In my personal opinion, far too many people can’t help but doubt themselves in situations when doubting doesn’t serve them well. However, the opposite is equally true. Far too many people make themselves believe that it should be enough to whitewash their personal insecurities by fabricating and displaying some kind of self-assertive demeanor.
Both attitudes are equally likely to turn out to be a dead end. If doubting yourself causes you to avoid taking necessary action, and therefore prevents you from creating the results you want, the course of events in your life will often leave you unsatisfied. Then again, if you experience too many situations when you have to protect yourself by keeping up an artificial image of superiority or indifference, you’re likely to miss out on some depth and quality in your social interactions.
Of course, you might well be used to making yourself believe that none of this applies to you, or that it isn’t actually a problem. However, just for the heck of it, I’d like to encourage you to indeed consider it to be an issue when your quality of life is being diminished in any way similar to how I’ve just described it. Recognizing the fallacies and roadblocks in life, instead of sugarcoating them, is a good thing. Quite simply, because if we’re poised to name these impediments what they are, we might actually be able to do something about them.
Interestingly, the two “evils” that I’ve addressed grow from the same root. If you don’t have a comprehensive and elaborate understanding of who you are and what your life is supposed to be about, it’s easy for others to throw you off balance. On the other hand, if a lack of self-clarity causes insecurities that you haven’t dealt with and hiding behind a straight face is the only escape route you know, you likely won’t get anywhere either. In fact, you will only ever get out of this trap if you are willing to look inside of yourself in order to figure out what it is that you need to gain clarity about and take care of.
For the sake of self-honesty, it makes a lot of sense for us to assess our lives based on the outcomes we create. Whenever our course of action doesn’t give us what we want, we need take a close look inside to find out if there’s anything we can do in order to get out of our own way. Then again, this can be tricky if we happen to succumb to the temptation of resigning to self-doubt, only because certain people in our environment, or in society at large, see and do things differently.
When it comes to making pivotal choices in life it’s normal for us to look for allies willing to help us feel assured. In fact, all of us who coexist with other human beings within human society probably know what it feels like to wish for others to be on our side. Then again, far too often, the people we talk to are mostly interested in confirming and affirming their habitual viewpoints and interpretations of reality. People hear what they want to hear and talk about what they want to talk about, more often than not. Generally speaking, most people are much more avid to talk about what’s right for them than willing to think about what’s relevant and even crucial to others. Therefore, value-adding insights and perspectives offered by other people are indeed few and far between.
Nonetheless, our own intuitive responses to other people’s opinions can tell us a lot about who we are. Evidently, to a certain extent, we require alternative viewpoints and notions based on experiences that we haven’t made ourselves, so we can find out what’s right for us, and what isn’t. Therefore, we need to become proficient at recognizing which perspectives and opinions are actually useful, and which ones should be dismissed. We need to have enough clarity about where we’re at in life, and we certainly have to be willing to decide for ourselves what we consider to be real, relevant, or righteous.
At the same time, we need to expect to be wrong about ourselves, so we can detect our blind spots and fallacies. In fact, we need to anticipate that we can be more than we currently are, and we have to exploit our empathic skills and social intelligence. In order to learn about ourselves, we need to learn about others and comprehend the world from their points of view. In order to be able to relate to these points of view, we need to gain clarity about the reality we want to identify with. With this in mind, we need to focus on noticing the differences between those people whose opinions have a debilitating effect on us, and those who’ve collected valuable and relevant experiences that, in one way or another, can teach us a lot about who we can be.
At the end of the day, challenging people to know themselves means extending an invitation to them to go beyond what they believe to know about who they are and what is of vital importance in their lives. It means, telling them to choose wisely whose views and opinions they want to consider an opportunity to put themselves into question, and whose ideas and judgements they choose to ignore. It means creating conditions that allow for them to be self-assured, and still open to be wrong in those situations when the spirit of ongoing self-exploration offers to lend its support.
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