Happy Sunday! I hope you’re staying in good health with your loved ones 🙏🏾
Main points:
Feeling inferior is a mental habit and can be reversed.
Someone holding a ‘superior’ position does not have the right to make you feel inferior.
When you work on your insecurities, you will dissolve the inferiority.
Feeling inferior is a state of mind. It is a habit that a lot of us have cultivated from young. And I know it's a state of mind because I only feel inferior in areas of my life that are filled with unattended insecurities. In areas that I've been confident, I don't have that problem.
I've seen others argue that we wouldn’t feel inferior if we didn't get put down by people who think they're superior to us. This is probably true and I don't disagree with that. I'm sure we’ll feel so much better if that energy disappeared. But it's still in our hands to not let others make us feel inferior.
In this issue of ‘Perfecting Life’, I’d like to share a few thoughts that have helped me feel less inferior around others. I hope it’s useful to you and please do share it with friends and family who might need to read this too!
01 Be mindful of when you feel inferior
Being mindful is a central theme within most of my newsletters because if you don't understand what's going on, you're not going to fix it. It's as simple as that. However, the great thing about feeling inferior is that it's relatively easy to fix compared to several other self-improvement tasks. So, take a moment to think and write this down:
Jot a list of areas in your life where you feel inferior.
Jot a second list of areas in your life where you don’t feel inferior.
Place them side by side and try to find a pattern.
02 What is it about this area of your life?
When I explored where I felt inferior in my life, I realized that these were areas I lacked confidence in. But, not only did I lack confidence, I also struggled with sticking to habits that could’ve helped me improve in that area and thus make me feel more secure. Here are a few more questions I asked myself:
What do I think I'm lacking in this area?
Realistically, which habits would help me sustainably improve?
In many cases, working on habits that directly improve your performance in those areas, will make you feel less inferior to others and generally while you carry out your tasks.
03 Be mindful of who you feel inferior around
So sometimes, it might not be an area of your life, but more specifically, a person or personality that triggers your feeling of inferiority. Again, for me, this boiled down to insecurities. These people and personalities would just help me project a sense of personal dissatisfaction which brought out the feeling of inferiority.
A lot of the time, they were probably just being themselves. And even if they did put on a superior façade, I definitely made it worse than it should’ve been. So finally here are the last few questions I posed for myself:
Which individuals or type of individuals do I feel inferior around?
What is it about them that makes me feel this way?
Do they have something that I wished I had?
If so, what habits do I need to achieve that?
Being mindful of all this will help you feel more confident around these people and thus accelerate your performance in tasks related to them. It will create a positive feedback loop that you need to feel better.
04 When it’s time to accept
And finally, as always, there will be a time that you just can't change your circumstances in order to feel less inferior. You have to analyze why you're feeling inferior and you need to engage in mindful practices to learn how to accept what you have and only focus on what you can control.
That’s all from me today! I hope you found this useful and I hope you try it out for yourself. Let’s work on ourselves in 2021 and achieve a level of self-satisfaction that can help us feel better and achieve more in everything we do. Have an amazing week ahead! 🙏🏾
Arun.
If you have any thoughts or questions, do drop me an email to hello@arunjayaraj.com or a DM on my Instagram.
About Me
My name is Arun and I'm a 4th-year medical student at King's College London. I'm also a certified personal trainer and fitness photographer.
Feeling inferior is a choice. Choose not to feel inferior. Choose not to compare yourself with others and choose to remind yourself that you are unique.