Why You Should Embrace Your Insecurities

Jon Guerrera
Living for Improvement
4 min readJul 23, 2011

“Each one of us requires the spur of insecurity to force us to do our best.”

-Harold W. Dodds

We all have them: insecurities that we’ve possessed since we were young. Insecurities that, when triggered, cause highly emotional responses and cause us to behave irrationally. These insecurities, at first glance, appear to be our arch nemeses. Powerful enough to deteriorate our lives and cause us mental anguish, but too deeply embedded in our psyche to separate as an external entity. In these cases, we are our own worst enemy.

The past year and a half has been a struggle with one of my deepest and longest held insecurities, with the culmination of it emerging in recent months. It’s amazing how years of positive thinking and optimism can quickly degrade into fear and doubt when an insecurity is triggered.

But if there is one thing I’ve learned from my years of studying happiness and psychology, it can be summed up by John Milton’s famous quote: “The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven.” The way I see it, I’ve been fortunate to have a life filled with friends, family, successes, manageable challenges, and leisure. Yet, insecurities have a way of instantly re-framing your experiences so that you’re the victim. Past successes can instantly become irrelevant. And I’m afraid to say that years of reading personal development material hasn’t done much to prevent this from happening. Although I’ve absorbed much knowledge on happiness and success on a logical level, insecurities play at a deeper level. The emotional level. And logical thought is the first thing to go out the window in times of emotional distress.

But for those who can maintain perspective and keep their emotions under control, it becomes obvious that insecurities can be a powerful tool for excelling. George St. Pierre, the current Welterweight Champion of the UFC, once told an interviewer that he pushes himself through his grueling workouts day in and day out with the fear that his opponent is training harder than he is. This fear is based on an insecurity, yet it is what drives St. Pierre to such unfathomable levels of skill and conditioning. If you’re ever unsure about whether your insecurities are helping or harming you, ask yourself the following: am I controlling my insecurities, or are my insecurities controlling me?

So insecurities can be used as a tool to excel as long as we don’t let them control us. Thankfully, there are effective ways to manage the emotional spikes that cause us to act so irrationally in the face of insecurities. In the past few months, I’ve developed a two-pronged approach for this very purpose. It’s powerful because it deals with both the symptoms and the root cause of insecurities.

The first technique is re-framing. One of the symptoms of an emotional attack from a triggered insecurity is the inability to maintain perspective. As mentioned earlier in this post, when you lose perspective, past successes stop mattering, focus lies on past failures, and the insecurity becomes magnified in its importance and emotional impact. One of the best ways to maintain perspective when this happens is to run the situation by friends who have experience in the area of life within which the insecurity lies. If none are available, reading the stories of others is a great substitute. The struggles, successes, failures, hardships, emotional intensity, and tragedies experienced by others will serve to put your insecurities in perspective to the grander scheme of what’s happening in the world. I personally use a combination of my favorite quotes on overcoming struggles and stories on Reddit.com’s “IamA” page to put myself back into perspective.

The second technique is communicating with your mind. Insecurities lie within your subconscious, yet most people haven’t the slightest clue how to communicate with this part of the brain. Techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, and hypnosis can all serve this purpose. As you diligently work towards removing the underlying issues through these techniques, you will find yourself having less and less powerful reactions when something triggers your insecurity. I’ve written extensively on this topic, and the best place to start is this post from a few months ago: How to Speak the Language of Your Mind.

“The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven.” With this idea in mind, never let insecurities drag you through hell. Take them with you to heaven.

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Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

Love every bit of how you described ‘insecurities’. Very true and hit the core of my mind.

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