One of the biggest reasons why people fail their goals is because of self-doubt. When you over-analyze things you start to doubt yourself and your conviction goes down.
Everything seems more blurred and what seemed like a good idea is now something full of flaws. This is how people get stuck and fail their goals.
I know how bad it feels when you start overthinking and start doubting yourself so this article will go over why you might doubt yourself and how to overcome self-doubt.
There are multiple reasons why you might doubt yourself. Here are 4 reasons why you might not believe in yourself.
1. You are comparing yourself to other people too often.
We can’t really stop ourselves from comparing ourselves with other people but you can’t let other people determine how you live your life.
When you see other people succeeding, you might start questioning whether you can do the same thing if you are following a similar path to them.
I have seen this happen to a lot of people, especially if they feel as if that person they are comparing themselves to is more capable than them.
As for the other side of the coin, if your dream isn’t the same as theirs like say you are following a less conventional path, you might doubt yourself because you don’t know if you can achieve your dream.
The people you are comparing yourself to have been successful following a conventional path while you still might not have accomplished as much. This can really get you down so you need to set your own milestones and start working towards them.
2. You are your own worst critic.
“You’ve been criticising yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.”
― Louise Hay
Self-criticism is good and all but when you are too harsh on yourself, it’s really hard to get started on your goals. When you first start out, you can’t judge a beginner with the standards of a pro.
You need to stop expecting perfection and embrace learning on the fly. Most people start off not knowing much and learn on the fly. You learn a lot more through experience than theory after all.
3. You are overthinking too much and allowing logic to drive all your decisions.
Thinking with logic is important and useful in a lot of situations but there are situations where thinking with logic hurts you. Let’s say one of your goals is to start a blog.
If you were to think logically, you can conclude that it’s not a good idea since the odds of making it big are quite low because there are millions of blogs out there and most of them don’t even make it to 10k viewers/month.
Once you reach that conclusion, you won’t even start your goal. You need to be comfortable with uncertainty and be open to taking risks. Life wouldn’t be any fun if you just followed logic all the time and didn’t take any risks.
4. You are afraid of failure.
You can envision the life you dreamed about and know the steps you need to take to get there but you are afraid of failing. Failing sucks and you don’t want to waste your time working towards something only to fail.
Fear of failure makes people doubt themselves and believe they can’t be successful. In order to overcome self-doubt, you need to build some self-confidence.
Taking action is the best way to build self-confidence. This might sound like a contradiction since you can’t really take action when you doubt yourself but there are some tricks that you can use to take action.
The 5 Second Rule
The 5-second rule in particular is very effective to get you to take action. The 5-second rule is simple and it’s exactly what it sounds like.
Instead of overthinking and not doing anything, count to 5 and then make a decision and take action. The reason why taking action is effective is because when you are doing stuff, you stop overthinking.
When you are focused on your work, you are only focused on the task at hand and you stop thinking about all those other things.
You want to practice being decisive and take action based on your decisions as much as possible to build up your self-confidence. Once you build up enough self-confidence, you can slowly erase your doubt.
While taking action as much as possible is effective in boosting your confidence, you also need to change your mindset for the best results.
Here are the 3 changes you need to make to your mindset to overcome doubt.
1. Stop worrying about plan B.
In order to be successful, you need to focus all your energy in one direction. When you are working on multiple projects at the same time, it’s really hard to get the results you want.
When your efforts are split up on multiple things, you can’t get that much progress on each thing. If you can focus on just one thing at a time, you can get the results you want at a fast pace.
The worst part about having a plan B is that you might get all wishy-washy with your commitment and not know which project to focus on.
That will make you indecisive and not take any action at all. Just think about focusing on one thing and only come up with a plan B if you need to.
2. Accept that progress is not linear.
If you ever worked out before you probably know what I’m talking about. When you first start working out, you can easily increase the amount you lift every week.
You reach a new high every week and it feels amazing until you finally stop making progress. You can’t increase the amount you lift and it feels frustrating.
You have hit a plateau and you need to make adjustments to your program to overcome it. No matter what your goal is, you are going to hit a wall at some point in time.
In fact, hitting that wall is a good thing since it means you are on the right track. If you aren’t facing any resistance that means you are not pushing yourself hard enough.
3. Embrace a learning mindset and be ok with messing up.
As mentioned before, no one starts off as a pro. You need to embrace a learning mindset to be able to learn effectively on the fly. There’s nothing wrong with not being the best when you first start.
Stop looking at mistakes as something that should be avoided at all costs. Every mistake is a chance to learn what went wrong and figure out the best way to get the results you want.
Whether you reach your goals or not is up to you. If you can overcome self-doubt, you are in a good position to achieve your goals and get the results you want. Do you have some goals you are working on right now? Let me know in the comments