I am curious about how this community views the cultivation of self confidence and building trust in yourself.
I am approaching my mid-30’s and I believe I have been very fortunate in my life thus far.
I am happily married with a loving and supportive wife. She challenges me to be a better person every day in the most supportive ways. I have a loving family, and luckily my parents are happily married and still living.
I have a job that I enjoy and most others envy, and according to my peers, I am a top-performer in my industry and well-regarded among most clients. Financially stable with eyes on the future for retirement and on a solid track to make that a reality in 25-30 years.
I have a small, solid core group of friends from high school and college who still contribute positively to my life and I enjoy keeping in touch with them.
I have hobbies that involve learning new skills outside of my professional industry. These things keep my mind nimble and stimulated.
Even though things are great from an outside perspective, I am personally stuck. I feel as if I am bad at everything and could always be doing better. I feel that I need to take responsibility for everything and do so because I believe it gives me some semblance of control. Yet, I feel like a total fraud who is incapable of making intelligent and well-informed decisions, both professionally and personally.
I have been in therapy on a weekly basis now for a little over a year. I am exploring this on my own with the help of my therapist, but I value perspective from this community.
In your experience, how have you lifted yourself out of the hole of not trusting yourself to a place in your life where you have started to trust yourself more? Have more faith in your decision making? Be confident in your decision making?
Thank you in advance for your perspective.
1 comment
It seems you’re mostly talking about being insecure about your competences and decision making processes, so I’ll tell you about those in my case.
Regarding competences, I learned to listen to feedback and ask for it whenever I was feeling insecure about how I was doing at work, for example. With some of the spontaneous positive feedback I got from people, I made an effort to repeat it to myself and also share with friends and partners and actually celebrate it somehow.
I think it has helped me a lot and strengthened the way I see myself.
With decision making, I guess I’ve never had that much of a problem, honestly, so idk. I’m always happy to spend some time with myself and that gives me plenty of opportunities to really get to know my feelings and thoughts, talk to myself and at least identify what are the things related to a particular decision I need/want to make. If I’m aware of all the surrounding things when facing a choice, it’s easier to make an informed one. I also ask for people’s input on where I stand and share my eventual fears or doubts or whatever.
I got the feeling through your post that there’s some pressure on yourself to do things the “right” way and to reach said “right” way alone, like you’d have to figure things out but yourself. I may be totally wrong on the feeling, but anyway. If that’s the case, then I also stress that what helped and helps me is sharing some of the process with friends and partners. I mean, they’re my peers, they love me and I know they don’t expect me to have everything figured out. I do the same for them and it helps knowing we’re all on the same boat, facing life the best way we can, even though we may have no idea what we’re doing eventually haha