Break Free from Self-Doubt: Unleashing Your True Potential

Ever wondered why the very goals you're passionate about seem to slip through your fingers? We're peeling back layers of self-doubt in this riveting discussion, revealing how this tyrant could be holding you back. We mash apart the deep-seated roots of self-doubt, digging into how our past experiences and learned limitations play a part in immobilizing us from stepping forward. We equip you with realistic strategies to dismantle self-doubt, like acknowledging its existence and challenging the negativity it brings along.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I want you to think for a second what you could achieve, accomplish or experience if you no longer had spiraling thoughts of what if? Or self doubt.

Speaker 2: 0:14

You're tuning into the confident connected leader podcast, your premier destination for breaking through your current professional barriers. Your coach and host, lisa Jeffs, will help you transcend limitations and achieve new levels of professional success beyond self doubt, sabotage and burnout. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1: 0:39

Welcome to the confident, connected leader podcast. I am your host, lisa Jeffs. Today we are talking about self doubt how it shows up in your leadership position, how it gets in the way of you creating your vision of moving forward confidently and how it siphons your energy and your will to do something. I know it. That sounds a little bit dramatic, but self doubt is the seed of self doubt Can permeate through. Projects can permeate through. You know you could be really, really excited about something. Let me know if this sounds familiar to you. You get really excited. You know you can feel it in your body. There's a new project you want to move forward on. There's something you want to launch. You know you can't.

Speaker 1: 1:43

You stay up all night thinking about it. You are imagining all these amazing things that are going to come from this project or come from this creative venture, and then the next day you wake up and solve. It's all good for about an hour or two and then the doubt creeps in. Am I really qualified to do this? What if this is a complete disaster? What if I embarrass myself? What if I lose money? What if I fail? How can I? I don't think I can handle this. All of these thoughts will literally suck the life out of a project and will make you feel contribute to you feeling like a frog.

Speaker 1: 2:35

So let's talk about self-doubt for a minute, because I do not believe that we come into this world doubting ourselves. I believe in that self-doubt is created throughout experiences and often through the limitations that we are picking up from other people and when we allow self-doubt to dictate what we do not do. So if we allow self-doubt to stop us from taking action on something that is exciting for us, on something that matters to us, we are allowing the limitations of others to be prioritized over our vision. So let's take it back. When we are children, we hear things from our parents, our caregivers, from teachers. We hear the words being spoken over us. You know, even if you have a parent, let's say, who is very worried about you and is constantly speaking over words such as be careful, what are you going to do? Do you have a plan B? What if this doesn't work out? Or if you have a very critical parent who is always on you and trying to do the best to give you guidance, but really they're just being critical and controlling and sometimes overbearing. These things can plant the seeds of doubt within us and how this manifests when we're adults and even in leadership positions, especially if you've been in a position for a while.

Speaker 1: 4:54

It's interesting that I see this. A lot of people at the beginning are able to move just with that pure excitement and motivation and they don't have a lot of skin in the game, let's say, but after a period of time maybe you've built up your reputation. You've built up people just know what to expect of you If you have a high value of excellence and then you want to try something new and all of a sudden it's like but what if this is a disaster? What if I do this and it's a complete flop? And then we hear these voices in our head of what if?

Speaker 1: 5:51

If we don't get this self-doubt under control, if we don't really prioritize doing the work right, doing the mindset work, doing the inner work and we're going to be going through more of that as this podcast grows and expands. I'm not going to get into all the nitty-gritty with this. This is more of a just an understanding of self-doubt. But if we don't put that in check, if we don't put these seeds of doubt if you think of it like a garden. It's just going to start to grow. Think of it like a weed. We have one little seed of doubt, but we don't tend to it, we don't challenge what we're saying to ourselves and we just let it be and grow. We're going to come back in a few days and there's going to be weed sprouting up everywhere and there's going to be all this stuff.

Speaker 1: 7:01

This will often lead to you not even taking action on something, or you talking yourself out of an opportunity, or talking yourself out of meeting people, of meeting connections, and this is absolutely tragic. I've been there. It doesn't, self-doubt, doesn't necessarily go away completely. It's not important for it to go away completely. What's important is to learn how to move beyond it, to acknowledge it as what it is. Oh, there's that thought again. Oh, there's that seed of doubt.

Speaker 1: 7:51

Is there truth to that? Do I know for certain that this is going to be an absolute disaster? Do I know for certain that this isn't going to work and nobody's going to want it, or nobody's going to want to listen to me, or nobody's going to take what I have to say seriously? Do I know that for certain, or is this just a voice in my head that was planted many, many years ago. How do I want to react to this now? How do I want to approach the situation? Am I going to listen to that voice and stay small and keep myself held back, or I'm going to just acknowledge it for what it is A voice in my head. There's lots of voices in my head. I can listen to anything. What would happen if I listened to the voice that I can cultivate that says well, what if this is the best thing that happens to you?

Speaker 1: 8:52

What if this taking action on this leads to this and leads to this and leads to everything I want and leads to my vision unfolding better than I could even imagine? Because we get to choose what we focus on. We get to choose if we're going to go down that tunnel of doubt and worry which just leads to more fear, leads to us feeling like an imposter. Or we can say, okay, I acknowledge that that's there, but I've done enough work on myself. I'm going to choose to see my value. I'm going to choose to see that I am not the person I was many, many years ago and I've grown and expanded beyond that. And I'm going to take action on what matters to me, because I'm going to prioritize my vision above the voices in my head that are telling me watch out, this might be bad. Then what if it is bad? What if it is? Are we going to allow an experience that maybe doesn't go the way that we want to stop us from creating our vision? Because, as leaders, whether you're leading a team, whether you're leading a mission or just leading yourself to create your own vision, the path to get there is filled with different experiences, and not all of them go amazing. That's just the way it is. In fact, many of them aren't going to, and that's part of the journey. So I'm going to wrap this up, because I didn't want this to be a long one.

Speaker 1: 10:51

To put the final thought together is you know, what helped me to move through my doubt was what if this is the best thing that ever happens? What if this taking action on this or going to this place or going to this opportunity and that's not to say that you need to take every opportunity or say yes to every single thing because of FOMO. That's not what I'm saying. Part of that is really and we'll get more into this in other episodes of the podcast is learning how to connect to yourself, so you can really tune into what's for you and what's not for you. But let's say, for the sake of this example, that you've tuned in and this is something where your intuition is saying this is expansive, this is something that you've been asking for, and there's a voice in your mind that's saying, oh, but this is really big and this is scary. And what if we do this? And it's an absolute disaster? We lose everything, we're a big failure, or maybe we'll blow up, and there's a fear there about getting so big.

Speaker 1: 12:20

But what if this is simply the next step in you creating your vision, the one that you've been asking for, the one that you've been dreaming of, the one that's on your vision board, the one that you've been journaling out about? For me, that trumps the self-doubt because, again, it's not about eliminating all self-doubt altogether. It's about learning how to respond beyond that, how to move beyond that voice, which is the limitations of others, the limitations that others have spoken over you, that they probably don't even remember and, to be honest, it may not even be a limitation for them anymore. So are we going to allow that illusion, the falsity of some limitation that someone spoke over you that they may not even have anymore to dictate what you are doing in your life, the actions you're taking. No, we are not. We're going to move beyond that. Okay, thank you so much for being on this episode.

Speaker 1: 13:40

We're going to talk in our next episode the foundations of sabotage, so you can get a better understanding of what sabotage is. Why does that come over us? And again, a lot of times sabotage can come on further in on our journey when it does feel like we have more to quote, unquote, lose. You're going to want to listen to that one, especially if you've noticed yourself holding back, maybe not going after certain things, or saying things like you know, I'm not ready yet or I have to prepare more. One thing that sabotage is is it can be very, very sneaky. It can, it can fly below the zone and it can have us feeling like we are doing all the right things. But if you've been in the same position for three months or longer and often it's far longer than that and you haven't been making the progress you want we got to look at, is sabotage present? We'll get into that in the next one. Thank you for sticking with me if you're still listening at this time. Again, my name is Lisa Jeffs and let's stay connected.

Speaker 2: 15:35

Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. You'll find all relevant links, including those for our complimentary gifts and trainings, in the show notes. Until our next episode, embrace your confidence and stay connected.