Do you often have the impression that others (your friends, your colleagues, your neighbors) are more successful in their lives? Cruel inequality or lack of self-confidence? Johanna Rozenblum, clinical psychologist answers this question.
Your neighbor takes on exciting challenges, your sister is more fulfilled in her family life, your colleague is more appreciated at work… If this impression of seeing others always do better pursues you, perhaps it is more a problem of perception, No ?
Devaluation, a well-anchored thinking bias
For Johanna Rozenblum, clinical psychologist and author of Uncondition yourself! to be published by Le Courrier du livre this end of September, this impression is in no way based on reality, there is no real reason why others are always better off than you.
“It’s a thinking bias, called negativity bias, which makes us think that everyone is more successful than us. But it is none other than the fruit of a psychological construction” she reveals to us.
A construction based on 3 major factors:
- Education, or the way we were compared to another child, the way we were put in competition for example at school;
- Life events, that is to say the few failures that we have been able to go through;
- Personality: some people are less self-confident by nature.
“The thought pattern, this pattern that we have, is built from these 3 factors and then becomes a rule of value that we give ourselves, but it is simply a “look” that we have on ourselves . In no case, a reality: nothing means that we will succeed less than another at the start” confirms the psychologist.
Good in his body, good in his head!
How to get out of this construction and restore your confidence?
However, it is possible to get out of this thought pattern and find a thought that is favorable to us.
“The first step is a cognitive part, of reflection, during which we must ask ourselves the question: in what situations does this way of thinking (others succeed better) come into play? When do I feel like a failure? When I am facing a challenge? When I am in competition? When I am facing other people at work? It is useful to point out the situations in which this conditioning takes place in order to be able to defuse it.
The update of These dysfunctional thought patterns are then a basis for working on yourself, by stopping comparing yourself to others, or by changing the way you look at yourself. “The idea is to arrive at another way of thinking: “I have done everything in my power, the rest does not depend on me” and to change this unfavorable dysfunctional thought into a more functional one that does not harm us. more.”
A job that you can attempt on your own or in which a professional can help you if this feeling of inferiority is too much to combat.
