“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
William Shakespeare
Self-doubt can be a troubling and persuasive voice that holds you back.
It holds you back from seizing your opportunities.
It makes getting started or finishing things harder than they need to be.
Sure, it can sometimes be useful as it helps you to soberly see your current limitations or simply recognize a half-baked or bad idea. But mostly, it holds you back in life.
So how can you get around that, how can you overcome those times of self-doubt so that you can move forward once again?
In this article I’ll explore 10 tips and habits that have helped me to decrease that destructive inner voice.
1. Say stop.
First, when your inner doubts bubble up, be quick. Don’t let them spin out of control or grow from a whisper to a stream of discouraging sentences. Instead, talk back to that doubtful part of yourself.
In your mind, say or shout something like: No, no, no, we are not going down that road again.
By doing so you can disrupt the thought pattern and stop that inner self-doubter from taking over.
2. Look to the past and awash yourself in the memories.
Be real with yourself and ask yourself:
How many times when I doubted myself or feared something would happen did that negative thing come into reality after I still took action?
The answer for me – and probably for you too – is not very often at all.
Self-doubts are most often just monsters in your head that your mind may use to keep you from making changes and to keep you within the comfort zone.
If you look to the past and see how well things have gone many times despite those self-doubts then it become easier to let go of them or to ignore them and to focus on the more likely positive outcome and to take action.
3. Talk to someone about it.
When you keep your thoughts on the inside they can become distorted, exaggerated and not very much in line with reality or reasonable expectations.
This is very much true when it comes to self-doubting thoughts.
So let them out into the light. Talk to someone close to you about your self-doubts.
Just letting them out and saying them out loud can often help you to hear how exaggerated these thoughts have become. And by talking about those doubts with someone that is supportive you can get a change in perspective.
4. Start keeping a journal.
Keeping a journal can be a helpful habit for many reasons. When it comes to self-doubts it can help you to:
Keep a realistic record of your life. And help you to remember the positive things, the successes you have had and how you have overcome obstacles if you are prone to remembering things with a negative slant.
Gain clarity more easily. It is often easier to alleviate fears and doubts and to gain clarity if you have an issue laid out on paper or in a computer document rather than if you try to go through it all in your mind. By making lists of pros and cons, going through your thoughts and emotions and similar events from the past and by writing down different perspectives on the issue it becomes easier to find solutions and to see your challenge in a clearer and more level-headed way.
5. Remember: people don’t care that much about what you do or say.
When you worry about what others may think or say if do something then the self-doubt can quickly become stronger and you get stuck in inaction and in fear.
When that happens remind yourself that the truth is that people don’t really care that much about what you or do not do.
They have their hands full with thinking about themselves, their kids and pets, jobs and upcoming sports matches and with worrying about what people may think of them.
6. Get a boost of optimism.
Let someone else’s enthusiasm, motivation and constructive optimism flow over to you. Spend 20 minutes with a an audio book, a podcast or a book that gives you that. Tim Ferriss’ podcast has helped me with this recently and have over the years often listened to audio books by Brian Tracy to get this boost.
This quick 20 minute session can greatly help you to shift your self-doubts into optimism and into thinking constructively about your challenge.
7. See a setback as temporary.
When you have a setback then it is easy to start doubting yourself and what you do. To start seeing this current setback as something that will simply be your new normal.
This way of looking at things can trap you in thinking that there’s no point in continuing to take action.
So instead:
Remember: You are not a failure just because you failed. Setbacks happen to everyone who take chances. It is simply a part of living life fully. Sometimes things go well and sometimes they don’t. So don’t make a failure into this huge thing or into your identity.
Ask yourself: what is one thing I can learn from this setback? Use the mistake or failure to your advantage and to move forward once again in smarter way.
8. Sharpen your skills.
If you, for instance, often get self-doubt before a presentation in school or at work then sharpen your presentation skills. Read a few books about it and practice at home in front of a mirror or in front of a friend. Or join Toastmasters to get the experience or knowledge you need.
Then you’ll feel more confident, competent and relaxed in such situations.
9. Don’t beat yourself up about it.
A common way to handle self-doubt is to get angry at yourself and your lack of motion forward. To try to beat yourself up as a way to get yourself to move forward.
That does not – in my experience – help that much.
I have found that being kind and constructive when feeling self-doubt is a better choice. So I use kind and understanding words towards myself but I also ask myself:
What is one very small step I can take to move forward in this situation?
Then I take that very small step and start to step by step move towards where I want to go.
10. Remember: You can course-correct along the way.
Trying to plan every move you will make on a journey towards a goal or dream can become draining and lead to quite a bit of self-doubt. And it it usually don’t work that well anyway since the best laid plans often start to fall part a bit or need some change when they are confronted with reality.
So do a bit of rough planning and then start your journey.
And remember that you can always course-correct along the way towards what you want. Empowered by the new knowledge, experience and feedback you will get as you keep going on that path.
“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
C. S. Lewis
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
Michael Jordan
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett
Oftentimes things go OK or even better than that.
But on some days they don’t.
You make a mistake, have setback or you simply fail. It’s no fun. But you can’t avoid it either unless you avoid doing anything at all.
So what’s needed is a smart and self-kind way to handle such situations instead of letting them lead to vicious self-beatings and to them dragging you down into negativity for the day or month.
This week I’d like to share 9 habits that’ve helped me with that. I hope they will be useful for you too.
1. First, just accept how you feel.
When you’ve just failed it will most likely hurt. Sometimes a bit. Sometimes a lot.
That’s OK. Don’t try to push it away by distracting yourself or by trying to push the responsibility onto the rest of the world (if you deep down know that this one’s on you partly or fully). And don’t try to paint it over with a smile.
I’ve found that it works better to not let yourself be lead away by those options or impulses.
But to just be with what I’m thinking and feeling. To try to accept it, to let it in and to hurt for a while instead of trying to reject it all and to keep it away.
Because when you let it in and accept it then it will go faster and in the long run be less painful to process what has happened.
If you reject how you really feel then those emotions will pop up at unexpected times later on and can make you moody, pessimistic, angry or sad.
2. Remember: you’re not a failure just because you had a setback.
When you’ve had a setback it’s very easy to start thinking that you will always keep failing in this area of your life. It’s easy to start thinking that YOU are indeed a failure.
Don’t fall for such a destructive and sometimes seductive self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead, remind yourself that:
Just because you failed today or yesterday doesn’t mean that you’ll fail the next time.
The truth is that this won’t last for the rest of your life if you keep moving forward, if you take action and you keep learning and it doesn’t label you as some kind of failure (except if you decide to create that label in your own head).
Seeing what’s negative as a temporary thing instead of something permanent is an essential key to an optimistic attitude and to keep going forward in life.
3. Be constructive and learn from this situation.
See it more as valuable feedback and something you can use to improve rather than only a big blow and setback.
I’ve found that the simplest and most helpful way to do that is to ask myself better questions (instead of the common ones that send you off into a negative spiral).
Questions like:
What’s one thing I can learn from this?
How can I adjust my course to avoid this trap/making the same mistake and likely do better next time?
What’s one thing I can differently the next time?
Take some time with these questions and be honest with yourself as you answer them. There’s no rush and while some of the answers may be immediate others might take an hour, day or even a week to pop up.
The important thing is to start thinking about the situation from this perspective and to be constructive about things instead of getting stuck in denial or negativity and apathy.
4. Remind yourself: anyone who wants to do things of value in life will fail.
We often mostly just hear about people’s successes. But the path to those milestones tends to have many setbacks. The story of someone’s success may seem only bright and fast-moving in what’s told in the media or we see in our minds.
But the reality – and the useful way to approach setbacks – is most often more like this quote by Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
5. Let it out into the light.
Another powerful way to handle the emotional fallout and the thoughts that come from a failure is to not keep it all bottled up inside.
But to let it out into the light by talking it over with someone close to you.
By venting about it while the other person just listens you can sort things out for yourself, help yourself to accept what happened instead of pushing it away and release that inner pressure.
By having a conversation about the situation you can see it from another perspective and through someone else’s eyes. This person can help you to ground yourself in reality again, to encourage and to perhaps even to find a way forward.
6. Find inspiration and support from your world.
A conversation with someone close to you can be very helpful.
Another thing you can do is to learn from those who’ve gone where you want to go. Read about how they handled setbacks and low-points before or during their success in books, on websites or online forums.
Or you can simply tap into the enthusiasm or motivation of someone else by listening to a podcast or audio book for maybe 30-60 minutes. This may not be specifically about your current challenge but can help you to shift your mood and mindset back towards optimism again.
7. Move forward again, don’t get stuck in mulling this situation over for too long.
Processing the situation and accepting it is essential.
But I know from experience that it’s also easy to get stuck in the same thoughts going around and around for week or a month.
The habit that has helped me with this trap is to take what I learn from questions like the ones I shared in tip #3 and to make a small rough plan for how I want to move forward from here.
So I take some time to sit down and write that one out.
8. Take action on that plan right away after you’ve drawn it up.
The plan you come up with will just be a start. You can course-correct later on, along the way.
So you don’t have to make it perfect. Trying to do that can sometimes just be a way to procrastinate because you fear failing again or because it is hard to start moving after this rough and disorienting thing that happened to you.
Split your start of a plan up into small steps and then take action on just one of them.
If you still have a hard time to get going then go for a very small step, just 1-5 minutes of action forward. The important thing is to get started and moving forward again so make that easy on yourself.
9. Improve your self-esteem.
A last thing that has helped me in general to handle setbacks is to improve my self-esteem.
By doing so failures don’t become something that so easily drags me down and I recover more quickly from them.
It also makes it easier to see what happened with more clarity and to take responsibility when I am responsible but also to see when someone else is partly responsible or when I just had bad luck that I could honestly not have predicted. And that helps me to not think that everything that goes wrong in my life is 100% my fault.
But how do you improve your self-esteem?
A good start would be to use much of what you find in this article. Like remembering that YOU are not a failure, that everyone have setbacks, to be constructive in the face of adversity and so on.
By doing these things over and over and making them habits your self-esteem improves.
And over time a smaller setback may just bounce off of you and a larger one will not be the same blow as it used to and the shock and climb back up from what happened becomes easier and not something that is as paralyzing anymore.
