How to CRUSH Self-Doubt | 5 Winning Techniques

Good morning, Believe Nation! Today we're going to talk about how you can crush your self-doubt. Rule number 2 is my personal favorite, and I'm curious if you agree which one you guys like the best.

We all doubt ourselves. I doubt myself every day.

I still do.

It's a work in progress, and I think that's the thing about it. It's not It's not as if you say, I'm happy and I got it, I got the keys to happiness. But I think there are certain things that you can do, which I try to point out what I do in the book, that are triggers. So when you realize that maybe I am doubting myself, that you can change your thought train of thought to get back on the positive side. And I think that's what it's all about. It's no secret formula in a lot of ways, but it's about recognizing when you're doing those things to yourself and how to correct them and get back in line.

First enemy we all have is doubt. You know, we doubt whether or not we're capable, we doubt whether or not we're worthy, we doubt whether or not we'll succeed, we doubt whether or not we even deserve it. And it's so unfortunate because I think doubt is one of the greatest enemies of our lives, and it's so easy to overcome But most people won't practice the discipline of overcoming it, which is weird, right? They say, "Oh, I'm so doubtful," and they stop. And it's like, if you have any negative recurring emotion in your life, doesn't maturity require you to face it and say, "Hey, how do I fix this?" You know? If you're always doubtful, you can't just wander around saying, "Oh, I'm so doubtful," like some kind of victim. That's not fair to the humanity you've been given, that real power of free will that says, "Hey, You can direct your consciousness. That's why you have this big prefrontal cortex. Other animals can't. We can. So handle it. If you've been plagued with doubt your whole life, then face it. Stop running from it. I know that sounds hard to say to people, but I was— I had the same story. I was so doubtful that people would want to care about what I say. I was so doubtful that people would want to read my books or listen to me at all. I was so doubtful that I could chase my own dreams, and I realized For what reason am I doubtful? Because of past failures in the space? No, I'm trying something new. Because people told me I might not be able to do it? So? What makes them an expert on my capabilities and my potentialities? I thought, well, why am I so doubtful? We're doubtful because the germ of fear spread in our body because somebody planted it there one time, or we cultivate it with our own thoughts. And at some point, maturity and consciousness says, if doubt has been plaguing you, let's have a look at it and let's realize, well, how do you banish it? Well, every single thing that we know from spirituality, from philosophy, from the great writers and the great texts of human culture has all revealed one thing: where there is doubt, grant me faith. That we have to have faith. And faith does not mean the absence of doubt. Matter of fact, the very definition of faith relies that doubt is still there, right? You can't have faith unless there's some part of you that says, "Well, I'm gonna go anyway despite the doubt." So I'm not saying we have to get rid of doubt forever and handle it. I'm saying doubt should never prevent you from advancing when you feel like advancing. That in your own mind, you must say, "Okay, I must trust in my abilities. I must trust that I will figure it out. I must trust that I can build it. I must trust that I can get some help and progress even though the doubt might be there. Look, the hero is a hero because the hero does it anyway, right? Even though the hero's terrified and risking it all, goes anyway. And we're all heroes in some way. We can all be courageous. But I also think, you know what, society overblows courage. Society says, you know, courage has to be some big magnificent act, but it's not. I mean, courage in this world anymore is just is having the belief in yourself and having the ability to genuinely express who you are. If you're doubting yourself, the only way through is to give yourself more faith and take more action. And with more faith and more action comes more competence. With more competence comes more confidence. In psychology, they call it the competence-confidence loop, right? The more you learn and try, the more you master and develop. So go out there, even with that— yes, let the doubt be there, but do it anyway.

Overcoming the negative conversation, that inner dialogue that's going on all the time, all the time, even when you don't want it to be there. You can't stop yourself right now from thinking. You can't do it. It's going on. And so learning how to empower yourself, part of doing that is standing up to yourself. You got to stand up inside yourself sometimes and say, shut up. You've got to do this. I was going to give a presentation, and this voice inside of me saying, you can't do this. You don't have everything it takes.

I shut up.

I am behind on my bills, and you're telling me what I can't do. I have got to do it. You'll get scared sometimes. Your mind will go blank on you. Some people you will allow to unnerve you, and you wonder, what's wrong with me? I'm not crazy. That's why you've got to learn to make a conscious, deliberate, determined effort to stand up inside yourself. Working on yourself, watching that inner dialogue, it will determine the quality of your life.

How do you handle self-doubt? How do you get rid of it? You don't get rid of self-doubt through the same means by which you you learned it, and that is in the head. Self-doubt is purely a head-created phenomenon. You were taught it and you do it to yourself. Your heart and your balls have a brilliance to them that allow them to do some magnificent shit without this guy getting in the way. And that's what it means when you get in your own way. That's what self-doubt is. The fastest Band-Aid ripped off remedy to fixing this terrible situation is to do the thing you're afraid to do. Do it. It's not about feeling confident about going into the situation. It's not about knowing that it's going to work out. It's not about having the most detailed plan for how this thing will happen. It's about doing it. Courage. You've got— courage is what you will experience and what you will grow when the doubt is there, but you do it anyway. So your problem isn't doubt, your problem is courage. Doubt is going to be there, but doubt gets out of the way when you express courage, right? Doubt is like— it's burned off by courage. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Do the thing and you will have the power." We're waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for the power. We're waiting not to self-doubt any longer, right? Whatever it is that you're deciding that you want to do with yourself that you're doubting your ability on, just do fuck it up completely. That's another thing that you've got to get through your mind, is that success is not doing the right thing, and it definitely isn't doing the right thing the first time. Success is having the courage to move in the direction of your dreams, move in a direction that your heart is taking you. That is what success is, as you are progressively realizing that thing. People think success is, "I've got a plan and I go and work out that plan." It never, ever, ever, ever, ever works that way. Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal, but progressive realization means that you're doing things that you don't know how to do. You're stepping out in faith. You're being courageous. Your self-doubt will step out of the way when you build the balls to do the thing. And the power will be added to you.

Fourth one is embodiment. So before I get into it, I gotta kind of tell you how it works. The subconscious and the conscious mind speak different languages. I alluded to this earlier. The conscious mind is verbal, right? We talk to our friends, our family, we can even talk to ourselves in a way that is— it's English in our head. But the way that we feel things, right? That you can talk to yourself all day, but it's very, very difficult to talk to yourself into feeling a certain way. What you need to do is have an experience, even if that experience is imagined. So the subconscious mind speaks in experiences while the conscious mind kind of speaks more in language that we use every single day. So in getting to how do we experience something, we want to embody the release of that self-doubt. So one of the most helpful ways that I've ever encountered, and I do all the time, is when I have a negative feeling, particularly self-doubt, I will freewrite. What that means is I'll pull up a Word document. You can go to 750pages.com.

Check it out.

There's another French one that is easy www.threepages.fr, and it gives you a thing, 750 words is about 3 pages, and it's enough time to just type, right? And it'll count your words for you. Type everything that's bothering you out. I feel this way because this said that, and now I'm going back and forth in my head. Dump it all. Actually feel it being poured onto the page. If you want to free-write it, some people enjoy this better with hand, that can give you that feeling of just catharsis, of getting it out. And this is important. This is not just a metaphor, because once you've gotten it out onto that page, into that website, you shut down the browser, close the computer, turn it off, and there's this feeling of closure. If you have a Word document, you drag it to the trash, you empty the trash, and it's gone. If there's a piece of paper, you light it on fire. And it's so weird because why would this help you? But the subconscious mind speaks in experience, and what that experience was, I dumped all my feelings here and then I lit it on fire and it's gone. It is incredible how effective that is. If you want to put it on steroids, Again, you can kind of trick your subconscious mind. If there's someone that's bothering you, what you can do is after you've done everything, you've, like, gotten it all out there, you go back and you write a letter to yourself from that person apologizing for whatever they did or explaining why they did what they did. Clearly, it's your own voice. Clearly, this isn't coming from them, but guess what? Your subconscious does not care, and that feeling of closure is palpable, so now you know that you should feel good. And you actually feel good. And again, you light that on fire and it's gone. It feels so much better. That is embodiment. There's tons of different ways, but that is the simplest and most effective that I have found to clear out self-doubt. So if there's something you got right now, start here. If it's recurring in your life, write it out, delete it, burn it, get rid of it, but make sure first you have that feeling of pouring it outside of yourself so it doesn't feel stuck.

I was playing a game against the 49ers. It was a Monday night game, and I had 2 sacks that game, and I had 10 sacks on the year, which is great by football terms. And I was on my way going to another Pro Bowl, which means I was one of the best in the NFL, but I felt horrible. I felt like I was one of the worst players. Didn't feel good about myself. And I went to somebody in Arizona who, you know, just reinforced that you have to speak kindly to yourself. You have to talk nicely to yourself, treat yourself, and say to yourself what you would say to somebody else to encourage them. And that's what I started to do. And the next week had a big game against the Cardinals, and it was, in my opinion, in 15 years in the NFL, the best and greatest football game I've ever played. And I think it was, it was because I truly told myself, you can do this. You know how to play this game. You belong in this game. And I've had to use that to do Live. I had to use it to do Fox because I wasn't so sure I could be a sports commentator, which a lot of people think is natural for an athlete to be able to do, but it's not. And then to come to morning television, I've had to tell myself that. To do GMA, I've had to tell myself that because I'm as scared and as fearful as anybody else to tackle something new. But I've learned that sometimes I gotta get over the fear of not doing it because I'm scared instead of not doing it because I can't do it. And I found that I was more just worried about being scared and what the repercussions were, actually more than really feeling like I couldn't do something. And now, by taking these chances, I feel like I can do anything. I think once you get to the point of where you don't really care about anyone else's opinion, and you really truly trust in yourself and you're willing to put yourself in an uncomfortable position, you'll find that you'll get comfortable real quick and you can do things that you never in a million years thought that you'd be able to accomplish. And I'm a true believer that it's all what you think of, of it. It's all what you think of yourself. It's all what you apply to it. It's all about the work that you put into it. And if you put all those things and you apply and you really are interested in something, then you can do it. I have no doubt in anybody. Everything is possible.

So I have two quick thoughts on this as well that I wanted to add in. For me, the first step in destroying self-doubt is understanding what you stand for. It's figuring out your one word, right? That's why I wrote a book on it. When you can understand what it is that you stand for, when you understand what you believe in, then it's so much harder for someone to squash you down. Where a lot of people are just living a reactionary life. Where when you understand that thing that really means the world to you— so for me it's about belief— you can't crush me anymore because I know my path. I have certainty. When you have certainty, you don't have the self-doubt. You don't worry when other people criticize you because you know the path that you're on. And so I highly encourage all of you to figure out what it is that you stand for, to create that certainty within yourself so that other people's opinions don't impact you, so that your own negative talk doesn't impact you. It goes away because you know the path that you're on. The second part that I'd add is also expect to suck at the start. A lot of times when you're starting something, you know what looks good and you want to be that good, but you can't be that good yet at the start because you're first starting out. You might be starting on YouTube and you look at somebody's videos, you might be looking at my videos, say, I want to be like Evan Carmichael. Okay, that's a good goal. In your first video, it's gonna suck. You know, if I want to be like Les Paul, Brown, great, the first time I get on stage, I'm gonna suck. Just expect to suck no matter how much preparation, hard work, and energy and effort you put into it. You're gonna suck the first time you do anything, and that's okay. And then next thing you do it again, you get better. Like anything else, any skill that you've learned, from the English language or whatever language you speak, to whatever music instrument you might play, to whatever sport you've picked up, the first time you tried it, you sucked. That's what always happens. And then with persistence and follow-through you get better. Where, because a lot of people know what's good and then they try it and they realize that they're not as good as they thought they might be, then that self-doubt creeps in. Like, oh, maybe I can't do it. Maybe I can't— like, it looks so easy to do a YouTube video, and then I did my own and it was so bad. Maybe I won't be able to go out and do that. Expect to suck at the start. It really releases a lot of the self-criticism, a lot of the self-doubt, because you expect it going in, and all you're doing is daily trying to get better and better and better than what you were yesterday. So those are my quick thoughts. I'd love to know what do you guys think? What did you learn from this video that you can apply in your life for your business? How do you overcome and crush self-doubt? Leave it in the comments below. I'm gonna join in the discussion. I also made this video because Tolu Zaman asked me to, so if there's a topic you'd like me to cover in the next edition of Believe Life, leave it down in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing amazing day. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.