Is it possible to be confident and insecure

Professionally, those are the most satisfying situations because those are the riskiest. Those are the situations where you really stretch. But the other thing that happens is that their relationships become more authentic. If you're hiding a part of yourself that is integral to who you are, your partner, even if he or she has never heard of the shadow, knows. They know that there's something hidden because people aren't stupid.

They know there's something inauthentic going on. The more intimate a relationship gets, the closer it comes to the most embarrassing parts of the shadow.

Those things get hidden, and that creates a superficiality or an inauthenticity to the relationship. Well, if you're comfortable with your shadow, then you're bringing all of you to the table.

When you bring all of you to the table, the other person is much more likely to bring all of them to the table. You don't realize it, but when you're insecure or when you're self-conscious, you're being ungiving, because you're holding back parts of yourself because you're embarrassed of them. What the other person experiences is not that you're protecting yourself, but that you're being aloof, cold, ungiving, withholding.

When you're not holding on so tightly, and you can give more energy to the other person. What I find is that when you give energy to people, they blossom.

They settle in, and they're much, much more relaxed and willing to reveal parts of themselves. That's how authenticity and intimacy really occur. The way I would explain impostor syndrome is the feeling of fraudulence you get when you become aware that the image you're projecting doesn't include big, big parts of you who you are.

If I'm denying parts of myself, then I'm working hard to project a false image of myself. It's the work that you're doing that creates impostor syndrome. It creates that uncomfortable mismatch between who you are and this image that you're projecting of yourself. People with impostor syndrome are usually exhausted by the age 40 because they spent so much energy trying to keep up this pretense. It's like they're constantly running an advertisement about themselves.

That's exhausting. That is exhausting. If you make a New Year's resolution that you're going to stay away from carbs and sugar, and by day four, you're eating donuts, how much confidence can you have in yourself?

This is really important because people need to know that a big part of self-confidence is self-credibility. In other words, do I believe that I will carry out the commitments I've made to myself? If the answer to that question is yes, then I'm going to be confident because I'm going to believe that when I make a commitment, it will be done. Then, within the week, I'll forget I even made the commitment.

There are parts of you that are watching what you do, and when you make a commitment and then so easily break the commitment, those parts of you lose faith in you. They should lose faith in you. Self-discipline is an incredibly important component of confidence. If you can't believe in yourself, you can't be confident. I think it's unrealistic to think that critical voices aren't going to come up. I've treated people on their deathbed and they're still hearing critical voices.

It's just that their relationship to those voices has changed so dramatically. I guess you had to come to the picnic too, fine, whatever. Where we really get into trouble with critical voices is that we listen to them, and the critical voice convinces us that it's our voice.

And once you can start to differentiate who you are from who the critical voice is, that's half the battle. They gain their power from sheer repetition. Even if you just say, "That's a voice I don't listen to," inside yourself, within a couple of weeks, that voice won't have as much power. If someone comes away from this feeling skeptical or cynical, I'm curious what you would say to them about why they should give this shadow work a try. I would tell them exactly what I tell my patients: I'm going to give you some tools.

If the tools don't work, fire me. What I am finding interesting and distressful if that my confidence has been decreasing with age rather than increasing! Do you have any thoughts around the inverse relationship between aging and confidence? This has been the most on point article when it comes to me trying to understand and overcome my thinking, thoughts, ways, and just how I got about my life and relationship. This has opened up a new way of approaching myself when I begin to self sabotage myself because of my triggers or emotions from being hurt in the past.

This I feel would be very helpful in reviewing myself in a positive way and calm the mind and soul. Asking for reassurance. And it works! Sort of… When we feel anxious, ask for reassurance, and then get it, we temporarily feel relieved of our anxiety and fears. And while extremely uncomfortable—painful, even— anxiety is not dangerous. Or else something bad will surely happen. Ruminating on past mistakes.

Rumination is a form of thinking where we repeatedly review and replay previous mistakes or negative events in the past even though doing so has no real benefit but does have the side-effect feeling bad about yourself: Laying in bed replaying the mistake you made at your presentation at work for hours. Thinking over and over about that conversation between you and your husband when he said you were being overly-critical and you thought he was being insensitive.

Brooding about the mistakes you made as a father when your children were young. Like reassurance-seeking, rumination does kind of work in a superficial sense. Expecting too much of themselves. Confident people are anti-perfectionists. Once again, cue the vicious cycle… Perfectionism and the need to feel perfect are a setup for poor confidence and low self-esteem.

Falling in love often ends in heartbreak. Creating a successful company usually means failing at 5 unsuccessful ones first. If you stop fighting imperfection and learn to embrace it, confidence will follow.

Just like rumination is unhelpful thinking about mistakes or bad things in the past, worry is unhelpful thinking about potential dangers in the future: Imagining telling your boss about the mistake you made and getting stuck going over and over various worst-case scenarios. Thinking about all the negative, critical things your friends might be thinking about you during the party. Making decisions based on how they feel. All You Need to Know If you struggle with low self-confidence, a new strategy might be to approach it in reverse: rather than trying to do things that will add confidence or make you feel more confident, work on eliminating things that are killing your confidence.

Stop doing these 5 things and watch your confidence grow: Asking for reassurance. Expecting too much of yourself. Making decisions based on how you feel. Thanks great article! Brilliantly captured. Thanks for putting all of this into one article. Very helpful!

Glad you enjoyed it! By post author. Thanks, Cynthia! Nice of you to say, Kim! Thanks, nice of you to say! Glad it was helpful, Wynette!

Thank you, Avni! Great Article! Very well written and very helpful. Appreciate the note, Asawari! I love this so much! Excellent writing. Thank you, Kira! Glad it was helpful, Tracy. Glad you liked it! Tracy, yes!

Good one! Thanks, Jaya! Two great books, btw! This is definitely gonna help. Thank You! Awesome realisations! Yet we often forget that even the most confident seeming people can harbour a great sense of insecurity.

Often what we project to the outside is not at all what we feel in the inside. And by hiding what we feel on the inside, we stop others from giving us the reassurance and the encouragement we so desperately need. The privilege of becoming a psychotherapist is that you are forced to put every aspect of your own personality and identity under the microscope.

A process than can be painful and revealing, as well as deeply healing. I was too innocent, too scared of conflict, too open to given everyone their version of the truth.

Working with people seemed interesting, so I decided I should start my counselling training at one of the most reputable training centres in London. It took a couple of painful life experiences, and some gentle and empathetic trainers to help me understand that my fairy tale narrative was full of cracks, and that I needed to find a balance between my insecurity and my confidence.

That balance, as well as a healthy dose of blind optimism, helps me to keep stepping forward into life and push the boundaries of my comfort zone. I now know that it is inevitable that this will bring out a frightened, fearful of failure, and trembling self.

And that this side of me is just as loveable, if not more, than her confident sister. These two sides of me no longer compete for the driver seat, they walk hand in hand, Insecurity being held close by Confidence, and Confidence kept humble by Insecurity. And at the other side of the divide we find people who believe themselves to be so useless, so insignificant, so lacking in any skills, that they maintain an inner vigilance through self-defeating criticism to keep themselves from finding out that they too have something to contribute.

Insecure people latch on to confident people like drowning sailors to a lifebuoy. And pathologically confident people need these insecure people to reinforce their fragile sense of power. The journey back to the middle is hard for both ends of the spectrum, but one that is well worth making, as it helps us to reach out and make our lives become truly useful in this world.