In my life I have taken pride in understanding and knowing myself deeply. Part of that meant accepting my struggles and developing strategies to work around them. While learning about Neuroplasticity and Growth Mindset however, I started to ask myself if these traits really are imbedded in who I am, or if they are just stories I have written about myself over and over until I believed they were objective reality; fixed and unchangeable.
For years I have known myself to be someone who lacks self-esteem and self-confidence. I accepted this, and learned to adopt a fake-it-till-you-make-it mindset as a way to get by in my career. And I honestly think I got pretty good at it. I could get up on stage in front of strangers, put deeply personal poetry on display, and advocate for my community in public forums.
So as I was reading about Neuroplasticity, I was like, how come my confidence never actually improved? I was doing the things, I wasn't letting this supposed weakness hold me back? Why didn't the actions translate into how I saw myself.
'Fake it till you make it' is a bit like 'Don't let them see you sweat'. It focuses its intent on others, and how they see you. It's not a personal growth strategy, it's a performance tactic.
I suffered through challenging social situations for years believing the most important thing was to /appear/ confident, not to actually become comfortable in my own skin. And when I felt like I did a good job, my brain reminded me that it was just because I was good at faking it.
In order for us to use our brain's Neuroplasticty to build skills and strengthen our abilities, we have to believe that we have the agency to choose who we are and who we want to be. Even when I was performing the part of someone confident, I never believed I had any power over how I felt inside. The only thing I could control was how others saw me.
Living in the safety of a fixed mindset hasn't just held me back from growth, self-confidence, and self-acceptance, it has also kept me from being accountable. One of my biggest take-aways from this learning is that, In order for us to do better today than we did yesterday, to respect each other, and to have hope for the future, we have to accept the fact that we have agency.
'That's just the way I am' quickly becomes 'That's just the way things are'.
It's static, it's passive, and it's honestly pretty depressing.
So maybe I can choose to be hopeful, to be proactive, openminded. Choose to take responsibility for who I am and how I interact with the world while I'm here. Maybe I can choose to develop my confidence until I feel genuinely comfortable in my own skin.
Or at least, I can choose to embrace the fact that I can try.