Insecurity At Work: How To Overcome It With Emotional Management
Work is one of the contexts in our lives where we experience well-being or, on the contrary, more anguish and stress. Feeling insecure at work is an unpleasant sensation that limits us and makes us feel less compared to others. But why does it happen to us? How can we solve it?
Insecurity is an emotion that can affect us in any area of our lives: couples, relationships, work. When we feel insecurity at work it is because our way of valuing ourselves depends on the context. We think we are more or less depending on how we look at work.
These sensations come from fear, from self-demand, and over time they transform into anxiety, which leads to intrusive thoughts and discouragement. They are common psychological difficulties that end up being very limiting when they are very intense, frequent and unpleasant.
But there is a solution and it involves your own personal change and learning. When we learn to understand and manage those emotions and the change occurs in you, everything else begins to change.
This is what we are going to see in this article. What does this insecurity consist of? Why does it arise? How can you manage or overcome it? Everything I am going to tell you in this article is based on direct experience as a psychologist and coach accompanying people in their personal change processes (in Human Empowerment you can read some testimonies).
Overcoming this difficulty does not depend on baseless theories or miraculous techniques (so common today) but on go deeper into yourself and apply concrete changes. It is above all a personal learning that will later help you feel better in the world of work. Let’s go for it.
Feeling insecure at some point in our lives is natural and even functional. We feel insecurity when we are in a new context that we do not control or about which we cannot predict anything. This happens to us on the first day of work, a first date or a first day of school. The mission of insecurity is to adapt to a new context and be prudent.
However, if this insecurity is too intense, frequent and long-lasting, it becomes a bigger problem, since it not only helps you adapt but also limits you more. Hence, you feel less compared to others (because there is a previous comparison that does not work for you) or you do not communicate as you want.
Consequences of job insecurity
The first and most important consequence when we live with excess insecurity is the discomfort it causes us. Human beings live with well-being when they make their own decisions, communicate assertively (that is, say what they want and need, in addition to what they do not want or can) and relate honestly.
Excessive insecurity limits us and prevents us from behaving naturally. In turn, it leads us to build a self-esteem that does not work, since we frequently compare ourselves with models that do not correspond to us.
In addition to discomfort, anxiety and discouragement, insecurity at work leads us to block ourselves and feel less and less. This occurs due to three main factors.
Emotion management
Whether your insecurity is so intense, frequent and long-lasting depends above all on how you manage that emotion, as well as other related emotions (fear, guilt, frustration). Emotion management is, above all, a learning experience. If the problem of insecurity at work is emotional, we must focus the solution on emotion management.
And how to manage these emotions? First of all through your behaviors and interpretations. That insecurity is a consequence of how you behave (it can be small details).
Dependent self-esteem
A dependent self-esteem is one that depends on external factors that you cannot control. If you are conditioned too much by the expectations you have about work, by too many demands, comparisons or value judgments (about yourself or about others), There will be too many factors that you cannot control and this weakens your self-esteem.
Self-esteem problems lead us towards fear and insecurity.
Personal rating
As we saw at the beginning of the article, insecurity at work is also a consequence of valuing yourself according to external models that you cannot control. When we feel less it is because there is previously a comparison. Your personal assessment should be focused only on you, on making the decisions you really want to make and on behaving spontaneously.
To do?
Now let’s see what the steps or keys are to achieve it.
Keys to overcoming job insecurity
Overcoming these types of difficulties requires time, perseverance and, above all, action. Today we live in the age of over-information, where they sell us a thousand magical theories and techniques to solve everything easily. But our reality is much more complex, as well as beautiful.
If you feel insecurity at work, it is due to learning that has been maintained over time. Solving it depends on learning about yourself, where you apply specific changes and it is internalized over time. This will make it a permanent solution and not just a temporary patch.
These are the steps we use in a change or therapy process to achieve this.
Find out how we manage it now
To learn to understand and manage insecurity, we first need to discover how you understand and manage your emotions now. To do this, it is about delving into what you interpret in situations where you feel insecure, how you react, and what behaviors validate that insecurity. What does this mean?
If every time you feel insecure you decide not to communicate, that behavior is what validates the insecurity and for this reason you continue to feel it. On the contrary, if faced with insecurity you demand too much of yourself and look for a perfect result that behavior will be what validates the insecurity and we must change it.
Once we discover how you manage insecurity, we draw up a concrete action plan that will lead you to the changes you need. Having an action plan in any change or therapy process is essential. A process without action is just reflection, and what you are looking for is to change your sensations. This is not possible only from desire, but from one’s own behavior.
Making an action plan is complicated, and this is why I prefer to work on it together with the person always in one session.
Assertive communication and limits
Assertive communication (knowing how to express what you want, what you don’t want, what you can and what you can’t) helps us generate security and limits. When insecurity conquers us, it is common for us to communicate in a more opaque way.
Company and constant support
For a change process of this type to work, it is necessary to have more constant company, so that you have support at all times and we can resolve the difficulties that arise on the same day. For this reason, my way of providing support is not only with sessions but every day, with no consultation limit and for any need you have, in addition to other weekly tools.
Go deeper to stabilize
Finally, a global change must take into account all parts of your personality: your emotion management, your self-esteem, your communication, your way of relating, your belief system and even values. Only if we work on everything in depth will we be able to internalize the changes achieved so that they are part of you.
This is what allows your learning to help you not only feel more secure at work, but also to be extrapolated to other areas.
If this is what you want and need, remember that you can contact me at to schedule a first session, get to know each other, see what happens and how we can solve it. I send you lots of encouragement!
Thank you for thinking of you, Rubén Camacho Psychologist and coach
