Why We Doubt Ourselves
Self-doubt, a universal human experience, often hinders our potential and stifles creativity. Unraveling the reasons behind this pervasive emotion can empower us to overcome it, fostering self-confidence and enabling personal growth.
Self-Doubt
The most difficult emotion to deal with is self-doubt. If left unchecked, it can paralyze and derail you, preventing you from doing meaningful work in fear of rejection, from having the patience to play the long game, and perhaps most damningly, from making the most out of this one life you have.
- Three rules to overcome this destructive force
- If you had no doubts whatsoever about the work you are doing, it means you do not care enough about it. Doubt has no room to surface if indifference is running the show.
Be envious of what others have accomplished
Envy is a complicated emotion that has its roots in survival and sexual selection, but in the domain of creative work, it has an especially sinister quality that makes it such a negative force for us. Envy takes a group of familiar and loving faces that should make up our support systems and instead warps them into sources of inadequacy that only makes us doubt ourselves even further.
Make quitting seem like a rational decision
Pursuing any meaningful endeavor is a vote for the rocky path of uncertainty
- When you’re doing meaningful work, you must be able to trade short-term disappointment for long-term progress
- Frame the creations of today as necessary steps for the future
- Self-Doubt lives solely in the now; it knows nothing more than what can be seen and experienced at this precise moment
- It makes us believe that the results we are experiencing today will run onward in perpetuity……when in reality, this is just a small subsection of a much longer time horizon that looks more like this
Self-Doubt Is Not Really About the Self
Doubt only emerges because we live in a world where we compare our own progress against the progress of others
- When we doubt ourselves, we are actually questioning our ability to meet the expectations of what we think is possible
- The very people that inspired us to pursue a calling can also make us doubt ourselves when we don’t think we’re reaching what they have attained
Rule #1: Overestimate others’ abilities, and underestimate your own
Whenever the gap between what you’re doing and what others have done widens, it will feel natural for you to question your progress, and whether or not you’re making any forward movement at all.
- This gap is determined by your perception of where you stand relative to others, and not what may actually be the case.
- As a creator, you have to go through every daunting step of the process to take that seed of an idea that once lived in your brain and turn it into something you’re proud of that you can present to others.