The awareness, the confidence and esteem concerning ourselves has a striking impact on to which extent we can lead a happy and fulfilled life. Self-awareness is something you can acquire by learning. It is hinged on knowing yourself, being aware of your strength, your weakness and your skills. You can learn this by heart and thus give your subconsciousness access to it.
- Character traits
When we know about our character traits, we will be able to cope with all kinds of feedback much more easily, no matter if it is accurate or not.
We know ourselves and we know the truth about ourselves well enough to stay calm. If we do not know ourselves well enough, any external feedback will get hold of us, especially if it is negative.
For this reason I deem self-awareness to be crucial for a self-reliant, i. e. independent life. If external feedback is the only source to rely on, our life feels like a roller coaster ride and our personality is veiled. Other people will perceive various aspects of us, most often those with resonate within themselves.
As a result, by not knowing yourself well enough, and by relying exclusively on external feedback, your personality will be blowing in the wind. Your own well-being is depending on others, and you are going to feel really bad when someone criticizes you. In other words, you trade a lot of power to your environment, giving away the control over your own mental condition.
- Self-confidence
The second aspect for an independent, self-relying life is self-confidence.
Self-confidence cannot be acquired in any intellectual manner. For this, you will need try out new thing and learn by doing them in real life.
By overcoming your own constraints, making new experiences, your self-confidence will grow. Every time you scaled an obstacle, you will start to feel confident about challenging the next hurdle, and then the following and so on.
Even if you make a mistake on the way or really mess it up, still your confidence will grow. Bad experiences help, too, can help to strengthen your confidence, because most likely insecurity is stimulated by uncertainty. The more we actively try, the more knowledgeable and experienced we will become. Uncertainty diminshes in more and more fields which encourages our self-confidence to grow.
- Self-esteem
We are in control of the level of the self-esteem we have. It is a matter of your very own perception related to other people to whom we compare ourselves.
By doing so, we again cede the power of control to others, and our self-esteem will surge and fall rapidly, depending on the people around us.
As a rule, all people have the same value. If you compare yourself to someone else, you try to equal things that do not fit together. There is no-one who is a complete likeness of you. Every person has their own character traits, strengths, weaknesses. Their life took a totally different course than yours. So why should another person’s life count less than your own?
If self-awareness and self-confidence have been developed thoroughly, then you shouldn’t compare yourself to anyone but yourself. Who am I compared to yesterday or the myself a year ago. Who am I compared with the best version of my own that I can imagine?
As I refer to myself, I begin to realise that I am in a process of change and development. Ideally, I will confirm my self-esteem and its increase, ceasing to compare myself with others. As a result, my self-esteem becomes gradually independent of my environment.
The Principle of the Three Pillars
By strengthening these three personality aspects we can become sovereign and independent of other people’s feedback and confirmation.
We become more relaxed and are able to reach out to others more easily. We will be less hurt and thus have less urge to defend ourselves. We can accept criticism in a better way and assess whether there is a point in it or not without feeling insulted or unappreciated.
We can do things that are important to us – in a way we deem right, because we do not strive for accpetance and appreciation anymore. Others will automatically begin to praise and appreciate us, as soon as we cease fishing for it.
As a matter of fact, we become authentic and we do things, because we love doing them, and not because we are trying to gain appreciation for it. With this attitude you become highly charismatic, and besides the appreciation you have learned to find in yourself, you will receive the praise of others on top.
Yours,
Aurel