How To Eliminate SELF DOUBT
I wanna to talk to you about something that might be affecting you and your business negatively to a far greater degree than you may give it credit for.
Before I go any further, lemme say that everything I am sharing today was not easy for me.
It’s incredibly personal, and before I began to put one word on paper I felt a sharp sting.
Fear…
When ‘fear’ happens, I know right at that moment that I literally have to stop and really focus to be able to get through it.
And if it’s this hard and I sometimes actually get ‘frozen’ then I know this issue is silently affecting many others in an extremely negative way.
What is it?
The problem of self doubt.
And how to eliminate self doubt.
If we can work through this together, right now….
If you and I can be honest for a few moments and really do some deep work together you’ll come out of the experience far stronger for it.
I promise you that.
I don’t ask that you trust me right now, rather I just ask that you please stretch yourself a bit…
Are you game? Great.
So, here we go, and realize I don’t care who you are.
Meaning…
I
don’t care if you’re Oprah, Bill Gates, Dr. Wayne Dyer, or Donald
Trump, we ALL have those silent moments when the only thought we can
hear or give focus to is, “What’s wrong with me?” or “I can’t do this”…
What triggers it can be one of a million different things.
Typically, it hits you at points in your life where your results don’t match the expectations you have put on yourself to obtain certain results.
For instance, you fall in love. Give your significant other your heart.
They go and cheat on you or leave you for someone else.
You’re left with, “What’s wrong with me?” or “I can’t do this” (again).
You give of your entire soul to your business building efforts and nothing quite seems to work.
In fact, you end up digging yourself even deeper into a financial hole.
The only you’re left with is, “What’s wrong with me?” or “I can’t do this”.
You’re left feeling deflated, isolated, empty. You don’t tell anyone.
You want to go hide under a rock and never come out, but instead you give a smile, and carry on as if nothing is “affecting” you.
Neither way of “dealing” with it is good for you.
In fact…..
Left untreated this “thought” can not only kill your chances of building the business you want, but on a far deeper level it can destroy the quality of your life and the lives of those around you.
When it hits you, the only way for your mind to react is to answer this question with all the “things” that “you think” are wrong with you.
I know because…
There have been times in my life where I’ve let this thought take me to those dark places.
And I mean ‘dark places’, and that dark place was with drugs…
Yes, I took drugs and went to very dark places due to my own self doubt and always being in fear!
I’ve let it rob me of results and achievements early in my life.
I’ve let it strain or destroy important relationships in my life.
Here’s my story about this…WATCH HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1DRmev6RWA
I’ve also seen this “thought pattern” destroy other’s businesses that I’ve worked with.
And please hear me, it’s not drugs I’m talkin about here, it’s the ‘thought pattern’ that I’m talkin about, the self doubt, the fear…
But…
I know that the affects are not a permanent state of mind. Thank God for that…
I’ve beaten it.
Every successful entrepreneur you and I admire, has found in their own way, a way to overcome it, and thus, so can you.
I don’t want this “pattern” to destroy your chances of success, because it shouldn’t, and it only has the power to affect us IF…that is IF you or I let it.
The problem is, most of the time it starts small, and by the time it gets “out of control” we’re too far gone to notice where we are mentally.
So, the way we overcome the problem of self doubt is to….
Inoculate ourselves against it. Give ourselves a ‘shot’ so to speak to become immune to that particular thought pattern.
Stop it before it can affect us in any major way. Before I go any further, let me say this first …
No matter how “bad” things may “seem” at times, there’s no problem so big that you can’t find happiness right now. This I know.
In fact, I believe finding that happy place is exactly where that success that you may think is eluding you lies.
The faster you can recover and remain in a place of joy the faster and easier success will find it’s way to you.
I say this, because the only way that I’ve been able to overcome these moments in my life has been through deliberate practice. Consistent effort to find and remain happy no matter what I’m faced with.
And believe me, it would take all day to tell you what I’ve been faced with in my past.
I’m sure you have faced issues in your life also that are very hard to remain happy through.
However, if you’re willing to fight for your happiness today then it will bring your life more meaning and joy on not just a daily basis, but a moment to moment basis.
Just imagine always being happy. How would your life change?
It’s an exciting idea isn’t it. Now, let’s see what we can do to make it a reality.
What I’d like to do is walk you through the general thought process that I’ve found myself going down when I’ve been hit with the “what’s wrong with me” and “self doubt” thought pattern.
Generally, it starts small.
Something doesn’t go quite the way you expect it to.
Sometimes you can just shrug it off, but other times, that feeling sticks around just a little too long, and once that happens….
You start asking yourself questions like “what did I do wrong?” You start to explore the answers.
If you could stop there and take positive action to invalidate those possible ‘wrong things’ you’d be golden.
But our minds don’t work that way.
Instead of telling us that we should go out into the real world and invalidate the possible causes it does this instead…
It starts to compare your results with others, and typically, others who you think are doing better in that area of life than you.
An example …
Let’s say you work your butt off for a promotion at work. You do all the right things. You make all the right moves, however when the times comes for the promotion you get passed up.
Then you get passed up again.
When your mind starts finding its way to “what’s wrong with me” place, you start to ask yourself questions like why did he/she get the promotion and not me?
You run through the list of reasons why you’re just as good as he or she is and you can’t find a definable reason why they’re “more” fit for the job than yourself.
The only answer your mind can serve you up with is…
Something must be wrong with me.
Another example…
I had a guy on one of my teams that started recruiting a LOT of people. I was happy for him, but they didn’t duplicate as fast as he expected them to.
Not long after he’d call me and say, “Maria, why aren’t they duplicating? I’m starting to lose confidence here.”
I told him what I did with my team, however, I believe he lost ‘belief’ in himself.
He reached a place where, whatever or whoever he was comparing himself to, his mind could only serve him the answer that it “must” be his fault.
That most dangerous of questions must have hit his mind like a ton of bricks, ‘what’s wrong with me’.
In both situations when your mind can’t find an answer, it logically moves to you as the root cause.
That’s bad, because as soon as that happens it starts to repeat itself in your mind.
You see our mind just thinks out of being a habit.
WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THE MOST, IS WHAT YOUR MIND THINKS IS TRUE!
Please, memorize that and know your mind is your enemy. It doesn’t know any better than to always go to the thought pattern that YOU have created.
“This is wrong with me. That is wrong with me. That other thing is wrong with me.”
None of it is true.
All of it subjective, but to you, in that place it couldn’t be any more true.
Once your mind goes there it starts to generalize. If you’re no good at X, then you’re no good at Y, and if you’re no good at Y, then you’re no good at Z.
Soon, you perceive yourself as without worth.
Complete and total self doubt.
And that is VERY dangerous place to be.
The reason that I share all this is so you can see the process in it’s full light.
So, how to eliminate self doubt is…
Knowledge.
Knowledge is the seed of action.
If we never know that this process isn’t “us” the only thing that you or I can do is take it as truth…even though it’s nothing further from the truth.
Your mind must work, and if you let it work on it’s own, it’s like a computer, at times, it can crash, but your mind isn’t you.
YOU control your mind.
You can either accept or reject what it wants to serve you.
Here’s a personal example of what I mean, that we’ll dig into deeper at a later date.
I have what I have come to call “Instant Gratification Syndrome” which means my mind always wants to find ways to instantly gratify itself.
For me, that means it constantly wants me to check my emails to see “what my daily income figures look like”.
Why? we’ll get to later, but … I feel my mind finding “reasons” for me to check my email when I don’t do so as often as it would like.
My mind is sneaky, and if I don’t do a reality check every now and then, there I go…
I believe I need to do whatever my mind says, and as result I check my email address and my mind wins.
My mind’s habits are NOT me.
Your mind is NOT you.
You need to understand that.
One of the best ways for proving this to yourself is to either write in a journal for 40 minutes uninterrupted or meditate for the same amount of time uninterrupted.
What you’ll find is your mind will constantly sway to certain things that it habitually sways to, these thoughts that come to your mind are NOT you.
They are the habits that keep your “lizard mind” in it’s happy routine.
Until you or I break out of those mental routines there is no growth.
The point I wanted to stress is you are not your mind’s habits.
When it goes to those places of self doubt, understand that your mind is lying to you.
It’s creating meaning out of nothing, and by believing it you’re bringing that meaning into reality.
Don’t believe the hype. So …
How do you defeat self doubt?
The easiest way once you can get into the habit of doing so, is to notice those times when you feel let down by certain expectations and simply let them go.
Here’s how your mind works, is if you’ve watch TV shows like “LOST” and got hooked after watching a few episodes it’s because they use what are called “open loops” to keep your attention. What loops are, are situations that go unresolved by the time the episode ends.
You
want, no, you NEED to know what happens, so you’ve got to tune in next
week and so you become “hooked.” These TV shows use a series of these
loops to keep us tuning in.
Not long ago, I realize how powerful this force is at keeping our attention, but had a profound epiphany one day writing in my journal on the subject when I realized if that’s how our minds work when watching TV, what about with our own thoughts?
It hit me like a bolt of lightning when I realized that all of the things that I felt stress over were essentially open loops.
Unresolvable thoughts in my mind that stayed there exactly because they were unresolvable.
From there, I quickly realized that if I want to live a stress free happy life that the thing I’ve got to do is let go of those things that are unresolvable, otherwise I’d be doomed to stress, and potentially extreme self doubt, fear and depression.
Your mind creates a small “Open Loop” whenever it can’t figure something out, so what does it do?
It digs in until that little “open loop” turns into a grand canyon sized unresolvable problem like “What’s wrong with me” or “I can’t do this”.
The best way to NOT get there is to let go of any thought that you can’t resolve right now!
If you can make this a habit your life will change drastically.
I promise.
But how do you let go?
It’s one of those things that’s easier said than done.
For me…
The best tool I’ve found is constantly listening to self-help audios or reading self-help books.
If I have a problem I go take a bath, put on my ear phones and listen to my audios or just sit there and meditate.
Sometimes it doesn’t go easy.
I’ll find myself thinking about it more and more, and it will find it’s way into my thoughts over and over again.
I have finally come to the conclusion after ‘thinking and thinking’ (which is a habit of my stupid mind) to just let it go!
What do I mean by letting go? Exactly that. Letting it go. Dropping it like a bad habit.
Listen, if you can’t do anything about it right now, LET IT GO!
There you go. That’s the thought process.
The other thing that I’ve found that’s helped me a LOT is to really define for myself within myself what makes me happy.
And sometimes it’s not that easy, but I’ll tell you what makes me happy as it relates to my business:
***To always keep learning and educating myself…
***To listen and I mean really listen to people who have what I want…
***Never giving up on my dreams…
If I’m thinking about and doing these things as it relates to my business I’m happy.
If I take myself there and immerse myself, the days could pass and I wouldn’t know it.
That’s just what I love to do. The money’s good too.
Now, I’ll take the money as the late Jim Rohn once said, but it ain’t the money that fuels me.
If I go to that place and do those things, and think those thoughts that put me in a happy place, there’s no room for bad, negative, or self doubt feelings. I’m too busy having fun.
You should take some time to really define that place in your business for you as well.
So, I’ve shared several ideas with you today that have helped me a lot.
I’ll stop here, but I WILL say this … You are not your thoughts.
You’re amazing if you let yourself be. If you’ll simply let go.
I’d love to know any self doubts you’re currently trying to overcome if you’re courageous enough to share.
I might be able to help…
You can even help me and others…
No comments:
Post a Comment