You know what you want to do, you have a fair idea how to do it, but there’s this nagging feeling, this little voice in the back of your mind that keeps telling you, you can’t. You then use the smallest of failures as evidence to justify this thought “you’re not good enough”.
Self-doubt is an out of date defence mechanism, and sadly, it’s probably the biggest thing holding you back from reaching your potential.
There’s a lot of information on this topic online but it’s my intention here to give you some actionable steps that you can take today to challenge your self-doubt, and take a step closer to reaching your potential.
First, it’s important to look at what causes self-doubt
Upbringing
Like a lot of our behaviour patterns, self-doubt can be linked to the way you learned to relate to your achievements. There are many ideas as to how it can manifest; not receiving praise, receiving too much praise, being told what you don’t deserve, not being allowed to questions your parents and teachers, or being made to feel your opinions don’t count. It could have been triggered by one major event or compounded over time.
However it manifested, the good news is that behaviour patterns are not permanent, with a conscious effort they can be changed.
Comparison with others
If self-doubt is a belief that you can’t do something, that a particular goal is out of your reach or that you’re simply not good enough, then it’s only natural that looking at others’ successes will add fuel to the fire. This is so easy to do these days; we’re surrounded by reminders of how other people are succeeding so it’s only natural that we envy others and believe that we’re not doing as well as they are.
Focusing on past mistakes
Neuroscientist Dr. Rick Hanson developed a theory that the human brain has a natural negativity bias. Basically, that means that you remember negative experiences more than positive ones. He called it Velcro and Teflon: your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. Is it any wonder that it’s so easy to focus on past mistakes and let them fuel your self-doubt?
When you are doubting yourself, you are focussing on what you lack, rather than what you have. This mindset will hold you back and ultimately prevent you from taking action.
How does self doubt affect you?
In a nutshell:
- You lose touch with what you truly want
- You procrastinate
- It creates performance anxiety
- It batters your self confidence
- It makes you feel like an imposter
- It stops you enjoying your successes
So it’s pretty clear that allowing self-doubt to infiltrate your life will seriously hold you back from reaching your potential, but how can you deal with self-doubt in a constructive way?
7 ways to stop doubting yourself
1. Change your limiting beliefs
Self-doubt comes from the deep-rooted belief that you can’t do something, that a particular goal is out of your reach or that you’re simply not good enough. A belief is something that you’re convinced is true, if you can find enough evidence to the contrary, you can effectively convince yourself of the opposite.
So if you doubt that you can achieve something, that you’re not capable, focus on your past successes. Think about all the times when you did achieve something, all of the things you have done in your life and hold on to them
2. Celebrate small wins
In order to get the leverage you need to challenge your limiting beliefs and build up a bank of evidence, start to recognise every small victory. Whatever that is to you, it may be a small one but it’s still a win. So acknowledge it, celebrate it.
Every time you reward yourself, your brain associates pleasure to the memories. The more you do this you work towards building up a habit of recognising wins, this will eventually tip the scale in the favour of positivity.
So make sure to reward yourself each time you are successful, write in a journal if you have a hard time remembering, revisit it often an remember the feeling of achievement.
3. Change your emotional state
The truth is that when you are feeling negative, pessimistic (both typical emotional states associated with self-doubt), what you need to get out of it is to ‘cheer up’ or ‘be optimistic’.
Easier said than done, right? Actually not, the truth is that you are the source of your emotions, you control them (not the other way around) and you have the power to change them in an instant. Something as simple as changing your posture can send messages to your brain that will influence your emotions.
So start by changing your body language, think about your posture when you feel good, strong, and confident, and replicate it. Smile, start at your eyes, let the smile spread from there to the rest of your face. Do it now and see how that changes your emotional state.
4. Learn to fail forwards
When you have a setback, make a mistake or a bad decision, it’s easy to slip directly into critical self-talk. This could be an overgeneralisation: “I’m a complete failure, I should quit”, Polarized Thinking: “I always fuck things up”, shoulds: “I should be better at this”, or any number of distorted critical thoughts.
You have to stop this. Failure isn’t a bad thing, failure is a necessary feature of progress. Learn to recognise each failure as a stepping stone towards eventual success.
Next time you make a mistake, something doesn’t work out like you planned or something else happens that you regard as a failure, ask yourself:
What have I learned?
What can I do differently?
How can I turn this around?
5. Surround yourself with cheerleaders
I’m not talking about people who will always agree with your ideas and tell you how amazing you are even if they really think you’re about to make a terrible mistake. I’m talking about people who support you, genuinely support your vision and who inspire you. The people you hang out with will either fuel your self-doubt or stoke the flames of your confidence.
Who are you spending the most time with?
What effect do they have on you, do you leave them feeling discouraged or motivated to go out and make shit happen?
Surround yourself with the latter, go out and find a community of like-minded people who share your passion and vision and who will help you to stay the course despite your doubts.
6. Get out of your way and stop making excuses
Excuses are the mental barriers we erect to protect ourselves but, in the end, hold us back. Whenever you are faced with opportunities, that same voice that tells you you’re not good enough, that you will fail also comes up with a whole boat-load of excuses as to why you shouldn’t bother doing what you know you really should be doing.
Think back on opportunities you passed up either actively or passively, what reasons did you give yourself at the time? My guess is that you’ll find that the majority of the time, those justifications were excuses created by self-doubt.
Next time your faced with an opportunity and your inner voice starters to come up with excuses, recognise them for what they are, challenge them, ask yourself:
What if the opposite were true?
Is this a genuine reason not to take this opportunity or just an excuse engineered by my brain to keep me safe?
7. Slow down to speed up
The real enemy here is your ‘monkey mind’, the part of you that is so good at coming up with excuses, and great reasons why you shouldn’t or can’t do what you know you need to do. It stifles creativity and stops you from moving forward with your passions.
The first step in shutting down your monkey mind is to become grounded and calm, remembering to be in the ‘here and now’. This technique is called mindfulness, there are many ways to practice it.
The most common way is to focus on your breathing, taking controlled breaths and every time you notice your mind wandering, come back to observing your breath.
Another way is through repeating a mantra, this can also distract you from your thoughts and remind you to be present.
You can even focus your attention completely on an inanimate object, observing it in every detail.
My advice is to simply start by observing your thoughts, recognising when doubt creeps in and starts taking over, and calming your self with simple, slow, steady breathing.
Why self-doubt is important
Although self-doubt can definitely hold you back if you let it influence your decisions, that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. Self-doubt is a completely normal human response experienced by almost every human being on the planet to some degree or another. In fact, A certain level of self doubt is a good thing, it can help you to see what you need to improve in order to do better and be more successful. The trick is to listen but not get sucked in. The techniques shared in this article can help you to do just that if you use them.
As always I truly hope that this article has been of some use to you, reach out and let me know if you have some success with these (or any other) techniques.
