“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”- Sylvia Plath
How to Gain Your Self-Confidence Back
I think it is safe to assume that we would all like to be successful in life. Success is relative and so it will look different for every person.
Why are some people wildly successful and accomplish everything they want, while someone who is of the same intelligence and from a similar walk of life struggles to just get by? Is it fate, or is he just lucky? While luck does play a major role in life, success can’t be attributed to just this one factor.
Every psychological suffering we have in life boils down to one thing. Self-doubt, self-hatred, and self-denial…this is our biggest enemy in life and these bundle of doubts keep us from leading a truly successful life…somehow deep down we believe we cannot get the things we want from life.
A little voice inside our head tells us that we cannot get it, our feelings tell us that we should not get it, and finally, we get the evidence in our lives when we do not actually get the things we want.
We need to take a penetrating look into our lives and discover what doubts are holding us back.
The reason that self-doubt sabotages and limits everything we do is that it goes so deep into our being, and everything we do rests on top of it.
So if you try a spiritual practice or a self-improvement program to try to change your life, your efforts will not really transform you, if you have not completed and let go of your doubts. Why? Because deep down, these doubts express themselves in our thinking, by having thoughts along the lines of… “These things may work for other people, but nothing really works for me….” We try something but deep down a part of us doesn’t believe it fully.
Completing our self-doubts will pave the way for a breakthrough in our lives. We can then rewrite our future.
A breakthrough entails no time to change. It is an immediate transformation. From this moment on you are now open to life’s vast opportunities.
Why we lack Self-Confidence
Sit down and write down what you want from life. The moment you write down something you think you want, one part of you may already declare, “I am not going to have it. I don’t deserve to have it. It seems impossible. How can this even happen?”
When all these doubts start arising in your inner space, look back to when you first started having these doubts in your life. When did you feel the pain that these doubts caused in your life? Get into a quiet and peaceful space and trace back to the moment you started to give up on yourself, that was the moment that self-denial started growing in you.
Think of the times you felt crushed by something that was denied of you. Doesn’t matter how trivial it may seem now. It could be the time your father yelled at you for singing around the house, and after that experience, you never really felt comfortable expressing yourself through music. Relive it as fully as possible, involve all your senses, and then just decide to be done with it.
See clearly how this deep-rooted memory is keeping you from moving forward by unconsciously shaping all your behaviors. You need to renounce from a state of understanding, knowing that whatever happened was a learning experience and you simply lacked the right understanding and perspective to deal with it at that time.
For many of us our deepest self-doubt, self-hatred, and self-denial were exploited by organized religions. It is how they are able to exist, they convinced us we are sinners. Growing up in a Catholic home as a teenager I felt guilty for my sexual thoughts and desires. Much of our neurotic behavior stemmed from all these deep-seated doubts. Every time we fell down, we strengthened our self-doubt, self-hatred, and self-denial.
When you have identified key moments in your life that gave birth to your doubt try and experiment with this consciousness exercise to wipe your slate clean. I wrote about it here: How To Heal Your Past by Cleansing Your Consciousness.
Thank you for reading my post, I hope it gives you some insight into what might be holding you back from living a joyous life. Every day we have a chance to take control of our lives, we simply need to let go of our doubts and take intelligent action. Doing this we will grow our trust in our innate intelligence and learn to respond to life intuitively as it unfolds in the present.
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