Self-doubts, what are they?
If your reaction when faced with major decisions like starting a business, getting married, moving to a new city, taking on a new position in a new job, making a presentation, facing an interview, etc. is doubt or indecision, there is good and bad news for you.
The bad news is that you have a major challenge to deal with called “self-doubt”, which is a major hindrance to success in life. The good news is that you are not alone.
Everyone has self-doubts at some point or the other in their lives. Even the most successful, confident people do have self-doubts because it is simply a human way of responding to the challenges that we get to face from time to time as we go through life. Some people are however more prone to self-doubts than others.
It is not abnormal to have self-doubts from time to time. As a matter of fact, self doubts is part of our nature and is sometimes useful for keeping us safe by helping us to analyse and recognise ideas that may not serve us well or may not be good for us. Unfortunately, they do go beyond their good purpose and tend to hold us back and do us more harm than good if care is not taken.
Allowing self-doubts to fester, grow, and create crippling fear and consequent inaction (which is what it does in the most part), creates an unfulfilled life or an average life at the best. The problem is not the fear, the main problem is in what most people do – allowing the fear to stop you from moving forward and reaching your goals.
Ok, so you realise that the familiar and very persuasive voice of self-doubts is troubling you daily and holding you back from seizing your opportunities or taking actions that are important for moving you ahead, what should you do?
Here are 12 tips that will help you to push through your self-doubts so that you can finally be free to move forward and achieve your dreams. These tips are usually what make the difference between successful people and others.
1. The major battle is in the mind, take control of it.
First, you have to be conscious of the fact that the battles over self-doubts are fought and won largely in the mind before the actual manifestation of the results.
Self-doubts usually start with not too loud, and sometimes not too obvious negative self talk that remind you of your weaknesses and how “you do not have what it takes to succeed” in any given area of your life.
Sometimes it comes up as an innocent self critic, or “voice of reason” trying to help you “be real”. It gradually becomes louder and louder, giving you more and more instances why the negative statement is true, etc etc., until you find yourself totally intimidated, overwhelmed and under its grip.
You have to therefore recognise when the negative self-talks begin and consciously stop them in their tracks before they grow and take hold.
Thoughts are words spoken to your mind, so if you want to win this battle, don’t be a passive listener. Create what I call “attack words” which you’ll use whenever negative self-talk starts to come up.
Don’t give it any room at all. My favourite attack words that I created for myself are: “sorry, I am not having this conversation, I am too busy getting better everyday”. This usually shuts down the negative self-talk with its resultant self-doubt.
2. Others are fighting the same battle,…..and winning. Be encouraged.
Successful people fight this same mind battle everyday…..and win most of the times. When you allow those self-thoughts to hang on long enough, you may begin to feel like others have it all together and you are all alone, or in the league of failures in this lack of self confidence boat…and you can’t get out of it. That is definitely not true. Always bear that in mind.
Even people that are successful or seem self-confident all the time, aren’t always so self-confident. The difference is that they realise that they are not alone, and it gives them the confidence to push down the negative inner voices and push through anyway. If others are pushing through their fears and succeeding, you also can. Tap from other people’s victories over their mind battles.
3. Most people are too engrossed in their own issues, Stop worrying about what they think.
Why? Because most of the time, they are not really concerned about what you do or don’t do.
Do not expend your energy, emotions and valuable time worrying about other peoples’ perception of you. It is not worth it.
Most times we get stuck in fear and self-doubt when we allow ourselves worry about what others may think, do or say if we do something. Will they like it, see it as professional, or make fun of me? Maybe they will see how incompetent I am. What will be their reaction? etc. The questions are innumerable.
When next you are tempted to worry, remember that most people are too busy worrying themselves about so many other things, to focus on you or your matter.
The persons whose opinions or perceptions of you you may be worrying about may even be more worried about your own opinion of them. Relax and move on to the next important thing towards achieving your dreams.
4. Don’t take criticisms, negative comments or actions too personally.
This is because most times, it’s not even about you.
Too many people are dealing with too many things in their lives and sometimes they pass it on to others as negativity because they do not know how to handle the pressures they are in.
Take it from me, that cynical criticism, lashing, rejection, or negative comment really may not be about you or about what you did or did not do or say at all? It may have absolutely nothing to do with your abilities.
The woman who cut you in traffic and looked angry, the man who vented at you with foul words, or the classmate that said you were ugly and dumb may just have been having a bad day or a stressful week. Or they may have just lost their job, be having personal insecurities that were triggered, or whatever else. You probably just happened to be the one they were taking it out on, even unknowingly.
Even when we are genuinely given constructive criticisms, sometimes our minds tell us it’s the end of the world and we can’t really succeed at whatever it is we made mistakes in.
We want to give up altogether. We feel like quitting. News flash – It’s not the end of the world. Everyone makes mistakes, even the most intelligent, careful, business savvy, or successful. Learn from the mistakes, correct or adjust, and move on.
5. Split your big visions and dreams into smaller goals, and work at them one step at a time.
Sometimes our big dreams and visions seem so overwhelming and daunting, especially when they seem slow to materialise. This can result into self-doubts and total inactivity if we are not careful.
To avoid this, split your long-term goals into several short-term ones aimed at eventually fulfilling the big dream.As you achieve the smaller goals, you will find yourself naturally motivated to do more and keep making progress.
By the way, do not wait till you get to the full achievement of the big dream before you celebrate. Celebrate and reward yourself every step along the way, you deserve it, you are pushing through to your success despite all odds.
6. Make use of hindsight.
Hindsight is an advantage because now you already know the outcome of the event.
Chances are that you had situations in the past that you were fearful or doubtful about the outcome. Chances are also that most of those situations turned out well despite your self-doubts or fears as you went ahead anyway.
If it has not happened in your life, chances are that you have seen or heard it happen in the lives of some other people. By benefit of hindsight, now you know for sure that most times things turn out right anyway. But our minds are usually not programmed to remember the good times. You have to therefore deliberately learn to leverage on it.
So when next those doubts or fears attempt to come up, remember all the times that things went right irrespective.
Remember your past successes or achievements, whether big or small, and you will find strength to keep moving and not quit.
7. Detox from negative people and surround yourself with people that encourage your progress.
Stay close to people who challenge and encourage you and stay away from toxic people who are always negative or pessimistic towards you.
Truth is, you may not always be able to avoid some negative people in your life but there are some others that you can stay away from. Do so. You have enough negative people to deal with already – You. You don’t need more.
8. Life happens, move on. Mistakes happen, forgive yourself.
Life and mistakes happen to us all. Sometimes they happen despite all the diligent, great and careful efforts we make or put in on our part. Learn from them and move on.
If you are like most people seeking to be successful, then you have likely set some very “perfectionist” standards for yourself to reach, otherwise, you consider yourself to have failed. Then you go on beating yourself up about it and further creating more doubts and demotivating yourself as a result. Just stop.
When life happens, stop, re-strategise and keep moving.
When mistakes happen, learn from the mistakes, correct, adjust, and move on.
This point is worthy of repetition: Everyone makes mistakes, even the most intelligent, careful, business savvy, or successful. Learn from the mistakes, correct or adjust, and move on.
9. Don’t be defensive, be proactive
Take proactive steps to feed your mind everyday with positive thoughts about yourself. The mind does not have room for “nothingness”. It is either it is responding to the negatives or to the positives.
Since your mind is more prone to negativity, you have to learn to deliberately feed it with positivity.
While growing up from childhood unto adulthood, we tend to hear more negative talk from some well-meaning as well as not so well-meaning family, friends and others. These gradually add up towards creating self-doubt and eroding our self esteem.
Its time to take proactive actions to weed out the negatives and lay the foundations for sustainable positivity.
How do you do that? Create a daily alone time to feed your mind with everything positive. Read a relevant book, articles, that encourage you to be positive.
Do this regularly and you will be amazed at how much easier it is to push through your self doubts to greater optimism and more success.
10. Stop the comparisons.
No matter how well you’re doing in life, there will always be someone who appears to be doing better. Do not compare yourself to others. We are all on different journeys of life.
Instead, compare yourself to your past self, your progressing self.
Comparing yourself to other people and their successes will likely result in self-doubt. It’s worthy of note that most of the time, what you see or hear about people do not reflect the full story. Usually the full story includes their own struggles, pains, doubts and fears.
You cannot tell for sure how happy or successful someone else’s family, marriage, job, or life in general is from most Instagram or Facebook posts for instance. Unfortunately, many are intimidated by stuff like that when they begin to compare themselves.
Stay focused on making your consistent progress, even if it is in little steps at a time, and you will eventually achieve your dream.
11. Train and retrain yourself.
The more knowledge you have and the more you understand something, the more confident you get in that thing.
The opposite is also true. The less you know about something, the more likely you are going to be doubtful about achieving success in it.
Imagine that you were to cook a meal and you only knew the name and what the end result should be but neither knew the recipe nor the process. That lack of knowledge erodes your confidence.
If on the other hand you were to study a bit about the food, its recipe and preparation process, imagine how much more confidence you would have in your ability to successfully pull that through.
Learn as much as you can about anything you want to do. Learn the much you can, start off, and continue the learning process while you are on the journey.
Train and re-train yourself. Attend seminars, courses, go back to school if need be, research, etc.
12. Just Do It
Stop over-analysing, just do it. The more you analyse and wait for everything to line up, the more the doubts arise. The more you take action, the better you will get at it.
Just ask yourself, “what is the worst that can happen?”. Usually, you will find out that it makes it easier to face your fears and take action.
Make a decision and start off. Whether it is blogging, a business, or whatever, just do it. You can make corrections along the way as you go along. Just keep taking action despite your doubts.
What other tips help you push through your self-doubts and which one of the above points resonates most with you?
