How to Stop Letting Self-Consciousness Ruin Your Relationships

Self-consciousness can certainly make it difficult to attract and to keep healthy relationships. Not only can it keep you from building new relationships, it can cause needy behavior, jealousy and clinginess...all the things which kill attraction and which drive people out of your life. However, if you’ve had problems with self-doubt, there’s nothing to feel bad about and no matter how impossible it seems right now, you CAN wipe out self-consciousness and become more confident...and it can happen sooner than you think. All it takes it first understanding what causes a person to doubt themselves...

The Root Cause of Self-Doubt

Self-doubt is born out of the uncertainty which comes from seeking validation from exterior things. For example, if the standard by which a person measures their own value is based on the approval of others, their fear of rejection and disapproval will be very, very high. This is at the root cause of social anxiety and approach anxiety. However, self-doubt can also be caused by seeking validation from anything exterior: failure, status, success, appearance. Anytime you begin to measure your own value by something which is exterior, you surrender a degree of your self-control over to it.

This is how people become controlled by the opinions and the perceptions and the emotional states of other people. This is what causes the fear of rejection or disapproval to be debilitating. This is the root cause of neediness, clinginess, jealousy and all those things which make it hard to attract and to keep high value relationships in your life. So the question now is: what can be done to stamp out self-doubt and replace it with rock solid self-confidence?

Self-Awareness is the First Step

Self-awareness is the first step to building genuine, unshakable self-confidence. Confidence which is not based on self-awareness is an illusion and will always be accompanied by an inner fear of “being found out.” The problem is that a lot of us don’t understand the difference between being self-aware and being self-conscious....and that’s what makes ALL of the difference. The difference is that self-aware people hesitate out of reflection and to gain more understanding about themselves and a situation. Their actions aren’t born out of the need to validate themselves, because they don’t measure their value according to exterior things.

Meanwhile, self-conscious people’s actions are mainly focused on gaining validation and approval. So an important question to begin with in order to build confidence based on self-awareness is whether any action or thought is coming from the need to be validated. The more aware of this you become, the more empowered you’ll be to build a personal sense of validation which belongs to you and to you alone.