Confidence through experience is crucial.
Self-reliance, resilience and self-awareness are all rooted in experiences. To be reliant on your own efforts and abilities requires that you gain confidence through your experiences. This confidence influences your resiliency, known as your ability to recover or adjust to misfortune or change. This confidence also influences your awareness of your behaviour and emotional characteristics. That is not always easy.
Self-reliance supports growth.
In the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari, 2015), the author makes the argument that society has shifted from a reliance on family and community to state and market. Perhaps this is where some of our distress as a society rests. If our government and corporations set out to convince us that they can provide for our needs, we are not conditioned to provide for our own needs. Traditionally, the family and community taught children from a very young age how to be self-sufficient, providing safety to grow and boundaries to protect. When children lack the feelings of safety and security, they are not as comfortable to venture out to try new experiences. If the environment provides perceived insurmountable barriers, there is no opportunity for the experiences required to build confidence.
Very quickly, the gap widens between those who are eager to try new experiences, those who meet defeat at each attempt and those who lack the confidence to even start. You cannot be reliant on your own efforts if you do not have the opportunity for experiences that will allow you to build confidence.
Confidence can limit self-awareness.
As you gain confidence through your experiences, you also gain a feeling of certainty in your abilities. As you learn skills that achieve similar outcomes each time, you trust that what you are doing is correct. The patterns become habitual and embedded in your beliefs. The challenge arises when there is a need to change. If someone tells you repeatedly that you are the best and if you are rewarded for being the best, you feel that you are the best. When something changes in our environment that requires a different skill set or if someone better comes along, you are still operating on the belief that you are the best. This can close off space for personal growth.
Noticing our reactions and reactions of others.
The challenge is that you cannot be resilient or adaptable to change if you are stuck in habitual, reactive patterns. Repeated experiences of both defeat and success leads to repetitive behaviour. If your efforts are constantly rejected, you form belief patterns that you are not worthy or good enough. If your efforts are consistently met with success, you believe in our ability and that your efforts will be rewarded. Whether positive or negative, your experiences bind a lot of energy through beliefs.
Your cue to adjust your habitual patterns is based on the reaction it provokes, either within yourself or in those around you. Reactions offer information to inform you when new experiences do not match your beliefs. There is a need to stop and listen. There is opportunity for expansion and growth. You will believe that you are not the one who needs to change. Learning to pause and shift your reactions is transformational.
Supporting growth and expansion.
You’re human and you react. Logosynthesis offers a powerful model to neutralize automatic reactions to create space for growth. By identifying, isolating and neutralizing your energetic triggers to these reactions, you can be open to new experiences rather than stuck in habitual patterns. Whether your past experiences caused you to become stuck in patterns of defeat or success, there is benefit in neutralizing your reactions to allow us to be present to better understand others and the world around you. Your opportunity is to work with what shows up in your everyday life to build self-reliance, resilience and self-awareness.