Douglas: Welcome to the Unleash Your Potential Blog, what question can I answer for you today?
DreamDynasty: What steps can I take to become more self-reliant?
Douglas: This is a great question, and one I am sure many people struggle with. What is self-reliance? According to Merriam-Webster, self-reliance is reliance on one’s efforts and abilities. And to rely on someone is to depend on or trust them. So, self-reliance is to depend on or trust in your efforts and abilities.
There is a lot to unpack there. When we are self-reliant, we are trusting that we can do what we need to do in a given situation without the support of others. I know that there are many times in my life when I wish I had been more self-reliant. Let’s face it, when we aren’t self-reliant, it is because we don’t believe in ourselves. On some level, we have judged ourselves (which we all do) and we have come up short. Therefore, we don’t think we can rely on ourselves.
Sometimes, the reason we don’t trust ourselves is because we have spent a significant amount of time depending on others to do things for us. As youth, we often depend on our parents and if they do everything for us, we come to be reliant on them, instead of ourselves. Sometimes in our relationships, we become dependent on a partner to do things for us, so we don’t trust that we can do things without them. At work, we may become dependent on a colleague or supervisor. In all of these cases, we have allowed our trust in ourselves to be overshadowed by our dependence on others.
So how do we become more self-reliant? We need to equip ourselves with some tools that will make it difficult to go back to being dependent on others. Fish hooks and porcupine quills have barbs on the ends of them to make them difficult to extract. I want to suggest that you should arm yourself with some B.A.R.B.S. that might help you become more self-reliant.
Be Your Authentic Self – If you are not your authentic self, you won’t know who to rely on. If who you are is changing depending on the situation or context, then you give away the strength of your identity.
Acknowledge Your Dependencies – Not all dependencies are unhelpful and need to be removed. However, you have to know what all your dependencies are if you are going to decide which ones serve you and which need pruning.
Recognize Your Strengths and Weaknesses – Naming what you are good at will help you to become more self-reliant in the short term. Naming areas where you can still grow will give you places to work toward becoming more self-reliant as you develop more skills/knowledge.
Believe in Yourself – You have to start cheerleading for yourself. A big piece of self-reliance is about believing in yourself. Like all things, start small. Find a place where you can acknowledge you are already self-reliant and CELEBRATE! Then build from there.
Start Accepting Responsibility – Self-reliance is taking responsibility for your own life’s direction. Remember that accepting responsibility is acknowledging that YOU are responsible for everything that happens in your life, the good and the bad. If you don’t accept responsibility for it, you cannot celebrate it as your accomplishment or fix it if necessary.
Self-reliance is something we can all benefit from having more of. I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t rely on others at all for there are many times when there is strength in numbers, but we also need to be able to count on ourselves when necessary.
I hope my answer sheds some light on your question. If you want to dig into this concept further, I encourage you to reach out and set up a conversation. In the meantime, check back tomorrow for the next question in the Unleash Your Potential Series!
Be Well!
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