5 Life-Changing Techniques To Help You Overcome Self-Doubt

If you suffer from self-doubt or critical self-thinking like I do, I don’t think we’ll ever really completely overcome the struggle. Like many other lifelong struggles, it creeps back in, even when we’re feeling confident or self-assured. But all hope is not lost. You can still incorporate these 5 techniques into your day-to-day life to help overcome those overwhelming moments of self-doubt. Whether it’s your dream career, your relationships, your family, or whatever, please hear me when I say this: you can do it.

Read a book about it

People who write books sat down one day and decided to gather a ton of information about some topic and spit it back out in a digestible way. Just because you didn’t “write the book” on your dreams doesn’t mean you don’t deserve easy access to that info. Someone else did the work, so now you can support them AND learn about something you want!

I have a writer friend who wanted to make a career for herself in copywriting but didn’t know where to start. She did two really crucial things: she read a book about copywriting (think Dummy manuals) and she asked a professional copywriter to help her revise her resume. Once she did, recruiters from companies like Microsoft and Google were contacting her with job offers in the field. Now she makes a living working from home as a copywriter during the day and still gets to pursue her dream of stand-up comedy at night. You know what she did to start pursuing her dream of doing stand-up comedy? She started doing it! Just like that!

When I realized the way I was behaving in my relationship was toxic and unhealthy, I read the book about attachment styles and did a miniscule amount of research on how to combat insecure attachment. And just like that, my relationship improved and got healthier (and hotter).

Make “everyone is pretending” your new mantra

Let’s face it: even the most confident, self-assured people you know have incorporated the cliché “fake it till you make it” into their lives at some point. No one is born knowing how to do a certain job, how to be in relationships with others, or how to behave when they reach the age of independence. It’s a feature of all communities that everyone doubts themselves at some point and at some level. Learning doesn’t stop. Even if you graduate with a degree in something, you’ll still learn something new every day in your chosen field. Everyone doubts themselves to some level, and if they don’t, they’re probably a sociopath.

Humility, some level of self-doubt and self-criticism, is healthy. It’s what makes people want to try to become good at something. Whatever domain of life you’re thinking of, the ability to check yourself, to question whether you are doing something well, is a good thing. The only people who don’t get imposter syndrome are people who don’t realize this. Imposter syndrome makes us the best employee/partner/friend/person we can be.

The bottom line is: if you’re a good person with good intentions, you do belong where you are. Self-doubt doesn’t change that. If you’re a bad person with bad intentions, we don’t want you even if you’re really good at pretending. Self-assuredness will never change that. Get out of here.

To my fellow imposters: you do belong where you are.

Try failing over and over and over again

Do you know how skaters become really good at skateboarding? They fall and then they fall again and then they fall again and again until falling becomes like second nature to them. A good skater will become calloused to the bumps and scrapes they get; an even better skater will wear gear that doesn’t allow them to get hurt. The same is true for any dream you want to achieve. Again, no one is born being good at what they do. Sure, some people have a natural skill for music or art or business, but they still worked their ass off to become successful in that field. Similarly, someone could have a natural skill but never become successful with it because they are paralyzed by fear.

The real object of all our self-doubt is just that: fear. The fear of failure, of realizing something might not be for us, of thinking we’ll never become successful if we try. Fear is paralyzing. But it’s also very manageable. I used to be afraid of public speaking. My first year as a teacher, I would visibly shake and almost be brought to tears when I spoke in front of my groups of students. Now, four years of overcoming that fear on a daily basis, I can now speak in front of the entire student body, I can even speak in front of people I don’t know! Fear is nothing but the realization that we’re doing something new. Once you start to develop a healthy relationship with fear and realize that almost everything in life is unexplored territory, you will start to calm that fear each and every day.

Create a realistic vision board and post it everywhere

What is both incredibly scary and sort of beautiful is that we are constantly bombarded with images. Whether on a phone, a computer, a billboard, or the walls of our own home, we see images every single day. And whether or not we want to admit it, we are affected by those images. This is where the self-help girlies really get it right psychologically. When I was 25, I made a digital collage of images I saw on Pinterest. I printed it out and hung it in my bathroom and next to my bed, I made it my work computer background, and I made it my phone background. One quote said “talk to yourself like someone you love,” one said “yesterday was heavy, put it down,” and one was a picture of roses in Paris, among many, many more. What happened in the year following was amazing. I cut my negative self-talk out at the root; I took care of my skin, hair, teeth, and nails in an intentional way. In short, I reoriented my relationship with myself. Instead of constantly seeing things that made me feel bad about myself, I started interacting with self-help and discovery pages on social media. It really, really works.

Post a photo of you as a child on your bathroom mirror

I want you to think back and try to remember the way you answered the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” when you were a child. The way we responded to that question when we were little was the most authentic moment of our lives. As children, we don’t consider the countless factors (and fears) that we do as adults. I also want you to think about the moment you started talking about yourself negatively. When did you start doubting yourself and your dreams? Chances are it was actually someone else that got under your skin and implanted those seeds of self-doubt. I don’t know if it was your parents, a teacher, a friend, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you would never tell the version of yourself that is taped to your bathroom mirror that their dreams are out of their reach.

Tape that photo to your bathroom mirror and run any self-talk past it first. If you need a pep talk for a job interview, would you tell that child that they probably won’t get the job and shouldn’t even try? If you are deciding on a birthday outfit, would you tell that child that the natural shape of their body is wrong and they need to lose weight? If you are in an abusive relationship, would you tell that child that this is their only chance and no one could possibly ever love them? No. You would hold that child close and tell them that they can do anything they set their mind to, their body is perfect just the way it is and deserves to be celebrated, and they are deserving of the healthiest, most beautiful relationship this world has ever seen.

Do these five things and incorporate the positive self-talk that comes with them into your daily habits and you will start to overcome your self doubt one day at a time. I’m slowly overcoming my own by submitting this very article.

I love you. You should love you. You can do it. You got this.