How I Challenged Myself to Overcome My Inferiority Complex
Short answer: I set targets for myself to accomplish, so that I can be a better person and feel less inferior afterward. I also tried to fully accept myself as who I am right now.
Since the start of my high school life, I have been fighting with my inner-self, because of something called “Inferiority Complex”. This feeling caused me to be a pessimistic person, and avoid failing at all costs so that I won’t feel inferior to other people. This is one thing that I wanted to get rid from my life, even though I didn’t know before that this feeling is called “Inferiority Complex”.
According to the American Psychological Association, an inferiority complex is characterized by constant feelings of inadequacy or insecurity in our daily life due to a belief that we are physically or mentally inferior to others, whether such a belief is based on a rational assessment or not.
A week ago, I read a book, titled “Inferiority Complex: A Seemingly Harmless Personality Blemish of Grave Societal Consequences”, and the content is pretty interesting, because I just found out that many people face the same feeling “Inferiority Complex”, hence this motivated me to write this article.
How did I overcome this feeling and move forward?
Set Targets to Improve Myself
This is the main reason how I could face my inferiority complex. I usually find out my main weaknesses and tried to fix it. Sometimes, I am grateful that I had this inferiority complex feeling, since it kinda motivated me to improve myself.
Although, sometimes I got lost. This is because whenever I see there’s someone better than me, I would mimic them and try to be better than them. I gained my current writing skill, public speaking skill, language speaking skill, programming skill, and designing skill from mimicking many people in my circle, while trying to outdone them (easier said than done though). Because of this, I often got burnt out easily. My friends usually refer me as a perfectionist because of this.
This is why setting reasonable target is very important, so that I won’t get burnt out quickly by improving my skills. By following these targets, I evolved from a “stupid person”, to a person that could fit into the society well.
Accepting Myself
I used to be very sad if I were to fail in achieving something (like not getting accepted to a company, a scholarship, or even something as simple as getting a score of 90/100 in an examination to improve my GPA). Now I realize that those behaviors of mine could self-destruct and bring me more unfortunate events.
So the best thing I can do is to accept myself as who I am, and do whatever I can in the meantime. I should let go of something that’s beyond my control, and do something within my control.
That’s all I could share. I felt like I need to write this to remind myself in the future. I know that I will face many hardships in my journey while pursuing Master’s degree in Japan. It’s been a long time since I last wrote an article about my own life experience too.
Thank you for reading!
