Day 10–30 Days of Journaling for Self-Discovery: A fear or belief that has held me back
It’s 10 of my 30-day journaling for self-discovery through challenge. In my previous post, I shared one of my favorite travel memories and even shared a stressful travel experience (I have a few more if you’re interested!).
Today, I’m diving deeper as the prompt is: what is a fear or belief that has held me back? How can I change it to feel more confident?
A belief that held me back
For some reason, writing about a belief that has held me back is hard. My mind keeps blanking and what I do write, I keep deleting.
It’s not that I don’t know what the belief is; I KNOW it’s that I’ve never felt good enough and I’ve written about some of the negative views I’ve had about myself here.
However, today, I feel like shutting my laptop and never posting again.
I believe there are a couple of reasons for this:
- writing about it brings out some of the fears and insecurities I have around not being enough (you suck at writing, no one wants to hear what you have to say, your writing sucks, why are you even writing on Medium)
- Sometimes, I’m unsure if I’ve become more confident
I know that the fear I have around writing about not being good enough is my lizard brain trying to protect me by avoiding uncomfortable feelings. I also know that I am far more confident than I used to be.
How I changed this belief
I used to believe I wasn’t smart enough, that I was terrible at my job, and that people were only friends with me out of pity, secretly disliking me;
My previous job and therapy both played a role in changing how I see myself. At my previous job, I realized I was good at my job and I’m great at connecting with people (you would think that people wanting me to stay in a role when I left a job was a sign, but I had too much self-doubt to see it that way). Through therapy, I realized that none of the stories I told myself were true
Other things that helped were
- feel good playlists
- journalling (writing about my feelings, letters to myself, and lists of the things I know that I’m good at)
- my gratitude practice
- finding practical ways of dealing with my automatic thoughts
- working on internal validation
- sharing my insecurities, fears, and failures with people and realizing that a lot of people feel the same
Conclusion
Reflecting on my journey, I’ve grown more confident by facing fears and working on the negative beliefs I have held. Through journaling and therapy, I developed self-assurance. In essence, my commitment to self-discovery cultivated newfound confidence.
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