Is Self-Doubt Secretly Killing Your Dreams?

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"Is Self-Doubt Secretly Killing Your Dreams?"

In today's episode, I cover the following:

- What is self-doubt and where does live (it's not where you think!)

- How self-doubt shows up in behavior (it's sneaky!)

- The top 5 thoughts that scream self-doubt!

- 4 reasons why self-doubt happens

- The top 5 ways to start healing self-doubt

and so much more!

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Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Building Her podcast. I'm your host, Kati Lillian. If you've been loving this podcast, go ahead and rate the podcast five stars and DM me on Instagram when you do that, because I want to connect and personally thank you. If you're a new here, hit that subscribe button. It really helps the podcast grow and that way you'll never miss an episode. So let's dive in. Hey, my name is Kati Lillian, and I am obsessed with all things mindset, personal development, and helping you build the best version of yourself. I'm a women's life and mindset coach and an entrepreneur who started a fun hobby of posting hashtag sweaty selfies, grew a successful side hustle, and now I run a six figure coaching business. I teach you the secret of building a life that aligns with your deepest values and one that you wake up excited for. This podcast is designed to expand your mind and. Challenge the status quo. So get ready to uplevel your life and let's start building her. This week's episode is going to be all about self-doubt. First of all, what is self-doubt? How does it show up in your life? And then of course, overcoming self-doubt. And I wanted to talk about this topic because it comes up in my one-on-one. Conversations, but also in my CEO Mastermind for Early and Aspiring Coaches. It came up this past week, but also I went on Instagram and I showed you guys that I was batch recording content for Instagram. So think reels, carousels, that kind of thing. And um, your girl was feeling fired up and creative. And so we went to our stories and we asked you guys. What do you struggle with most often? And it was. A mixed bag, I would say between the options I gave you in my poll. Uh, overcoming self-doubt, how to move in blind faith, and how to build confidence. And everyone said all of the above. So we're tackling one at a time. And so I wanted to devote this entire episode to overcoming self-doubt. So as you guys know, if you are new here actually, and you don't know about my podcast. A lot of these are like going to school, and I say that with so much conviction and confidence because it's true. You literally get so much information in one 30 minute episode. Not all of them are 30 minutes of course, but a lot of them are shorter so that it's more digestible for you to. Understand and learn, and then hopefully also apply and integrate. But I always say take notes. Get your notebook. Get your notes app, even though I do like writing better and, um, pay attention to this one. Okay. Self-doubt is a subconscious belief, so just recognize that already it, it's hidden. It's in your subconscious, right? Remember, 95% of what runs the show is our subconscious beliefs and our subconscious mind, and we hardly ever tap into it on a day-to-day basis because. We are on autopilot. Essentially, that's what our subconscious serves and, and does for us. It allows us to drive a car without actually thinking about every single step it takes to drive that car. Like, check your blind spot, push a little bit on the gas to go turn your blinker on, right? Like it's just so automatic. Sometimes I'll drive to wherever I go. These days it's not. Often or very exciting with baby girl, but when I do go out, I honestly sometimes don't even remember the drive or I'm like, oh yeah, how did I get here? Because of how automatic and, um, just natural it feels. So that's our subconscious. So just recognize that self-doubt lives there. So that's fun. We, we need to tap into our subconscious to understand how to even deal with self-doubt, how to overcome it so it lives in the subconscious. So I really stress that and highlight that because it shows up in sneaky ways. So again, I guess just so we're all on the same page, self-doubt means that you believe, again, on a subconscious level, I am not capable, I am not ready, I am not worthy, or I am not enough to succeed at this. So that's what's running in the background, and it's not loud because of it. And when we do certain things, it feels so normal to us because we're literally wired that way. But I just wanna highlight this for you, so hopefully your awareness is brought to the surface so you can at at least realize when you're living or when you're moving with self-doubt. So it shows up in disguises like perfectionism, procrastination. Over researching or learning, comparing yourself to others, not finishing things. You start because you start it and then you don't get the results that you want, or it feels very hard to push through. Avoiding visibility, so the idea of feeling and being seen and showing your true colors. Or lastly, constantly looking for the right time or, oh, I just need more clarity. Okay. So some other ways that this could be showing up and I guess a bit more like specific examples. Um. Number one, if you always say like, I'm not ready yet. And so if you are building a business, if you're listening to this and you're building a business, you are an earlier aspiring coach. You have some kind of service that you want to sell online, and so that requires you to show up online and sell and launch something, but you're just not ready yet. Because you're learning or you're over researching, so you stall, launching offers, you stall, going live, you stall pitching either yourself or your services. You keep building things and you keep wor working on them, and you have offer after offer after offer, but it's kind of like an offer graveyard and it just sits there on your computer and it's never seen the light of day because you never sell them, right? You have to show people your face. Or if, I guess it's a product, you have to show them the product and you actually have to sell it. Number two, the question of what if it doesn't work? So what that looks like is you obsess over worst case scenarios and worst case scenarios are very simple to identify because it always starts with the question, what if? What if I launch this offer and nobody buys it? What if I post this reel and it flops? What if I show my face on my stories and people judge me and they think I am not pretty? Right, so we constantly obsess over these what if worst case scenarios, or you can say doomsday scenarios. And because of that you don't trust yourself and you don't validate yourself. Like, no, I do look great. I like how I look, and that's all that matters. So what you, what do you do? You seek constant validation from others. It's called external validation before moving forward. So you ask, is this good enough? Do I look okay? Do I look pretty? Is my lighting okay? It's constant questions for someone else to be like yes or no, but you constantly outsource your power. Three. You ask yourself, who am I to do this? So you completely downplay your ability to do anything because you see yourself as not that great, right? You minimize your voice. Your power or your credentials. Maybe you don't think you're good enough because of your background, who your parents were, where you grew up, what city, what town, where you went to school, what college you went to, or no college, right? Whatever it is. But you're guess you're second guessing yourself and you're like, I am not that great. I don't know everything. So why should I act like I know everything? Why should I act like I'm the expert? And you think everyone else around you is way more qualified? Next you might be thinking, I just need to get more organized. So what you're doing is you hide behind planning and systems and maybe constant cleaning. And you hesitate to do anything because you're so bogged down by the disorganization of your life. And so productivity, because you're always doing something, actually becomes a shield. And then the last one I failed before. So what if I fail again? Right? You're bringing your past into your present, and then you're projecting that onto the future, so you base your belief, your current. Belief on past disappointments or again, so-called failures. I'm using air quotes over here, not current desires or dreams or visions, and therefore you hesitate to invest in yourself or invest into a mentor or a business coach, or digital course, or mastermind or retreat, or whatever the investment is. Right, because you don't take new risks. It's like, well, I failed before. I'm just gonna fail again. So why bother Now? Hopefully some of you listening to this are feeling really lovingly called out, and that's my job as a coach. I lovingly call you out. I don't judge. I don't do any of that. This is always a self space and self safe space and judgment free zone. But I do have to call out what I notice. I. And I'm really good at it because I literally was this person I dealt with so much self-doubt and every thought that I just mentioned was me. Oh my God. I always head behind organization and I always asked, well, what if this and what if that, and who am I to do this because I don't have the coolest or highest uh, schooling, if you will. Yeah. And um, yeah, I never felt ready to take that scary leap of faith as they call it, or the scary launch. So yeah, self-doubt, queen over here. So I've had to work through a few things to say the least. But that's my job is to make you aware of what it is. And remember, we always want to look at it from compassionate curiosity for ourselves, never to self judge, right? Like as you're hearing this and you feel called out, it's never like, ah, fuck, this is me, right? God, you're so stupid. It's more of like gentle and soft as if you're talking to a child. Right. Like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I do think about the what if worst case scenarios a lot and that's it. That, that's awareness number one. Okay, so we do it compassionate curiosity. So the next question is, well, where does this even come from? And and why does this even happen? So to answer that question, that's a great question. Thank you so much for asking why self-doubt happens. There's four pieces to this. Number one old programming, so messages from childhood, from your school, from teachers in that school, from past jobs, any kind of. Relation or association you had with others and basically these experiences that you had. It is true, right? Like this thing did happen. However, the way we remember these experiences are always so twisted because it's based off of our perspective at that time, right? It's actually not fact anymore. It was an opinion that you had back at that time, and now you just remember it as that, and it's actually crazy because it's just now a story that's on replay in your mind. But if you go back to that situation from now, this perspective from now, this older, new version of the human that you are, and you think back and reflect on that time, you're like, oh, actually, when those kids made fun of me, I. Wasn't even that bad. I just took it so hard because I was 12, right? But now I'm 34. I could maybe see it from a different lens. And so it's really nice that we get to change the way we see certain things that have shaped who we are and we get to rewire our brains, and it's called neuroplasticity. So anyways, old programming. Second thing is comparison culture. And we live in that, in today's digital age. I mean, we see everyone's highlight reels. We see literally everything on social media. We see Instagram, we see TikTok, we see YouTube, we see whatever platform is out there. I. And we see people with their ring lights on. We see people still using filters. We still, people see, or we still see people with photoshopped uh, filters or photos or now I guess also videos. I mean, now, I mean, AI robots are in the mix. You can't even tell who's real or who's not. So recognize that the comparison culture is very real because. We get to see everything and unfortunately, it is usually always the highlights or the wins. We don't really see the struggles or behind the scenes, at least just again, on a social media, very public platform. So it does feel very natural now to compare our successes or our failures with. That of the social media landscape. Number three, unresolved failures. So your nervous system is protecting you from what it thinks will be more pain. So this goes back to what I just mentioned of our mind creating a story essentially around a certain situation that happened. So even though at that time it might feel obviously very real or unfortunate, or. Um, hard, right? Whatever the case was. And of course, there's different levels to all these experiences, but the, the matter of fact is that you have not gone back to resolve that pain. You have not gone back to redefine what failure means to you. You have not gone back to forgive yourself. And so you're living with that in your nervous system. Hence why sometimes it might feel very uncomfortable or your body literally tenses up. Or if you're afraid to do something, your heart starts beating faster, or you get sweaty palms, like those are all very real nervous sys system symptoms. Just thinking about something that you're going to do that you're very afraid of, but that nervous system was wired because of unresolved failures in the past. Or again, just anything that really broke you, broke your heart, disappointed you, whatever, was very, very hard to deal with. Again, there's different levels to this. Um, for example, I always had a fear of public speaking and I remember distinctly in college. I had a public speaking thing that I had to do just for my classroom. It wasn't even for a lot of people. It was like, let's say 20 people in the classroom. But I was so, so afraid, and just to add the cherry on top, I had to do it with like a German accent because it was like a. I don't know, like a drama acting experience. I, I took communication studies in college, so it was a lot of like Yeah. Communicating in different ways. Anyways, so I was so nervous that I forgot my lines. And I felt like such an idiot and I felt so stupid with my accent'cause I didn't even really like master the accent very well. And then people were laughing, but I internalized it and I thought that they were laughing at me, not like with me because it was really funny. So that was like a traumatic experience for me, and in my head I defined it then as like, I'm just a really bad public speaker. Like I will never do this again. That was a painful moment and I will never do that again. Right. So that's what my nervous system remembered. Years later when I had another speaking opportunity. And so I remember I had the, the fast beating heart. I had the sweaty palms. I had the sweaty upper lip too. That's fun fact about me. My upper lip sweats when I get, uh, nervous. But I was like, you know what? I gotta do it anyways. I gotta prove to myself that I can do this, that I can overcome this. And um, thank God I had a life coach that I hired at the time, and she really helped me through this fear of mine. And it did come back down to my breath. Right. We always complicate everything, but she helped me with my breath and breathe through my fears and it's really interesting too because now I realize and have learned that breath work is what taps into our subconscious. And when she showed me how to breathe through it and how to remain calm in through the nose, out through the mouth, even when I was up there speaking, um, changed the game for me and I was able to rewire this story. I. This belief that I had that I was really bad at public speaking with a new story of I'm actually not that bad and I can just breathe through it, and if I shift the focus from me and how I feel, and I shift the focus to the audience and what do they get out of it, and the message that I want to convey. Then that's all that matters. At the end of the day. It actually doesn't have to do anything with Katya and her fear. It has to do with me being the messenger of the message. And so like that already was so. Eye-opening for me because I was like, oh, like it doesn't even matter how I feel, or even just, you know, what I look like or anything like that. It's just more of like, what are the words coming outta my mouth and how is that educating those that are listening that that's truly what it was. So. I digress, but that's what it is. Uh, unsolved, unresolved failures in your mind. You have to go back to it. You have to revisit that experience, and you have to look at it now from a different perspective, from a different lens as this older version of you, and make peace with it and forgive yourself and look at it from a different place of like, oh, well, maybe this is why I was nervous. I wasn't fucking breathing. Number four, the last one, why self-doubt happens is you just don't have any new evidence yet. So remember the unresolved failures because the, you have this old evidence that your brain has latched onto, and so now you just haven't given yourself enough proof of the opposite of what's possible, right? So your brain just fills in the blanks with fear because remember, your brain is designed to keep you safe. And so I knew with my new speaking gig opportunity that that would replace the old speaking failure that I had, right? Because it replaces it with a successful quote unquote speaking. Um, opportunity. And so now that is what my brain latches onto is this evidence of like, okay, maybe I was bad at one thing, but actually I was bad, or I was really good another time, and now that is enough to replace the old memory and have this new memory and continue the momentum so that we can create many more opportunities that turn into memories that prove that you are. A good public speaker. It's pretty wild when you think about it. Okay, so how to start healing Self-doubt number one, simply name it. Remember I told you this is all about awareness. So when you have those thoughts of like the what if worst case scenarios you're, you can recognize that and be like, oh, okay, this is self-doubt. This is not truth, this is not fact. This is just a thought pattern that I am allowed to. Change. And this is so, so, so important because when you name it, you guys, you actually take your power back. It's not just running again on autopilot in your subconscious. Now you're bringing it forward, you're bringing it into your conscious mind and you're like, uh, uh, this is self-doubt, not today. Right. That's how you take your power back by simply naming it. Number two, gather evidence of what you have done. So essentially what this is called, or what I like to call it, is your proof bank. Okay? So questions to understand what that proof is, is what have I overcome? So I'm not superwoman. I haven't overcome everything. There's still some struggles that I have and will always have. I'm human, but there is a shit ton of things that I have overcome. So let's write that down. What results have I created for myself or others? That last one's really good or others. So what have I created? What results, what tangible results, but then also how have I already helped others just based off of what I say. Um, a friend, maybe they call me, they text me when they're in need, like, what have I already done for others? And then what have people thanked me for? What do I just probably naturally do or naturally, my energy, who I am, who I am being. How has that already helped people? And we know it if they have thanked us for it. So build a case for yourself with this proof bank. That's a really, really powerful exercise. And then once you have that proof bank, you can take micro brave action. And that's emphasis on the micro'cause. I think a lot of us scare ourselves with like this mountain we create in our mind of. Oh my God, this big thing, it feels so scary. Or we focus on the macro, like leap of faith, all or nothing mindset. It's like, no, why can't we just take steps in the right direction? Why can't we just make progress in inches, not feet? Right? Like you don't need to leap. You just need to move. You just need to start building. Shameless plug for my podcast name. Building her. So for example, if you're afraid to show up on social media, I would then just say like, record one story just one time. Like, just do the thing, like show on. Show up on your stories. Show your face. Have like a funny story that you wanna share, or maybe you just read a book or a chapter in a book, or a friend called you and said this, or you listened to this podcast episode. Like anything that just like happened that you would share with a friend over FaceTime. Like what would feel very organic and natural to you to say to a friend over FaceTime and just try showing up on your story, one story on Instagram or make one offer. What's like one thing you could sell because people tell you you're really good at it and also you really love to do it because you get energy from it or reach out to one potential client. I am not saying 500, I'm saying one. And if you do that in one day, then you did it, and that is how you start. That is literally what creates momentum. Remember, confidence isn't what starts the momentum, but it's what follows it. So you have to start scared. Let that build momentum, and then that momentum in turn builds the confidence. Ask yourself, what would I do if I believed in myself? Just 10% more today. So maybe I don't believe in myself a hundred percent, and that's okay. But what if it was just 10%? If I showed up as that version of Katya who believed in herself just 10% more, what would that version do? And then go do that thing. And then the last one is get in the right room. So being around women who have already done the scary thing shows you it's possible. And this is not a comparison game. This is showing you what's possible. This is allowing you to look at their wins, their successes, and be like, holy shit. If that's possible for them, it's possible for me. And when you look at it in that light now, that rewires your brain because now your brain sees proof. It's not your own proof, but it still sees proof of concept. It's like, oh, that is possible. So I can do it too. That's why coaching and groups mastermind spaces like CEO, shameless plug is possible. Right. You see what other women are doing. You see when women sign one-on-one clients for the thousands of dollars, you see them raise their rates. You see them build a business that feels good for them on their terms, which looks different for everyone. You see them launch the podcast. You see them launch the group program. You see them make tens of thousands of dollars a month. Like you literally see what's possible, and then you want to go do the same thing. I was part of, gosh, probably like three masterminds at this point in my career, and that's besides my one-on-one mentorship. Um, but very, I would say my most recent mastermind I. I was so expanded by the other women in that Mastermind because some were not as far along as me. Some were on the same level, and then some were light years further than me. And all of them were expansive. Like they all served a purpose because one, they made me feel seen with the ones that were on my level, like, like-minded people. Um, they were my peers and now turn friends. Some that I was further along. Sure ego boosts, but also just. I was there at some point in my journey, and so I had just a lot of love for themselves, but also for my younger past self. And then also I was expanded to new heights and again, reminded to what's possible. So there was one girl in particular who. Built a multi six figure business and then crossed the seven figure mark in her business. She had a book already that she had published. She led in person retreats. I have done neither of those things, so I was like. That's cool. There was another girl who had a 10 K day all from a digital course. Self-paced offer. Did not include, it did not require her time. I was like, that's cool. So seeing these women of all ages, by the way, just killing it at life expanded. Me and my brain so, so much. And it was the best investment ever. So that's what happens in those spaces when you get in the room. Um, okay. So I think that about does it in terms of this episode. I, I really hope this. Allows people listening to feel one seen, but too empowered to now name and recognize your self doubt, and then go at it from a lens of compassionate curiosity while you make some of these changes and apply some of these strategies that I just mentioned. So remember, my final reframe for you on self-doubt is that you don't need to feel ready to take the next step. But what you do need to feel is excited. You do need to feel like this is the right step in my journey. I don't know what it all looks like. I, I don't have all my ducks in a row, but I do see that first duck. And I do feel energized by just the thought of this. So you just need to take that next step. And then you start feeling ready, then you start feeling that momentum, then you start making decisions that expand you. Then you start getting in the room. But you do need to take that first step and maybe don't look at it as like, is this the right step or the wrong step or Right. That indecision. But just look at it as a next step. This is just a next step. And then we, um. We correct. We course correct. That's what I was trying to say. We course correct. And then we take another step and then another step, and then another step. And that is how the dream unfolds. That is how the vision unfolds. That is how the smoke clears and clarity is gained. You have to take that step. So I really, really, really, really hope that this helped. Um, someone listening and everyone that responded to my Instagram poll, hopefully you are listening to this episode. And that's it. That's what I got for you this week. If anything about this episode resonated with you, please do me a favor and take a screenshot of this podcast and post it on your stories and tag me at Katya Lillian. I would love to connect with you and thank you in advance, and I appreciate you. Until next time. Mmm.