How Self-Discovery Can Help Build Self-Confidence
Photo by Mohnish Landge on Unsplash
Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself – Miles Davis
How well do you know yourself? The importance of self-discovery
In my therapy sessions with clients, two recurring themes are self-discovery and relational issues. Many individuals seek therapy to delve deeper into their identities, beyond their assigned roles as siblings, parents, spouses, and friends. It’s not uncommon to hear statements like, “I don’t really know who I am” or “I feel like I’ve lost touch with myself.” Sessions revolve around exploring what this means and how to reconnect with oneself.
It’s hardly surprising that we often become disconnected from ourselves. From the moment of our birth, external influences shape our beliefs, thoughts, opinions, and emotions through our communities, families, the media, and society. For some, traumatic upbringings can also distort their sense of self, sowing seeds of self-doubt. It’s important to clarify that this doesn’t imply a rejection of family and community values, which are vital for our well-being and survival. Instead, it underscores the existence of an individual self within us, distinct from the roles we play in the lives of others. Exploring this truth can be instrumental in deepening our relationship with ourselves and, in turn, with others.
People come to therapy to become more attuned to their emotions and thoughts. By doing so, they can learn to experience their emotions and relate to others in healthier ways. While the idea of loving oneself before loving others has gained popularity, it can create unrealistic expectations that we must be fully healed before entering any relationship. In truth, healing needs to occur within the context of relationships, too. Although some aspects of healing happen in solitude, our entire journey to healing cannot take place in complete isolation. It starts with self-discovery and extends outward. By understanding and caring for ourselves better, we can begin to unfold and rebuild unhealthy dynamics in our relationships and communities.
Reconnecting with ourselves
One way we begin to reconnect with ourselves is through self-reflection. This can involve intentional solitude, therapy sessions, and journaling. You might start by asking and exploring questions like:
Who am I? How do I identify?
What do I value?
What are my needs?
What are my fears? Why do I fear them?
What are my boundaries and limits? What feels good and what doesn’t?
How do I perceive myself, and how do I feel about myself?
It’s also important to acknowledge your strengths, what you like about yourself. Most importantly, have you confronted your shadow? Have you examined it closely, embraced it, cried with it, and forgiven yourself? This process of extending grace and compassion to your shadow is essential, because if you’re unwilling to embrace it, I wonder if it is fair to expect others to know how to do so?
Stillness and silence can feel scary, because they tend to amplify the thoughts and feelings about ourselves and our life journey that we tend to avoid. How can we expect others to love and respect us if we haven’t learned our definition of love and respect? Why do we desperately seek this in others before understanding it for ourselves? I wonder, how helpful it is to enter familial, platonic, or romantic relationships when we’re strangers to ourselves? Establishing our own definitions for concepts, free from external influences, is crucial.
Building self-confidence through self-discovery
Along with identifying core values and needs, I enjoy helping my clients redefine concepts for themselves such as confidence. For me, confidence is rooted in deep self-awareness. It involves accepting and understanding all facets of oneself, especially the shadow self. When you truly know yourself, external criticisms and perspectives lose their power over you. You remain solid and unwavering because you understand who you are, what you think, what you feel, what you value, and what you need. This includes recognizing when you need feedback or help and being willing to ask for it.
Self-love is nurtured through the process of self-discovery, which, in turn, fosters confidence, ultimately resulting in enhanced self-trust. As we dive deeper into understanding and embracing all parts of ourselves, we cultivate a profound connection. When we gain insight, consistently align our actions with our core needs and values, and learn to trust our intuition, our self-confidence naturally flourishes. This journey reveals that self-betrayal is far more distressing than any fear we might hold, even the fear of losing relationships.
As I mentioned earlier, I enjoy collaborating with my clients to make these concepts practical. Confidence is built through practice and expression. Let’s practice redefining confidence together. What does confidence mean to you? How do you define it? What does it look like? Consider these examples:
Confidence means…
believing in your worth
doing what is right and feels good to you
maintaining your own vision, even when others disagree
not letting criticisms and judgments define your self-worth
approaching conflict with care and compassion
trusting your intuition
expressing and respecting your boundaries
expressing your genuine feelings and thoughts, even when it's challenging
leading with intuition, kindness, and empathy rather than defensiveness, manipulation, and hostility
embracing creativity and vulnerability
accepting failures, missteps, mistakes, and setbacks
practicing self-compassion
When we truly know ourselves, we build our confidence, and inevitably set a new history in motion.
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Love After Love
By Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each with a smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
