On Purpose with Jay Shetty - 3 Deep Insecurities We Have and 3 Powerful Steps to Overcome Them

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

Our insecurities are a reflection of how we view ourselves and how we take people’s comments about us. If we let comments and thoughts that aren’t our own dictate how we live our lives, we will only end up with deeper insecurities.The more we let other people’s thoughts and opinions affect our own decisions and how we see ourselves, we become blind to who we really are and the potential buried deep within us. We can not let these words continue to decide for us. In this episode of On Purpose, Jay Shetty tells us how to find our own voice and turn these insecurities into stepping stones for healing and self-improvement. Sama Tea is now available! Go to http://samatea.com/onpurpose to order a box of Sama now and get access to our free live monthly tea parties, be the first to try out new tea flavors and receive a free exclusive download that shows my personal routine and rituals.Key Takeaways:00:00 Intro00:47 We all have insecurities02:49 Body image issues are usually from other people's comments 10:32 Assess your desire to be involved11:48 The real definition of confidence17:06 Sign #1: Saying yes to everyone19:26 Sign #2: Constant seeking of validation19:55 Sign #3: We overcompensate21:51 Developing confidence and becoming successful are different planesLike this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jay Shetty and on my podcast on purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Hart, Louis Hamilton, and many, many more. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real-life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. What if you could tell the whole truth about your life, including all those tender and visible things we don't usually talk about?

I'm Megan Devine. Host of the podcast, it's okay that you're not okay. Look everyone's at least a little bit not okay these days, and all those things we don't usually talk about, maybe we should. This season, I'm joined by stellar guests like Abbermote, Rachel Cargol, and so many more. It's okay that you're not okay. New episodes each and every Monday, available on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. What do a flirtatious gambling double agent in World War II?

An opera singer who burned down an honorary to kidnap her lover, and a pirate queen who walked free with all of her spoils, haven't comment. They're all real women who were left out of your history books. You can hear these stories and more on the Womanica podcast. Check it out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. When you meet someone who's arrogant or overcompensating as I was saying, often it's because they're feeling an insecurity. So when you send some arrogance from someone,

you can actually, if you really pay attention, you'll notice that they're actually dealing with a deep insecurity. And what that changes is that you now realize that it's not that that person is overconfident or that they think that much of themselves, it's actually that they probably don't think enough of themselves. Hey everyone, welcome back to on purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow. Now, today we're talking about insecurities. We all have them.

We all have them. We all experience them. And whether you're someone that considers yourself to be confident or has most of your life together, I'm still sure that you have moments in your days, your weeks, your months, your years where you feel insecure. Think about it for a moment. When was the last time you felt insecure? Was it this week at a dinner table over a conversation? Maybe it was about a subject that you don't know so much about and you felt that everyone around you was highly educated or had an interesting opinion about it. You didn't even know what they're talking about. Or did you feel insecure on a work Zoom call? Because someone had lots of great questions, lots of great ideas. Maybe they came up with something that was rewarded or talked of highly by your colleagues and

peers, but maybe people didn't love your idea. Or you didn't even feel that you had something to offer. Or maybe you felt insecure in your partnership. Maybe you weren't feeling the attention from your partner. Maybe you were feeling a sense of discomfort. And they didn't notice or they didn't recognize it. The incredible thing about insecurities are they show up in so many different places. Are they show up in so many different places? They show up personally, professionally, with our partners, with our parents. They show up in each and every area of our life. And the interesting thing about insecurities

is that if you do nothing about them, they continue to grow. They continue to get worse. If you ignore them and just hope that they're going to go away one day, unfortunately, they don't. Now, I was reading an article on Vogue that I found to be really, really fascinating. And they were talking about how the survey that they did

found that approximately 99% of people could remember the first time they experienced an insecurity and where they were when it happened. And the average age that respondents could recall first developing insecurity was 16. And the findings show that men were 35% more likely than women to have first been insecure about their personalities or abilities, while women were 16.8% more likely to have first developed insecurities about their bodies. And I know you can relate to that. I know we can all relate to that. Now the study and the article went on to say that about 59% of people who responded that they deal with body image

issues said that insecurities were initially brought on by other people's comments. However, in contrast, most people who struggle with feeling insecure about their personalities, abilities, or aspects of their personal life responded that those negative thoughts have largely been self-imposed. Notice how fascinating that is. That if it's about your body, it's based on other people's comments. And those comments may not even have been directly to you. Sometimes they are.

I saw this great video on TikTok I came across the other day. And I was scrolling through my for you page and I found this guy, but he was talking about how he posted a video a couple of days before. And it was a video I believe at the no time to die, 007 Premiere. And it was one of those cameras

that kind of goes around the base, right? It does this 360 thing and you stand in the middle. So he'd posted that. And he said that that post got over 10,000 negative comments, 10,000 negative comments. And they were all directly towards him. And they were all making jokes about his body. And so he was reading out some of the comments. And I'm trying to remember what some of them said But some of them were called yet this wasn't casino royale. It's chicken royale

the man with the golden gut There were just so many examples of negative comments and He said something he said that he could take them as lighthearted banter and fun But he said there are people out there who will be thinking about this until they go to sleep. And he said, please, everyone who's leaving these comments, please, please, please take a moment to realize there's a human on the other side of the screen. And we can see that through this study that so many of our body image issues, 60% nearly say it comes from other people's comments. So that's when

the comments are directly at you, but often it comes from comments about weight, about physical image that are just said in your vicinity. And so what does this teach us? What are we learning here? When we have an insecurity about our body image. What we're learning is that what we hear, what we read, what we see is going to inform what we think we should be. What we hear, what we read, what we see is going to inform who we think we should be. So if we're only reading gossip magazines, if we're only seeing what the mainstream media wants us to see, if we're only hearing and reading that, we're going to feel pressure to be that. This is group think bias because you're surrounded by a group that thinks or feels a certain way, and therefore you adopt the same behaviors and mindsets.

So if you've been struggling with your body image for a long time, I want you to think about what are you reading? What are you hearing and what are you seeing the most? And how could you now this week read here and see different things? I want you to expose yourself to campaigns that have a positive body image. I want you to follow people on social media that you believe are impactful towards you and your beliefs on body image. See, we can't always change from the inside out if we don't start from the outside in sometimes. It could be either raw. But if you're someone who struggled for a while, we need to start changing your environment.

And I want you to deeply think about this because body image is something that we all struggle with. And it's something that we're constantly identifying with ourselves. Now, in the Bhagavad Gita, which is the book that I talk about, the first lesson in the Bhagavad Gita is, you are the soul, not the body. And CS Lewis interprets that best in my opinion. He said, you don't have a soul, you are the soul, and you have a body. And it's amazing that something we have has become what we use to define how we feel about ourselves. It's like saying, I let my clothes define who I am, because your body is just simply something you're wearing on top of your consciousness, and you're

letting that which is simply material and physical define how you feel about yourself. Imagine you let your clothes define how you feel about yourself. It's incredible to think that, but we're doing that with our body, which is a garment, which is a set of clothes. Now that is me, we shouldn't take care of our clothes, it isn't me, we shouldn't take care of our body. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take care of our body, but we also have to realize that we are not our bodies.

So when it comes to body images, again, it's coming through other people's thoughts, other people's comments. Let's really reflect on that. But it then says that our negative thoughts about our personality or abilities usually comes from our own mind. So now it's not even about everyone else out there. Now it's not even about the opinions, the expectations,

the reflections, the projections. It's about us, that voice in your head, that inner critic that says, you didn't come up with a good idea. You don't know what you're doing. You're not good enough, you're not smart enough. What do we do about that voice? What we have to do with that voice is we have to communicate with it. If you try to ignore that voice, it will get louder and louder and louder like an alarm. Because what that voice is doing is showing you something that you may want to improve. It's a signal and an alert.

So if I'm at a conference and I'm about to speak, I've been invited there to give a keynote, to do a Q&A, to do a fireside chat, and I'm listening to the speaker before me. And let's say the speaker is speaking about something I know nothing about. My insecurity signal goes up, and I think, oh, maybe I need to know about this. I know nothing about this. And in that moment, the alarm is so loud that you can't make a clear decision. So what I'll do is, I'll sit with that later on,

and I'll say, well, do I really want to learn about that? This actually happened recently. I was at a conference, I was hearing someone talk about crypto and NFTs and, know blockchain and and I know a fair bit from my digital background but I haven't immersed myself in it and I walked away thinking that's what I need to know and then I started spending more time on it and I realized that as much as I find it interesting and I want to be involved in the space it's not something I want to obsess over and so the first point is you're opened up to the signal. You then want to make time for yourself to reflect, consider,

and really what I would say is assess your desire to be involved. And then you get to make a decision. Don't make a decision before it's moved on from being a distraction. What we do is we make the distraction our decision, but you can wait a bit longer and decipher whether it truly is something that you want to care about. So this article is brilliant, by the way, that I'm sharing some of the studies from. It says that the good news is that developing insecurities when you're young doesn't mean they'll stay with you forever. In fact, the survey found that over 50% of women and over 59% of men surveyed now feel that they've fully come to love and accept themselves. And so dealing with insecurities, the study shows gets better with age. And it talks about how actively working on loving things about yourself,

one step at a time may help to find self-acceptance. And this is something that really blows me away. It's the definition of confidence. I checked this a few years back and it really stuck with me. So confidence is a feeling of self-assurance, arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities. Notice how confidence doesn't come from other people valuing you, validating you.

It comes from you, valuing and validating yourself. So let me ask you that question now. When was the last time you did that? When was the last time you sat down and I want you right now to on a piece of paper, and I'm gonna do this while I'm talking to you because I believe it's so important. I want you to grab a pen and piece of paper sitting in my friend's desk.

So I'm about to do this on his. But I'm about to just put a line down the middle of the page and I want you to write on one side abilities and on the other side I want you to write down qualities and I want you to make a list of your abilities that you value and your qualities that you value. So one of my abilities that I value is my ability to communicate effectively.

I believe that I'm able to understand, synthesize, make things really simple, accessible, practical, actionable. And by the way, it's hard for me to say that because I start thinking about it, I said, oh, wow, am I being egotistic? Am I being arrogant? Are people going to judge me? But I'm not saying it from place of arrogant. I'm trying to just live up to this definition

that is given of confidence. I want to be confident. I don't want to be arrogant. I don't want to be narcissistic." In the 1680s, a feisty opera singer burned down a nunnery and stole away with her secret lover. In 1810, a pirate queen negotiated her cruise way to total freedom, with all their loot. During World War II, a flirtatious gambling double agent helped keep D-Day a secret from the Germans.

What do these stories have in common? They're all about real women who were left out of your history books. If you're tired of missing out, check out the Womanica podcast, a daily women's history podcast highlighting women you may not have heard of, but definitely should know about. I'm your host Jenny Kaplan and for me, diving into these stories is the best part of my day. I learned something new about women from around the world and leafyling amazed, inspired, and sometimes shocked. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is what it sounds like inside the box-paw. I'm journalist and I'm Morton in my podcast, City of the Rails. I plunge into the dark world of America's railroads,

searching for my daughter Ruby, who ran off to hop train. I'm just like stuck on this train, not now. It's where I'm gonna end up, and I jump. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters, I'm stuck on this train, God knows where I'm going to end up. And I jump. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters living outside society, off the grid, and on the edge. I was in love with the lifestyle and the freedom

this community. No one understands who we truly are. The rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood, history, and the thing we call the American dream. It's the last vestige of American freedom. Everything about it is extreme. You're either going to die, or you can have this incredible rebirth and really understand who you are. Come with me to find out what waits for us and the city of the rails.

Listen to city of the rails on the I Heart Radio appio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Or cityoftherails.com. I'm Jay Shetty and on my podcast on purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprobe. Everything that has happened to you can also be a strength builder for you if you allow it. Kobe Bryant. The results don't really matter. It's the figuring out that matters.

Kevin Haw. It's not about us as a generation at this point. It's about us trying our best to create change. Luminous Hamilton. That's for me being taken that moment for yourself each day, being kind to yourself, because I think for a long time I wasn't kind to myself and many many more if you're attached to knowing You don't have a capacity to learn on this podcast you get to hear the raw real-life stories behind their journeys and the tools

They used the books they read and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. Confidence is a feeling of self assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities. Now let me think of a quality. I believe that I'm a loyal person. I really believe I'm a loyal person. I stick

by people. I know you're loyal listeners and I appreciate you for that. Loyalty is a very important quality to me. So I want you to make a list of the abilities and qualities that you have. And I want you to appreciate yourself for a second. Now you may not love yourself when you say these. But I promise you that the more you notice this, the more you learn to love yourself, you're practicing it. See, first we have to be aware of who we are. Then we have to practice that. So now that you're aware of these, you're going to be them more. You're going to be more loyal. I'm going to be more communicated. more, you're going to be more loyal. I'm going to be more communicated. And what that leads to is love. Because now I've made myself aware, then I practice it, then I love love starts

with awareness and then practice. When you write down what you're aware of that you love about yourself, then you practice it more you become it more you love yourself more. It's a beautiful methodology. So first you have to become aware. Now on this list, I want you to choose one quality, every single day, one quality for a week to share. So let's say my quality, as I said, was loyalty. I can think about loyalty and I can say,

how can I experience loyalty? How can I share loyalty with this person? How can my loyalty help them? Or another quality that I may say that I have is my ability to listen. Oh, that's an ability. There you go, I said my ability to listen. So if you have the ability to listen,

let me now be more of then a love moment of myself for listening. This is how we also detach from our body. When we've realized that we have qualities and abilities beyond our body to offer to others, to offer to ourselves, see, we've been brought up to believe that the only thing we have to offer to someone is our body and our appearance.

And when you feel that way, you question yourself at every step. But when you really dive into what are my abilities and qualities that I can offer to others? Beautiful things can happen. One key finding from the survey shows that 62% of people who felt positively about their personalities and abilities above their bodies, or other aspects of their life, felt best about themselves. The study proves that. How fascinating is that? No matter how you feel about your body, if you really value your qualities and your abilities, that will supersede how you feel about your body.

Again, that doesn't mean you neglect your body. It's just learning to love yourself for who you truly are. Now, this is really, really interesting to me. Approximately 45.9% of survey participants cited caring less about other people's opinions as the reason they've come to accept themselves. 19.6% of people said their religion or spirituality helped them. And 15.7% had helped from family or friends and 8.8% of respondents said they got help from a therapist. Now let's just look at that. Not thinking about other people's opinions.

Spirituality which has community, family or friends in therapy, right down those right now. How strong are those for you? Are you seeing a therapist right now or a coach? Are you spiritually connected or religiously connected? Do you have family of friends around you that deeply understand you? Remember, it's not about the number. It's not about the amount of people. Remember, it's all about the depth, right? It's all about the depth. So, what I really want you to consider here is what are the habits that you practice that you think are signs that you are experiencing insecurity and you want to address them in this way?

One of the first signs of insecurity, which isn't often seen as saying yes to everyone, being a people pleaser, because what we're saying is that I only feel secure when someone else feels that I am making them secure. How amazing is that we are feeling, we're trying to say that our sense of security is based on us feeling like we make someone else feel secure. But how can we help someone else feel secure if we don't feel secure within ourselves?

Another one is that we always criticize others. I find this to be fascinating. Sometimes I'll be appreciating someone. And I can tell that someone may not even know this person, but they can't bring themselves to appreciate them because they feel that it somehow reflects negatively on them. So I have a friend who's very ambitious and driven and a lot of people around him will criticize him because his ambition and drive reminds them of their own lack of it. And when you start criticizing someone,

start asking yourself, am I criticizing them because I'm insecure? And what your mind will do is you will justify it in another way. You say, no, no, no, they're a bad person. They've done bad stuff. No, no, no, they're the right person. But then think about it. Sit there and think about it. Are you really doing it because you have an insecurity? I've done this exercise myself. And I realized that it helped me understand that I wasn't secure because I wasn't conscious of my own abilities and my qualities. And I wasn't practicing them enough. Actually, when you let yourself criticize someone else, you become those qualities.

So now you lose yourself completely because you start to do that. Let's say you don't like someone complains. Now you complain about them complaining What have you become you become a complainer? Let's say you don't like someone who criticizes But you're criticizing them. You've now become someone you don't love and like Let's say you don't like someone Because of how they treat their friends Ask yourself honestly. Have you ever done that to someone that you were friends with?

It's so important to remove insecurities from within ourselves by pulling out the root and trying to change ourselves, not forcing it to be changing anyone else. So when it comes to your insecurities, please don't avoid them. And look out for where they start to grow. Another way they start to grow is in our constant seeking of validation. Right? How many people do you know where they're constantly checking how everyone feels about everything they do? Right?

You're always trying to be like, well, what do you think about this? Do you think it's a good idea? Yeah, I should do this, right? And so when you see yourself falling into that trap, ask yourself, why am I doing this? Why am I going through this? Why am I checking with myself?

Why don't I feel confident in myself? And the third way we do it through overcompensating, right, we overcompensate for how we feel about something. So to me, insecurity is something that I've dealt with throughout my whole life. And you actually find that a lot of people, their careers, their journeys are compensating for an insecurity they felt.

So some people chase success and fame because they felt unwanted when they were younger. Some people chase money because they felt unstable when they were younger. Some people chase money because they fell unstable when they were younger. So our pursuit is based on our insecurity. Now, this is something that we really have to think about because if your pursuit is based on your insecurity, when you conquer that pursuit, when you get to the top,

you will still feel insecure. Think about that for a moment. If your pursuit is based on an insecurity even when you accomplish that pursuit, you will still feel insecure because the insecurity did not come from a lack of that thing. The insecurity came from a lack of you feeling you had that, a feeling that you can create that, right? It wasn't that you didn't have fame or success. It's that you felt rejected or you felt isolated or lonely. So you believed that successful fame would fill that, but actually it was a different healing that was required. You're almost applying the wrong medicine

to the wrong thing. When you make money, what that gives you is money, which is great, but it doesn't give you stability, security, a feeling of confidence, because that can only come from that thing. It's like saying, I'm flying to New Orleans, but I'm expecting to land in LA. It doesn't work like that.

It's a different ticket, right? Developing confidence and becoming successful are different planes. And we're taking one hoping for the other one to happen. So I just really don't know how that ever became the way we live. But as you can see, it's a recipe for a lot of long-term challenges and issues in our lives. And I wanted to share this too, that a lot of people, when I first met them, I thought that they were egoistic or I thought that they were arrogant or I thought that they were cold and I realized they were just insecure. When you meet someone who's

arrogant or overcompensating as I was saying, or you meet someone who's cold or you meet someone who's kind of feels cocky, often it's because they're feeling an insecurity. So when you sense some arrogance from someone, you can actually, if you really pay attention, you'll notice that they're actually dealing with a deep insecurity. And what that changes is that you now realize that it's not that that person is overconfident or that they think that much of themselves, it's actually that they probably don't think enough of themselves, right? We think that people think too much of themselves,

actually they don't think enough of themselves, and that's why they end up in that position. So if you have a friend who's dealing with insecurity, you may think telling them that they're amazing or telling them that they do something really well will solve that insecurity. Now the reason that doesn't work is because when you give that glorification

or those statements to someone, they now think they have to constantly evolve up to that. So that creates another sense of insecurity. So let's say they did something well and you said you did that really well, then I'll insecure that they won't be able to do it again. So actually when you're working with someone who has insecurity or you have a friend or family member who has high insecurities, and from your outside perspective, you're confused

because they look amazing. They're doing amazing. They're successful in their own right. And you're wondering, how's this person anxious? Let me remind them of how great they are. It's actually helping that person. Remember how great they are. It's actually helping that person remember how great they are. You reminding them or remembering how great they are is not enough, they need to develop that muscle.

Right? They need to develop that skill. You telling someone you believe in them is different from them believing in themself. And you believing in them sometimes actually makes themselves doubt themselves more because they're scared they can't live up to your belief. And I did this for a long time. I literally should tell people how amazing they are, how incredible they are, I'd be specific about it. And I started to realize that was part of it, but that didn't solve the issue.

I had to help them build the skill. That's why this activity I've given you today, write down your abilities, write down your qualities. If you encourage them to do that, if you do this, if you share this podcast episode with your abilities, write down your qualities. If you encourage them to do that, if you do this, if you share this podcast episode with your friends and you do that together, you'll start to see incredible benefits even in your community because guess what?

If all of you are discovering your passions, if all of you are understanding your strengths, your qualities, you're gonna be in a atmosphere of a group of people with high self esteem. And when you're in that group, you're gonna learn from each other, you're gonna grow together. There's gonna be a lot more abundance in that space.

I wanna thank you so much for listening to on purpose for your ongoing commitment. I deeply appreciate each and every single one of you so much and I wanna share with you some incredible reviews that you all left. And here we go. So I mean, there's so many of them just scrolling through trying to find one. Here's Merlock Holmes. I really enjoyed listening to this podcast. First of all, Jay's voice is so soothing and motivating. Thank you so much. Secondly, the topics covered in guest speakers are great for real world applications. I've sent so many links to my friends.

They probably think I'm a sponsor. Love the information and practicality of it. And sometimes I just laugh because it feels like they are speaking directly to me in my situation. Great podcast, definitely worth a listen. Merlok Holmes, thank you so much. This one is from Tea Perry. Someone suggested I rethink like a monk about a year ago and I've been hanging on every word J. Shetty has said ever since. This podcast has changed the way I communicate, spend my time and energy. What I eat, how I view my challenges, everything. I'm so truly grateful for each episode and learn so much every time I listen. Thank you so much. And this one's from

Mel crying right now because there's so much I relate to here. We all go through trauma and I've really been bad at putting myself down and accepting that I was that woman. I'm seeing the woman I am today against all the odds. I deserve love and abundance and so does everyone else. The beauty held within me is so much more than anything else. I see it when I look at people walking by genuine love and empathy I have for others. I have many layers and every layer is important. I hope you all remember that I see you,

I acknowledge you and I appreciate you. And I can't wait for you to apply one thing from this podcast and watch how your life changes. Thank you so much. I'll see you next week. What if you could tell the whole truth about your life, including all those tender and visible things we don't usually talk about? I'm Megan Devine. Host of the podcast, it's okay that you're not okay. Look, everyone's at least a little bit not okay these days, and all those things we don't

usually talk about, maybe we should. This season, I'm joined by Stellar Gas like Abbermote, Rachel Cargol, and so many more. It's okay that you're not okay. New episodes each and every Monday, available on the iHeart radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Getting better with money is a great goal for 2023. But how are you going to make it happen? Ordering a book that lingers on your nightstand isn't going to do the trick. Instead, check out our podcast, How to Money. That's right, we're two best buds offering all the helpful personal finance information you need without putting you to sleep. We offer guidance three

times a week and we talk about debt payoff, saving more, intelligent investing, and increasing your earnings. Millions of listeners have trusted us to help them make progress with their financial goals. You can listen to how to money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Yom Le Van Zant and I'll be your host for The R Spot. Each week listeners will call me live to discuss their relationship issues.

Nothing will tear a relationship down faster than two people with no vision. There's y'all are just floppin' around like fish out of water. Mommy, daddy, your ex, I'll be talking about those things and so much more. Check out the R-Spot on the iHeart video app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.