How to Withstand the Assault of Self Doubt and Go After Your Dreams

Image by Semin Paek from Pixabay

I was doing a class with Yvette Rose this week about rediscovering your brilliance, it gave me a very clear ah-ha moment.

Having been asked to think about a time when I wanted to do something very much, she asked us:

• What emotions did you feel before fear kicked in?
  
• What fear felt like after the initial positive feelings?
  
• Whose face/voice you see/hear when you connect to that fear?
  

The example I chose was my recently rekindled desire to work with adolescents, inspired by the movie Freedom Writers. The initial emotions I felt were excited, purposeful, motivated, curious, hopeful and confident.

Then, after the fear set in, I felt inadequate and lacking in confidence, wondering “Who am I to do this?” and “What if I mess up or get too involved?”

I know where these voices of doubt come from, and the ah-ha was simply that my initial positive emotions were my inner compass, the voices of fear are actually echoes of the separate voices of doubt and apathy from other people. I can also see that their doubt, and apathy, had more to do with what they believed about themselves.

However, I recognise that doubts are seeded there nonetheless, and my job is to learn to have more faith in my own inner compass and intuition than those doubts. I do not want to allow others’ self doubts and fears to become my limitations.

I was taking my kids through Steven Covey’s Circles of Control exercise this week, drawn out as circles within circles, with what we control at the centre:

• Circle of control – things we can directly control (like what we think, say and do, how we respond to stress, what we wear etc)
  
• Circle of Influence – the concerns we can do something about. We have indirect control over those things (such as having a certain influence on others’ thoughts but no direct control over them)
  
• Circle of Concern – those things that matter to us but we have no control over (like how tall we are, how others react and behave, politics, the economy etc).
  

Everything outside of the outer circle is of little or no concern to us (and that will be a matter of personal interests).

This is about controlling the things I can, which includes getting to grips with the voices of self doubt, and getting myself around more people who are involved in the things I’m interested in, and hearing their stories. It may also involve pursuing further education or qualifications, doing voluntary work or gaining some other experience as a stepping stone.

Having been through some big changes in their lives, it was interesting to see where the kids put certain things. My daughter, for example, felt she has little or no control over her thoughts “they are just there” she said. It made me pause, as I suspect most adults believe that too since we apparently think around 70,000 thoughts a day, 80-90% of which are a repeat of yesterday’s thoughts.

Psychologists call these thought patterns, and most of us have very self defeating thought patterns. Last week when I wrote Are You Willing to Take Your Sovereignty While Allowing Other People Theirs? I was reflecting on control patterns, these are patterns of behaviour between people, and are very much linked to our repeating thought patterns.

Some of my predominant self defeating thought patterns are things like: I’m not enough, I don’t have..., I’m too much, I’m alone, I’m different, I’m unworthy and so on. Where did these thought patterns come from? I can see why my daughter believes “they are just there” because it’s not by conscious choice they are there, they are the voices of fear I talked about at the start, and they have been planted there subconsciously from childhood and reinforced over the years through voices of others.

While (because of the repetition) these thoughts have well worn neural pathways in our brains, the good news is our brains are in fact malleable and our thoughts can be changed. It requires belief, focus and repetition. Rather than allowing my mind to work on automatic pilot, I have to catch these unhelpful thought patterns and flush them out.

To change what is an unconscious process, I have to become conscious of it and really shine a light and question it as I did when I looked at my fear around working with adolescents, which were essentially fears about my own worth and capabilities. I then have to begin to reimagine it and continually practice new ways of thinking about the issue and coach myself through the fears.

I’ve done this with almost everything I’ve gone after in my life that felt too audacious or scary. And in every case I’ve had far more to offer than I imagined possible at the outset. That’s not to say that no growth was required, in fact it was likely the growth opportunities that attracted me to begin with, but I don’t regret anything I’ve ever gone after for that reason, there was always something to learn.

And it’s that cycle of stretching out of my comfort zone, learning and growing that has built the resilience and confidence that allows me to teach my kids these lessons with assurity.  Is it scary? Yes. Heck yes. What’s more scary is a life half lived, a life of staying small and not going after the things I want, that my inner compass is clearly saying “yes” to.

What is your inner compass saying yes to? And what thought patterns might be holding you back? Who do these fears really belong to? And what can you do today to help you reimagine a different future?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Believe In Yourself Even if You Feel No One Else Does, What Are Our Thought Patterns Really Doing for Us?, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Shine Your Inner Light - Let No One Keep You Down, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, and Finding Your Purpose – the Magic of Those Who Believe in You. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.