Self-reliance is a highly regarded trait that is not only worthy of respect but is also capable of enriching life and creating many more opportunities. When you don’t rely on others to do the things you want to do, or to get by on a day to day basis, you increase your options and you build confidence and experience.
But if you are not someone who is naturally independent or self-sufficient, what can you do to acquire these traits?

Is self-reliance something you are simply born with… or not? Or can it be learned?

How to Build Confidence and Experience

To become self-reliant you need to spend more time getting by on your own. This means learning to enjoy your own company, to ‘make do’ with fewer resources and to deal with challenges without going to others for help. The problem is that many of us are used to having a support network around us and thus struggle to ‘let go‘ of that help long enough to learn the skills we need to be alone and to cope with adversity as it arises. The only way to acquire the skills necessary for self-reliance is to force yourself to cope alone more often and to remove that temptation to get help, comfort or support when normally you would.

What’s one great way to do this?

Travelling!

When you go travelling you basically remove yourself from that support network as well as your creature comforts. Thus, when challenges arise (which they will), you will be forced to cope with them by finding your own way rather than turning to someone for help. This works even better if you head somewhere where you can’t speak the language and where you feel like a ‘fish out of water’ as it means you’ll be coping without even being able to ask strangers for help.

Be Alone

You can also gain self-reliance simply by doing more things yourself. That might mean going to the cinema occasionally on your own, going out for food or engaging in hobbies. Going to the gym on your own is a simple activity that can make you more used to spending time without company.

Want to go one step further?

Live alone!

Ultimately, the trick is to force yourself to cope when normally you would ask for help and to occasionally put yourself out there without a ‘safety net‘. This is how you can gain the knowledge and expertise to cope with whatever life throws at you.

Self-reliance is an incredibly important skill and is essentially the key to happiness and stability. If you are someone who can be completely happy on your own and who doesn’t need the validation, entertainment or help of others to get by, then you will never be left without resources and unable to continue to function.
Ultimately, we are all alone. As much as you might love others and feel they are there for you, when you close your eyes at night it is just you. That shouldn’t be scary though – not if you are okay with being self-reliant.
Unfortunately though, many people struggle to spend time with themselves which is perhaps the very most basic expression of self-reliance. Here then, we will look at how to become better at being on your own without becoming either lonely or bored.

Keep a List of Activities

One useful tip that can make a big difference is to keep a list of activities to engage in. This might mean for instance that you keep a running note of any books you want to read, any films you want to watch or any computer games you want to play. By doing this, you will then have a long list of things you’re keen to do when you’re on your own and you’ll be excited to get the chance to do these next time you are rather than just sitting twiddling your thumbs.

Start New Hobbies and Activities

This will tie into the latter: if you have a hobby or a regular activity that you do then you’ll be far less likely to find yourself bored. What’s more, when you do something like painting or working out, you will often be alone or at least quiet and solitary when you engage in that thing. Writing is particularly good because it forces you to practice having an internal monologue which ultimately can result in you becoming better at ‘keeping yourself company’. Some people also find that playing music can keep them company.

Spend Gradually More Time Alone

Another thing you can do to become better at being alone is simply to practice. In other words, try spending more and more time alone until you start to find it less upsetting. Maybe try taking long walks alone at first, before eventually building up to doing things like taking holidays on your own.

Self-reliance means having the will and the courage to do things alone and to be alone rather than relying on others. This is a very powerful tool because it means that you can never feel completely alone or lost. You are the one person who will always be with you – and if that is enough, then it will make a big difference and put you in a much stronger position. If you are self-reliant, then there is nothing that can be taken away from you that will leave you completely destroyed.
As mentioned, true self-reliance takes courage. The ability to be alone, to take risks without a safety net and to cut ties when it best serves your interests is one that requires a certain fearlessness that not everyone possesses naturally. So for many, the first step towards self-reliance will be in acquiring that courage that makes everything else possible. And one tool for doing this is ‘fear setting’.

What is Fear Setting?

Fear setting is an idea that was made popular by Tim Ferriss in his book ‘The Four Hour Workweek’. Interestingly though, the concept really takes its cues from an aspect of ‘cognitive behavioral therapy‘ known as ‘thought challenging‘.

For most of us, our fears come from beliefs we hold about things that could go wrong or that might happen. In the case of self-reliance, we might be afraid that everyone is going to leave us and we’ll go crazy from loneliness. Or maybe we worry that if we cut ties with our current career, we’ll end up with none to come back to.
These fears are what limit us from taking risks often and what prevent us from living to our full potential. Thus they are also a huge obstacle when it comes to achieving real self-reliance.

Fear setting is about taking these beliefs then and making them less scary. You do this by writing them down and by assessing how likely they are to come to fruition. What’s more, you will also come up with contingency plans for how you would cope if they should ever happen. So for instance, if you’re worried you might end up without your job if you take time off, fear setting would then be the process of thinking how you might cope. Would you be destitute? Or might you find it was relatively easy to find work? Do you have enough in savings to survive for a few weeks?
Use fear setting and your fears don’t seem so big – and that’s how you gain the courage to be fully self-reliant\

For the most part, self-reliance is a trait that we generally consider to be positive and many of us strive to be more self-reliant so that we can get more out of our lives without needing other people and so that we can develop ourselves without needing others and so that we can be more independent and happier on our own.
But as with all things, it is possible for you to have ‘too much of a good thing’ when it comes to self-reliance. If you become too self-reliant then this can actually end up being detrimental to you. The key is to being self-reliant when you need to be but also knowing when to ask for help.

When You Need to Ask for Help

Those who value self-reliance above all else can often make the mistake of refusing help or failing to ask for it when we really need it. Thus we can end up taking risks or being less happy because we stubbornly refuse to defer to others.
A good example of this is in business. Many entrepreneurs will be highly self-reliant and this is what moves them to work for themselves to begin with. They are ‘self-starters’ and are entirely self-motivated which is to be applauded.
As the business grows though, many self-employed people struggle to hire new staff or to outsource aspects of their work. This is because they would rather do everything themselves and maintain full control. The result though is that app designers or hair dressers also start handling their online marketing, their writing, their graphic design and their sales calls… and this in turn means they have far less time to spend doing the thing they’re really good at. This can cause their product and their service to suffer so that they may even end up losing customers or clients. What’s more, they of course won’t do as good a job at marketing unless they have the same amount of experience as a specialist. Which they likely don’t.
Another example of being overly self-reliant is something you often see in the recently disabled or the ‘new elderly’. As people lose mobility they can often refuse to let others help them get around and do things, partly out of pride and partly out of not wanting to be a burden. Unfortunately though, their unwillingness to give up that self-reliance actually makes them more of a burden and puts them in greater risk of injury.
In cases like this self-reliance can actually be a negative. While this is a skill we all should learn, we also all need to know when to ask for help.