Why Overcoming Insecurity Is Your Most Important Adult Work
- Apr 27, 2024
- 4 min read
Written by Jaemin Frazer, Author, Speaker & Coach
Jaemin Frazer is an award-winning life coach and author. He is the founder of The Insecurity Project and specializes in helping entrepreneurs, leaders, and business owners eradicate insecurity so they can show up to life unhindered by doubt, fear, and self-limiting beliefs.
Although personal insecurity is a universal affliction at some level, most people are insecure about being insecure and so rather than overcoming their fear, try and mask, medicate and manage it instead.
However, when you come to understand the exact nature of all insecurity and how it is created in the first place, it becomes wonderfully obvious that feeling insecure provides us with our most important adult work.
If you're intrigued, here are 3 surprising distinctions about how all insecurity works
1. Insecurity is natural
We are story tellers who must make sense of our experiences. In the difficult, upsetting, or embarrassing movements of our childhood, it is impossible not to personalise these painful moments against ourselves, assuming we are the reason it is happening.
In these moments, children inevitably form negative opinions about themselves.
The most precise definition of insecurity is that you are most afraid that your worst childhood opinion of yourself would be confirmed to be true by the world.
Therefore, all insecurity is built on a work of fiction written by a scared child.
No one survives their childhood without developing limiting beliefs about themselves.
Even perfect parents could not protect their children from developing irrational fears and self-limiting beliefs. (Nor would they want to even if it was possible).
This means insecurity is completely unavoidable.
Every human being who has ever lived, and is yet to live, will face this same longing for love, belonging and significance in the process of forming as an adult. Your struggle with insecurity is not somehow special or unique. It’s not that some people face the insecurity problem while others are spared, everyone develops this fear. If insecurity is the constant, the variable is what people do with it.
2. Insecurity is useful
There are seasons of life where having something to prove, driven by fear, neediness and insecurity is incredibly motivating. In fact sometimes this energy feels like rocket fuel or a performance enhancing drug!
The issue is that while it starts out as natural and useful, there is definitely an expiry date on both the usefulness and naturality of this fear. In fact, the longer insecurity remains intact and unaddressed inside you, the more toxic and maddening it becomes.
And then, after insecurity stops being useful to drive up performance, it becomes useful as the path for our maturity.
The gift within our insecurity is the resistance it provides. Growth never exists in a vacuum or perfect condition. It requires some kind of oppositional force.
From the deep dark recesses of our mind a voice of fear taunts us. The terrifying question of what would be discovered if we were to be laid bare, can either paralyse or energise us.
What if it’s true? What if you are no good? What if you are unworthy? What if you are not enough?
Sure, but what if it’s not true? What if there is no substance to this fear? What if I am inherently good? What if I am deeply worthy? What if I AM enough?
The voice of insecurity gives us the opportunity to find out which one is true.
3. Insecurity is removable
I have no confidence in the common thinking about what one is to do with self-doubt, fear and limiting beliefs. The advice of podcasters, authors, and athletes on dealing with fear frequently leaves me puzzled, while conversations about insecurity with practitioners in the personal development space rarely inspire me.
The general consensus seems to be to struggle against insecurity the best you can. Mask, medicate and manage the monster. It is my heartfelt conviction that we can and must do better than that. The natural cycle of insecurity is for it to be felt, faced, deconstructed, removed, and replaced.
The tragedy is not that children get wounded and afraid; it is that adults do not understand it is their most important job to go back into these wounds and set themselves free from the misunderstandings of their childhood.
With 100% certainty, this is a solvable problem when you are ready. Not only can you solve it, you must.
If you are ready to do this work in your own life, there is a clear and predictable path to follow as explained and unpacked in my book Unhindered – The Seven Essential practices for Overcoming Insecurity.
Jaemin Frazer, Author, Speaker & Coach
Jaemin Frazer is an award-winning life coach and author. He is the founder of The Insecurity Project and specializes in helping entrepreneurs, leaders, and business owners eradicate insecurity so they can show up to life unhindered by doubt, fear, and self-limiting beliefs. He is widely recognized as one of Australia's best personal development coaches and a leading voice globally on the subject of personal insecurity.
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