The One Realization That Turned My Insecurity Into Confidence

In very early 2022, I found myself at something of a personal dead end.

I’d never been particularly confident. I’d always battled insecurity and fear and self-loathing, and things had just gotten a hell of a lot worse.

It was pitch black, a steady flurry of snowflakes dusted the highway, and I found myself almost unable to see the road through the tears that were streaming down my face.

As I drove through the night, alternating between sobbing and screaming, I wondered just how it had come to this.

It sounds incredibly melodramatic to say that all of this pain was over a breakup.

Even more so when you consider that the relationship had lasted less than a single year.

But in that moment, all of the struggle, all of the progress I’d made to overcome my inner demons (or so I thought), had been wiped away in a single moment.

I found myself back at square one. Miserable, alone, insecure, and cripplingly afraid of the future.

But far from being the end I imagined it was, this was secretly a new beginning.

Over the next few months, between bouts of crying and existential numbness, I looked inward.

And amid this crucible of all things terrible, I discovered a truth that had been the source of my lack of confidence, my insecurity, my people-pleasing tendencies, the reason I’d been such a “nice guy” for my entire life.

Alan Watts popularized a concept known as the “Backwards Law” - the idea being that counterintuitively, the harder you chase something psychological (security, love, acceptance, respect, confidence) generally the harder it will try to elude you.

There’s a subtlety to the way this manifests in our day-to-day lives.

I spent 26 years of my life CHASING the approval, the validation, the “Good job, Andrew!”.

Not because I wanted it - but because I NEEDED it.

Or so I told myself.

And the harder I chased, the harder I tried, the more insecure and hopeless I felt.

Interestingly, the very relationship that left me feeling completely obliterated, had itself only manifested as a result of the ONE time I had given myself unconditional permission to push myself out of my comfort zone and just see what happened. I allowed myself to stop chasing and to simply BE OKAY, and suddenly things changed.

But I didn’t learn the lesson. I didn’t understand just yet. And so as the relationship went on, my insecurity grew larger and larger and I found myself a victim of the Backwards Law. My fundamental belief that this girl was “out of my league” meant that I felt the need to “try” to keep her in my life. It didn’t feel “normal” for her to just “be” in my life. I needed to EARN IT.

The harder I tried to keep the relationship, the harder I pushed it away - things slowly getting worse and worse until they eventually culminated in my late-night drive past endless rows of streetlamps that appeared only as blurry streaks through my tear-streaked eyes.

The truth I discovered about myself was simple, but it changed everything.

The driving force behind this “Backwards Law” is this:

Every time I chose to chase approval, every time I people-pleased, every time I was “nice”, I was slowly chiseling away at my source of power.

When I tried to be confident, I was telling myself that who I was WASN’T enough. That subconscious belief doesn’t motivate a great deal of confidence.

When I tried to chase validation and approval, I was telling myself that other people’s opinions were more important than mine. Even further reinforcing the belief that I NEEDED to chase other people’s approval and validation in the first place.

The same pattern appeared in almost every area of my life.

The realization that changed it all was that I had been REJECTING MYSELF - in favor of the opinions of others, in favor of approval and validation.

In my rush to feel better about myself, I didn’t realize that the primary person consistently rejecting me was me.

That rejection of self was implicit in almost every action I had taken, caving to fears and anxieties about “what other people might think”, and constantly avoiding anything that would open me up to the perceived pain of rejection.

I had unknowingly been hamstringing my confidence, my trust in myself, for YEARS - decades even.

That realization has changed everything. My life is fundamentally different now. That night I spent screaming through my tears was the best thing that has ever happened to me.

I used to break myself into fragments, using some pieces as a shield to hide behind, and frantically burying all of the unsightly ones so that nobody would ever find them. In my experience, true improvement only happened when I stopped hiding from myself.

Stop rejecting yourself. Heal your relationship with YOU. That’s where it all starts.

You can watch my video about this topic here! https://youtu.be/1ZB9CGbnJLI