The idea of self-doubt is kind of muddled. People talk about self doubt, self worth, self esteem, self concept, self image, etc.
There’s all these words in the psych and self-help communities that discuss kind of how you view how you perceive and how you project yourself.
We’re going to dig way deep into that stuff in the upcoming months through the self positive blog, but right now I’m just talking about self doubt.
As we we defined yesterday in the, what is self doubt blog, I’m really only concerned about the self doubt that affects your behavior. If you doubt yourself, like, I’m not good at this, or I can’t get this done or I probably not nobody’s gonna like it anyway, that kind of stuff for the things that you actually want to do, then that counts. That’s the working definition, we’re working with here itself positive right now.
Table of Contents
How Self Doubt Can Fuck Up Your Life
And today we’re going to talk about the dangers of that.
I did this example in yesterday’s blog… I was like, you know, I don’t give a fuck that I have self doubt about my ability to make it in the NBA.
Like, I don’t care.
…because I don’t want to be in the NBA. So, that self doubt isn’t affecting my behavior any, so I don’t need to get rid of it. I don’t need to uproot it and throw it out.
If, if I wanted to do something else like you know, get a decent partner or make a lot of money, then any self doubt that interferes with those goals. Those are important for me to root out, those are important for me to find the background for and get rid of.
So, the dangers of having these self doubts in your life is, first off, they stop you from doing shit.
- Self Doubt Damages Your Motivation
- Self Doubt Causes Procrastination
- Self Doubt Leads To Regret
- Self Doubt Causes Defeatism
- Self Doubt Stunts Self-Improvement
- Self Doubt Stifles Inspiration
Self Doubt Damages Your Motivation
If you continue to have these thoughts prevalent in your brain and you keep moving forward in life with the same thematic thoughts running, then it’s going to damage your motivation. The first part is it keeps you from doing it by damaging your motivation. If, if you, if you don’t think you can do a lot. And then you go out and, and you just like cap off your results because you’re done for the day like you don’t have, you know, you hold yourself back then. You don’t produce a lot, and then you don’t reap the rewards of that stuff.
Feedback from getting things done from getting things accomplished, according to your goals is part of what makes happiness.
It’s part of what makes you satisfied in life. And so if you go out and and you try to do things. And then you don’t do much, and then you don’t get good results, it doesn’t reinforce itself. And then you don’t continuously get happier and happier and happier.
If you just sit around and listen to your fears and your self doubt, and you don’t put yourself out there enough, a lot, then you don’t get a lot of results and then you get minimal psychological and emotional benefits from that.
Self Doubt Causes Procrastination
Secondly, self doubt causes procrastination. It keeps you from pulling the trigger on things that can actually do stuff I got this a lot in my last business.
I think I talked about that yesterday, where I tried to do all of the work that was possible to be done, like copying pasting things scheduling things getting, you know people on board like starting websites and not finishing them, like all of these things that I could do so that I wouldn’t have to put myself out into the world, which is what I needed to do to actually get the business to grow.
I need to do two things I need to get people to figure out who I am by putting myself out there, and then I needed to ask them for money in return for something of value. That’s what I needed to do, and I did none of that.
I did a whole bunch of other infrastructure stuff and and hype Manning and whatever that had nothing to do with putting myself out there, right. I was procrastinating and doing the things that was that were the actual results getting actions that I take because I was scared.
I was sitting there with myself down going you know if I put myself out there and then I’m accepted that Who am I was myself. If I’m going to get hated on then. am I really going to be able to reach people. All of these self doubts were stopping me from doing what I was supposed to do. I didn’t just give up when my motivation to wasn’t damaged. Instead, I used procrastination as my means of resistance.
If you don’t think you know you know how to do the right things or have the right strategies, then you’ll run around learning and exploring strategies that are possible until you feel confident enough to get things accomplished.
As I said in my last blog post, the making self development work for you. You just got to go act, (speed of implementation), get feedback iterate and keep moving forward. That’s how you actually gain confidence. The experience of it is more valuable than the strategy and the planning, especially if your strategy and plans comes from your limited understanding of the situation.
So, you have to just kind of take action in order to actually get the confidence to keep moving forward if you’re just waiting for the confidence to come that procrastination doesn’t do shit. And then you don’t get any results, and then you’re not happy and then you die sad, right, so that’s that leads us to our third point.
Self Doubt Leads To Regret
One of the dangers of self doubt is it leads to regret. When you miss opportunities, you’re going to experience regret. If you make the wrong choice, you can experience regret.
You can always reframe them obviously here it’s all positive we’re trying to make sure that we keep ourselves in a good mental state and be positive and all that but like when you fuck up, you tend to regret it, unless you reframe it. And if you don’t fuck up, then you tend to forget all the good stuff, unless you reframe it, but if you don’t act because of self doubt, your regret has no basis.
You can have regret for not acting, but at least you did, I mean you didn’t even learn anything. If you try and you fail you can regret it. You learn something and you’re going to do it better next time.
I ran two social media companies into the ground but I learned so much while running them that I started to succeed after a while in my new ventures. That was useful but had I not pulled the trigger at all.
Man, I could have thrown a football over that mountain
Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite
Then I there’d be no hope in the back end there’d be no… it would just be empty. So the third problem is self doubt leads to regret. That kind of stacks onto itself for the fourth point;
Self Doubt Causes Defeatism
The fourth point is, like, if you regret not taking action, you can start to identify yourself as somebody who doesn’t take action in general.
Then you feel like you’re *never *going to take action, or that every time you do something it’s going to be stunted, it can actually build on itself and create like a negative feedback loop of you completely not believing in yourself.
So, after a while you start to identify yourself as somebody who doesn’t actually take action, who doesn’t actually get anything done, who doesn’t actually, who succumbs to society’s expectations and do what everybody tells you, because there’s so much pressure from the outside world.
In trying to get you to fit in and to conform, you will, unless you fight it on purpose. You’re going to have a hard time, not having to stuck into that mold and so you’re going to feel like you belong there and not belong where you want what’s going to actually make you happy.
Self doubt stunts self improvement.
That’s it looks good on a blog post it sounds weird the podcast but basically if you’re not moving forward and taking action, you don’t actually get to learn things that are new, the new stuff that that is going to teach you and make you wiser and make you a better person and make you more effective at stuff.
You’re not actually learning anything new anymore because you’re not engaging in life. You’re not sticking yourself into the fire, you’re not figuring it all out. If you listen only to yourself, you don’t let it in, and it doesn’t let you move forward and actually try stuff make mistakes fall on your face, then you won’t learn anything.
With the lack of learning, obviously you don’t have new perspectives, you’ll get better results, and you’re in the same place you where when you started. You haven’t got anything new to expand your mind or your personality or your emotional core. So, if you let the defeatism and the regret stack onto each other, you won’t even try to do new shit.
Then you just lay settled in to the spot where you think is comfortable enough and that’s when people drop into mediocrity and settle and stop engaging in life. I don’t want to be one of those people
Self doubt stifles inspiration.
It’s really hard to be creative and inspired from a place of complacency, mediocrity, or survival. If you allow yourself to settle into a space where you’re – at the general mode – unhappy, it’s really hard to create and be inspired from there.
When you believe in yourself, it’s easy to get inspired and excited to do new shit and to stack on to the new stuff. You can get into this period of discovery and exploration that will let you create and and take in new data with an open mind and, and you’ll create from that space.
It’s just a different kind of paradigm, but when you don’t believe in yourself it’s really hard to get inspired to do anything new or even to create anything new. If you stop listening to the self doubt, and stop letting it rule your identity in the moment, your mind will be open to be much more inspired and much more creative.
Exercises on the Dangers of Self Doubt
I got some exercises for you today in your journal and I already told you to put a journal down so get a fucking journal. I don’t really care what it is, get a journal cuz I’m gonna release in this shit every day and I’m putting out like exercises and things, you know, writing exercises so that you can kind of get to know yourself better have better self awareness and have better emotional control. Put these down in your journal.
Self doubt can damage you… which one of those do you relate to? Write that write a little bit down in your journal about how which of your doubts are stifling your inspiration.
If you haven’t done yesterday’s exercises. Go ahead and do those, too.
I thought that I wasn’t good enough and so I would never be good enough to do anything I’d have all these dreams I was inspired to do something big, but I thought if I do it, it’s not even an even get traction nobody’s gonna like it and then that I would just wouldn’t do anything about it, in that and that’s done in my self improvement so if you relate to any of that, go and write a couple of sentences in your journal about that.
And then we’re going to talk a little bit tomorrow about what to do when you kind of identified self doubt and how to take it out of your scope, as normal.
Stay awesome, stay positive.
-= Duke =-