“Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will” – Suzy Kassem

Whether it’s the night before a job interview, gearing up to give a speech or prepping for an important project, it’s normal to feel doubts and worries. It’s something we all experience and to a certain extent it can be healthy – it helps us to make the right choices and challenges our decisions.

However, self-doubt can hit us like a wave, washing over us with feelings of anxiety, fear and overwhelm. Self-doubt is often the barrier to success, feeding into a cycle of you being unsure of your abilities and, ultimately, standing in your own way. Sometimes, there’s nothing else holding you back except your own doubts. In this blog, we’ll explore why self-doubt is holding you back and what you can do to fight it.

What is self-doubt?

 I don’t deserve to do well in this interview, I’m no good, I’m going to fail, I won’t achieve my goals, I can’t achieve anything….

If you recognise these negative thought patterns, chances are that it’s your self-doubt surfacing. Self-doubt is where we can’t see the good qualities in ourselves, like our talents or abilities. And it’s no wonder that if we see the world through this filter, we often lack the motivation to try because we believe we are destined for failure.

Self-doubt is strongly connected with our inner critic and imposter syndrome, which harm our confidence in our capabilities. It’s born out of our fight-or-flight response – and most of the time, we choose to flee and avoid facing the situation or task that our brain perceives as a ‘threat’.

Many people also find it easy to fall into a vicious cycle of comparison to others and a preoccupation with not being good enough, constantly feeding these feelings of self-doubt with what we believe is the ‘truth’. In reality, it’s not an objective view of our abilities – after all, one person’s success doesn’t cancel out the success of anyone else.

Left unchecked, high levels of self-doubt can quickly drain our self-confidence and self-esteem and flood into other areas of our life, including how we feel about our image and worth. It can seep into our relationships with others, leading us to question our partner’s feelings for us, or if our friend really does enjoy spending time with us as much as they say.

There are two common ‘coping strategies’ that have been identified in psychology that inadvertently enable our self-doubt. The first is called self-handicapping, where we manage our uncertainty about our abilities by interfering with our chances of success. Think of it like self-sabotage – you might stay up all night or procrastinate so that you have something to place the blame on when you underperform: I would have done better, but I was tired. This ties the failure to an external factor, rather than our own identity or competence.

The second strategy is overachievement. In much the same way, this way of facing the obstacle tries to avoid failure, but instead of not working hard enough, we make sure that failure is prevented by putting in the extra effort. It’s often not efficient to spend hours upon hours on a job that takes half the time, but it quietens our self-doubt to prepare so much. Despite our achievements from this tactic, it doesn’t extinguish our self-doubt. In fact, it fans the flames by encouraging these feelings as the only way to do well.