Feeling Inferior
12 January 2007[Words: 738, Reading Time: 3-4 mins]
There are a few things that can really knock your self esteem. Recognising them and having a strategy in place to counteract them will do wonders to keep your self esteem intact and even develop it further.
Sometimes people are better suited to a task than you are and you may begin to feel useless in these situations. Someone might be better able to bargain, might know someone who can solve the problem at hand, might have superior technical knowledge than you.
Apart from knowing that your very presence is the most valuable way you give to the world, knowing your life purpose, your destiny helps in maintaining and building your sense of self esteem when you begin to feel useless.
Put simply your life purpose is similar to your gifts or talents; it’s how you make the world a better place. What you do specifically that makes the world brighter.
So say you love programming, for example. Absolutely love working with codes. Even if you don’t love it, you’re still exceptionally good at it when you focus. You might not think that you’re adding to the world but it can be a way to enrich the world - because you provide other people a medium of expressing themselves.
By the way, you don’t have to have just one medium through which you make the world a better place. You can do it in hundreds of ways!
It took me a long time to find my life’s purpose, and every day I’m refining exactly what it is and how I’ll fulfil it. In some way, I believe my life purpose, my destiny, is to help people get in touch with their souls and understand themselves. I have a desire to enrich the lives of those I meet. I’m really excited about my confidence system and I think that by fully fleshing it out and spreading it to the world I’ll do my part.
So when someone else is able to organise a charity drive for polio or make someone laugh when they’re blue, that’s how they’re giving to the world. By knowing and living your life’s purpose you can also accept that others enrich the world and be happy for them when they’re living their own life purpose, instead of feeling guilty/inferior because you feel you can’t contribute at that particular moment in time.
I don’t have a website to direct you to that’s head and shoulders above the rest in terms of Life Purpose but my coach definitely helped me in this area, as did candid talks with friends.
These two sites:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/01/how-to-discover-your-life-purpose-in-about-20-minutes/
Can help you but there’s plenty more resources (note to readers, if you do know of an empowering resource that helps people find their life purpose then please post it in the comments for others to enjoy)
What if someone is better than you at the very thing you’re really good at and proud of?
If you’re feeling a degree of jealousy remember this: Someone’s skill or no ability in no way detracts from yours. Just because someone is really good conversationalist doesn’t take away from your conversational skills.
You can also use that person’s ability as a source of inspiration, as a role model.
I think it’s great to have role models. They show you what’s possible and inspire you towards becoming bigger, better and fuller. It’s important, however, to realise what the purpose of a role model is – to inspire and motivate you, not to be used as a comparison when berating yourself. There is a tendency to humble yourself when you really admire someone, so it’s important to watch out for any negative effect that role models can play on your self esteem.
Finally there are times when someone is more important than you, and they deserve more attention. Perhaps for the success of some mission they are more vital than you, but that does not mean they are more valuable intrinsically. If you understand that life is not a zero sum game then you know that someone else getting attention does not take away from you whatsoever.
Even the simple process of understanding this makes it easier to keep your self esteem intact.
But if there’s one thing that’s absolutely crucial to remember is that the biggest way in which you provide value is your very existence. If you internalise this, your self esteem really will become unshakable.
One Response to “Feeling Inferior”
January 15th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Hey Colm
Well said about the role model. As a coach, we are somebody’s role model. Yet at the same time, we need to have our own role models too, to inspire us and to help us reach greater heights so that we can contribute more to those whom we can.
What a good way to transform jealousy to one of inspiration! Good one