Breaking Out of Your Shell

Feelings of insecurity are incredibly hard to overcome, as they require an shift in thinking about yourself and how you are perceived. Before discussing how to go about overcoming insecurity, it's best to begin with just what insecurity is. Insecurity can be defined as not feeling good enough to meet challenges in life or feelings of helplessness in conflict. It can also mean a feeling of being discovered to be inadequate or unsuited to meet responsibilities at home, school, or on the job.

Most people that have feelings of insecurity and want to do something about it will turn to self-help advice. While self-help can work if the desire to change is strong enough to overcome the inherent obstacles, in general most self-help techniques are not effective enough to create a lasting change. When overcoming insecurity, the advice "Start to think positively" or "Shift your attitude" may be great advice and adhering to it will certainly solve the problem, but it requires a change in core beliefs. Without knowing how to affect those core beliefs, simply saying "I will change how I think" won't do much.

Feelings of insecurity stem from negative experience and feelings of confidence stem from positive experience. So one technique that can be easily employed with a greater chance of success is to figure out all of the things that you do very well, things that people compliment you on, and focus on doing those things in a public setting (if appropriate). Repeated praise does wonders for self confidence. In that context, it becomes much easier to "shift your attitude". Overcoming insecurity may be a difficult task, but it's far from impossible, given the right tools.

Doing the things that you do well is the easy part. Once you have been praised and your confidence is a little higher, then you can turn to the hard part of overcoming insecurity. Pick out things that make you insecure and then do them. The trick here is to start small. Make a list of things that you feel insecure about and perhaps rank them from most to least insecure. Then begin slowly with the things that make you feel the least insecure and you will probably find out in no time that there was nothing to feel insecure about at all. Even better, if you receive positive feedback, that should give you the confidence to move forward and try the things on your list that make you feel the most insecure.