“I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be. “
Billy Connolly
Overcoming insecurities can be a real battle. It doesn’t take much for doubts to make their way into your mind and if left unchecked can develop into insecurities that will gnaw away at your mind and erode your confidence. As with everything that emanates from your mind it doesn’t have to be your master, it’s your mind so no matter how bad things are at this point of time, you can change it to think in a way that is beneficial to you and not adversarial.
We live in a world where success appears to require strength, and as such it’s tempting to bury your insecurities in some hidden corner of your mind where if you don’t see them then you don’t have to believe that they’re there. Out of sight out of mind won’t get rid of your insecurities, until you admit that horror of horrors you have weaknesses then you’ll never get rid of them.
You don’t have to shout it out on the street that you have insecurities, it can be a good idea to talk them through with someone close to you but the important thing is that you admit that you have a problem. It’s not until you admit that you have a problem that you open your mind to dealing with something that you had closed away.
You won’t be able to go to sleep one night and tell yourself that you’ll be free of these destructive thoughts in the morning, they’ll have had time to become entrenched in your mind and in how you think and act, but no matter how entrenched this negative slime has become in your mind, you can kick it out and regain control of your life.
Your confidence and belief in who you are and in what you do are critical to your making the most out of who you are. You cannot and you will not generate forward momentum if you doubt yourself, you have believe that you have a bright future otherwise it won’t happen.
Your first step in the battle for you is to identify the root cause of your problems. Somewhere, at some point something has happened that caused you to start losing confidence in yourself and you I was going to say need, but given the gravity of the situation I would say that you have to identify what’s caused the problem.
Get your pen and paper out and start tracking down anything that could have caused your insecurities, it doesn’t have to be something major, it could be something which at the time seemed quite insignificant but it’s stuck with you. Go through everything and get it out of your mind and onto paper. It’s much easier to be objective about something once it’s out of your mind and you don’t have your mind playing games with you.
This is a good point to as well as hunting the source of your negativity to also look at your positives. When your mind is focused on everything that’s good about you it will displace all the fun it was having in trying to knock you down. Everything that you write down will remind you and your mind that there is more to you than you’ve been lead to believe.
Once you’ve isolated the root of your insecurities then you’ve got something to work with. Seeing your opponent in black and white makes the problem seem far more manageable than it was when locked up in your mind, it’s less threatening, unlike when locked in your mind it had a life of its own, now it’s something that happened, a few words on a bit of paper.
Once you’ve your root cause take the time to work out why it’s impacting on your confidence and sense of security. Again, get your pen and paper out and have a brainstorming session as to why it affects you, get down every reason that you can think of no matter how silly you might think them, it could be that one silly reason is the key to unravelling your problem.
Going through why you’ve allowed yourself to be affected negatively can be a negative process so make sure that your lists of positives are within easy reach. It’s an annoying trait of our species that we find it so easy to forget all the compliments and the positives that we receive, for some reason our minds revel in reminding us of all of our negatives.
Given that being on the receiving end of a cerebral assault of all of our negatives real and imagined can stop us from taking positive action, it does make me wonder if our minds would much rather that we didn’t push ourselves, and that maybe pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones is alien to how our minds operate. One of these millennia I need to work on that thought.
You need to examine each of the strands that make up your root cause and where there is something that’s genuinely negative, you need to find ways to heal or to remedy what’s happened, maybe what you need to do is to turn negatives into positives, or maybe it’s a case of coming to terms with something that’s happened and finding closure. For all the strands that are either fictions of your mind or completely irrelevant, you need to recognise them for the waste of your time that they are, accept that they’re a load of cerebral drivel and kick them out of your mind.
Right, you’ve deal with the root cause, now you need to find to find a way to deal with all of the negative habits that you have developed as a result of your insecurities.
One of the worst, at least from my perspective is when people compare themselves to others. I can understand why they do it, their insecurities have eroded their sense of security in who they are and I’ll concede that it’s natural for them to compare themselves to their more successful acquaintances and work colleagues.
It might be a natural thing to do but it’s such a destructive habit because they use the successes of their acquaintances and work colleagues to reinforce how useless they are. They get lost up in their own uselessness and forget that their more successful colleagues have their own difficulties to content with. Those individuals also forget that there could be people looking at them, envying the success that they have had and comparing it to their own miserable lives.
By focusing or rather latching your attention onto the lives of your more successful acquaintances you forget about that most important life, your own.
Look to your own life, look at your successes and not your failures. We’ve all had failures, they’re a bloody nuisance but a useful tool to help you learn and motivate you. Look at ways that you can enhance your life rather than tearing it down, look at ways that you can boost your professional career, embrace change rather than clinging to the past and decide on the life that you want to lead and take action to achieve.
Your insecurities will stop you from realising what you’re good at and making a star attraction of your weaknesses. Weaknesses may be a nuisance but nobody is perfect, we’ve probably all got things about ourselves that we’d like to change, the trick is to exploit your positives to their full potential.
If you have personal weaknesses such as low self-esteem then it’s important that you work on those because the less personal negatives you have the more whole you are, the more you can live life and the more likely you will be to be all that you can be. Any professional weaknesses that you have such as project management should be worked on but not to the detriment of your strengths. It’s your strengths that will ensure that you succeed and as such you need to take every opportunity to enhance them.
Learn to work on how you think. Your insecurities will cause you to think negatively about yourself so get into the habit of being able to shout down that negativity with either positive or funny thoughts. It’s not easy being negative when you’re thinking good things about yourself or if you’re smiling.
Get into the habit of not taking yourself too seriously, because when you do you will always find things to criticize. Laugh at yourself, whilst being self-deprecating is a cause for concern, self-deprecating humour can help you to see the lighter side of life. There have been more than a few times that I’ve had to explain to people that I’ve been joking, especially when they think that I’m being negative, but that in itself helps you to dispel negative thought by showing you just how ridiculous it is.
Instead of talking yourself down, get into the habit of talking yourself up. Remind yourself of all of your positives, have positive notes stuck up where you can see them, look at yourself in the mirror and say positive affirmations out loud. The more that you talk yourself up, the positive that you are about yourself, the more you do to recondition your mind to think more positively.
Rather than beating your chest and saying, “woe, woe, and possibly even more woe,” get into the habit of taking action. You might have to take it in small steps at first, but each forward step that you take builds your forward momentum, and each step forward that you take is a visible reminder that you are capable of achieving whatever you put your mind to. I think therefore I can be. What can you be?
Whilst you might have to do what your boss wants you to do and that you don’t get paid enough to do what you want to do, there is nothing stopping in this universe that can stop you from creating a reality in which you can live with what you have whilst striving to exceed and build the future that belongs to the person that you really are.
We are all, whether we like it or not infinitely more capable than our minds allow us to believe, it is however up to you to find the real you and launch yourself up the world. You are capable of achieving great things but you have first to believe in yourself to begin that journey. It’s your mind that’s causing all of these insecurities, they are all too real to those who suffer them but at the same the solution is in regaining control of the mind, that rascally collection of cells that has the power to raise us up, to cast us down or to do whatever we require of it. It’s your call, identify the root cause of everything that’s holding you back and deal with it; identify all of the negative habits that your insecurities have caused and deal with them, it’s as simple as that, all that you have to do is to take action and find that belief that you had in yourself when you were a child, it’s still there, you’ve just temporarily mislaid it.