Practicing Self-love To Overcome Insecurities

June 16, 2022
Vanessa Angela Sugianto is a 20-year-old girl from Indonesia who is in her second year of university, at Widya Mandala Surabaya Catholic University. She is interested in mental health matters, and it was grown by the active support and action of her good university friend who introduced her to Be There Certificate. At the moment, she becomes the leader of the Students Journalistic Organization in her faculty. Moreover, she also has actively participated as the committee for some events. In addition, she was the 1st runner-up in an essay writing contest in the 2nd Asian University Virtual Friendship Games 2022.
This story took place in Indonesia

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In this modern era, people are always busy with their daily activities. Our vicinities are also always in the hustle and bustle condition every day. Sometimes, in our quiet inner self, we can have a sense of insecurity, and there can be so many things that can trigger it. Insecurity, not treated properly, can cause terrible physical and emotional effects on us, so I’d like to share a way for us to deal with our insecure feeling – by practicing self-love.

As the citizens in this hectic world, let’s take a peaceful moment to look at our inner selves, learn more about our insecurity, and take a look at how self-love can overcome it. Insecurity is defined as a feeling of lacking confidence and not being sure of our own abilities or of whether people like us. This feeling makes us feel inadequate, anxious, and less confident about ourselves.

In Robert J. Taomina and Ruinan Sun’s book, there are five possible causes of insecurity include:

• Lack of family emotional support, lack of physiological need satisfaction, lack of emotional intelligence, lack of openness, and lack of agreeableness

These causes can lead us to deal with the following five insecurity types:

• Relationship insecurity, social insecurity, body image insecurity, job insecurity, basic need insecurity

We can also say that insecurity comes automatically to our life due to technological aspects in this modern era. As science and technology thrive significantly, we can find social media plays a notable role in our life. We can watch any videos worldwide easily, and it can bring insecurity to us. How can social media make us be insecure?

The simple answer is that we tend to compare ourselves to people whom we see on our social media. Sometimes, they are richer, smarter, prettier, more handsome, and more talented. Subsequently, we look at ourselves, realize our conditions, and compare our weaknesses to their strength, which make us be insecure. In my own experience, I was insecure due to my social media, specifically Instagram.

One day, I watched my friend’s video which shows that she is not only exceptionally good at singing but also outstandingly pretty. Following that, I really felt insecure because I knew that neither my singing skill nor my appearance were at the same level as hers. I was not confident to post my singing videos on my Instagram feed. I was unsure about my skill, and I was afraid that other people wouldn’t like my videos.

Luckily, a way to cope with my mentioned insecurity finally dawned on me – by practicing self-love.

Firstly, I accepted my emotion —sadness and fear— from knowing the fact that my friend is better than me at singing, and my singing skills really needed to be improved. Second, I identified my weaknesses and tried to improve them; for example, I knew that my voice projection was wrong so I learned from YouTube videos about it and tried to fix it. Third, I willingly decided to love every singing video which I made, and I appreciated myself for being confident to post them on my Instagram account.

You can follow me in practicing self-love to overcome your insecurities. Realize that our insecurities cannot be avoided or ignored. So, what we need to do when we face the thing which arouses our insecurity, we need to give our correct response to it. Accept ourselves as we are; then, make our maximal effort to improve ourselves in the area where we are insecure. Don’t force anything that you cannot do or have, for you just need to be yourself who is unique and special.

Lastly, love and appreciate yourself after you have made any improvement and effort. After we practice loving ourselves more and coping with our insecurity, we can always support another person to do so.

We can equip ourselves more in helping other people who struggle with their insecurity, anxiety, and many more, by learning about it in Be There Certificate. It provides Be There’s 5 Golden Rules to recognize when someone might be struggling with their mental health, to support them, and to connect them to those who can officially help.

I encourage you to be there for yourself every time your insecurity strikes you, improve yourself to win over your insecurity, and love yourself wholeheartedly for every uniqueness that you have.

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