It may often feel like it, but having some amount of self-doubt is perfectly normal and doesn’t make you a negative person. Self-doubt is that feeling that you aren’t good enough or you aren’t doing something right, so you end up second guessing yourself. In many cases, this can end up backfiring and sabotaging your success.
The thing is that everyone has a little bit of self-doubt. No one is ever really free of it. Self-doubt can even be a good thing, in moderation. Being able to assess yourself is an important ability. It allows you to manage decisions and the impact those decisions may have on your life; because decisions are hard to make, and they do come with consequences.
You can also get too extreme with self-doubt. This happens when you start second guessing every decision you make. You end up doing this so often that you don’t trust your own ability to make good decisions, and instead you become overly self-critical.
Taking time to appreciate your success
One of the reason people often doubt themselves is because they haven’t sat down and given themselves time to assess and appreciate the many successes they have. This is so often overlooked that people don’t realise how much they’ve accomplished.
For example, finishing school is a major accomplishment. Finding a job, being able to earn a living, getting your career started are also great examples of big successes.
That’s not all though, there are little things in life you should acknowledge as well. Someone giving you a compliment, or you complimenting someone are positive experiences and should be seen as points of success. Relationships and their maintenance are built upon an accumulation of small successes over time and is analogous to how your entire life plays out.
Wins, big and small add up to meaningful achievements and life moments. The more you recognise this, the easier it will be to look past your own doubts about your worth or skill level.
Setting meaningful goals for yourself
If you set clear goals for yourself, you can often mitigate the self-doubt. You’ll have milestones and achievements to hit, and it provides a clear target that you will achieve, or not.
Goal setting helps to clear and focus the mind towards something and doesn’t leave much room for doubt.
For example, if you resolve to lose weight, it helps tremendously to set a target to achieve. Instead of saying “I want to lose weight”, you can instead decide that you want to lose 10 KG over the next year. Then when you break it down by month, you know you only need to loss slightly less than 1 KG per month. It’s a target that is both achievable and clear. Then it becomes a matter of how you’ll get there rather than if you will.
This acts like a map for you to follow, and decisions you make will use this map as a guide and doesn’t require you to believe as long as you follow this guide.
Join us at College of Allied Educators to learn more about yourself, what motivates you, and how you can find happiness, meaning, and success in work, love, and life.
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