6 Steps to Defeating Self-Doubt
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Self-doubt is one of the things that most holds people back from achieving more success in their life and business. It is something that everyone, even people who appear very successful may battle with self-doubt. The further ahead you are towards reaching your goals the more you will have conquered self-doubt. With more success comes more confidence and less self-doubt, but you need to eliminate some of that self-doubt before you can succeed in the first place. There are several ways to help defeat the demons of self-doubt from your life.
1. Make Small Promises and Keep Them
One of the best ways of fighting self-doubt is by making small promises. These may be promises to yourself or to others. This can be an effective technique in creating momentum in your life. What is a task that you need to accomplish? Set a plan for completing that task, give yourself a deadline and then promise yourself that you will do that task. Once you have made a promise to yourself in this manner, make sure you do everything within your power to keep your promise.
Making yourself promises has the opportunity to build fantastic momentum but if you make promises you do not keep it will result in increased self-doubt not diminished. That is why you should make small steps in your promises. The promise needs to be something that is easy and manageable for you. It might be as simple as making one sales call each day, or writing one blog post each week.
After you have completed what you have promised yourself you will build on that success by making another small promise to yourself and keeping that. Keeping one small promise after another eventually leads to momentum and big success in your business.
2. Turn the Promises Into Small Achievable Goals
Once you are comfortable choosing tasks, promising yourself that you will complete them and then finishing them by the deadline you have set, it is time to move towards setting goals. Make sure that you focus on setting small achievable goals. Nothing helps to erase your self-doubt than reaching a worthwhile goal. Start with small goals, achieve them and then slowly increase the challenge of the types of goals you set. As you progress you will build momentum and confidence in life.
3. Put Others First
Another way of getting rid of self-doubt is to take the focus off of yourself and place your focus on others. Instead of focusing on what you can do for your own business or to achieve your own goals, focus on how you can help others. One of Zig Ziglar’s most famous quotes is that,
“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
Notice here that the focus is on other people, not on you. Further, by focusing on others there is no time to dwell on your own limitations and concerns.
4. Focus on the Positive
Many times the reasons for our self-doubt is that we are focusing on the negative things of life. You may be focusing on everything that is going wrong rather than what is going right. We are focusing on our weaknesses rather than on our strengths. Simply reversing this process can go a long way to eliminating much of the self-doubt from your life. You need to train your mind to only remember the positive. Focus on your success not on your failure. You need to learn from you failures and move on.
Successful people face rejection everyday. You face rejection when seeking financial funding for a business, you may face rejection when trying to make a sale, or you may face rejection from a boss or coworker. The reason for your success is your ability to completely forget about most of this rejection. Successful people learn from all of their mistakes but focus on their victories. After all if you dwell on the negative things that have happened to you in the past, you will never be willing to move forward. This same principle applies throughout life. If you focus on all the car accidents that happen in the world there is no way you’ll be able to drive your car – instead you focus on the fact that most times you go for a drive nothing happens.
5. Focus on Your Strengths
Make sure you are focusing on your strengths not your weaknesses. During periods of self-doubt you will likely find that you are irrationally focusing on all your weaknesses and ignoring your strengths. Chances are you have you have many more strengths than you realize. Work on continually thinking about how your strengths can be contributing to the growth of your business or achievement of your goals. If you have trouble with this take some time and meditate on all the strengths you bring to the table. Write these down. Take this even one step forward by having people around you tell you about the strengths they see in you. You can also use this technique to lower the self-doubt in those around you. Many times you will see strengths in others that they do not see in themselves. You can make a big difference by helping them see the strengths that they might not see easily.
6. Attitude
Although the above ways of defeating self-doubt all are to some extent or another reliant on your attitude, it is important enough that it deserves attention on its own. One of my favorite sayings in business is that “attitude is everything.” Nothing affects your self-doubt more than your attitude. In fact self-doubt is an attitude of its own. It is a very limiting attitude that you place on yourself.
Thankfully attitude is a CHOICE. Each day you can choose what attitude you are going to follow. Make sure you start each day with a positive, “I can do it” attitude. Always believe that you can achieve your goals. Always believe the best in people, and always focus on the positives. Learn from the struggles and focus on the victories.
Always be working on your attitude. Manage your attitude by reading positive material, listening to motivating audio tapes and choosing to make it a daily goal, become the leader in attitude for your team. (See my article 10 Tips for Maintaining a Positive Attitude)
By making and keeping small promises, setting and achieving worthwhile goals, putting others first, focusing on the positive, focusing on your strengths and managing your attitude you can greatly diminish the effect of self-doubt in your life. Now take the focus off yourself for a minute and think about ways you can help eliminate the self-doubt you see in those around you. Encourage them to take these steps towards eliminating self-doubt.
Written by:
The Success Professor – Danny Gamache
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Tags: attitude, Confidence, Goals, self-doubt, strengths, success
Good post. I really thought the suggestion to complete small tasks was a good one. Even though we often think that the little things don’t matter, it is amazing how productive and accomplished we can feel when we complete even the little things. It is like taking things one step at a time and successful completion of the smaller items, gives you the momentum you need to start working at the larger ones.
I enjoyed reading your post. It was very inspirational! I especially like #3 Put Others First and #4 Focus on the Positive. Your post reminds me of a self-help book I’m currently reading called Natural Success Principles (author Jack Hatfield).
After watching his premature baby daughter beat overwhelming odds to survive, he believes we are all born with everything we need to succeed inside us BEFORE we are born. This world can be confusing to us but once we discover what was inside us BEFORE we were born, we can then begin to achieve our full potential. We can take responsibility for our actions and find our definition of success!
Thanks for your comments everyone.
@alternaview – you are so right, building momentum through completing small tasks is so important .
@Betty – that sounds like a great book, thanks for recommending it.
@Nazim – you can do it! Make sure you come back and comment to share your progress!
[...] This is a big one. It was the big one in the past for me, is still the biggest one today. While with success comes more and more self-confidence the self-doubt is still there, it is just in different forms. Self-doubt is the voice in your mind that limits you – that says you can’t achieve it, that suggests you won’t make it, that you don’t have the skills and that it won’t work. Self-doubt causes you to focus on your weaknesses rather than your strengths. Self-doubt is a deadly poison for people working towards a big goal. If you let this limiting belief take over you will slow down and stop pursuing your dreams. You need to recognize self-doubt as an attitude that you can control. Focus on your strengths, and remind yourself that you can achieve your goals. Have a support system around you and train them to give you positive reinforcement about your abilities and strengths. Bonus article: Six Steps to Defeating Self-doubt [...]