How to Overcome Self Doubt and Take Action In Your Life

If you want to learn how to overcome self doubt, you need to understand how it works. The Diagram above provides a quick explanation of the self doubt loop. When the brain hesitates, you to start overthink. This stops you from taking action when you need to. When you don’t take action, you prevent yourself from successfully completing your goal, which may reinforce your initial hesitation around taking action. This will further confirm your doubts that you won’t be successful which may lead to more overthinking that will keep you from taking action in the future.

Emotions are Normal

Its also important to understand, that emotions are normal. Feelings of overwhelm, insecurity, and nervousness… are ALL normal. Once you understand that confidence isn’t necessarily a feeling, then you will be able to accept those feelings as a normal part of building confidence.

You don’t have to feel confident all the time but you don’t want to let yourself grow into self-doubt that stops you from living your life.

The emotions are there yes. But acting on them, or not acting because of them, is a choice.

The Brain Can be Wired

This is important. Until recently scientists thought their brains stopped growing by the age of 25. Meaning our ability to learn and change decreased with age. And this is where the saying comes from that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But today we know that our brain never stops growing and that our ability to learn last our entire lifetime. This ability to change is called behavioral flexibility and is made possible because of neuroplasticity. By practicing new tools to overcome our brain habit of hesitation the repetition actually changes our brains and we become a different person.

The 4 Traps of Self Doubt

The brain gives us 4 self doubt traps to “protect” us from the uncertainty of situations that could possibly lead to failure, embarrassment or discomfort. They include: Hesitating, Hiding, being Hypercritical and Helplessness.

Once your recognize what traps you in self-doubt, then it’s no longer a trap, It’s a choice. You get to choose whether you want to continue that cycle of fear and self doubt, or if you want to take action towards becoming a #FearConqueror in order to prove your self doubt wrong.  By taking action, instead of getting stuck in overthinking or other self-doubt traps, a new habit loop is formed in which taking action builds confidence.

Self Doubt Trap #1: Hesitating:

Hesitating is triggered by uncertainty. And it looks like waiting, overthinking or perfectionism. One characteristic to look for is being busy. Staying busy is a signal that you might be hesitating. You may find yourself about to start the task that you are doubtful about and immediately find some other tasks to keep yourself busy with. “Oh let me just knock this out of the way,” may be a phrase you tell yourself to keep busy. But before you know it, time may have slipped past you and you weren’t able to complete the task that you initially wanted to complete.

Here are a few behaviors to look out for:

• Telling yourself a story about what could go wrong.
• Not putting something out there until it’s perfect.
• Making a plan but then not acting on it.
• Using avoidance mechanisms to avoid dealing with important issues.

Tips to Overcome Hesitation

If you find yourself hesitating here is the solution:

Step one: Become aware of what hesitating looks like for you.

• Ask yourself: What behaviors do you do when you hesitate?
• What do you tend to tell yourself?
• What activities do you do to avoid taking action?
• What do you tend to over think about what are you waiting to be perfect about?

Step two: Start small and take baby steps.

Instead of thinking of the big picture and all the details of what it would take and what could possibly go wrong, break down the situation into tiny chunks and focus on only one step. This is called using the progress principle which comes from research from Harvard Business School that found that the simple underlying factor that led successful people to feel productive at work was to make progress on one thing that mattered to them every day.

And so here’s an activity that you can do every morning:

• Write down one thing that matters to you.
• Write one thing that you can do that day to move forward on it and it can be something simple like having the conversation or researching something or buying a book.

***Remember you can feel uncertainty and still take action.

Self Doubt Trap #2: Hiding

Hiding is triggered by fear of others and overwhelm. This usually looks like, avoiding procrastinating shrinking back or staying behind the scenes. And one characteristic lookout for is that this one is more quiet.

Here are a few behaviors that you might display if you’re hiding:

• Focusing on big dreams which lead to overwhelm, creating excuses not to act and a feeling of being paralyzed.
• Another one is not standing up for yourself or not asking for what you really want/need.
• You also might actively protect yourself or hold yourself back
• Being able to identify a dream and feel really passionate about it, but not actually have an actionable plan.
• Shrinking back from an opportunity or playing it small.
• Always being afraid of being judged. Looking like a fool or disappointing or upsetting someone else.

Tips to Avoid the Self Doubt Trap of Hiding

If you tend to hide, here’s you may be able to overcome it by doing the following:

Step One: Identify what you’re afraid of, and minimize the fear.

Ask yourself these questions:

• In what areas do I tend to hide and procrastinate and when I find myself hiding and procrastinating.
• What is the underlying fear that’s causing it?
• What does this thing that I’m afraid of look like?
• Why does it matter to me and does it actually matter?
• What could I do about it?

Step Two: Identify the avoidance mechanisms that you use to procrastinate.

What do you tend to do when you procrastinate? What behavior are you doing instead of what you should be doing? And then once you know that, the next step is…

Step Three: Identify what you actually want.

What is that big dream that you use to overwhelm yourself and avoid taking action once you know what that is? Break it down into actionable goals and create a quantifier goal.

For instance, say that you want to become a best-selling author, identify how many books that you would actually need to sell in order to meet that qualification. Then write five to 10 sub-goals that you would need to accomplish in order to get there. This way, you get to take the goal out of the dream world and make it real and tangible by making concrete steps. And then the next step,

Step Four: Take small steps that moving towards your goal

Knowing what actually needs to be done is part one and then taking one step at a time is part two. Similar to what I recommended for hesitation:

Start by focusing on one small step that you can take every day to make progress and doing this builds competency. You cannot think your way out of this, you have to take action, show up and speak up. Remember you may always feel terrified and feel like a big deal when you’re going up against your self doubt. So the trick here is to expect it and prepare for it. And remember that you can take action anyway.

Self Doubt Trap #3: Being Hypercritical

The third self doubt trap is when you are hypercritical. Being hypercritical is triggered by the fear of being hurt, disappointed or failure. It usually looks like arguing against yourself, being self-critical or complaining. When you are trying to determine if you are being hypercritical, a good characteristic to look for is negativity. Below are some behaviors that you might display if you are hypercritical:

• Looking for and focusing on flaws
• Focusing on why you can’t do something.
• Fixating on what can go wrong or airing things to death
• Knowing that you need to do something but always having excuses why it’s not going to work.
• Believing that you can’t or that it’s not possible and
• Perhaps you’ve failed or been hurt before and you’re picking apart the situation looking for evidence that it’s going to happen again and
• You might have failed or disappointed yourself before and you’re convinced that you’re going to do it again but ironically you’re afraid of failing but not acting is actually causing you to fail.

Tips to Overcome the Self Doubt Trap of Being Hypercritical

If you find yourself suffering from the self doubt trap of being hypercritical, you can overcome it by following these steps:

1.  Recognize the excuses that you’re using to hold yourself back. What excuses do you tend to use that keep you feeling doubtful and unable from moving forward?
2. Identify what you’re afraid is going to happen if you follow through on this thing. So what negative outcome do you believe is going to happen.
3. Eliminate the excuse. So what can you do to eliminate this obstacle or the possibility of this excuse becoming a reality?
4. Make a decision that you are going to commit to giving it your all for a certain period of time. When you finally make a decision to be committed, it gives yourself a chance to prove yourself wrong.

 For example, if somebody felt like they can’t start a business because they feel that if they do it, they might not be able to meet their family’s needs then they would have the following choices:

• One would be to eliminate this excuse by getting a job and only doing their business is very very part time on the side or not doing it at all because then the excuse is no longer there.
• The other alternative is to commit to giving their dream 100 percent to start this business no matter what and going all in.

• The third option is to commit to giving the dream or the business 100% for two months. If at the end of that it’s not providing an income, then they will get a job and keep working on the business on the side.

The last option is often the best solution for someone who is hyper critical because the key to overcoming being hypercritical is to find a solution instead of just complaining. If you remove the excuse and take a massive action, then it helps you to get out of your own way and at least get yourself started. But it takes a bit more of a boost than it would if you were only hesitating.

And so again remember that you can feel fear and still take action.

Self Doubt Trap #4: Helplessness

Helplessness is the most extreme form of self-doubt because a lack of confidence has become a part of the person’s identity. Not only that, it’s a part of their identity that gives them benefits even though ultimately it harms them. So for this reason, if you find that you relate to this form of self doubt, recognize that you will need to commit to a deeper level of personal development and study and practice to break this habit.

Helplessness is triggered by insecurity or low self-worth. Ultimately, helplessness is a fear of success.

Common signs that you deal with the helplessness self doubt trap includes the following:

• Playing the victim,
• Blaming
• Lack of self trust
• Dependency and
• A defeatist attitude.

And one characteristic to look for is pity. There are a number of behaviors that you can look for to see if this is something you’re experiencing some include:

1. Belief that ‘nothing ever goes my way’ as well as blaming others or the outside world for all outcomes in life. This is an extreme version of an external locus of control.
2. Having every excuse in the book. It may be that you’ve learned that poor me gets you sympathy and attention from others.
3. You might be overly dependent on other people.
4. You might feel like the world owes you something.
5. You may have a false sense of incompetence or that you can’t handle your own problems.
6. Lack of self trust. You don’t believe that you can do it alone.
7. You also might be unwilling to be vulnerable or
8. You might just not do for yourself because you’re always wanting others to do for you. Fear of success can be part of the cause for this issue because deep down, you fear that if you were to succeed on your own you would lose the support of other people.
9. Lack of taking responsibility for your life or acting like you’re giving others control of you because you need them. But in reality, you’re controlling them with your need. If being helpless doesn’t get you the care-taking that you desire you may find that you resort to intimidation or coercion to try to get that need met.
10. You also might have underlying feelings of anger at being expected to be responsible self-approving. When the reality is that you’re still trying to get approval and attention that you never got as a child. And so all those different pieces might be in there somewhere. If you relate to this form of self-doubt.