5 Tiny Tips That Will Make You Stop Doubting Yourself

Here are five ideas I always return to whenever I experience the human sense of doubt. Internalizing these helps me take on life’s challenges from a healthy, confident state.

Here are 5 tiny tips that will make you stop doubting yourself:

1. Doubt is human

For many of us, it can feel isolating when we have doubts about our capabilities. One of the worst things you can do is to buy into the idea that you separate from everyone else — that you’re unique in your insecurities. We’re all going through doubts, no matter how seemingly together we seem — please trust me on this. Doubt isn’t reserved for a select few weirdos. A sense of doubt is a normal human response to existence and our growth within that reality.

Whether we allow doubt to slowly cripple us is another issue, but don’t believe you’re the only one. When we know this is an innately human condition, we sense our connection with each other. We can look straight into the eye of another man and know he too can doubt. This will lift you.

2. Doubt is a thought

This point alone could significantly minimize unnecessary doubt, so listen in. Doubt is always a thought. It is an idea we hold in our minds. Always. It’s never an accurate representation of what is happening. It’s an approximation — a lie essentially — conjured up in an attempt to help but rarely helpful. When we understand this, we see that all feelings of doubt result from doubtful thoughts that — guess who — YOU made up in your head. We can’t stop thoughts from arising, but we can stop holding on to them tight.

If you have a doubtful thought, getting into the practice of letting go and moving on will bring relief, improve your performance, and change your life.

3. Doubt can be helpful

When we have doubt, whether when nervous before a meeting, a musical performance, or when we’re starting a new venture, it usually points at one thing: you need more experience.

Here’s the issue: many of us confuse doubt from our lack of skills with personal inadequacy. That’s plain dumb. It could be true that you need more practice to be more effective in something, but that has nothing to do with personal worth. Feeling doubt can point to a need to gain more skill in something — great. Use that, but don’t make it about you — make it about your lack of skill. Big difference.

4. Focus on your system, not on yourself

Ask a doubtful person who’s about to enter into something for which they have doubt, and you’ll often hear variations on the following:

"I’m just not that kind of person."
"I don’t know whether I have the self-belief necessary to do this."
"Do you think I’m ready to just step in like this?"
"I have personality issues that make me uniquely incapable of doing well at this."

On and on. Wow, aren’t we creative at finding excuses in the face of things that scare us? Notice how every reason is self-conscious. We make it about us. We do everything but the thing we most need whenever taking on a new venture: focus on the venture. I have found my doubt dissipates quickly when I forget myself and focus on creating a system that inspires action. That system need only be as simple as deciding on my next single and simple step. Now we’re moving. Now it’s no longer personal, and we’re doing something.

5. You don’t need 'self-belief'

Spend any time reading my stuff, and you’ll see one thing that separates me from the robotic gurus who parrot crap they hear from everyone else. You don’t need "self-belief" to do things. You need to act. Many of us make things unwittingly harder for ourselves by trying to find this elusive self-belief. Focus, as we said, on your next steps and take action regardless of how you feel. Action creates belief effortlessly. You need not find it beforehand. That only creates more self-doubt.