How to Stop Second Guessing Yourself

Hey there, it's me, and I'm in a different spot right now. Got some coffee. It's late at night. Um, before you watch this video today, which is about second-guessing yourself and how to stop doing that, there's something I want to share with you. This is episode 400.

I've been podcasting now for—

goodness, this will be year 9, 8, 9, 8. Long time.

That's what that means.

But I wanted to share this with you. There is a lot that goes into getting the podcast into the world. I am live every Monday with the Inner Circle, and we take a portion of that video and button it up here and share it with you every week. I also record a podcast with guests, and we release that audio only. Two podcasts a week. I love it. It's fun. I enjoy it. That said, It is a lot to— not just for me, but the other people on the team—

to make the videos, to cut the audios, to make the social media clips, to write the show notes.

And all of those things I read, review, and approve. So I want something to happen between episode 400 and 500, and I'm not so sure that it will if I keep doing the things that I'm doing. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to keep going live in the Inner Circle because, you know, that's what I do.

And every blue moon, if there's something I really need to say out in the world, I will.

However, we're going to cut our production in half. The interviews will continue. They will be on audio and usually on video, but I solo will not be because I'm going to take some time. And instead of editing podcast show notes and reviewing videos and social media and approving graphics I'm gonna finish this book between episode 400 and 500. My hope is that I'm able to use some of the time I would have spent editing and approving and instead get something written. And before episode 500 comes out, the hope is that the book will be out before that, or at least Sometime close. So episode 400 marks me pulling back a little bit and this season being a little weird and doing whatever it takes to make sure I make room for the thing that I need to make room for. So enjoy this episode and stop second-guessing yourself. Sometimes the decisions that you need to make, you don't have all the answers, you don't know exactly how it's going to go. But you just know in your knower that you need to do the thing. And this is me doing the thing too. All right, y'all. Enjoy.

Hello, my name is Chrystal Evans Hurst. And if you are joining me for the first time, do not expect me to look this way the next time you see me. The lashes are left over from yesterday, as are the clothes and the hair. It was tied down two nights ago. But I'm glad you could join me on today. If this is your first time, I'm glad you're here. I'm here usually, I try to be here, releasing videos every Sunday night, podcasts every Sunday night, every week. If it ain't Sunday night, it's Monday, because I do my best, y'all. But I'm releasing content because I believe that my job in this world is to provide practical wisdom to women of faith, women who believe in God but may not always feel that they're on the right side of God, but still want to know how to do things well. Because I believe you need to be intentional about living your life well. And I do that by sharing what I'm learning. And usually while I'm in the heat of learning it, because my gift in the world— and sometimes I don't like the gift that I have in this world— but it is authenticity, transparency, honesty, and let me tell you how to do it. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. And that's what I do here every week. If you are here on accident and you're watching on Facebook, or maybe you're watching on YouTube, Make sure you do whatever you have to do to be notified. Y'all know how to do it. Like, follow, subscribe, and press the notify me bell. All of the kids tell you how to do this all the time on YouTube, so I don't need to tell you to. You know, it is what it is. Even my 14-year-old can do it. Like, follow, subscribe, guys.

That whole thing.

I'm glad you're here, and I want you to know that you are getting this content by way of a group of women who believes not only in the content that I share, and they are in a group to get more content from me behind the scenes, deeper dives, courses, community journeys, but they are the reason why we're able to produce all of the things and share them. Because as my daddy pastor says, salvation is free, but ministry and even faith-based business It all costs money. So I want to give a thank you and a shout out to those women who are in this inner circle who make sure that we can afford to keep all these things going. So I want to talk to you today about how you can stop second-guessing yourself. Right this very second, right this very moment, right here, right now, today, on today, I'm in the middle of a major second-guessing situation, because this is how we do it. We go through it and we talk about it. One of the best reasons actually to journal is because you catch the mud while the mud is being slung around. Somehow after you clean it up, you remember the mudsling, but you don't remember the details. And so me sharing a little bit of the mudslinging is because I want to talk to you about it while I'm, while I'm in the middle of it and while I can remember the details. It's been a cray-cray week, y'all. I have had things shut down on social media. I have had people get sick. I have had birthdays happen. I have been running around without internet. I have been functioning on no sleep. It's been one of those weeks when if it can happen or go wrong, it will. And then there are all of these things that I'm supposed to be moving forward and doing, and between the life I'm living and between the list I have in front of me. I'm holding the two in balance and going, am I supposed to do this? Are these blocks or are these like interruptions? Like, how am I supposed to know the difference? Am I supposed to be pressing through or am I supposed to be bailing out? Like, which one is it? And I want you to know that whether you're making a decision or making a move, uh, whether you are trying to move forward in your life and do new things, or whether you're simply just trying to keep the wheel of progress going in your life in a very basic way. We all have moments where we have to make the decision of who we are, who we want to be, what we're going to do in our lives. And that will involve decision-making. And often, for many of us, that will involve second-guessing the decisions we make because we want to make the right ones. We don't want to experience regret, or maybe we've had the experience of regret and no, we don't like it. And so in the effort to make the right decision, whether that's who we marry, where we go to school, which car to buy, which house to buy, whether we're gonna, um, have this friend or that friend, choose this church or that church, have this ministry or that ministry, get this dress or that dress, we will have moments where, because we want to live life well, and that involves making decisions, we will have to decide And sometimes that leaves us wondering, did we make the right decision? Sometimes those decisions are big. Sometimes those decisions are small. But if you're human, you've at one point or two second-guessed yourself. And if you find yourself fitting that category today, well, you're in good company. There are some things that you need to understand. Let me describe and define second-guessing yourself. I want to define it as a tendency to doubt your decision. And by a tendency to doubt your decision. I want to add the word a lot to that, because if you find that you're regularly second-guessing yourself, you're a second-guesser. Just go ahead and adopt that. I'm a second-guesser. I am a second-guesser, but that's because I like to do things right. You know you're a second-guesser if you often ask yourself, I think I want to do this, but but what if, what if I don't do that? Or what if I do this and this happens? You are looking at the decision, but all of the derivatives of the decision and trying to isolate and identify what the implications and the dominoes of the decision that you make will be. And so it makes you struggle to make the one decision because you are struggling with all of the implications of that decision. You know you're a second guesser if you frequently suffer from anxiety because you are ruminating, usually over an unproductive thought, about the decision you need to make. The fear of what happens, the insecurity of what happens if you make a certain decision. And second-guessing results from you having an emotional connection and a negative emotional response to the outcome of the decisions you make. It's more than asking yourself, what if? It is calling your emotional makeup into the mix in a negative way because you are concerning yourself with all of the other possibilities related to the decision you make. It is tied to a lack of confidence that you don't trust yourself to make the right decision. And maybe you have a history of not making good decisions. And so you want to make a decision, you need to make a decision, but you don't trust yourself because you don't have confidence in your ability to make the right decision. Or you're simply indecisive. That's me. I make a decision today and then I wake up tomorrow and I make another one. No matter what, these are things, these things that I'm mentioning are unproductive and not good for you. You will not live your life well if you are constantly, constantly without end asking yourself what if, constantly feeling anxiety about the decisions you need to make, constantly feeling insecure or with low confidence. That you cannot even trust yourself to make a decision and constantly not able to make the decision to cross the road. I talk in my book, She's Still There, about the squirrel. We all know, we've probably all seen him, who could not decide if he was going back or going forward. And because he danced about in the middle of the street, he is no more. Indecisiveness gets you nowhere. So does a lack of confidence. So does anxiety and insecurity that leaves you prone to not going anywhere. The problem with second-guessing yourself is you are a victim of black and white thinking, and that says that if I make this decision or that decision, that this one decision— lights on, lights off, yes or no, black or white, in or out— will be unrecoverable. It will leave me in a state where I can't fix it, where I won't be able to move forward, that this is the last decision I'll be able to make. And of course, there are decisions that are bigger than other decisions, but most of the time, y'all, things aren't black and white. You can make a decision today and tomorrow change your mind. And I realize you don't want to marry the wrong person and change your mind and get a divorce, but if you make a mistake and you learn the hard way you made a mistake You can get out. We don't want to. And that's why I say some decisions have higher consequences than others. But most decisions, there is a backdoor. And most decisions aren't as big. We don't make those big decisions every day. But if you're indecisive every day, you will live in a state of anxiety because you can't land the plane. Don't ask me how I know. It costs you time because you will make a decision and then spend time rethinking the decision. Which is like treading water and going backwards. It is making a decision to move forward and then going backwards because you are not sure you made the right one. It will result in an unnecessary amount of fear in your life, fear of making a commitment even after you say you've made a decision because you're now afraid of the outcome. Why do you second guess? Well, there are a lot of reasons why you could second guess. Maybe you grew up with critical parents, or maybe you have judgment from other people in your life that have made you feel as though the decisions that you've made aren't right. Maybe the people in your life haven't been supportive, but instead have been critical of those decisions. Your friends, your family. Maybe you have made bad decisions in the past. You've made horrible mistakes. And now you don't trust yourself based on past decisions. You have past regrets. Listen, I have made decisions in my life that leave me prone to being a packrat. Um, I have double and triple and quadruple copies of my photos everywhere. And the reason for that is because in 2007, I had a computer and some of my most precious memories on that new computer got lost. Lost, totally lost. I had the drive sitting on my kitchen table, my external drive to back them up, and I had not gotten to it yet. And it had been sitting, sitting there reminding me to back up my photos, and I didn't. And as a result, 6 months of photos got lost. But those 6 months were a trip to see my grandparents. Then it was a trip for my children, 3 of them at the time, to meet my great-grandparents. And I lost those photos forever. Some of those memories were very, very unique and I lost them. So now what do I do? Double, triple, quadruple. And when it comes time to delete a photo, y'all, I second guess. Do I have this photo? Am I sure I have this photo? I'm not sure, so I'm going to leave this right here. In the 6th grade, I had a box full of letters, letters from a cousin, letters from some friends, letters from my grandmother. And I was cleaning out my closet and decided to be a minimalist and got rid of most of those letters because at that time they didn't hold value. They were just taking up space in my closet. And to this day, I keep way too many cards and way too many letters because I now regret tossing some of those letters away that my grandmother wrote me when I was in the 4th and 5th grade. So now, because I feel like I don't really know until I have hindsight 20/20, I toss nothing. I won't know until I'm 10 years down the road if this matters to me or not. So I get it, the second-guessing and why we hesitate. If you've made bad decisions with men, you don't want to trust your decision about this one. I understand. Buyer's remorse— regrets can come when you bought a new house and now you're like, you're in over your head. Or you bought the car and as soon as you drive it off the lot, you feel regret. Or you have a job and you thought it was great because you needed to leave that old job, and 3 weeks in, you're like, oh my goodness, was this the right decision for me? Or the honeymoon wears off and now you see that man in all of his glory and you wonder, was I better off by myself? Can we just keep it real, real quick? So let me give you some quick solutions to second-guessing yourself, okay? The first thing is you need to give yourself grace. And I say this because You will make bad decisions even after you have gotten all the information. You've gotten the premarital counselor, you've taken the personality test, you've gone through the 4 interviews, you've met all the people on the team, you have looked at the house, you had the inspector, and then you had the other inspector come in. You have moved forward with the new church after visiting for 3 years. All of the things that you think would help you to make a good decision, right?. And then you will have moments even after doing all of your due diligence, will you ask yourself, did I make the right decision? That will happen. So you need to release this idea that in black and white land, if you do all of your due diligence, bad decisions won't be made. But here's what gives yourself the grace to release yourself to that thinking. Even when you fail, you learn. Even when you make a bad decision, you grow because you get to know how to live life better. And you also get to know you. Sometimes you make a decision and you knew you weren't supposed to do it, and then that's how you learn to hear your inner voice. That's what it felt like for my soul to tell me I shouldn't have done it. Now I know how to hear my soul, I know how to hear my spirit. But you don't learn if you don't move forward and make a decision. So you have to agree to let that go at the onset. You have to agree that there are going to be some bad ones in here. When you take the test, the SAT, they tell you if you don't know the answer, just leave it alone. But most of these, they say go with your first inkling, right? And you learn. Even when I'm doing testing and we do SAT testing here with the kids, I have this whole little program that we use. I'll say, go with your first inkling. If you don't, if you know you don't know it, then leave it. But if you kind of have a thought and an idea, go ahead and choose it because you're gonna go back and you're gonna review your answers and you're gonna learn from your mistakes. That's what helps you to grow in taking the test. You see what your tendencies are. You see what the tendencies of the test are, and you learn how to play the game. Do you know how you finish a puzzle? You finish a puzzle by trying pieces. You do your best to look at all the pieces that are spread around, to look at the pieces that are already connected, and you find a piece that looks like it could fit. And by all intents and purposes, you don't pick up a piece that you think could not fit. You pick up the pieces that you think could fit, but you know how you know for sure whether or not it does? You try it out and you give yourself grace if it doesn't fit to try again. That is the premise. You gotta give yourself grace. And when you make bad decisions, you let it go and you learn how to recover. Because the biggest gift that you would give yourself in this life is resiliency. That when you get it wrong, you bounce back. So here's how to stop it. You ready to hear it? Here we go. When you notice yourself squirreling, going back and forth in the middle of the street, when you notice yourself making a decision and then feeling the anxiety and then not making the decision and then feeling like, I gotta make a decision, when you feel yourself, when you notice yourself talking to a million people about the same thing and not coming to a conclusion because really there is no conclusion, You just have to decide, stop, stop. And you give people in your life permission to tell you to stop. You just have to notice it and you have to say, stop, stop. Pick one. You have to notice it and interrupt it. Interrupt yourself overthinking. Number 2, You need to commit to your decision and accept the decision as final. Like, you need to say, this is the final decision, and decide to live with it, to choose to live with the outcome, and then to release the outcome because you don't control anything anyway. If you make mistakes, you move on because you will have mistakes. That's the gift of acceptance. Other decisions may have been better. That's the gift of learning. None of us will make right decisions all the time. That's the gift of giving yourself grace. You need to settle into the reality through acceptance that the decisions, once you make them, they're in the past. You can learn from them and pivot in the future, but that decision is in the past. And remember that any negative experience contributes to your learning and your growth. You interrupt the thinking and then you accept your decision. You settle in. Okay, then all those thoughts that were squirreling around in your mind, let me tell you what you do with them. You redirect them, and you constantly ask yourself, if it was the right decision, what did I learn? How did I come to that decision? How did I know deep down in my knower that that was the right decision? How did I arrive to it? Who did I talk to? Who was helpful? Did I do a pros and cons list? Did I journal? How long did I pray about that? How did I know that God said go? You notice, you redirect the energy Immediately interrupt the thinking, accept the outcome, and then redirect those thoughts to learning from your decision-making process. And you wanna know what you do after that? You do something else. You pick up a book and you read, you go walk, you work a puzzle, you go to breakfast with your friends for Sunday brunch. You fill your time with something else to give your brain something to do. Because if you have a habit, of not being able to land the plane and make decisions. Then when you make a decision, you have the habit of second-guessing yourself. Give your brain something else to do. And that could be redirection, noticing your thoughts, but it also could be go for a walk, like do something else. Interrupt, accept, redirect, and practice.

Practice.

Here's what practice looks like. When you are trying to figure out what job to take, you go on interviews. A lot of y'all know about that. You may not even be trying to leave your job, but you'll go out there on Indeed or Monster Jobs or ZipRecruiter, and you'll put out your resume because you're touching base. How much could I make with this resume? Who would give me an interview? What are people looking for? And you just try stuff, right? You are always in the mode of learning. You want to know how you learn about what you like and you don't like about men? Or women, for those men who are here watching, go on dates, get to know people, group activities, get to know a person, have friends, just gather information. Knock on the door. You try new opportunities, you do new things, you learn what you like and you don't like. You practice learning and you practice failure. Practice going on the dates to get used to he's not the one. Practice going on the interviews to get used to applying for jobs that you shouldn't get, to get used to hearing the no. Practice on getting it wrong so you'll know for sure when you wanna go after the thing that's right. Develop some tough skin. Everybody ain't yo boo. Every job isn't your job. Every house isn't your house. Every church isn't your church. Every venture isn't your venture, but you try things and you learn. Instead of worrying that you're making the wrong decision, Try things that actually don't involve a needed decision so you learn how you make decisions and learn more about you, God's voice in you, and the knower he gave you. So when you find yourself second-guessing, you need to start from the platform: I'm going to give myself grace, and if I get it wrong, I'm going to let it go because I'm going to learn how to be resilient. And then in the middle of the decision-making, you interrupt yourself when you see yourself squirreling. You accept: I gotta make a decision, but There's a deadline, I'm gonna decide, and then I'm gonna learn from it. You redirect your thoughts when you move forward for that decision and find yourself, instead of re-guessing the decision, deciding to learn. What did I learn from how I made this decision? So I can be prepared for next time. And practice, practice, practice making decisions and practice running into failure because that's how you learn. These are the things that will be wonderful when you get better at decision-making, okay? There is no greater gift in life that you can give to yourself apart from trusting God in you than trusting the you in you, that you know yourself and you know when your yes is yes and when your no is no. Because over time, you will realize that even when you made bad decisions, you were learning you. You got clarity on who you are, what you want, that those decisions that were poor, they did not— some of them can, but most of them did not destroy your whole life. But what they gave you clarity to you about your life, and you know what you're going to do and what you're not going to do. It helps you to get clarity, have the light go on about you. It raises your self-esteem. I can make bad decisions and bounce back. It raises your self-awareness. I know that job, that man, that house, that venture, that situation is for me, is not for me. It helps you to go through life knowing who you are, and that is such a great gift to know this, because doubt is often core. It's corely rooted in self-esteem. And if you have low self-esteem, it's because you doubt that you got what it takes to do whatever it is that you have low self-esteem about. Until you start rising up to you and greeting you in the light of day, you have to tell yourself positive stories, and decisions is how you get that. You learn from the negative stories, but you tell yourself the positive stories and that builds you. You tell yourself about the times that you did rise above adversity because of the decisions that you made. You tell yourself about how you rebounded from bad decisions in your life. You tell yourself about how you have handled the consequences of the bad decisions in your life that you thought you were gonna fold, but you didn't. You tell yourself that you are right now watching this video, learning about not second-guessing yourself. You tell yourself about what you're good at, what you learn, how you rose above it and what you now can do as a result of that. You celebrate you and you talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend. Girl, you made that bad decision, but listen, you bounced back from that. It took you 20 years to get that degree because you fell into this, that, or the other, but honey, you did that thing. Yes, you did. Amen. Watch your negative self-talk, because if you keep talking to yourself negatively, you will never stop second-guessing yourself. Because you will always be questioning. And why wouldn't you be? You don't trust the person in you. So you build resilience by learning to trust yourself, raising your self-esteem, talking to yourself the way you would talk to a friend. And when you meet the decisions and you're second-guessing yourself and squirreling in the yard, you interrupt, you accept, you redirect, and you practice. Stop second-guessing yourself. Life is too short to be going round and round in circles, and you certainly don't want to be caught in the street because life is going to keep coming and you just need to pick a sidewalk and keep moving. Listen, I hope this has been helpful to you. If it has, leave me a comment. Tell me where you are currently struggling to make a decision in your life, and if you know what the decision is Go on and stake your claim today. Put it in writing. That'll firm it up for you. And if this video has been helpful, y'all know what to do. Share it with a friend.