Somehow, despite the fact that you might have lots of friends, a reasonable job and a life that seems happy on the surface, it’s still possible to feel inadequate on a day-to-day basis. If you feel like this and wonder if you’re good enough at work or home, it’s quite likely that you’re dealing with feelings of inadequacy.
It can hit you quite suddenly sometimes, whatever your gender or age, and have nothing to do with your actual abilities or performance. In fact, these sort of feelings aren’t unusual and have more to do with low self-confidence rather than what you achieve on a day-to-day basis. Such feelings of insecurity can shock us at times, especially if we’ve been confident in the past and they can cause anger, insecurity, a withdrawing from things you used to enjoy and lack of motivation. We all experience these feelings sometimes, but if you’ve felt them more lately, what can you do about it?
- Learn to regulate your emotions as they’re then easier to manage – for instance, negative emotions can diminish our ability think clearly and make decisions which have the knock-on effect of fuelling feelings of inadequacy. If you’re feeling like this, take a quiet moment to reflect on what’s just happened and how you might deal with it.
- Modify your expectations and don’t set unachievable goals; I mentioned this in my last blog too, but that’s because we set ourselves up for failure if our goals are consistently too high.
- If part of your inadequacy stems from your work, particularly if you’ve taken on a new role, get help with the things you’re struggling with. You may need to go on a course to help at this point, but remember that no-one is good at everything they do straight away, even if it sometimes seems like that!
- Develop some self-compassion and practice this every day, either with a short meditation each morning or writing down your strengths in a journal. There will be more than you realised, once you get started. Things that you may take for granted about yourself are probably qualities that other people admire in you. Not that you’re dependent on others to make you feel adequate, but recognising what makes you competent in a lot of areas will help you to feel better about being a capable human being.
- Ask other people for help – choose someone that you trust and talk about how you’re feeling.
Hopefully, by practising the above every day, your feelings of inadequacy will subside and you’ll go back to enjoying life rather than constantly doubting yourself.
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