For years, I thought confidence came from success and from other people thinking well of me. The problem is that there’s always someone else who looks more capable or more successful. And when our sense of self-worth depends on what other people think of us, we’re at the mercy of their opinions.
Living From Your Higher Self takes a different approach. It starts by separating our abilities, which vary from one situation to the next, from who we really are.
Self-Confidence Is Not the Same as Self-Worth
Self-confidence is our belief in our ability to do something. We may be completely confident driving a car and yet terrified of speaking in public. That kind of confidence belongs to the ego’s self-image, which is based on performance and comparison. It goes up with praise and achievement and down with mistakes and criticism, so it’s always looking for a chance to prove itself.
Our Higher Self operates from something else entirely: our intrinsic worth. It’s constant and unconditional, and it has nothing to do with our accomplishments, our failings or what other people think of us. Our confidence can change with the circumstances. Our worth doesn’t have to.
This doesn’t mean we suddenly become good at everything or never doubt ourselves. It means we can acknowledge our limitations without letting them define who we are.
Where Our Stories About Ourselves Come From
We all receive messages about who we are from a very early age. Some are spoken out loud: we’re not clever enough, or we’re too sensitive. Others we work out for ourselves, perhaps because we weren’t picked for something or felt different from everyone else.
I saw how powerful these messages can be when my son, Dan, was ten. He had always loved school, but suddenly he refused to go. I discovered the school had been making him carry a book from lesson to lesson, where his teachers recorded everything he did wrong, and each evening the Head Teacher went through the day’s entries with him. Dan was a lively lad and a bit of a class clown, but he wasn’t a bad child. Every day he was being told he was, and he believed it.
When an educational psychologist changed the book to record the good things he did instead, Dan was back to his old self within a week. Nothing about him had changed except the story being told about him. I tell the full story in Why Personal Growth Isn’t Enough.
Most of us carry a book like Dan’s. A child who isn’t praised may conclude they’re not good enough, even though there could be any number of reasons a parent doesn’t give praise, none of which has anything to do with the child’s worth. Once we’ve formed a belief about ourselves, we notice the experiences that confirm it, and every day we sign another entry. Over time the story feels like a fact, and we forget that we were the ones who gave those experiences their meaning.
It’s worth asking yourself what’s written in your own book, and who first wrote it there.
Imposter Syndrome and the Need to Prove Ourselves
I once coached a woman who had a high-powered career and had worked in a number of countries and roles. She was thinking of applying for a new job but felt daunted. She’d met some of the people there and thought they were very confident, knowledgeable and extremely well qualified. She didn’t feel she was on the same level.
As we talked, we looked at the story she was telling herself. She had focused almost entirely on what she thought the others had and she lacked. So we looked at her own experience instead: the cultures she’d worked in, the challenges she’d overcome and what she could bring to the role. She began to relax as she saw herself and the opportunity in a different light.
Nothing about her credentials had changed during that conversation. What had changed was her view of them.
Imposter syndrome is the fear of being found out, and it often affects people who are highly capable. It helps to question the beliefs behind it. Who decided we have to know everything? Why do we assume other people are more capable just because they appear confident? And what would be so terrible about admitting we still have things to learn?
This is where humility comes in. When we know our own worth, we don’t need to pretend we know more than we do, and we can appreciate other people’s expertise without feeling diminished by it. Our Higher Self has nothing to prove, so we can go into a new situation with curiosity rather than a need to show we’re as good as everyone else.
Observing Our Thoughts Instead of Believing Them
When a thought says “you’re not good enough”, it’s just a thought, not a verdict. It’s usually a story the ego has built from past criticism and experience. We are the observer of the thought, not the thought itself, and as the decision-maker, we get to choose whether to keep feeding it.
Our feelings help here too. When we feel inadequate or embarrassed, our Emotional Compass is telling us we’re believing something that isn’t serving us. Rather than blaming ourselves or anyone else for the feeling, we can ask what we’re telling ourselves and whether it’s actually true.
Long-standing beliefs don’t disappear just because we’ve noticed them. Some have been with us for decades. But once we notice them, we have a choice about whether to keep treating them as the truth.
I know this from my own experience. For about ten years, I wanted to write about Living From Your Higher Self. I’d studied the ideas thoroughly and knew how much they had helped me, but whenever I thought about writing, I backed off. Who the hell was I to write about it? What if people thought I was talking nonsense? Underneath all those excuses was a simple belief that I wasn’t credible enough.
What changed was realising I couldn’t control what other people thought of my writing. Some would find it useful, and some would dismiss it. But I could decide what I thought of myself, write honestly about what I’d learned, and simply not join in if others chose to judge me. Approval wasn’t guaranteed. I had just stopped making my willingness to write depend on it.
Separating What We Did From Who We Are
Sometimes our negative stories come from things we genuinely regret. We’ve let someone down, made a bad decision or failed to live up to our own standards.
Living From Your Higher Self doesn’t mean pretending those things didn’t happen. It means being humble enough to acknowledge them and feeling enough remorse to put things right. There’s a difference between accepting that we did something wrong and deciding that we are wrong. The ego keeps us going over it in shame long after we’ve understood what happened. Our Higher Self asks us to take responsibility, make amends where we can and move on. When we know better, we do better.
Forgiveness works both ways. If someone has treated us badly, we may have taken their judgement on as part of who we are. Forgiving them doesn’t mean excusing what they did; it means their behaviour no longer decides how we see ourselves. Forgiving ourselves means we don’t serve a lifelong sentence of self-condemnation. Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It’s a bit like a computer game, where we sometimes have to play a level several times before we can move on, and we can be kind to ourselves while we practise.
Changing the Story One Page at a Time
Undoing a lifetime of negative beliefs can seem a massive undertaking, but we don’t have to rewrite the whole book at once.
Another client was dreading a Christmas event with her team. She felt very much at odds with them and expected an uncomfortable evening. I asked her to imagine watching a film of the event and to focus on a scene near the end, where she was travelling home feeling warm and happy. We explored what that would be like rather than everything she was afraid might go wrong.
When I next saw her, she told me she’d had that very journey home. During the evening, she had found herself speaking from the heart to the team, and they had responded warmly.
Imagining a good outcome doesn’t guarantee one. But changing her expectations changed the way she went into the evening, and that made a very different experience possible.
We can do this with whatever is in front of us. The next time you feel insecure, pause and ask yourself: Is this thought actually true, or is it an old story? How would I deal with this if I wasn’t afraid of being judged?
The answer might be to ask for help, speak honestly, prepare a little more or set a boundary. It might simply be to let yourself feel nervous without making it into a problem. You don’t need to feel confident before you act. Confidence often grows out of action, when you discover you’re more capable than you thought.
Recognising the Worth That Was Always There
Real self-esteem isn’t about being the cleverest person in the room, having all the answers or presenting a perfect image to the world. We can still feel fear and self-doubt, make mistakes and find that some of our beliefs were wrong. None of that is a judgement on who we are.
Building self-esteem means clearing away the old, fearful stories that kept us from seeing the worth we had all along. You don’t have to tackle every one of them at once. Start with the next page of your story.
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