How To Overcome Feelings Of Inadequacy

In the last article we looked at some of the reasons why a person might be filled with feelings of inadequacy. In this article, we will look at how you can overcome it.

1 – Identify Inadequacy

The feeling of inadequacy results in you thinking you are not good enough to do something, or have something.

2 – Remember The Meaning Of Inadequacy

The feeling of inadequacy tells you that you have a negative subconscious belief which makes you feel as though there is something wrong with you.

This feeling also tells you that you might be lacking a certain skill in your life, which if you learnt how to do, would positively benefit your life.

3 – Determine Why You Are Feeling Inadequate

The feeling of inadequacy is usually caused by some failure in your present, or anticipated failure, which triggers a negative subconscious emotional memory from your past.

4 – Do Something To Overcome Your Feelings Of Inadequacy

If you had been aware of what I discussed in the previous article when you were a child, you could have stopped many negative beliefs from forming in your subconscious.

However because you were not aware of this, you now have to do two things.

1) Prevent any more negative beliefs forming in your subconscious.

2) Remove or replace the negative beliefs you currently have.

So lets have a look at some of the ways in which you can do this.

Question Your Beliefs

The first step you need to take to prevent accumulating any more negative subconscious beliefs, is to question your beliefs and the beliefs of others.

For example, if someone says something negative towards you, or you have a negative thought, question whether it is really true.

In most cases you will find that by changing your perception of the situation, you will no longer feel inadequate.

Also remember that although adults are far more critical than children of the information they hear from others, they are not immune to it.

This is because we naturally place greater emphasis on information we hear from friends, authority figures and society.

So if any of these are making you feel inadequate, start to question why this might be. As often we behave just like children, and accept whatever these people say to our own detriment.

Have An Internal Locus Of Control

Do not make the mistake of associating how you feel about yourself, with your abilities and accomplishments.

Otherwise whenever you don’t perform something well, you will feel as though there is something wrong with you, like you are just not good enough.

This does not mean you shouldn’t feel satisfaction and pleasure from the things you do in life, but rather to have an internal locus of control where you determine how you feel. Instead of letting someone or something else decide for you.

You Were Not Born Inadequate

The good news is that since you were not born feeling inadequate, at some stage in your life you learnt to feel inadequate, which means you can unlearn it.

One very effective way is to monitor your thoughts and reject the negative beliefs that come into your mind, by replacing them with positive thoughts.

This is also known as self talk, which is a term used to describe the thoughts you have and how you talk to yourself.

Self talk is often a reflection of the type of negative beliefs that are stored in your subconscious, and is one way in which they reinforce themselves.

For example, thoughts like “I can never do that” or “I’m such a stupid idiot” which are repeated over and over again throughout a persons lifetime, serve to deeply engrain such beliefs into the subconscious.

By stopping this negative self talk, and replacing it with positive self talk, you can repair some of the damage that has been done and prevent new negative subconscious beliefs from forming.

In order to successfully reprogram your subconscious, you must master your self talk. No exceptions.

Ask A Friend

As I discussed in the previous article, your subconscious emotional memories can be triggered by an external stimulus, causing you to feel the feeling associated with that emotion.

This emotion can then dominate your thinking, causing you to think or act in a way that goes against how you consciously wanted to think/act.

In other words, your feelings can make you feel bad, even though you are trying to make yourself feel good.

Because emotions can cloud your judgement, you may therefore find it helpful to ask a friend to see what they have to say about the situation.

You may then find that something triggered your subconscious emotional memory of inadequacy, causing you to feel inadequate.

When in reality, there was no need for you to feel inadequate because you did nothing wrong.

If you are unable to ask a friend, you can do this by yourself using a sheet of paper. On one side of the paper write down all the things you are telling yourself that happened. On the other side, write down what actually happened.

This will help you to see the reality of the present, by separating it from the emotional memories you have of the past.

Once you are able to separate your past from your present, you can then objectively look at the situation to see how it could be improved.

What you will usually find is that your feelings come from a lack of knowledge or skill, which if you were to improve, would also improve that area of your life.

Alternatively you may find that your feelings of inadequacy were entirely misplaced, and the reason you experienced such feelings was because something triggered a past emotional memory.

Experience, Experience, Experience

Whilst monitoring and changing your thoughts is certainly a very important step in reprogramming negative beliefs, if that’s all you do, it won’t be very effective.

This is because all the experiences we have in life are stored in our subconscious, which then affect how we view ourselves and the world we live in.

So unless you have new experiences in your life, you will be stuck with your old negative subconscious emotional memories.

It may be possible to overcome these negative beliefs by changing your thoughts, but without experience to solidify it, this change will largely be superficial and therefore will not have a lasting impact on your life.

You can spot superficial change by how you react to things. For example, suppose you are working on controlling your anger with your thoughts alone.

After a few weeks or months you feel that you have managed to control your anger, but then something bad happens and you loose it.

Afterwards you feel bad, because you thought you had learnt to control your anger, but obviously you were wrong.

In this example you can see how superficial change can give the illusion of making things better, when in reality no lasting change had been made to the subconscious.

The best way to incorporate new information into your subconscious, is to learn about it and do it. Using what you learn to guide you through your experiences.

For example, you may fear doing something because of some perceived negative consequence. However if you view all experiences as beneficial (whether they are good or bad) because you will learn something from them, you will be more confident to experience new things and find it easier to get through the bad times in your life.

This attitude of learning from your mistakes and then applying what you learn to your life is the very foundation of self improvement.

Summary

When you feel inadequate you feel like you are not good enough. This feeling usually comes as a result of a subconsciously stored negative emotional memory from your past.

Whenever something happens in your present that reactivates this memory, you will start to feel inadequate. Associated with these feelings will be thoughts of inadequacy, causing you to think and feel like you are not good enough.

To overcome your feelings of inadequacy, you need to monitor your thoughts by carrying out the advice given in these two articles.

This will help to prevent your negative beliefs from reinforcing themselves, and eliminate inappropriate feelings of inadequacy which were generated by something reactivating your past emotional memories.

In addition to this you need to experience new things in your life, and use those experiences to create new subconsciously stored positive emotional memories.

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