Doubts. We all have them, it is part of being human. Depending on how you deal with them, they can guide you away from potentially difficult/dangerous situations or cause you to miss many great opportunities. It is important we learn to understand why we get them and what purpose they are serving us under each situation. For instance, if I have doubts about a website I have built I have learned to trust my doubts as they usually lead me to a better design. However if I get doubts about going into a really busy bar I know it’s just because of all the new faces I am seeing and put it to the back of my mind. Below I have detailed my eight strategies for dealing with doubts.
- Doubts are there for a reason
Understand and accept that regardless of the way they make you feel, doubts can be good as well as bad. Doubts can be caused by all sorts of internal feelings, such as anxiety or fear of doing something new, so it is important you view those doubts rationally. If, for instance, you have doubts about handing in an important essay to your tutor, it could just be your anxiety about what result you will get. However, it could also be that deep down you don’t feel the essay is good enough. You need to analyze the source of your doubts and consider whether it’s valid or not. - Get the opinion of others
Few people are so confident in their abilities that they don’t need a second opinion from people to quench any doubts they may have. Asking a friend or work colleague for their thoughts is a great way of getting a alternative and unbiased viewpoint that you may not otherwise be able to achieve from being so closely tied to your work. It will either help clear the doubts from your mind or give them some validity, in which case you can move forward with confidence and take action. - Gain some perspective
Because we can be so attached to our projects, goals and personal issues it can be difficult to set realistic expectations. Getting the opinion of others can help with this, but sometimes you just need to be realistic with yourself. If you are having doubts it may be that you are expecting too much, being impractical about what can be done or being too attached to your work. In such a case you need to sit down and gain some perspective by re-evaluating what you want to achieve. What you want to do and what you need are often very different things. - Push through the doubts
Sometimes doubts can happen regardless. For instance, you could be a shy person at a busy party or an employee on the first day of a new job. In those situations of course you’re going to have doubts, but you can’t let them get the better of you and hide in the toilets or rush out of the office before you’ve even got to lunchtime. - Clear your head
Sometimes when you have all those doubts swirling around in your head, it can be useful to disconnect from what you are working on and do something else. I personally find a brisk walk helps to clear my head and gives me a chance to think through issues with a refreshed mind. If the weather is bad, as it usually is in the UK, I also sometimes read a book or play on my Wii. It’s amazing how if you leave something for a few hours or even days, it can cause you to come back to it with a completely fresh set of thoughts and ideas. - Plan, plan, plan!
Imagine that you are driving to a destination but you have no clear set of directions of how to get there. Your mind is naturally going to be full of doubts. Am I going in the right direction? Should I have gone left at that junction? Now, apply that same idea to a project. If you don’t have a clear plan of how you are going to work on it, what you are going to do, how long it will take, what the finished product will be like, etc. it’s only natural that you will doubts. - See where your doubts lead you
Some of the best works of art or scientific discoveries have come from people who questioned every doubt in their mind and followed them through to see where it took them. If you have doubts about the color scheme of your bedroom, try a different one. If you have doubts about the opening paragraph of your essay, experiment with different wording. You may find you like the changes, you may not. At the very least you will have learned something new – bright yellow is not a good color for a bedroom! Just don’t go too far. Defying your doubts about jumping off a cliff into the sea is probably not a good idea. - Resolve the unknowns
If there is one thing that will bring doubts flooding out it’s not knowing something. I’ve done several posts in the past about surviving at university, mentioning how you should get to know the layout of your campus as quickly as possible. That way doubts won’t creep in about where a lecture room or the cafeteria is. The same principle applies for most other things in life. The more information you know the less doubts you will feel. Doubt is ultimately uncertainty in your decisions or actions so it makes sense that the more you know about something the more confident you can be in making the right choices. I bet few people would have as many doubts about interviews if they knew what questions were going to be asked and who was asking them!
September 17, 2007 at 03:02PM
A variant of pushing through the doubts is if you can’t come to a conclusion do it anyway. It takes people who can stand to make a mistake, when doing nothing would be worse. In my country, there is a saying that only those who don’t make mistakes are those who don’t do anything at all!
September 18, 2007 at 01:20PM
Good point Rolf. Though I’m not especially a fan of the book of the same title, feel the fear and do it anyway is a very good line and is similar to what you are saying.