How to overcome self-doubt at work
Twelve months ago, I set out to deepen my ability to support clients with how to overcome self doubt at work and in their small business.
This is how I started training with Sas Petherick’s Self-Belief Coaching Academy.
If you haven’t come across her work before, Sas is a super smart coaching practitioner who has made her obsession with supporting humans with self-doubt her life’s work. Sas is a master coach and supervisor whose approach is designed to help people understand their experiences of self-doubt and move into a calmer, more capable and more compassionate version of themselves.
Not only did working with Sas give me the evidence-based knowledge and tools to support my coaching clients on how to overcome self-doubt at work, but it also profoundly transformed my own relationship with self-doubt.
Here are some of the lessons I learnt along the way:
Sometimes we need help to solve the right problem.
Business problems are solvable with knowledge, skills or process. Protective beliefs show up whenever we feel any resistance to achieving our goals or being ourselves. Sometimes we confuse the two and we end up trying to solve the wrong problem.
How you talk to yourself matters
The words we choose (and the ones we leave out) matter. Concepts like ‘self-sabotage’ and ‘limiting beliefs’ suggest there’s a flawed, broken part of you. But there’s no enemy within. You’re simply trying to protect yourself from a risk – and that doesn’t sound like a very terrible idea.
Reframing self-sabotage as ‘self-protection’ and limiting beliefs as ‘protective beliefs’ helps you see how you’re keeping yourself safe and why. Then you can decide whether (and how) you’ll navigate them.
Mindset work has its place but rarely in the presence of self-doubt.
Advice that tells you to “feel the fear and do it anyway” misses the point. When you’re experiencing self-doubt, your nervous system is flooded with the instinct to fight or flee.
Controlling your thoughts to change your behaviour doesn’t help you understand why you’re feeling the discomfort. It tells you to bypass the wisdom of your emotions and bodily sensations. No wonder our discomfort turns into resistance and we don’t do The Thing.
Making a change is scary but so is staying the same.
When you don’t take steps in the direction of your dreams and desires, you develop a heap of resentment. The resentment grows so big and feels so insurmountable that you end up experiencing the very same risk you’re trying to keep yourself safe from.
That risk – of failure, judgement or disappointment – it’s there even when you’re stuck in patterns of procrastination or perfectionism and not doing the thing you dream of.
Self-belief is a practice.
It’s true that believing in yourself and your brilliance doesn’t come easily to most of us. But just like any muscle, it takes effort and it’s strengthened by taking action. Our brains are hard-wired to notice the mistakes we’ve made and the things we could have done better. Get to know your self-doubt. Experiment with taking new actions and growing new beliefs and watch your self-belief snowball.
Belief and bravery look different on different days.
Sometimes you’re ready to make great leaps. Sometimes you’re not. There’s space for both in our work and lives. The best action to take is always the one which feels most doable on any day.
Your goal might not be nearly as important as who you become in the process.
More, bigger and better are the measures of success that society tells us we should be working towards. But sometimes, the biggest win isn’t what you achieve but who you become in the process.
There’s always a chance that everything will work out brilliantly.
Your inner protector can’t predict the likelihood of a particular risk occurring, nor can it predict its outcome. It looks at the current context, your past experiences and your blueprint and it takes a guess at what might happen. But that’s all it is – a guess. I find it endlessly reassuring to know that my smart, sophisticated and somewhat sneaky inner protector hasn’t sussed this out and that there’s every chance things will work out just as I’d like them to.
The aim of this work isn’t to live without your self-doubt. It’s to get to know it really, really well.
It’s human and ordinary to experience self-doubt, and it will always be there, in layers. I wouldn’t begin to claim that coaching (with me or anyone else) will fix your self-doubt. This work isn’t about managing or controlling the resistance (that fight, flight, freeze or fawn stress response) or eliminating the risks. It’s learning to work with your self-doubt and resourcing yourself with self-belief, self-acceptance, self-trust and self-worth instead.
Navigating self-doubt is a messy, imperfect, non-linear process, but it’s the most glorious journey in coming home to yourself.
