Self-Doubt

This talk explores self-doubt as a natural part of living a larger life, and why it may be a sign you're stepping into self-authorship. You'll learn how doubt can cloud the mind through avoidance, stories, and control, and what research says about the helpful middle path between doubt and overconfidence. Come away with simple ways to bring warmth to self-doubt, ask better questions of yourself, and keep moving forward.

Transcript

And this week we're going to talk about the next progression that happens when you start living a larger life. Which is self-doubt. Self-doubt. Who do you think you are? Right? So our mind has a tendency to doubt itself. And I think today what I want to share with you is that self-doubt isn't good or bad. It sort of depends. And it isn't something that you're going to escape. And it may be a sign that you're on to something if you're doubting yourself. I work a lot with high performers and just this week I was working with someone who's, I work with people that they're founders of companies or they're entrepreneurs so they Part of what they have to do is they have to go pitch to people. Convince them to invest in their project their project, Right? So in the same way that maybe you have to pitch yourself if you're starting dating or you have to if you're starting a new job and I wrote down what this One person said to me because I was like, Oh my gosh. I'm looking at her like you're so successful You have so much going on your you've made it and and she said when I think about Doing this thing. I think everyone will think I'm a loser. I feel sad and alone and I avoid doing it because I don't want to experience that. So she's doing all these other things to avoid that feeling. And it reminds me a lot of like, Like you're standing this you're standing on a cliff. And you want to get to the other side of something you want to live a larger life maybe you need to leave something that's not working for you or maybe you have left something that's not working for you you want to start something you want to start a book you want to go to a a social event, Whatever it is. And there's this like river of doubt between where you are and where you want to be. And all these thoughts go in your head, Like what if I fail or everyone doesn't think I'm going to lose or like my client or I can't do it or I don't trust myself. Will I make it? That's the inner experience of all of us. That's the experience that I've had many, Many times in my life as I've had to start new things over and over again. 10 years ago, I had a podcast that was really successful. It got to like this giant, You know, I think we had like 2 million followers. It was giant and I knew I had to leave. And I left, I ended it, I felt relief. And then this wave of, Oh my gosh, I don't know if I can do it, Washed over me. So we have this confidence myth. And if you think about something in your life, A place maybe where you wanna live a larger life and how self-doubt shows up for you, Oftentimes what we're taught is that you have to be confident first. Like you have to develop your confidence. There's all sorts of books and trainings and leadership stuff on being confident. And that that will lead you to take action and then you'll take action and then you'll have success in what you do. And then we see other people that we think are confident that are doing that. And I actually want to reverse engineer that because it doesn't really work that way. In fact, Too much confidence can be a hindrance and can be a not helpful thing. But let's talk about first just sort of doubt as a hindrance. And I actually use the word hindrance because in Buddhism, Doubt is one of the five hindrances. It's one of the five things that actually is considered to cloud your mind, If you believe it. And the word that they use in Buddhism is, I'm going to say this quickly, Vichikiccha. The C is a ch. So vichichicha, Which is one of the hindrances, Is this sort of doubt, And when it can lead to, If you think about something maybe for you that you're wanting to do, Maybe you want to start, I was just talking to my husband the other day. He hasn't been, I'm going to throw him under the bus. He hasn't been exercising and he wants to start up again. And he was like, Can I exercise with you? We were like setting out our backyard. And I was like, Yeah. And you know, One of the things that can happen when you doubt yourself is that you actually, You procrastinate, You avoid, You put it off, You don't do it, You don't try, You postpone it, Right? I'll start when I have more confidence. And we don't express that, Like, I'm not sure if I can get started again. So if you think about something for yourself, The ways in which maybe something you want to start and how you engage in these avoidance behaviors, You don't get going because you're, I'm kind of riddled by all this, Will I fail? And a lot of times it's the social aspect of it. Like what will people think of me? That happens a lot for me. What will people think if I do X, Y, And Z? Even if X, Y, And Z is what I really want to do or want to try. And then doubt can also be a hindrance when we start to get all caught up in the story, In our mind of doubt. And there's actually, I did like this deep dive into all the research on self-doubt in psychology. And there was a study called the mis-measurement of love. And this was a study done in 2001 by Dr. Murray and colleagues. And what they found was that in relationships, When you have self-doubt, You actually perceive. That your partner is not loving you and you sort of underestimate how much They love you. And then at least this whole ripple effect of problems. And we can think about that like in terms of even friendships or relationships where we have this self-doubt and then we actually misinterpret signals that reinforce our story. And then self-doubt can also lead you to do controlling behavior. And controlling behavior looks like things, Something like defensive pessimism in psychology, Which is where you just tell the negative story of how it's going to turn out poorly to defend yourself in case it does turn out poorly. You do something called self-handicapping, Where you create conditions so that you actually won't be successful at it. Or you do this over-efforting, Where you kind of overcompensate for what you feel self-doubt in and you end up making it way harder for yourself because you're overachieving, Over-efforting, Putting way too much in. Okay, So for you, If you think about something that, A way in which you want to live a larger life, How self-doubt is sort of clouds your mind, How it, What do you avoid? What stories are you stuck in about it? And what kind of control behaviors do you do? I've been thinking about self-doubt for me as I'm trying to really pare down and really focus myself in my life and letting go of a lot of things. And what happens for me in the control behavior is that I end up over-indexing on the, I just have these two things and I have to like do them absolutely crazily well, As opposed to just really letting ourselves naturally move into the spaces of inquiry and letting that self-doubt The. And inquiring not a hindrance. So not all self-doubt is bad, And there's a good amount of research actually that it's not about whether you doubt, It's what you do. With that doubt. Fun studies, And I'll put these all in the notes later, But rope skippers, They had these competitive people skip rope as a competition and they primed them either with a little bit of doubt before the competition or an overconfidence before the competition. And not surprisingly, Actually having a little bit of doubt, That little bit of like, Can I do it? Am I going to make it? Leads you to work extra hard and in kind of like not be overconfident, Confident. I see this all the time with sports. My son plays football and they just came, This is their last game. They came in, They've been winning every single game. This last one, They start winning, They're winning, They're winning, And they get a little overconfident. So they let down their guard. Self-doubt can be helpful to keep you going. And that's really the middle path. There's been a ton of studies on therapists and self-doubt, A quite sort of older study looking at therapists. I think it was called something like love yourself as a therapist, Love yourself as a human, Doubt yourself as a therapist, Something like that. And what they found is that actually therapists who doubt themselves, If they also have a little bit of warmth towards themselves when they doubt themselves, Their clients end up having better outcomes. And then later studies showed that the more experienced you are as a therapist, If you doubt yourself, You have a better alliance, A better relationship with your clients. You don't want a therapist or person helping you that doesn't doubt themselves. Doubt is what leads us to questioning ourselves and seeing if we have the skill sets and doing the extra work to make sure that we're on track and adjust and adapt. So this idea of self-doubt being the middle path can be really helpful if you think about it as sort of this flexible ability. When my kids were little, We used to always say, Yet. So it's like, I don't know how to cut strawberries or whatever yet. I don't know how to do that math problem yet. And just adding that, That. Understanding as yourself evolving and having a little bit of doubt taking the middle path can actually lead to maybe a bigger life a little bit more self-authorship and playing uh in arenas that are a little bit outside of your comfort zone and that engender self-doubt, And that might be a good thing. I do this because I think of self-doubt as sort of a middle path that there's the hindrance of. Uh. . . Thinking that you already know what you're doing. That can really limit you in life because we need to continue to evolve and grow. And that hindrance can also be that the problem is other people. And then there's this other hindrance of avoiding, Controlling, Or being stuck in a story. Those really limit us, And I write a lot about that in Wise Effort. So how do we get to the truth? What do we actually do when self-doubt shows up? And we'll do a meditation on this today. But the first thing that I would suggest is that when self-doubt is showing up, It's probably a sign that you are entering into a larger life. It's a sign of self-authorship. You're not following some path or other person's idea or something that's already been set out in front of you. You are becoming the author of your own life, Your own experience. And that is a good thing. And your mind doesn't like uncertainty. So it's trying to, You know, Control it. So it's a sign of self-authorship. And then when self-doubt shows up, Thinking about those therapists that are self-doubting, Bring some warmth. Because we can doubt, We can stand at the edge of something like, Oh my gosh, I'm gonna. Get on a stage or I'm going to start a blog or I'm going to tell the truth to somebody that I'm afraid to tell the truth to, We can stand at the edge of that. And if we bring warmth to ourselves, Then we're better able to take that leap. We don't have to change the doubt, But we can change how we relate to ourselves with it. So we welcome the doubt as an opportunity for some self-inquiry. That question of who do I think I am? There's different ways you can ask yourself that you can actually also just ask, Like, Do I have the skill set? Am I missing something here? Do I need some more preparation for this? And then stepping back from the story at some point so that you can, Number five, Just engage in your life with self doubt as part of it. It's just part of the human experience. I have it. You have it. The person at the grocery store next to you has it. The person that you think is the most successful of successful probably has loads of it. And we can just say this is this is part of being human. This is my mind's attempt to control the uncontrollable and my mind also helping me out from time to time. So those are my thoughts on self-doubt.

Reviews

Thank you for helping me to change my perspective! Your words help me to see that what I have always thought of as negative can sometimes be one of the most positive influences in my life!