I don’t know the first thing about NFL football, but I have no trouble relating to Buffalo Bills running back Ty Johnson’s struggle to overcome bouts of crippling self-doubt.
A few years back, Johnson was dropping balls and questioning his abilities at every turn.
“There was a lot of things as a player I was experiencing, and you know it makes you question yourself as a player,” Johnson told WKBW news reporter Michael Schwartz a few days before the Bills trounced my hometown team, the Ravens.
Johnson then posed a question that’s plagued us all, at one point or another: “Do I deserve to be here?”
Fortunately, Johnson found a way toward, as he put it, “having positivity” by writing affirmations like I’m great or Be present on his wrist before every game.
This solution might not work for everyone, but it’s clearly helped Johnson to put doubt in its place so that it no longer dominates his every waking moment.
We should all be so lucky. Living with doubt breeds a lot of uncertainty, as we postpone decisions and plans, not sure how they’ll turn out. Furthermore, as mental health professionals have long known, self-doubt often leads to a vicious cycle involving anxiety, procrastination, low self-esteem, and depression.
The good news? We have the power to turn this around—to go from doubtful to purposeful.
“Uncertainty is a foundation of creativity,” Maggie Jackson, author of Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, told me recently.
My own lifelong strides with doubt led me to conversations with doubters around the world—from artists to entrepreneurs. And I’ve come up with five strategies every self-doubter can adopt to shift their mindset toward feeling motivated and more self-confident.
1) Change the channel. Competing inner voices clamor in our heads for attention. Your “doubt monster” may be among the loudest and most persistent—but it’s not the only voice. Acknowledge the fear and insecurity. Then invite your self-affirming voices to speak up: Look at what I’ve already accomplished! Put the positive voices on repeat—and even try saying them out loud in the mirror each morning. You’ll be surprised at how changing the channel will alter your perspective.
2) Focus on your ‘why.’ When the jitters kick in, take a beat and remind yourself why you’re doing the work you do in the first place. Whether you’re a major league athlete or an entrepreneur embarking on a new start-up, you’re going all-in on something you love, something that lights you up and gets you out of bed in the morning. Your ‘why’ holds the key to driving your passion forward. Any doubts you feel are worth the price—and it’s not their job to slow your roll.
3) Put your doubts to good use. Doubt can be a force for good. Think of the surgeon who pauses before cutting into a patient. Doubt focuses your attention. Your doubts are not telling you “no,” they’re telling you where to sharpen and apply your skill, talent, and intellect so as to achieve your goal. This is a classic “yes-and” strategy: acknowledging doubt’s downside while harnessing its upside.
4) Gather the right allies. Anytime you take a big creative risk, friends and family will question your motives and possibly your sanity. You cannot comfortably make big moves surrounded by doubters who exacerbate your doubts. Instead, expand your networks to identify more allies—people and institutions that will back you and encourage you every step of the way. Dial down the adversaries and dial up the allies.
5) Renegotiate your relationship to risk and reward. Our culture prizes efficiency and a fast return on investment. But anytime you set an ambitious plan in motion, doubt quickly kicks in when conventional measures of success, whether profit or external validation, do not materialize. Try uncoupling risks from traditional rewards. Start-up companies and novelists often fail many times before succeeding. The time and effort invested in your passion project or career is intrinsically valuable; productivity and accolades are not the only—or even the best—measures of a worthy pursuit.
Doubt is a trickster, often masquerading as fear and lack of confidence. It wields enormous and sometimes undetected influence on how we make decisions. All the more reason to take stock of your self-doubts and ask whether they are serving you or holding you back.
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• Need More Self Compassion? Researcher Suggests These 4 Simple Steps to Overcome Our ‘Negativity Bias’
Never forget that at every stage of life, we retain the capacity to change in ways that give our lives meaning and show us we have not yet finished becoming who we really are. There is room to grow and discover. Chances are, you’re still well on the way to finding that out for yourself. Don’t let self-doubt hold you back.
Amy L. Bernstein is the author, most recently, of Wrangling the Doubt Monster: Fighting Fears, Finding Inspiration, an inspirational book for self-doubting creatives. She is an award-winning novelist, a former journalist, and a certified nonfiction book coach helping authors find their best path to publishing. She also teaches workshops and brings an empowering message to conferences and podcasts around the world.