Do you struggle with making decisions?

Are you that person who sleeps on things, and spend hours the following day considering it before you can make a simple decision? And then with big scenarios or big life-changing things you get stuck in doubts that feed more doubts until you implode. 

What is self-doubt?

Self-doubt is a feeling that something will go wrong, that your ideas are stupid, or that you are no good.

You may often wonder whether your ideas are any good, whether people will like you, and whether you are capable of doing something.

If you're thinking that something might go wrong, you may worry excessively. This may make you feel nervous or anxious, and you may have a hard time performing well.

Why is it important to learn how to manage self-doubt?

Negative feedback and judgemental thoughts make us feel bad and cause us to question ourselves and our abilities. They can also hinder our performance in certain situations. We are bombarded with negative thoughts all day long. To combat this, we must learn to develop strategies to help us manage self-doubt and give us the confidence to face the challenges that we encounter throughout our lives. from time to time. It’s not uncommon to have doubts about your ability to accomplish something. This is because you're being judged by yourself.

The only thing that you have to rely on is your own experience. So why are there so many people that don’t have self-doubt? If we're constantly being told that we're inadequate, what makes us think that we can overcome our doubts?

The reason for this is simple.

A positive attitude makes us believe that we can do anything. Self-doubt makes us believe that we’ll never succeed because we’re always looking at the negative. If we look at the worst possible outcome, we might as well just give up right now! So how do we get rid of this thought process?

The answer is quite simple. We must get past our fear of failing. It takes time to develop this skill, but with practice, it becomes easier. If we can get rid of our doubts, then we’ll be able to achieve more. We’ll be able to succeed. We’ll be able to conquer our fears. All that we have to do is to find a way to get past our fears of failing.

From time to time, we should consider the risks of our actions. After doing so, if we still feel like going through with it, we can’t blame ourselves if it doesn’t work out. As long as we take care of our health, we shouldn’t expect to die too early.

It’s never too late to make a change. It's never too late to start living life. And when you start taking care of yourself, the rest will follow.

Is self-doubt a weakness or a defense mechanism

To help you understand how to overcome self-doubt, I'd like to share two concepts with you. The first concept is something that has been a constant in my experience over the last 22 years in the mental health service. It's been a consistent pattern where whenever I work with anyone who is struggling emotionally, the breakdown has been because of this concept.

And the concept is that we have all got the wrong idea about weaknesses. We feel that the thing that is making us struggle emotionally is our weaknesses whereas in actual fact, what's causing the emotional problems are our strengths.

In this case, you see self-doubt as a weakness. It feels like a weakness because it's something cannot get through.  Where reality, self-doubt is been created by another strength. The strength of self protection. You are protecting yourself from making a decision that could approach you or hurt other people. And the better you get at protecting yourself or protecting the harder it will be to make decisions.

This leads me to the second concept.

Could self-doubt be your superpower?

 Think about what happens with superheroes when they have just realised they have new powers. During this initial phase, they are so clumsy with your superpower. Not able to manage the super hearing. You can see Spider-Man sticking on every surface not knowing how to stop or control the power.

How does this relate?

For us, our strengths become our superpowers. The reason they become superpowers is because we have formed them for years. Because of all the experiences we've been through and the coping strategies we've had to learn to get through life, we have relied heavily on these things to help us through situations. And because of this these character traits have become very strong.

If you're environment whilst growing up needed you to learn how to protect yourself or needed you to protect other people, or needed you to be aware of how your behaviour and decisions affect the people in your life, that environment would definitely contribute to developing self-doubt.

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The best way to manage self-doubt without negative consequences

If you deal with your self-doubt as if it is a bad thing, this will make you feel guilty and will actually work against you developing the ability to reduce self-doubt.

Instead, it's better to think about self-doubt like it is a well-oiled skill that you have developed over the years which keeps switching on when you don't need it. It's trying to do its thing just like Spider-Man's sixth sense. Your superpower has determined that something is happening to you at that moment that requires you to call upon your self-doubt prowess to save the day.

So it's important to be kind to myself as I learn to teach that part of myself when to switch off and when to switch on. This way I can teach myself to gradually get better at gaining clarity in my decisions and directions.

Thinking about self-doubt this way helps us to call the issue out and label it. But we've labelled it in a more compassionate way that allows us to work with self-doubt in a way that does not become overwhelming.

How to overcome self-doubt problems

Going back to our superhero analogy, whenever a superhero develops their power and finds himself clumsy with it, what do they do? Do they just let it be, or that they spend some time practicing the superpower trying to readjust?

The answer is that they spend a lot of time honing, the power until it reaches its full potential.  But try to use it in a positive way. They tried to learn how to make its switch on when it's needed and switch off when it's not.

This is the same thing we would need to learn around self-doubt, now do we know that it's a superpower. Because in honesty in certain situations where self-doubt would become a beneficial skill. For example, being able to look at all the different aspects of the business to avoid taking bad risks.

So, to start knowing when you are in need this on, when do I need it off, and when do I need to tone it down, we need to experiment.

Step 1) Discover what exactly the superpower makes you do?

The idea here is that your self-doubt makes you do different things. For example, self-doubt could make you predict a lot of negative outcomes... Self-doubt makes you become introverted as you spend time thinking about your decisions... Self-doubt makes you put off decisions making and block issues out... Self-doubt makes you self criticize... Self-doubt makes you choose safer options,  making you more risk-averse.

As a side note, if you look at each of these activities that self-doubt makes you do, can you see how they all seem to be directed at either self-protection or protection of other people?

Moving on...

Step 2) Start doing the opposite or alternative action.

Ask yourself, will the outcome will be bad and disastrous if you do something opposite or alternative?  Then take any of the actions you discovered in step one and start practising the opposite or alternative reaction.

For example, if you tend to go introverted and quiet whenever you are having to contemplate something that is making you doubt yourself, the goal will be to take that as a cue to start talking more and expressing yourself more. You could go as far as expressing some of the things you are thinking and feeling confused about.

This will feel hard to do initially because it's not your normal. But this is how we start practically working against self-doubt becoming too strong in your life

Another example...

If you keep finding yourself making negative predictions whenever you are trying to decide on something, take this as a cue to practice making positive predictions as well. Because what says that the positive prediction is less likely to happen than the negative one?

Are you seeing the pattern?

I am not saying that this process will be easy. Because you are being made to face things. It's like going to the gym to lose weight. That is never easy. There's a lot of pain is trying to lose weight however you are rewarded heavily if you keep at it.

And if thinking about making these changes is making you feel uncomfortable, that is a good sign that we are touching the correct issues here.

Step 3) Repeat steps one and two until they become habitual

Brain plasticity theories have thought us that we can create new brain cells if we practice certain behaviors. So, if you practice repeating the previous two steps, they will be embedded in your unconscious. This will lead creation a new brain transcript that is the opposite of the old one.

After going through all the above, you may still have one question... 

How do you tell the difference between dealing with a rational decision and genuine self-doubt?

I know, it's hard...

When you have made plenty of devastating decisions in your time. If you've spent more than 10 years dealing with self-doubt can be hard to tell the difference between real issues that need to be doubted and unnecessary fear-driven worry.

If you made lots of decisions in your past gone wrong, it can become very difficult to make any more decisions regardless of the fact that you have actually made a decision that worked out well.   

The reality is that this is the picture for everybody. Even people who don't have problems with self-doubt, make loads of decisions that go wrong and also make loads of decisions that will write.

You have perhaps watched YouTube videos talking about how Elon Musk would have made thousands of decisions which mostly failed and just attaining you of those decisions succeed.

But he has capitalised on those tiny successes to become a billionaire. And if you listen to the biography of so many successful people, you will find the same pattern there. They all made so many decisions that did not go well. Yet, the reality is that all those failures were not really failures. The more you fail the more opportunities you have to succeed. Because by doing loads of things, eventually one of those things will work.

Applying this concept to self-doubt, helps us recognise that the blurred line of being able to make decisions will keep remaining blurred as long as I am not well practised at making decisions. Whereas if I spend more time practicing making decisions, I will become better at telling the difference between a situation that was doubted and the situation is just driven by irrational fear.

How to use self-doubt to achieve a meaningful life

Ultimately, self-doubt is at which if overused can be disastrous however if it is underused as well it can also be disastrous.

So it's important to put more effort into experimenting with decision-making to help free yourself to find the best balance so that you can know beyond any doubt when you should use self-doubt as a superpower.

The biggest life lesson in this regard is to embrace self-doubt and to try and understand its purpose and potential for a better life.

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