How to Reduce Self Doubt

When you're not confident, you can find yourself agreeing to things you never dreamt you would, or to avoid and pass up opportunities that you previously believed would be a dream come true.

Self doubt reflects an inner belief that you are not worthy or good enough at something. On a conscious level you are likely to believe you are worthy, however, self doubt is more subconscious - coming to the surface when you are under stress. For instance, due to social comparison many mothers doubt their skills as a mother whenever they (or their children) are not acting as perfectly as they believe they should be. As a parent, you do your best to provide love, support, understanding, security and fun. However, the stressors of life often get in the way of making this possible. As a result, every time you have to do something that takes you away from your picture of how the perfect mother should behave, you are likely to beat yourself up over it and further feed the self doubt.

In order to reduce self doubt you need to change your internal beliefs. This means ingraining in your mind that you are good enough, you are trying your best and you deserve good things in your life. These beliefs need some effort to ingrain because you are often fighting against years of self doubt and strongly held negative self beliefs. Whilst these beliefs tend to hold you back, they do so in order to protect you from getting hurt. Thus, a life coach who uses techniques such as NLP or hypnotherapy can really help to clear out these old beliefs (on a subconscious level) and instill more positive - useful beliefs in their place.

Almost everyone experiences self doubt in one area of their life from time to time. It's the product of upbringing and ongoing reinforcement. Therefore, it's a learned behavioral response, which can be re-trained. Having a high self belief is the cornerstone of life success, so reducing self doubt is critical to overall happiness in life. It is an issue that many people struggle with and can cause a great deal of frustration.

Often you'll find yourself working so hard to achieve a desired goal, only to self sabotage your success. When self doubt kicks in you'll convince yourself you're not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, rich enough, or even lucky enough - whenever you're faced with a roadblock. You will also tend to interpret roadblocks as a reflection of your poor self worth, rather than life's inevitable challenges you must face in order to grow as a human being.

Each new day gives you an opportunity to start again and build on your self worth. Every step you take towards self worth, reduces your self doubt and brings you closer to happiness and success.

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