Episode 62: How To Stop Second Guessing Yourself
You are listening to episode 62 of the Create What You Crave Podcast. The one that I talk about how to stop second guessing yourself and start trusting yourself instead.
As women, we have been taught to look to others for help in making decisions and that we can’t trust ourselves completely to know how to handle things or what is best for us.
That’s why we second-guess ourselves on small decisions and big ones. We haven’t had the practice of listening to our own wisdom and trusting that without fear of making a mistake.
It’s time to change that, don’t you agree?
What You’ll Learn:
- Answering the question I pose may surprise you.
- Why you second-guess yourself.
- The 2 most common reasons you do it.
- The cure for decision paralysis.
Listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcast app:
You can create the career and life you crave when you begin to make the shifts in your thinking and start trusting. Schedule your Discovery Call with me today so you can go from avoiding decisions to taking charge of your life with confidence.
Episode 62: How To Stop Second Guessing Yourself (Transcript)
How are you my friends? It has been a busy month – lots of family gatherings at my house. There are 2 birthdays, my daughter and oldest son, and then Easter, which meant lots of cooking and baking for this mama.
I do enjoy having them all at the house and I make sure to include my dad, too. He loves their energy – and believe me, there’s plenty of it!
Choosing to be a mom is something I’ve always wanted. I’ve never second-guessed myself around that fact. There are plenty of other things in my past life where I did that for sure.
When I was younger, I didn’t trust myself to know what I wanted or what I should do in certain circumstances or what was best for me because I was never shown how to do that.
It took me years and lots mistakes and lots of growth work to finally stop looking to others for their opinion on what I should do.
That’s what we’re going to talk about today – how to stop second guessing yourself.
Let me ask you a question:
In the last week have you:
A) Felt anxious wondering what someone else was thinking about you?
B) Agonized over a decision out of fear of getting it wrong (whether it’s as small as what to have for breakfast or as big as whether to take a new job)?
C) Prefaced an idea at work with, “This may be dumb but…” or ended one with, “Does that make sense?”
D) All of the above
If you chose any of those options — and especially if you chose D — you’re not alone.
Women are taught growing up that their value depends on how they look, what they do for other people, and whether everyone else likes them at all times. In other words, we are taught that our worth is conditional on all of these things.
So it’s no wonder that we look outside of ourselves for:
- Our self-esteem
- Our self-worth
- Help in making decisions in our own lives
So, whatever we do, we second-guess ourselves
We get dressed in the morning, then spend all day worrying about how we look.
We send an email, then we re-read it 10 times to make sure it was ok.
We turn someone down for a second date, then ask all of our friends if they think that was the right decision.
Women are taught that their value is like the stock market — it rises and falls based on the consensus opinions of everyone who interacts with them.
By the time we get to be adults, we can sometimes feel at a loss for what we think and take on other people’s ideas, priorities, values and beliefs.
We don’t know how to ground into our own priorities, our own beliefs, and trust ourselves to have our own backs no matter what.
It’s Time To Start Trusting Your Decisions
If you truly want to create the career and life you crave, you NEED to know how to trust your decisions.
The more chaotic the world is — climate change, the economy, women’s rights, — the more important it is that you know how to chart your own way and create your own outcomes.
You can’t create…
- A career you truly want when you’re constantly trying to do what your parents, best friend, and first boss told you to do.
- The relationship of your dreams when you’re constantly second-guessing yourself about your choice of partners, your life plans, and whether you’re even lovable to begin with.
- A life that feels beautiful and bold and truly yours, until you know how to identify what you truly WANT and how to really trust yourself to you go after it.
Let me be clear: There is zero shame in not knowing how to do this already.
You’ve literally been taught NOT to do it.
You’ve been taught to people-please, to seek validation from others, and to second-guess yourself at every turn. This causes a big dose of self-doubt, and we never make good decisions when we are in that headspace.
So many of us have experienced wanting to feel self-confident and not care what other people think, yet we find ourselves worrying and second-guessing all the time anyway.
This isn’t actually because you are genetically programmed to be a people-pleaser. We all have the capacity to make strong decisions and feel empowered in our lives.
The problem is that your subconscious mind is keeping you second-guessing — and therefore keeping you from claiming that power.
The 2 most common reasons you second guess yourself
1. We Don’t Want To Take Responsibility For Making Decisions
Why? Because we don’t trust ourselves and are afraid we will make the wrong ones.
Women are literally socialized to believe this.
We are taught that we are emotional and irrational (especially when we have hormonal shifts), and that we need other people to tell us what is sensible and good.
And because we are socialized to doubt ourselves so deeply, we actually are unable to feel certain of ANY opinion or decision. No matter what we decide, we will tell ourselves we might have gotten it wrong.
So when we contemplate making a decision, we fear later beating ourselves up for having made the wrong one. This keeps us paralyzed from making any decision at all.
2. We Have Negative Feelings About Authority & Power
We associate authority and power with feelings or outcomes we don’t want, like stress, responsibility, abuse, or harm.
When you think about having power and authority, even just over your own life, how do you feel?
- Some of us feel anxious — like that’s too much responsibility and we might get it wrong.
- Some of us feel aversion — we may have experienced harm from authority figures in our own lives or seen the harm created by the abuse of power and authority around us.
So we don’t want to identify with it. This is why many women say they want to feel empowered, but actually, they just want to NOT feel disempowered.
They want the absence of anxiety and when they think about having authority, they actually feel anxious just in a different way. It’s a catch-22.
So we stay stuck, both feeling stressed because we don’t have authority in our own lives and feeling like victims of other people and circumstances…but also being unwilling to claim our authority because we associate power with stress, responsibility, or harm.
We don’t even realize that we can redefine authority in our own lives to feel strong, powerful, valuable, and good.
How To Stop Second Guessing Yourself: The First Step
The good news is that you actually can reprogram your subconscious mind to change these thought patterns, stop second-guessing yourself, and start living on purpose.
I help my clients with this in every session – looking at their thoughts to see what is serving them well and what isn’t. This is how they go from being stuck to trusting themselves completely.
It requires learning how to:
- Build self-trust and self-esteem
- Believe in your own capacity to learn, grow, and make smart decisions
- Change your neural pathways so that you take responsibility and create incredible outcomes for yourself without beating yourself up every time anything goes wrong.
When we are seeking validation, we are seeking permission to believe something about ourselves. We can give ourselves that permission directly to practice thoughts to help us believe it on our own.
We need to take back the power we’ve given other people and what we imagine they are thinking about us to determine how we feel about a situation, and instead be clear about how we want to think and feel on purpose.
When we mistakenly believe that a job can deliver us purpose and happiness, we will put so much pressure on that decision that we will often end up stuck and spinning in indecision. It’s important to remember that purpose and contentment is created by your thinking, not your job.
If you’re looking to the outside world for answers, validation or contentment, we need to talk.
Don’t waste one more minute in decision paralysis. Don’t let one more day go by not trusting yourself. Schedule your Discovery Call with me today. I’m ready to partner with you!
Until next time, remember:
I believe in you.