Life has been pottering along quite nicely the last few months. I’ve been feeling confident, inspired and motivated and opportunities have come my way. I have been feeling positive about the future I want to create for myself and my ability to make it happen. Then last week happened. There was no concrete reason why it should have appeared. No warning signs. I guess I could blame the new moon but as much as I like reading that stuff, I don’t lend too much weight to it. But I woke up last Monday and there it was, looming large and threatening me. Self -doubt. Ah, my old enemy, my nemesis – why have you suddenly reappeared?
It actually took me a couple of days to realise that the feeling of foreboding, of ‘stuckness’, the inability to see ahead where previously I’d been brimming with ideas, was a direct result of self -doubt reappearing. And along with it came some other old enemies – self- defeating prophecies and self-sabotaging tactics. It wasn’t all that long ago that I would have just carried on my merry way and continued down the path of Going Nowhere Fast. Thanks to some amazing teachers and a bucket load of self- study, I managed to catch myself in time. But it did make me ponder – where on earth did it suddenly come from and why?
I had a think back to the weekend (which had been a lot of fun), where my mind had been quite busy thinking and creating and finding solutions. Then I remembered how I’d felt Monday morning. Flat (quite normal: not a huge fan of the hamster wheel), uninspired and……fearful. Fearful that every Monday morning for the rest of my life would be the same. Fearful that my plans for next year and the future were just a fantasy and that there was no way I could ever make it work. I was destined for failure, because after all, who I was I to think that I could live the life I dreamed of?
Then along with this defeatist attitude came some old mindsets. I started to find imaginary cracks in my amazing relationship. I began to cast my fears and doubts upon him. All the work I had done on forging my own path started to unravel, and this whingey internal voice started to play out in my head. Luckily, It was enough for me to pull myself up and see that I was beginning to create exactly what I didn’t want. That if I stuck with this lack of faith in life and myself that I would end up fulfilling my self-defeating prophecy.
And the only way to get back to balance and back to inner confidence was to face those fears. To have a good hard look at them and understand them for what they were – understandable but not facts and not inevitable. Indeed, what they needed was a good kick in the butt and some hard work to make sure failure was less likely to happen. And that I think is the trick. When self-doubt raises its (extremely) ugly head, have a look at what you can do to ensure those doubts don’t become truths. Forge ahead with well thought out plans and lay the foundation for success. Work hard to ensure that success is inevitable and listen to your intuition, to your gut. Listen and believe in yourself. Don’t look at what others are doing, and don’t let others negativity or inability to see your truth cast doubt on your dreams. If you want it badly enough, you can be sure that there will be a lot of hard work, some obstacles and at times some reassessing. But I know for myself, that one of the biggest determinates of my success will be my faith in myself. So self doubt – bugger off!