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insecurity | reddit flickr about search contact |
I believe that insecurity is the root of most dysfunctional behaviors. (Do you like me? Do you think I'm an idiot?)
Many have written about something called the "Imposter Syndrome", where successful people fear being found out as a "fraud", where all prior success is self-attributed to only being lucky.
Everyone has insecurities. The trick is how you deal with them.
One day I had an epiphany of how to deal with this.
I had recently started a new job. I had been at the new company about 30 days, and I was starting to hear some embarrasingly nice things said about me behind my back.
I was afraid I'd break into pieces when they discovered all my weaknesses and I fell off the pedestal. :)
So I pre-empted the event by writing up a self-evaluation which included my strengths and weaknesses, and gave it to my boss. Just so he'd know. So that I didn't have to fear about him later getting mad at me when he discovered that I often miss meetings, get lost, forget things, can be impulsive and emotional, etc.
Of course stating your weaknesses is not meant to be an excuse for when you make mistakes; the mistakes can still be bad, but describing your weaknesses ahead of time can help you and your boss work on plans to mitigate those weaknesses.
You have nothing to hide if you hide nothing.
Another example: you are invited to a football game but you don't know anything about football, and you're afraid the other sports nuts there will laugh when you ask how many more innings are left. So to pre-empt this, at the start of the event, you can make fun of yourself and say you don't know anything about football. :) Hopefully you'll have some other redeeming qualities that caused you to get invited in the first place, and then the football addicts might have some fun teaching you about football...
And here is one more technique: when you get some nice letters or emails, save them in an "I'm OK" folder, and then sometime if you are feeling really bad, read them again. :)
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