It’s perfectly natural to be afraid of failure or of coming off looking bad. Everybody has these fears from time to time. It’s unnatural, however, to be so plagued with worry that you feel like you can’t get a single thing done.
It can be helpful to write down each of your successes after they happen. Keep a success journal at your desk and fill it up with proud achievements and fond memories. When you feel incapable of anything and feel like you can’t do anything right, you can look over your list and remember what an awesome, capable person you are.
If you cannot tell when your responses stop being reasonable and start being ridiculous, try running it by someone whose sensibility you trust. They should be able to tell you if your worst case scenario is feasible or overthought.
Before you set out to do something new, you can even write down the best thing that can happen, or the best three things that can happen, so they are fresh in your mind when the time comes.
By only looking at the negative things that are distinct about yourself, you focus on them and neglect your positive qualities. If you have been hard on yourself for a long time, it can be difficult to think of anything worthwhile about yourself at first.
A helpful exercise to get you more comfortable with positive self-talk and to rein in your self-abuse is to tell yourself two sincerely nice things about yourself for every negative thing. They don’t have to be related. For example, if you burn your tongue because you didn’t wait long enough for your coffee to cool off and swear, “Idiot! That was a stupid move,” at yourself, you must then remind yourself, “But I do play tennis pretty well, and I have a great sense of humor. " It may seem odd, but you are shifting your attitude when you praise yourself.
Say a distant friend of yours from your music class approaches you and tells you they want to start a band, and they’d like you to join. Your automatic response might be “No way, I’ve never been in a band and you certainly don’t seem to know how to make a successful one – besides, I don’t think of myself as a musician and I don’t have time with classes and. . . " In this way of thinking, before anything has gone anywhere, you have already shut yourself down and denied any exploration into the potential of the idea. You could bond with that friend and their friends, get an interesting experience out of it, and have a new story to tell. Say yes and see where it leads you .
While having a few negative friends is perfectly fine, if you are surrounded by negativity, even if it is not directed at you, you are absorbing its effects. Even if your friend is pointing out the stupid looking hairstyle on someone else, if you happen to like that hairstyle, now you are feeling as though you were mistaken and losing confidence in your own opinion.
If you find yourself condemning other’s failures or decisions, think about why you are doing so. If your initial thought is “because they’re wrong,” think a little harder. Why is it wrong? In what context? Is it your cultural background or how you were raised that makes you think so? Would someone from another country or cultural background feel the same way? Just because someone is doing something differently than you would or is living in a way you would not choose, it does not automatically make them wrong.
If you’re self-conscious about your image, try going to a clothing store somewhere out of the norm and trying on a bunch of clothes that you know don’t suit your tastes. Laugh to yourself at your appearance in the mirror. You may actually find something that unexpectedly suits you. If not, you have your own familiar clothes which may seem a bit less ridiculous now. Just try new things as often as you can!
If you take action to improve the things you don’t like about yourself, you’ll be on your way to feeling more secure in no time. Nobody said it was easy to figure out what you want to change about yourself and then to go for it. But this is better than the alternative: forever bemoaning the things you don’t like about yourself without lifting a finger to do something about it.
If you try hard enough, you’ll always be able to find someone who is healthier, wealthier, and wiser than you are. But chances are, there are many people who wish they were more like you in some ways, too. The grass is always greener, and the person who you may think is perfect and has it all together may be wishing he or she were someone else.
Sometimes, talking something out is half the battle to solving it. You may be feeling worse because you’ve been bottling your insecurities up inside you.
To be clear, you shouldn’t aim to be the best soccer player on the field or the sharpest student in math class to impress other people. You should do it to make yourself proud.
This doesn’t mean that you should be super self-deprecating and laugh at your own expense all the time. But it does mean that you should treat yourself more lightly and with more forgiveness; if you laugh at yourself, people will feel more comfortable around you because they won’t be afraid of offending you all the time, and you’ll find that you feel more comfortable with yourself in return.
For example, if you’re going to a party, try to find out who will be there, what kind of things people will do there, what the dress code will be, etc, so that you feel like you have a better sense of what to expect. If you’re worried about giving a presentation, make sure you know how many people will be there, what the room will look like, who else will be presenting, and so on, so that there are less X factors for you to worry about.
Meditation can draw your focus away from insecurities and worries, leaving you with a sense of peace and calm.
