Most of us don’t actually have an inferiority complex, we just cultivate it as part of our charm.
It’s a role. We play the part of someone who is insecure and meek and awshucksy. Someone who lucked out and doesn’t know what they did to deserve to end up here, but hey, reluctantly accepts their position anyway.
This performance of inferiority is quite endearing. Especially when we’re young the world is still in front of us, our innocence can serve as a very useful survival technique to keep vulnerability at bay.
Why stand up for our value when we can use depreciation to deflect attention?
Brantley’s meditations on loving kindness reminds come to mind. She writes:
Our feelings of inferiority can actually leave us feeling isolated and separate from the world. We may not be perfect, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still accept the difficult parts of ourselves and treat them with compassion.
The other piece is, what got us here won’t get us where we need to be.
And so, while our mask of inadequacy may have served us when we started, it’s no longer useful today. Because this isn’t our first rodeo. By now, we have so much talent and skill and experience, that we don’t need our inferiority anymore.
Even if it was who we were when we started, it’s not who we are today.
Obama once made a brilliant reflection on his second term as president, saying that because his confidence had grown, he didn’t have to pretend to know everything anymore.
That sounds like someone who is secure enough in his own inner structure.
Someone who doesn’t need to rely on an act of inferiority to make people love him.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
When did you start to feel calm in situations that used to leave you feeling out of place and inferior?
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Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.
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