How to Be Self-Reliant: 4 Actionable Tips on Emotional Independence

Self-reliance is the cornerstone of what it means to be a person who is the cause rather than the effect of their life.

An adult who is not self-reliant is at the mercy of life and whatever it throws at them.

Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had some interesting things to say about self-reliance in his essay of the same name. This article is a dissection of that essay and its implications on modern life.

At the end of this article, you’ll get some actionable tips on how to use this in your day to day.

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What is Self-Reliance? What Makes Someone Self-Reliant?

Self-reliance is the ability to use oneself and unique life experiences, perspectives, and inclinations to relate to and deal with life’s various challenges, opportunities, and circumstances.

A person with self-reliance is a person with self-esteem. They may not see the whole terrain, but they trust themselves to “figure it out” somehow.

As a human being, you come into this world entirely dependent on others for your survival. Humans detach from their caregivers at a later stage than most other animals, so we spend an extended period of time in a state of reliance on other people.

Over time, this translates into people who cannot do basic adult things such as shop for clothes, apply for jobs, or do other life necessities on their own and it creates a major shock when they need to.

Past a certain stage in life, there is little that your parents can do for you and you’re now forced to fight for your own survival.

Your ability to cast yourself out into the world and stretch into unfamiliar territory where everyone is a stranger will determine your success (or failure) in life.

You can only do that with a good degree of self-reliance.

Why You Should Care About Self-Reliance (Especially As a Man)

Society has changed dramatically since Emerson was alive, but many aspects remain the same.

As a man, you will be seen as the “tip of the spear”, the “head of the household”, the “breadwinner”.

You’ll need to bring a healthy dose of masculine energy to a relationship if you want to keep the spark alive.

You’ll need to realize that no one is coming to save you. If you fail, no one in life will pick you up.

You can have friends, you can love your family, but you need to understand that success is an inside job and that inside job will be completed only with a healthy dose of self-reliance.

It’s the only way.

Emerson’s Thoughts on How to Be Self-Reliant

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a lot to say about life in general, but he had especially deep insights about the individual.

He eventually came to the conclusion that a man can only rise as high as his own thoughts about himself.

Of course, these thoughts circle back to one’s self-trust, one’s one sense of self-reliance.

Here are four actionable takeaways from Emerson’s Self-Reliance.

#1. Trust Yourself

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within more than the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

When you’re young, you’re told that you don’t know that much about the world and that you need to sit down and shut up.

While that may be partially true, what isn’t true is that we are completely ignorant.

From a young age, people start to find out their advantages (and disadvantages) very fast.

Some things come easy to you might be harder or even impossible to others.

These things give us some guiding light as to what we might be good at.

But many people did not have positive reinforcement growing up, so they were told to ignore it and do something “safe and secure”, which may be where you want your calling to be. But what if it isn’t? What then?

Well, you may spend most of your life seeking after validation in an attempt to blot out that inner voice.

Add that up over millions of people and that’s why we have so many people who feel lost and emotionally shattered in today’s world.

As a man, developing a strong indifference to results AKA “outcome independence“, is essential.

You always control your actions, never the results.

#2: Create Beneficial Habits

“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.”

I don’t think a lot of people realize how easy it is for first impressions are to become final impressions.

In any social circle you run in, you’ll notice that everyone has some sort of “archetype”. Some people have the archetype of the Joker, another one has one of the Player, another one has that of the Storyteller.

These are predictable habitual grooves that keep people locked into a certain one-dimensional persona and prevents them from expanding. Here’s an example:

In your friend circle, you’re known as the guy who isn’t good with women or who “doesn’t get girls”. You’re known as the “nice guy”.

You decide you want to change that.

You read some books on how to improve your confidence, you start going out more, you upgrade your fashion and physique, etc…

But lo and behold, someone in your social circle finds out about this and says:

Why you reading that stuff man? You know that’s not for you.

Because if you changed your archetype, you would break their paradigm of you fit into their mental construct of the world.

If this happens, you have two choices:

1. Ignore it and carry on
2. Step back into your assigned role

Because let’s be honest…consistency is comfortable. Change is not.

If you want to start a habit, it will take a minimum of 21 days before it seems normal. But before it gets integrated into your subconscious, it can take anywhere from 66 days to 2 years before your brain rewires to accept the habit.

After that period of time, it is accepted by the subconscious mind as a new behavior.

You’ll need consistency, discipline, and faith to institute new behaviors that go against your current comfortable programming.

#3: Learn How to Fail

“If young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and complaining the rest of his life.”

Like there is an art of self-reliance, there is an art of failure – one that comes from taking risks.

When you take risks, you will fail in some aspect a majority of the time. When you do fail, however, you gain experience – which is there is no substitute for.

We are socialized that failure is bad and it should be avoided. But becoming a strong and independent man is all about testing your limits to see how far you can go. When you test limits, you will inevitably hit a point where you can’t go any further.

No shame in that, just keep moving.

Start an “enterprise”. It may be a blog, it may be a business, it may be a social group. Use your best efforts to sustain it.

Eventually, you will run into failure. Learn from that failure and try again, so your next efforts will be better. Continue this process of optimization until you get as close to perfection as you can.

#4: Think On Your Own

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

Becoming more self-reliant is a hard task to do in an age where everyone is encouraged to be a consumer and be reliant on other people and things to alert their emotional state.

You are encouraged to keep buying pointless garbage to keep the wheels of consumerism churning.

Have you ever stepped back and thought to yourself:

This is absolutely stupid.

As standard protocol, you should question everything that passes for “normal” in society.

If you don’t, you’ll just be another person who goes through life in an unconscious haze without any type of self awareness. There’s a large chance that when you reach the end of it, you’ll realize that you lived it all for other people rather than yourself.

Mindset(s) of the Self-Reliant Individual

The self-reliant individual has a whole mindset, a whole personality that is centered around expressing himself to the fullest and acquiring needs for himself and people in his immediate circle to thrive.

These are the keys to his paradigm and the keys to understanding what Emerson puts forth in Self-Reliance.

Vision

“Without vision, the people perish.” – Proverbs 29:18

The self-reliant man has a vision. He has an idea of where he wants his life to go in the long run. He has goals.

He may not know the ideal road to get there, but he knows the end destination and trusts the road to take care of itself once the target is clarified.

How to build: What do you want from your life? What will you tolerate from life? Write it down. Write down your goals for this week, this month, this quarter, this year. Write out what you want to be doing 10 years from now.

You don’t have to know the route, but if you never know the destination, you’ll never get to it.

Productivity

The self-reliant man is productive. He is able to produce results for himself and other people in beneficial areas and is compensated justly. He takes what he has and makes the most of them. He is the alchemist that is able to turn stone into gold.

How to build: Productivity is a skill, usually one born from experience. As a productive person, you’re able to produce both high quality and high quantity in whatever it is that you do. With that ability, you are able to “write your own ticket in life”.

If you want a deeper insight into the nuances of productivity, check out this podcast I did on the subject:

Mental Toughness

At the cornerstone of self-reliance lies the concept of grit and mental toughness. How much pain are you willing to take in order to separate yourself?

Because let’s be honest, being alone can suck. In days before civilization was established, if you were alone (or even worst, cast out from the group), there’s a very big chance you could die.

We don’t live in that type of world anymore, but it still informs many people’s actions. There’s a blanketing security in conformity but there is also a type of stifling of individual self-expression that happens at the same time.

How to build: Creating a mindset that allows you to push through pain and resistance is not done overnight. You do it through practice and stacking up the wins that come from hard-fought victories. Reading the article I linked above won’t hurt, either.

Conscientiousness

The self-reliant individual is conscientious. This means he is deliberate with how he uses his resources, namely time, money, and energy. As a conscientious person, he is more concerned with maximizing the first one in order to squeeze the most out of the latter two.

Time is the currency with which we trade with life, and the self-reliant person realizes that to take advantage.

How to build: Some people have higher levels of conscientiousness than others. These people are often more detail-oriented and “dot the I’s and cross the T’s” more than other people. While some of this shows itself at an early age, higher levels of conscientiousness can be built into someone’s life accordingly.

Equanimity

The self-reliant individual is equanimous. This means that he is “rock solid” stable no matter what is going on around him.

When everyone else is flipping shit, he is able to be the calm in the midst of the storm and do what needs to be done whether he feels like it or not.

Without equanimity, the other four preceding aspects are impossible.

How to build: Equanimity can be built in many ways, but it is best built through a practice of meditation. Meditation helps you open your mind to “big picture thinking” and puts things into an experiential context.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

To sum it all up, being self-reliant entails:

• Trusting your own inner voice (intuition) despite what the crowd may say
• Creating productive habits that will help you in life
• Learning how to fail and learning lessons from that failure
• Doing your own thinking while simultaneously seeking out alternative voices
• Creating a vision for your life
• Being self-aware
• Maintaining an evenness of mind regardless of what is going on in your life

Self-reliance is a necessity if you want to live a great life. It’s a practice worth building if you want to be in control of your own destiny.

I want to know in the comments: what are some ways that you are being self-reliant and what does self-reliance mean to you?