Thursday, March 18, 2010

Check, recognize and change your insecurities


Insecurities, we all have them and we all try to hide them to one degree or another. The problem is most of us are insecure about a lot of the same things, are we well liked, did I do a good job, am I good enough. However we think of expressing our insecurities as an assault on our confidence. Now as you know I am a big believer in confidence but I think we also need to accept our insecurities as well.

This does not mean that we have to get on our roofs and scream to the world "I am afraid of rejection" but it does mean we have to be honest with ourselves. Insecurities are one of the things that can stop us from getting what we want, not because we are incapable of the doing what we want but because we are scared. We are scared to test the insecurity and find that it is right, we are scared to admit we are insecure, and sometimes we are even scared of what it means if we succeed. Successes means that something we have believed about our self is wrong and that we have to reexamine or it means that we got lucky.

If we accept that we got lucky this one time we are even less likely to challenge that insecurity again. On the other hand if we succeeded because we can then we have to admit we did not know ourselves as well as we thought we did. At this point we have to decide if we are going to change this false belief about ourselves and make changes in our lives accordingly or if we are going to ignore the realization that we are more capable than we thought and go back to being insecure. The choice is ours.

I say take the challenge tackle areas of your life that you feel insecure about, talk about them with those you trust, and when you succeed don't give the victory over to luck, take credit for it yourself and challenge those false notions.

Have you ever driven a car that was seriously out of alignment? It pulls to one side and if you are not constantly vigilant you will find yourself driving off the road or hitting other cars. This is the effect that our insecurities have on our journey of personal development. The drag us away from where we want to go and we have to constantly make cores corrections to account for them. Confronting your insecurities is like taking the car in to the shop for an ailment. You find where the problems are and then you know what needs to be done to fix them, or at the very least why the car, or your life, is always pulling to one side.

So check, recognize and change your insecurities. It will save you energy from all the course corrections and let you enjoy the journey more. Have a great day.