going to be fast descending if I am not very familiar with the hill and where it's ok to let it run and where it is not. Adding to that is the fact that as I am older I don't fear death any more than when I was younger but I know that an injury is something that isn't going to be fun and is going to be harder to recover from. My biggest desire to be faster is to stay ahead of cars as much as possible as many of the roads that are tricky descents are narrow with no bike lanes so being able to avoid holding up traffic is a big thing for me since I wouldn't like it if I was the guy in the car