Are you on a mission to live your passion, show yourself to the world and achieve the success you always wanted but get blocked by thoughts of “I am not good enough. I am not ready.”? Then you are likely experiencing self-doubt. Whether it is a new idea, a goal, or just positive feedback you received, self-doubt kicks in and ruins your confidence. And this costs you your happiness. So the question is: how to eliminate self-doubt forever?
This article covers what self-doubt is, its root cause, and how to eliminate self-doubt forever.
How Self-Doubt Keeps You Stuck
Imagine you are on a boat and you move slowly forward. You look around you and see other boats moving faster than you and at one point you wonder, what is happening? Why am I having trouble moving? Then you go, check and you see that the anchor is still in the water and you seem to drag this anchor behind. All of a sudden you realize that all this time the anchor was slowing you down. With that realization, you confidently pull the anchor out of the water and back onto the ship. Suddenly you notice that you are moving faster again. What a relief.
For this example, you can replace the anchor with self-doubt. In your life, no matter how hard you try to move forward, it will be harder for you when you carry the weight of self-doubt.
For some people, the self-doubt is so strong that like an anchor stuck in the ground, it is preventing them from moving forward at all. For others, it’s just something they drag behind and slows them down.
Whether it is in the career, finances, or relationships, self-doubt affects all areas of your life if undealt with. For example, you are stuck in the same career because you think you are not good enough to apply for a new job. Or you stay in the same toxic relationship because deep down you doubt that you are capable of being loved.
How To Eliminate Self-Doubt Forever: The Relief Of Self-Confidence
When you know how to eliminate self-doubt forever, you are getting on a path of building self-confidence. In contrast to self-doubt, self-confidence enables you to move forward and achieve your dreams, like the fuel in a car it continuously helps you move forward. Thoughts of
I can do this.
Let’s just try.
I have nothing to lose.
Come up. You apply for the job of your dreams, you get the success you want, and find the love that you crave. Your life radically transforms the moment you shed the self-doubt and start believing in yourself.
What Causes Self-Doubt
Self-doubt has been defined as uncertainty about one’s abilities, potential for success, or competence in performance situations.
Psychologycompass.com
Some people have extreme forms of self-doubt where they are so uncertain, that they don’t even try to do something. For others, it’s in the form of an inner critic for example.
Self-doubt has its origins mostly in past failures, childhood experiences, and beliefs. When as a child you were told for example that you are not capable of doing art, you will doubt your capability of becoming an artist later on.
A more general theme that can be seen with someone who generally experiences a lot of self-doubts is that they were raised by very careful parents who were doing everything they can so that the child doesn’t experience anything bad. The issue with that is that children need to fail. They desperately need to try things and see if it’s working or not to build the confidence in themselves that they can deal with failure and persist through it. If they were protected from failure, they never learned to try new things. And that is showing itself in adulthood in the form of self-doubts. Because anytime they try to leave the safety and change something, they doubt their capacity to do exactly that.
How To Eliminate Self-Doubt Forever- The Steps
Doing An Investigation Into Your Belief System
Beliefs are an important element to look at when asking the question of how to eliminate self-doubt forever. Beliefs about success, yourself, or a specific subject can fuel your self-doubt. For example, if you believe there are no good men/women out there or the other gender doesn’t want a relationship at all, you will doubt yourself whether you can find a compatible partner.
Or if for example, you believe that changing jobs a lot is detrimental to your career, you will doubt that you can go out and find a better job.
For that reason, it is very important to look at your beliefs around any area that your desire to have success. To go deeper into this topic, check out my article on Limiting Beliefs: Identify and Overcome your Limiting Beliefs.
Deal With Your Resistance
Sometimes you have resistance and a negative belief related to your highest potential and in that case, self-doubt prevents you from experiencing the “bad” consequences of confidently achieving your dreams. To understand this better, imagine you are in your full power. You take action and achieve what you desire. Feel into that. Now see if you can notice any resistance and ask yourself
What bad might happen if I am this way?”
What are the negative consequences of being in my full power?
Answers that could come up are things like “I will make other people jealous. I will be alone. Nobody will like me. The other sex will not approve of me.”
These are negative consequences you avoid and that’s why self-doubt functions to protect you.
Understand Your Personality
Understanding your personality when dealing with self-doubt is crucial to your success in life. If you are in general a more careful and insecure person, you will likely experience self-doubt in almost all situations. Generally working on the self-doubt can help in that case but can likely not eliminate it completely. For that reason, an important step is to accept and love your self-doubt (see step below).
Accept And Love Your Self-Doubt
A lot of trouble is caused when you resist reality and try as hard as you can to be someone else. You then slip into denial and pretend that you are this super-confident person when in fact you are doubting yourself a lot. The issue is that pretending makes things worse and enhances the split between your actual self (insecure, full of self-doubt) and the self you are trying to be (confident, courageous). For that reason, understanding, accepting and even loving the self-doubts is a great way to solve this dynamic and cultivate true confidence. To do this, go through the following steps:
- Bring up something where you encounter a lot of self-doubts
- Close your eyes and imagine that the version of you that is doubting is the little child you
- Look at that child and notice what it looks like and what it’s doing
- Now ask the child what it needs
- When you received an answer, imagine providing that need for that child with all the love and care
- Spend some time just being with that child. Allowing all the love and warmth to flow from your heart space to that child
- Stay here as long as you want
Action- The Healing Tool For Doubt
When dealing with self-doubt there is a shortcut that can help you answer the question of how to eliminate self-doubt forever. And that is taking action. Whenever self-doubt arises, you can ask the question of
What would someone without this doubt do?
and then follow through on the answer. That way you let the reality show you that there maybe is no reason to have self-doubts. Or another great way to take action is to work on your skills and talents. Find something that you master and become good at. That way you gain confidence in one area which then shows itself in overall increased confidence.
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