How Self-Discovery Can Help Build Self-Confidence from the Inside Out

Photo by Mohnish Landge on Unsplash

Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself – Miles Davis

How Well Do You Know Yourself? The Importance of Self-Discovery

In my therapy sessions with clients, two recurring themes are self-discovery and relational issues. Many people seek therapy to delve deeper into themselves, beyond their assigned roles as siblings, parents, spouses, and friends. It’s not uncommon to hear statements like, “I don’t really know who I am” or “I feel like I’ve lost touch with myself.” Sessions revolve around exploring Self and how to (re)connect.

It’s hardly surprising that we often become disconnected from ourselves. From the moment of our birth, external influences shape our beliefs, thoughts, opinions, and emotions through our communities, families, media, and society. For some, traumatic upbringings can also distort their sense of self, sowing seeds of self-doubt.

It’s important to clarify that this doesn’t imply a rejection of family and community values, which are vital for our well-being and survival. Instead, it underscores the existence of an individual self within us, distinct from the roles we play in the lives of others. Exploring this truth can be instrumental in deepening our relationship with ourselves and, in turn, with others. 

People come to therapy to become attuned to their emotions and thoughts. By doing so, they can learn to experience their emotions and relate to others in healthier ways. While the idea of loving oneself before loving others has gained popularity, it can create unrealistic expectations that we must be fully healed before entering, or fully enjoying, a relationship. In truth, healing needs to occur within the context of relationships, too. Although some aspects of healing happen in solitude, our entire journey to healing cannot take place in complete isolation. It starts with self-discovery and extends outward. By understanding and caring for ourselves better, we can begin to unfold and rebuild unhealthy dynamics in our relationships and communities. 

Reconnecting with Ourselves through Self-Reflection

One way we may begin to reconnect with ourselves is through self-reflection. This can involve intentional solitude, therapy sessions, and journaling. You might start by exploring questions like: 

• Who am I? How do I identify? 

• What do I value? 

• What are my needs? 

• What are my fears? Why do I fear them? 

• What are my boundaries and limits? What feels good and what doesn’t? 

• How do I perceive myself? And how do I feel about myself?

• Acknowledge your strengths: What do I do well? What do I like about myself?

Additionally, a crucial element of self-reflection is to identify and confront your undesirable parts, your shadow. Learning to closely examine our shadow parts, embrace them and extend forgiveness and grace. The process of embracing and extending grace to your shadow is essential, because if you’re unwilling to embrace it, I wonder if it is fair to expect others to do so? When we avoid doing the work of exploring our shadow, we’re placing a burden on our relationships as these parts will inevitably come up. Each individual within a community is responsible of doing the work in order to have more functional relationships and healthier communities.

Stillness and silence can feel scary, because they tend to amplify the thoughts and feelings about ourselves and our life journey that we tend to avoid. How can we expect others to love and respect us if we haven’t learned our definition of love and respect? Why do we desperately seek this in others before understanding it for ourselves? I wonder, how helpful it is to enter familial, platonic, or romantic relationships when we’re strangers to ourselves? Establishing our own definitions for concepts, free from external influences, is pivotal.

Redefining Confidence for Yourself

One of the most important concepts to redefine for ourselves is confidence. Along with identifying core values and needs, I enjoy helping my clients redefine concepts for themselves, such as confidence. For me, confidence is rooted in deep self-awareness, it involves accepting and understanding all parts of yourself. When you truly know yourself, external criticisms and perspectives lose their power over you. So when there is tension or conflict, you can remain solid and steady, because you understand who you are, what you think, what you feel, what you value, and what you need. This self-knowledge also strengthens our relationships. We're better able to distinguish where we begin and another person begins, and we can recognize and express our needs—like when we're needing validation or constructive feedback.

Self-love is nurtured through the process of self-discovery, which, in turn, fosters self-confidence, resulting in enhanced self-trust. As we dive deeper into self-understanding, we cultivate a more profound connection to the world within and around us. When we gain insight, work towards aligning our actions with our values, and learn to trust our intuition, our self-confidence naturally flourishes. This journey reveals that self-betrayal is far more distressing than any fear we might hold, even the fear of losing relationships.

I enjoy helping clients make these concepts practical. Confidence is built through practice and expression. Let’s practice redefining confidence together. What does confidence mean to you? How do you define it? What does it look like? Consider these examples:

Confidence means…

• Believing in your worth

• Doing what is right and feels good to you

• Maintaining your own vision, even when others disagree

• Not letting criticisms and judgments define your self-worth

• Approaching conflict with care and compassion

• Trusting your intuition / body’s wisdom

• Expressing and respecting your boundaries

• Expressing your genuine feelings and thoughts, even when it's challenging

• Leading with intuition, kindness, and empathy rather than defensiveness, manipulation, and hostility

• Embracing creativity and vulnerability

• Accepting failures, missteps, mistakes, and setbacks

• Practicing self-compassion

When we truly know ourselves, we build our confidence, and inevitably set a new history in motion.

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Love After Love

By Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror, 

and each with a smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.