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Stop doubting yourself: Self-doubt is one of the most common enemies of success. It not only makes you doubt your abilities but stands in the way of starting a project or work. In this article, we will talk about the meaning of self-doubt, the self-doubt definition and the steps to stop doubting yourself. We will talk about self-doubt in the context of confidence and achieving your full potential.

What is self-doubt?

Self-doubt is uncertainty about your capabilities and belief in yourself. It starts with a few questions such as What if I make a fool of myself? It might even lead you to avoid trying in the fear that you might mess up something.

Self-doubt is a mindset that holds us back and focuses on limitations instead of outcomes. It forces us to think about fears and why something will not work. And you know how it works when you focus on fears instead of efforts. We get what we focus on the most!

Unfortunately, self-doubt easily leads to failure, loss of confidence and trust. It breeds the fear of trying and creates a narrative to prevent yourself from feeling bad. Unfortunately, in doing so, you’re punishing your confidence and chances of success.

Stop Doubting yourself meaning

We all know that self-doubt is bad. But is it completely true? Our fears, doubts and limitations have a powerful message. They aren’t always right, but they tell us something. In the article – how to overcome fear, we deeply concentrate on understanding what the fear is trying to tell us.

Self-doubt is a form of fear too. Most often people tell us to ignore fears and focus on optimism. But fear or worry doesn’t reduce if you ignore it. It is asking you to do something about it. Instead of ignoring your self doubt, the best thing to do is to understand what it means. By doing this, you’re taking the first step in the journey to stop doubting yourself.

What causes self doubt?

It is mostly our previous experiences. We derive our confidence from past successes. Unfortunately failures impact us more than success. Its effect is stronger! Instead of treating failure as a feedback, we feel the hurt it has caused. When we do this, we start doubting our ability to take a similar challenge in the future.

Naturally, it leads you to start doubting yourself. The way to build self-confidence is by continually working on things that make you doubt yourself. Stop doubting yourself is a nice phrase. It can be practical only when you start doing something about your doubts and fears.

Stop Doubting yourself quotes

Here are a few stop doubting yourself quotes to bring focus back to our aspirations.

Our doubts are traitors. And make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt – William Shakespeare

If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced – Vincent Van Gogh

I seek strength, not to be greater than other, but to fight my greatest enemy, the doubts within myself – P.C.Cast

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will – Suzy Kassem

Believe in yourself, your abilities and your own potential. Never let self-doubt hold you captive. You are worthy of all that you dream of and hope for – Roy Bennett

You are so much stronger than you realize. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re not. Not even you – J.W.Lynne

Source: Self Doubt Quotes

8 Steps to stop doubting yourself

These steps aren’t linear and can be powerful even if used in isolation. The most important point to take away is that stopping self-doubt is a process. You need to train mind continually and build confidence. As you grow, the scale of your challenges increases. Self-doubt will not go anywhere. Instead, your capability to handle these doubts increases. In saying – stop doubting yourself, I’m only asking you to treat your doubts with respect and do what’s necessary to move ahead.

Be Kind to yourself

Doubts and fears are natural. They’re very important in telling you that something can go wrong. Only fools ignore fears and turn a blind eye! When your mind tells you about fears, listen to it. Your emotions are sending you a message.

Perfection is overrated: Perfection is such a lie and an awful standard. It leaves you eternally unhappy and elusive. Don’t beat yourself up for making mistakes. That’s the only way you will ever grow. Make mistakes and move on, but be kind to yourself! – Read: Why being perfect is bad?

Treat each outcome as feedback: Not all outcomes can be successful. If you fail, be thankful for the failure and take feedback. Understand that failures occur only to point you in the right direction. Ignorance is the worst enemy with failures

Identify your source of doubt

Find out where this doubt is coming from. What’s making you doubt your abilities?

Are you doubting yourself because someone doesn’t believe you? : It sounds simple, but often the most common cause of self-doubt. You don’t need someone else to tell how good you are. Your results are the best source of truth. If someone doubts your ability, ask for their reasons and rationale. If they don’t have the right data, ignore them completely. There’s no time for baseless arguments.

Does the doubt help you?: Your doubts must have a constructive outcome. If their only purpose is to make you feel bad, then it is useless. Find a way to castaway these useless doubts because it takes time from doing useful things.

Gain confidence from past successes

Your past is a beautiful indicator for confidence and data. It is difficult to build your life upon failures. What you can do however is to start again intelligently. Notice your successes, each small one of them.

Create and measure milestones: The biggest secret in building your self confidence is to set yourself up for success. By this, I mean breaking down your large goal into achievable parts. These must indicate whether you’re getting close to a goal or not. Using a single milestone is an awful way to pursue your goals.

Make sure that your milestones are challenging: Anyone can win with poor goals. Don’t sacrifice the quality of goals just to create an illusion of success. If you do this, even winning this game will make you feel like a sore loser. Instead, continually challenge yourself to grow. Failing at a good game is better than winning at a poor one.

Competition is great but not comparison

2 Points to remember:

• Don’t compare your start with someone else’s middle
• Compare to your own past and compete with your ideal self to continuously improve

Remember, you’re always in competition with yourself. There’s no point in comparing yourself with others because it’s unfair. Both of you will never be on the same journey or go through the same challenges. The comparison needs to be between equal parameters but not persons.

If you’re doing that, you might as well make peace with feeling bad for yourself and lowering your confidence. The problem with comparison is that

• If we compare with someone doing better, we’re filled with jealousy, anger
• In case of someone doing worse, we feel great about ourselves which fills us with a sense of power over another.

Neither of these emotions is fair or helps us grow. Our life’s goal is what we want to achieve. Doesn’t matter what someone else is doing.

Develop a circle of safety beyond doubt

• Not the one that says you’re great
• You want a true group that can help you grow
• They can be brutal but true – feedback being constructive

A circle of safety is people that you can trust. It can’t be a group that always worships you. A circle of safety is a place where you can be yourself. People around you trust you and care about you. They are brutal with their feedback but with a very strong intent for you to grow. It is a safe space for you to experiment, try out different things and find your confidence.

Don’t jump to conclusions

Doubts are there to help you. They don’t mean that you’re useless or don’t have enough talent. Catch yourself from making these leaps of assumptions. When you have a nagging self-doubt, find out what you can do to reduce the doubt. Distraction doesn’t help – take an action that creates a solution.

• Take your time after each feedback
• Trust the data and patterns instead of intuition – I always do like this is the worst enemy

Create solid milestones to reduce doubting yourself

• Define what success means to you.
• Break down success into achievable parts

Success is not a singular achievement, it is a journey through small steps. If you want to win over self-doubt, make sure that you set the right challenge. By this, I don’t mean an easy challenge but a worthy one. Remember, the agenda is to stop doubting yourself, not setting awful goals to fail.

Failure is good feedback to learn from. But you can build your confidence from success. Instead of looking at a binary outcome, identify the successes in your failure. I’m sure even when things go wrong, you’d have done some things right. The idea is to build from these right things to your final outcome.

Build confidence through continuous process

• Success is a journey
• Continuous improvement, measuring milestones

Remember that your doubts are your friends- they’re craving your attention for a particualr outcome. Instead of ingoreing them or complaining about them, find a way to embrace these doubts. Maybe these doubts are telling you something.

Building confidence is a process, just like anything else. If you want to stop doubting yourself, know that it will come through a change of approach and perspective. Make sure that you create an environment for this.