Eliminate Self-Doubt from Your Life

“I’m not up to that!”

“I don’t have the guts.”

“I don’t know, maybe some other time.”

Do you recognize these quotations from your own life? Do you tend to second-guess your talents or your courage? Do you always hesitate, instead of taking the plunge? Afraid of risks, or afraid of failure?

Welcome to the club!

Everyone experiences similar feelings at some point in their life. For most of us, it’s an everyday ordeal. Unfortunately, this sort of thing becomes a bad habit. It starts to sound like a broken record. Is self-doubt keeping you from stepping out the front door? If a lack of confidence or courage is handcuffing you, it’s time to take serious steps to alleviate this situation.

A good place to start is to determine the possible origins of your self-doubt. Perhaps some traumatic failure in childhood damaged your self-esteem, and caused you to fear failure to such a degree that you came to fear even making an attempt.

Perhaps your esteem was beaten down by certain authority figures in your life, who made frequent comments to the effect that you’d never do anything special in your life. When repeated over a significant period of time, disparaging comments like these can have an effect, even on the subconscious level. We may not be aware of their scars, but they continue to hold us back as we try to advance in life. Quite simply, we refuse to believe in ourselves, just because others didn’t believe in us.

At some point, one has to get past all of these tired old ways of thinking. Certainly, stop adding to the chorus of critical and disparaging voices yourself. Human nature is such that we’re quick to put ourselves down; when someone else criticizes us, we’re surprisingly quick to take their words to heart, repeat them like a mantra, and heap on negativity ourselves. Soon we’re feeling too small and helpless to even lift a finger. Low self-esteem can become a genuine straitjacket in this way.

Begin freeing yourself from this prison of self-doubt by compiling a chart of your best qualities. You’ll realize you have a lot to be proud of. Reflect on your past accomplishments.

What qualities and talents did each of your achievements reveal in you? What else could you do with those talents? Keep in mind that any person only develops further over time—that the talents we may have been born with will continue to grow with use.

Those achievements of yesteryear are actually mere stepping stones on the road to greater things. The chart you compile is therefore hard evidence of your abilities, and that a lot of great things lie ahead of you. If, that is, you can overcome your self-doubt, and force yourself to venture back into the world and uncover new places.