Self-Consciousness and Self-Confidence Are Like Two Sides of a Coin
I’d like you to imagine you have a coin in your hand. It’s like a regular coin, with two sides, but on this coin, one side represents self-confidence, and the other side represents self-consciousness. Just like a real coin, when you’re looking at one side, the other side is completely obscured. You can only ever see one at a time.
So, if you’re looking at the side that represents self-confidence, it’s like the other side doesn’t exist. If you’re looking at the side that represents self-consciousness, it seems impossible to believe that anything like self-confidence even exists.
This is exactly what happens in life. When you’re totally involved in a social situation, you feel your natural connection to others, so the illusion that you have no natural, full-time connection to others has nothing to feed on. In other words, you feel the self-confidence you and I and every human are born with. It stops feeling like, “I” and “them,” and starts feeling more like, “we.”
Self-Confidence
One of the sides of the coin, self-confidence, is the voice of the deepest part of you, in other words, the most dependable aspect of your thinking. The other one, self-consciousness, is the least dependable side of your thinking. This is the sort of thinking defined by “I’m not enough.”
Self-confidence feels great. When you’re not thinking about yourself, when you’re not thinking about self-confidence, it’s just naturally there. Start to question that natural self-confidence, and what happens? You’ve just flipped the coin over. What felt like self-confidence when you weren’t thinking about it, became something else the moment you put your attention on yourself.
Self-Consciousness
Self-conscious thinking is like any other thinking we do. It just feels worse because it’s like we’re looking at ourselves reflected in a funhouse mirror. The image we see in that mirror isn’t a truthful reflection of what’s really there; it’s a gross distortion. The only image a funhouse mirror can ever reflect back at you is a gross distortion.
I’ll say it even more simply. Self-consciousness is you trying to think about yourself and be yourself at the same time. Sound impossible? It is! There’s no way to think about yourself and really be yourself at the same time.
Seeing that for yourself gives you all the guidance you could possibly need, because the second you notice yourself caught up in self-consciousness, you’re getting a clear signal that you’re headed in the wrong direction.
You don’t need to know any more than that. You don’t need to examine the content of the self-conscious thought, you just have to notice that it feels horrible. That horrible feeling is a signal to you, and its message is clear: don’t go there.
That’s when you can place your focus on your present activity, or the person you’re talking with, or whatever you’re doing (or trying to do) at the moment. Abracadabra! you’ve just cut self-conscious off from its supply of oxygen. Self-consciousness is never anything more than a thought. And if you’re not believing that thought, you can’t be self-conscious.
