How to Believe in Yourself Right Now

So many of us professional women who have succeeded at multiple levels of school, and may even be in powerful or respected positions, are still trying to follow all the rules and the meet expectations. We’re always ready for some external authority to look at our life, and highlight with a red pen everything that we are doing wrong. We talk to ourselves about where we fall short of who and what we want to be.

Is that true for you as well?

At this time of writing, my own self doubt starts:

How do I say what I want to say? Will I find the words? Will I engage the audience in something that matters to them?

Does this line of self questioning sound familiar to you?

I learned a helpful trick for handling the anxiety jumping around in my stomach during my “slow year.” Overstressed from multiple factors, my body shut down and could barely move. I tired easily. Everything felt heavy and extremely difficult. I had to slow down my reality to match body.  Eckhart Tolle teaches that we can always handle the moment that we are in. This became my guiding principle. Instead of anticipating the intense fatigue or pain that would come with the entirety of the activity, or face the pain and fatigue worrying that I wouldn’t be able to handle it, I focused on exactly what I was doing in that very moment. I learned to handle each micro moment as it evolved.

Too often, you get stuck in a negativity loop, questioning, doubting, feeling the anxiety which escalates your doubt. Negativity narrows your focus, you see only a narrow path ahead of you.

So, how do you open the path to wider possibilities?

You can learn to trust yourself in this moment and to have faith in your future self. You have to believe that who you are in the next moment, hour, day, year, decade, will be someone who can handle each thing as it comes. 

So, I respond to myself, “Trust yourself. Keep writing, keep engaging with the thoughts and the words, and it will come. Give it the time and attention, and something will emerge. Keep going, just keep writing, and something will connect. You’ve done it before, and you will do it again.”

Now that I am fast again like everyone else, I remember these tips when the self questioning starts:

1. Keep reminders for yourself of when you have been successful at a challenge. Take time every day to reflect on your strengths and your successes. Try the What Went Well exercise. This Positive Psychology exercise brings into your awareness the strengths you already bring into each moment. Do it for a while, and you will feel an easy shift.
2. Build relationships and contact with people who believe in your potential, who can see where you are going and not only where you are right now. Who is someone who believes in you that you can talk to more often? Notice as you go through the next few days, several weeks, who might already believe in you if really took the time to listen? How can you fill your life with these voices?
3. Remember that you can always handle the moment that you are in. Take everything moment by moment as I described above. Instead of thinking, I only have a few hours to get this done with the underlying fear of failure gnawing at you, say to yourself, I need to do the most I can and the most focused work I can right now. What does right now need to look like? What will help me right now to do that?
4. As soon as you finish reading this, send a message containing number one and two to a professional mother in your support network. Make that person’s day by showing that you remember their successes and by being the person who believes in her.

It takes time to develop new strategies and habits of thinking. Be patient. It’s always okay to start over again exactly where you are right now.

Coaching customizes a conversation for you that engages you in having your own insights your own process for believing in yourself. Get in touch with me for a complimentary session.