The Tragedy of Self-Doubt

Hey friends and welcome back to the 10 Minute Mind Shift Podcast. 

You can listen on Apple Podcasts or read on…

We are just going to jump right in for the 10 Minute Mind Shift. 

This is episode #15 The Tragedy of Self-doubt.

We need to look for the little nooks and cranny’s in which self-doubt resides and blow it out of existence and here is why…

Self-doubt has you:

• It has you ruminating in indecision and confusion.  You doubt you can make the right decision.
• It has you quitting ahead of time because you doubt your ability to create the outcome.
• It has you showing up small and not taking advantage of opportunities and not even getting into the arena.
• It has you so afraid of failure that you forget you must be willing to fail in order to succeed.
• It has you stuck in a job you hate and under earning because you don’t think you have the ability to offer more value.
• It has you stuck in a crappy marriage for fear of being alone, being on your own, or being the one to make the first move to save the marriage.
• It has you stuck in pride for fear of being vulnerable.
• It has you tolerating and unavailable for self-care, and self-love.
• It has you sitting in impossibility, so you are reluctant to even dream let alone set a goal worth working for.
• It has you stuck in friendships that do not nurture or enrich you for fear of leaving the old Tuesday night nacho fest crowd behind.
• It has you sitting in resentment of people pleasing because of your fear of saying no.
• It has you loathing your body vs demanding the self-care and self-love of nourishing your body.
• It has you buffering in mindlessness.

Self-doubt is debilitating and tragic. 

Today…

I am going to give you 6 steps to blowing your own mind and obliterating the indulgent emotion of self-doubt.

Humans have more than 50,000 thoughts a day.  Not all of them are affecting us, most of them are helping get through our day on auto pilot.

It’s how we get through most of the day.  We are able to get up, make the coffee, brush the teeth without a single conscious thought about any of it.

And then, there are those thoughts running in the background, the subconscious thoughts that we think that wreak havoc on our daily live and our goals, hopes and dreams, and we don’t even realize it. 

The mind shift that I want to give you today is in terms of creating the exact outcome that you want by managing your thoughts and deciding the exact emotion that will fuel your actions so that you CAN create the outcome of your heart’s desire.

I want to shift you into the gear of causing the effect in your life instead of living at the cause and effect of your life.

I have always read self-help books and I have spent years trying to apply their teachings to my life.  Sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t and here is why. 

Even though I thought I was giving it good try, everything I was doing had to do with the action I was taking.  I didn’t understand the power of the thoughts and emotions that were the fuel for my actions.

And, here is the biggy, I was doing it all from a place of not believing that I had the ability to affect the change in my life.

Like an app running in the back of my mind, I always had the thought, “this stuff works for other people, but not for me.”

In the back of my mind, I was playing the reel of self-doubt and for sure self-pity.  I would feel so sorry for myself when I couldn’t create the outcome I was looking for,

Then I would throw my hands up and tell myself…see, “I was right after all.”  “Who are you to think your life could be different by managing your thoughts?  That kind of thing is for the self-help guru who wrote the book, but it’s not for people like you!”

The piece that was always missing was believing in my ability that I could create the outcome my heart desired.

Without the belief, I wasn’t creating the fuel that I needed in order to take productive, creative, thoughtful action. 

I was being fueled by self-doubt and self-pity.  Two very easily accessible indulgent emotions that I talked about in episode 10. 

They are easy to access but useless!

How this affected my life.

For years, maybe for as long as I can remember even having my first thought, I have lived with all kinds of food chatter.  Even as a kid, I had constant thoughts of food.  Then, as I matured it turned into body image chatter.  It felt like 90% of my time either thinking about food or cellulite.

I would compare how I looked to people who weren’t even real.  The very magazines that I bought to help me get rid of that cellulite had pictures of women who had their cellulite air brushed out. 

Huh?

I would wonder if other people moved through their life without thinking about food and cellulite and I admired people who seemed to do just that.  I had no idea that they probably had the very same chatter.

I worked on it, I really did, bur as long as I had the goal of having a better relationship with food, but I was full of self-pity and self-doubt, I was destined to carry that chatter box in my head every day of my life.

Here is a very recent story of how self-doubt almost cost me my dream of earning my bronze medal.

When I bought my horse Dutch, I knew he had zero travel experience and although I got him in the trailer to come home, it was clear, he was not trailer trained.  He was a fire breathing dragon during the entire trip home and the next time I asked him to load it was full of drama.

He literally flipped himself backwards and then wouldn’t even go near it.  He’s 17 hands tall which is quite large but when he caught on that we work walking toward the trailer he would blow himself up even bigger.  He would shake and then flip…it was awful.

I have trained several horses to trailer so I thought I had the confidence to train Dutch. 

I started from scratch, did all the things I had done before and still, no result.  Several weeks later, I was really getting disappointed and frustrated.  If you have been following me, you know I have a goal of earning my bronze medal in dressage and it felt like that dream was slipping away.

One of my barn friends mentioned that she knew of someone that offered trailer training and her ad said she could get the job done in an hour…guaranteed.  I was all over that!

If I couldn’t do it…I would outsource it!

She came the following Sunday and three hours later she gave up.  Then she said she had a sure-fire way of getting him in the trailer, you know, in the event that I got stuck somewhere and he refused.  I am like, we are there already, what’s the secret? So, I am like, heck ya, I need to know.

An hour later, she said…I don’t know what you are going to do.  Of course, I had to ask this question to just seal my evidence of tight.  Have you ever had a horse not trailer for you, she said, I have now? 

I mean people…are you feeling my pain right now?

I went home and cried.  I am not even kidding.  I am sure the medals are not coming to us and it sure doesn’t seem like we are going to them either.  Dreams dashed.

The next day, as I am doing my thought downloads, not even really thinking about anything in particular, these thoughts just flowed out, and this is the beauty of doing a thought download.  You don’t even know half the stuff you are thinking. 

Here were the thoughts and how each thought made me feel…

• he’s never going to do this – Impossible
• this is really messing up my goals – Inconvenienced
• the medals aren’t coming to us., we have to go get them – Graspy
• I’ve lost my trailer training mojo – Self-Doubt
• this is taking too long – Entitled
• it shouldn’t be this hard – frustrated
• he’s just being difficult – discouraged
• I am not equipped to train a warmblood after all, I should have known – imposter
• Maybe I never knew what I was doing to begin with, I must have gotten lucky – fraudster

Now, as a reminder…thoughts create feelings and feelings fuel action.  I was being fueled by frustration, needy and graspy energy, desperate, entitled and inconvenienced energy…so you can image how inspiring, thoughtful, creative and productive my actions were.

I was being fueled by all of the wrong emotions that I needed in order to ask a 1500-pound animal to jump into a box.

So, think about that thing that you are trying to create…a happy healthy marriage, a promotion at work, a calm and peaceful household, a number on the scale or in your bank account.  Now think about the thoughts and feelings that are fueling your action.

What kind action are you taking? 

Is it desperate action, frantic action, panicky action or inspired, thoughtful massive action.

We have to stop and evaluate our thought models when we aren’t getting the results we want to create.

So here is what happened next…

I decided how I needed to feel in order inspire Dutch to respond to my request. 

I needed to believe that is could be done and that I could do it. I needed to get out of the panic, needy and graspy energy so I went to work creating new thoughts. 

Thoughts that would support the outcome that I wanted to create. 

How did I do that? 

I relaxed into them, I allowed them.  I decided how I wanted to feel and how I wanted to experience this relationship with my horse, this journey to the bronze medal.

I chose these emotions. 

Patience, compassion, calm, encouraged, proud, honored, accomplished, understanding, prepared.

Now, knowing how I wanted to experience Dutch and out journey, here are a few thoughts that I came up with.

• This will happen right on time
• We have all year if that is what it takes
• I am capable of training Dutch
• Dutch is capable of learning
• Dutch is just being a horse and doing what horses do, nothing has gone wrong
• I have always known how to do this
• This is not as hard as I am making it
• I am totally equipped to handle this lesson

I spent a few days thinking and practicing thinking these thoughts until they became easy to think and after a few days, I could feel my belief level change and I started to believe my new thoughts. 

The following weekend I decided to practice loading and practice my new thoughts…this will happen right on time, and I am capable and Dutch is capable and I have all year…and before I even pointed to the trailer, he walked right on. 

You know that I was not believing my eyes.  But there it was. 

The only thing that had changed in a week was my thoughts and my feelings.  What changed was how I showed up. 

• Instead of needy and graspy, I patient and confident. 

• Instead of entitled to success, I was willing to give it time to evolve. 

• Instead of feeling inconvenienced I was embracing the opportunity to learn.

When you are fueled by something other than self-doubt, there isn’t anything that you can’t create, invite or attract into your life.

It’s the self-doubt that is repelling the money that you want to make, the marriage that you want to have, the number on the scale, all the things that you want are being blocked, blocked by self-doubt.

It gets even better. 

One of the boarders mentioned that she would like to be able to show her horse but he had been in a trailer accident and they would need to drug him to load and then he wouldn’t be able to be showed.  I put her through these steps and guess what…yep, he loaded right up.

So here are exactly the steps that you need to eradicate your self-doubt and create the outcome of your heart’s desire.

#1.  Decide what you want, what is the outcome that you want to create?

#2.  Decide how you want to experience this journey; how do you want to show up?  Make a list of how you want to feel.

#3.  Relax into and allow thoughts to surface that will create those emotions.

#4.  Practice thinking them every day.  Practice being the person who has created the result.

#5.  Be willing to be uncomfortable and fail, over and over again until you create the result.

Alright my friends, I hope that there was a mind shift in there somewhere for you. 

If you are ready to take this work to the next level...ping me!