Turning The Inside To The Outside

The Humanity Project is still very new. And we’re very much a work in progess, focusing and improving our efforts as we go along. Part of the challenge, it seems, is that we’re trying to do something that’s pretty tough to accomplish. We want to take an inner experience most people would recognize in themselves, a tendency to frequently feel strong and irrational self-doubt, and we want to then explain that this is not limited to them. That’s what we always believe, isn’t it? “I’m messed up, sure, but most people don’t seem to be.” That’s wrong. It’s a problem we all face, though in different ways within different people. To our group, this tendency is the elephant in the room. No one wants to talk about it, but everyone knows it’s there. This tendency toward unhealthy self-doubt is seen by many people as a painful but inescapable part of their life.

The Humanity Project stands for the belief that this is not an inescapable part of anyone’s life. That’s the very crux of our idea: Humans don’t NEED to suffer from this kind of destructive self-doubt. We know of no evidence that shows this self-doubt is somehow hard-wired into our brains. It’s a learned tendency, something we begin to acquire as kids. (In next week’s blog, we’re going to talk about how this process seems to begin in children, starting us mistrusting ourselves from early life.) But for now, let’s just say that this process obviously happens to all of us, to varying degrees. The Humanity Project thinks it’s time to point out what this is: A widespread, serious problem that damages individual lives and ripples out from individuals to damage society. That’s not an easy idea to communicate without sounding “New Agey” or flakey – but it isn’t either one of those things. It’s a fact of life. So let’s drag it out from inside our minds and push it into the light, call it the problem it is, and see what we can do about it, individually and as a society. Because there’s another fact already proven many times by people, both famous and anonymous folks. Humans have the ability to change, to gain real self-confidence and self-trust. The Humanity Project wants to explore new ways we can increase awareness of the self-doubt tendency and find ways to help us rise above it in everyday life. That’s both our mission and our challenge. We hope you’ll want to join our effort.