Feelings of inferiority and inadequacy are often related in comparing ourselves to people who are better than we are. It's impossible to develop a feeling of inferiority when we compare ourselves to people who are not as good as we are. So it's very helpful to balance our understanding and our comparing, to consider both sides; consider people who are better than us and consider people who are not better than us. This helps us to make more of a realistic judgment of who we are and our abilities. Quite frankly, on most levels, any one of you here will find that there are people who are superior to you in some things. And there are also people who are inferior to you in some things, which makes you superior to those people. So you are going to find that you have got both, and you are going to find that with some of your skills you going to be on a very equal level, so to speak, with other people. If you look objectively, you are going to find yourself sometimes superior, sometimes equal, sometimes inferior. As long as we are not a Buddha yet, we are always inferior in some level to what he and other enlightened people have been.
It's not like we want to throw away the feeling of inferiority either, in the sense of always knowing that we are not superior, that's helpful, that brings us more humility. But to actually get caught up with it as to a negative trait, this can be balanced if we look at people that are actually below our levels instead of always looking at people above our levels. Some of this relates to the basic way that a person looks at life; the glass is half empty, the glass is half full. The person who feels that the glass is half full, is happy with what they've achieved, happy with what they've got. The person who feels that the glass is half empty is upset with what they don't have. So a general attitude in this will go into the feelings of inferiority and inadequacy, but we are only looking at what we can't do, and not enough time is spent on what we can do.