Dealing with personal INSECURITIES

How to deal with your own personal INSECURITIES

The context here is when you are with people. This post is basically for guys ‘cause women in general are good at this.

Try these 4 steps:

1) Make a list of all the things you’re insecure about.
Put things like “I don’t make a lot of money”, “I don’t drive a nice car”, “I don’t look like Salman Khan/Aishwarya Rai”… whatever.

2) Then spend time accepting each of those things;
things that you can not change about yourself. Accept who you are.
Note here- there are many things that you are insecure about; can be changed / improved. I’d say do not accept them as they are; work on them and make the changes required.

3) Learn to laugh at the things you’re insecure about.
Sense of humor is necessary element…work on it.

4) Tell the fact (depending on the context and situation).
Telling truth is crucial. ’cause I personally believe hiding fact is cheating and that makes me bad person.
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Example -
Lets say- you are in an interview and the interviewer asks about a paper you flunked in during 2nd year of engineering [Well I flunked in all Electronics papers]. Here is what you might say -

“When I was going though engineering college admission process one of the current student warned me that getting engineering degree from this college is not easy…it takes minimum 6 years for an average student to complete BE here.
I took the challenge that I’d complete BE in 5 years and God! I did wonder! I completed that in 4 years with few repeat papers”

laugh on this and then put the fact right away like “my electronics was not good” or whatever is true reason.

Now, realize that what you are/do is what you are/do, and if they don’t like it, it has nothing to do with YOU. It doesn’t matter. There are lots of good people out there and they would like you for who you are; there are good many opportunities out there you would fit in.

Then imagine another one, and how you’ll respond to it. Go through the entire list. Learn to laugh at the things you’re insecure about.
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Here is another example. I was very insecure about my color when I was kid*. I was thinking people would judge me because of my dark color.

*till 7th grade. After 7th many girls, boys started hanging around with me and eventually I came out of that insecurity.

Well, now if a person asks me about my color (obviously only a jerk would ask you that; my girlfriend’s brother asked me that once ;) ), I would just laugh and tell the person –
“Yes I am dark and very photogenic…anyway women go crazy for dark men”
and probably I’d show that person my photo with my beautiful girlfriend – latest one…and…I mean latest photo and not latest girlfriend ;)
I would care less what the person thinks about me.

Take the time to really think through all the areas of your life that you are “insecure” about, and work out your issues around those areas.

I think this could be a GREAT first step towards building confidence with people.

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PS: 1. This post has borrowed some material from the talks I had with my best buddy Vikram about few of his individual counseling sessions.
2. Step 2 has been suggested by many selfhelp program speakers/gurus.