One of the biggest reasons why people fail their goals is because of self doubt. When
you over analyze things you start to doubt yourself and your conviction goes down. Everything
seems more blurred and what seemed like a good idea is now something full of flaws.
This is how people get stuck and fail their goals. I know how bad it feels when you start
overthinking and start doubting yourself so this video will go over why you might doubt
yourself and how to overcome self doubt. There are multiple reasons why you might doubt
yourself. Here are 4 reasons why you might not believe in yourself.
1. You are comparing yourself to other people too often. We can’t really stop ourselves
from comparing ourselves with other people but you can’t let other people determine
how you live your life. When you see other people succeeding, you might start questioning
whether you can do the same thing if you are following a similar path to them. I have seen
this happen to a lot of people, especially if they feel as if that person they are comparing
themselves to is more capable than them. As for the other side of the coin, if your dream
isn’t the same as theirs like say you are following a less conventional path, you might
doubt yourself because you don’t know if you can achieve your dream. The people you
are comparing yourself to have been successful following a conventional path while you still
might not have accomplished as much. This can really get you down so you need to set
your own milestones and start working towards them.
2. You are your own worst critic. Self criticism is good and all but when you are too harsh
on yourself, it’s really hard to get started on your goals. When you first start out, you
can’t judge a beginner with the standards of a pro. You need to stop expecting perfection
and embrace learning on the fly. Most people start off not knowing much and learn on the
fly. You learn a lot more through experience than theory after all.
3. You are overthinking too much and allowing logic to drive all your decisions. Thinking
with logic is important and useful in a lot of situations but there are situations where
thinking with logic hurts you. Let’s say one of your goals is to start a Youtube channel.
If you were to think logically, you can conclude that it’s not a good idea since the odds
of making it big are quite low because there are millions of channels out there and most
of them don’t even make it to 10k subs. Once you reach that conclusion, you won’t
even start your goal. You need to be comfortable with uncertainty and be open to taking risks.
Life wouldn’t be any fun if you just followed logic all the time and didn’t take any risks.
4. You are afraid of failure. You can envision the life you dreamed about and know the steps
you need to take to get there but you are afraid of failing. Failing sucks and you don’t
want to waste your time working towards something only to fail. A fear of failure makes people
doubt themselves and believe they can’t be successful. If you want to learn how to
overcome a fear of failure I linked a video I made about it in the card above and I will
link the video on the end screen as well. In order to overcome self doubt, you need
to build some self confidence. Taking action is the best way to build self confidence.
This might sound like a contradiction since you can’t really take action when you doubt
yourself but there are some tricks that you can use to take action. The 5 second rule
in particular is very effective to get you to take action. The 5 second rule is simple
and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Instead of overthinking and not doing anything, count
to 5 and then make a decision and take action. The reason why taking action is effective
is because when you are doing stuff, you stop overthinking. When you are focused on your
work, you are only focused on the task at hand and you stop thinking about all those
other things. You want to practice being decisive and take action based on your decisions as
much as possible to build up your self confidence. Once you build up enough self confidence,
you can slowly erase your doubt. While taking action as much as possible is
effective in boosting your confidence, you also need to change your mindset for the best
results. Here are the 3 changes you need to make to your mindset to overcome doubt.
1. Stop worrying about a plan B. In order to be successful, you need to focus all your
energy in one direction. When you are working on multiple projects at the same time, it’s
really hard to get the results you want. When your efforts are split up on multiple things,
you can’t get that much progress on each thing. If you can focus on just one thing
at a time, you can get the results you want at a fast pace. The worst part about having
a plan B is that you might get all wishy washy with your commitment and not know which project
to focus on. That will make you indecisive and not take any action at all. Just think
about focusing on one thing and only come up with a plan B if you need to.
2. Accept that progress is not linear. If you ever worked out before you probably know
what I’m talking about. When you first start working out, you can easily increase the amount
you lift every week. You reach a new high every week and it feels amazing until you
finally stop making progress. You can’t increase the amount you lift and it feels
frustrating. You have hit a plateau and you need to make adjustments to your program to
overcome it. No matter what your goal is, you are going to hit a wall at some point
in time. In fact, hitting that wall is a good thing since it means you are on the right
track. If you aren’t facing any resistance that means you are not pushing yourself hard
enough. 3. Embrace a learning mindset and be ok with
messing up. As mentioned before, no one starts off as a pro. You need to embrace a learning
mindset to be able to learn effectively on the fly. There’s nothing wrong with not
being the best when you first start. Stop looking at mistakes as something that should
be avoided at all costs. Every mistake is a chance to learn what went wrong and figure
out the best way to get the results you want. Whether you reach your goals or not is up
to you. If you can overcome self doubt, you are in a good position to achieve your goals
and get the results you want. Do you have some goals you are working on
right now? Leave a comment below and check out the video shown on the end screen if you
want to learn about how to overcome a fear of failure.