Self-reflection invites self-awareness, and self-awareness enables you to better regulate your emotions.
From this, we can get a deeper understanding of why we feel the way we feel and make positive steps towards change and growth.
Better emotional regulation equates to less anxiety.
Less anxiety means a more peaceful, contented, and stress-free life.
Who we are at the core, is neither our social roles, our attachments, our behaviours, our coping strategies nor our possessions, but that inner searchlight we brighten or dim by choice.
As a result of not fully embracing ourselves in a loving way, we believe one set of our characteristics is lovable and worthy and another is not.
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We define ourselves by comparison, where we see a positive reflection, we feel good, and where we observe a negative reflection, we question who we really are and experience a feeling of inadequacy, or low self-esteem.
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This is partial self-rejection, and partial self-love.
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, "My son, the battle is between two "wolves" inside us all.
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"
The old Cherokee simply replied, "
The one you feed."
Lacking self-confidence is something most of us struggle with at some point in our lives.
When we don’t see ourselves as worthy, smart, intelligent, beautiful internally and externally, we tend to develop a mindset that drives maladaptive behaviours and takes us further away from our loving Inner Self.
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If we constantly carry a mindset of not feeling worthy, we will pretty much do anything we can to avoid feeling that way, in many cases leading to addictive behaviours, trying to change the way we look, identifying with a particular group and in some cases even changing our physical look through surgery.
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You are here because you probably realise how destructive that belief can be, from being unable to meet new people to not seeing any worth in what you bring to the world by simply being you.
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Maybe you crave that sense of inner freedom that comes with full self-disclosure, visibility, and acceptance of the person you are…perhaps you’re at the stage of your life where you no longer know where you start and end?
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Eventually we get tired of being our very own worst critic. Sooner or later, we realise that mindset simply does not serve us in the long run at all…
So, we create an external dependency on others to celebrate features of our character we believe to be worthy of love.
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We play a role and pigeonhole ourselves into a collective narrative that enables us to feel validated, not realising that sense of wellbeing is only being felt, from hiding the parts of ourselves we don’t want the world to see.
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By definition then, our reality has become somewhat of an illusion.
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In doing this, we create a set of background problems for our Inner Loving Self.
These problems become deeply seated in the blind spots of our psyche and then show up in our life as issues we don’t understand (jealousy and insecurity in relationships, lack of assertiveness, poor or no personal boundaries etc.) and can leave you vulnerable to abuse.
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In this way, we erode our sense of self by developing a Pick and Mix attitude to our very own existence which then manifests itself in behaviours and ways of being, only to fit in and feel connected.
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Ultimately then, a lack of self-confidence is rooted in low self-esteem, and the solution to having low self-esteem is to investigate why you have formed that opinion of yourself in the first place.
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And when we look deeply within, we find that your ‘self-talk’ isn’t really you at all, but software, running on autopilot, a self-sabotaging program that endlessly self criticises, based purely on the opinions of other people.
