Episode 105 - How Doubt Can Guide You Toward Authentic Alignment

We trace how doubt—often disguised as perfectionism, overthinking, or busyness—pulls us away from alignment and how small, courageous steps restore movement and trust. Stories, frameworks from the Bhagavad Gita and Stephen Cope, and practical prompts help turn uncertainty into rhythm and action.

• doubt’s masks: procrastination, perfectionism, overthinking, staying too long
• the Gita’s teaching: doubt as destroyer of peace
• dharma as alignment with truth and duty
• three detours: closing the door, denial of dharma, improper aim
• competence versus aliveness as a guide
• timing doubt, comparison, and replacing timelines with rhythm
• antidotes: humility, smaller first steps, courage through play, trust in process
• three reflection prompts to reframe doubt and check alignment

Email us your questions or topic ideas at Sarah@risingwithsarah.com

Book:

The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling by  Stephen Cope

Related Podcast:

Feel Behind In Your Career, Relationship, or Life? On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Related episodes:

Episode 76 - The Growth Mindset Reset: How to Redefine Success and Embrace Failure

Episode 87 - Spiritual Awakening Explained: The Elements of Inner Growth and Why Love is and Accelerator (Part One)

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Chapters

• 0:46 Doubt and Dharma
• 5:14 Fear of Closing the Door
• 6:32 Denial of Dharma
• 8:04 Improper Aim
• 13:40 Antidotes: Humility, Courage, Trust
• 16:55 Reflection Prompts and Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

If you've ever found yourself stuck in guessing your choice modes, wondering whether you're on the right path, or if you've somehow missed your calling, this episode is for you. We're exploring the quiet, paralyzing power of doubt. Specifically the kind of doubt that creates injustice to start becoming the word. Welcome to Roots of the Rise with me, Sarah Hope, where spiritual wisdom needs practical tools in short, bite-sized episodes. These are tasters, not deep dives, designed to spark curiosity and guide you toward authentic alignment. So you can discover who you truly are, release what holds you back, and rise into your best self. Today we're talking about doubt and dharma because when it comes to authentic alignment to becoming who we're truly meant to be, there's this sneaky thing that gets in the way of all of us at some point. Doubt. Doubt doesn't always look like doubt. Sometimes it looks like procrastination, overthinking, or perfectionism. Sometimes it looks like staying too long in a job, a relationship, or a role we've outgrown. Because the unknown feels riskier than the discomfort we're used to. Doubt wears many masks, and almost all of them appear right at the edge of growth. There's self-doubt, you know, that inner critic questioning our worth or our readiness. There's purpose doubt, wondering if we even have a calling, something we're meant to do or be. There's path doubt, thinking we've chosen wrong, we've taken the wrong fork in the road. There's timing doubt, that sneaky belief that it's too late, we've missed our chance, or we should have figured things out by now. And always there's trust doubt, that shaky feeling when we can't quite believe that the universe or even our own intuition is leading us in the right direction. Every one of these forms shows up the moment we begin to step into who we're meant to be. They're just fear dressed up as reason. Now, I'm not talking about healthy skepticism or discernment. This kind of doubt does not help us refine truth. It pulls us away from it. It makes us question our gifts, our timing, our belonging. When we begin to doubt our path, our purpose, our worth, we stop moving forward. And that pause over time can quietly harden into a kind of spiritual stuckness. Stephen Cope, uh, who wrote The Great Work of Your Life, which is one of my absolute favorite books, I recommend it all the time. Uh, anyway, in the book, he writes that before the Bhagavad Gita, most Eastern traditions saw grasping, craving, greed, attachment as the great human torment. But all that changed with the Bhagavad Gita, which was written over 2,000 years ago and is one of the most revered spiritual texts in the world. It is a cornerstone of Hindu philosophy, often compared in significance to the Bible and other great works like that. It tells the story of the warrior Arjuna, who, frozen by doubt on the battlefield, receives guidance from Krishna, the embodiment of the divine, on how to live with courage, purpose, and faith in alignment with one's true duty or dharma. Because really that's what dharma is. It's about the truth of who we are. So in the Bhagavad Gita, the true destroyer of peace isn't seen as grasping, it's doubt. Doubt afflicts the person who lacks faith, it says, and can ultimately destroy him. In this sense, doubt doesn't mean curiosity, it means paralysis. It's what happens when our mind touches both sides of a dilemma at once and can't move forward. It's the paralysis of analysis. Yoga calls it the invisible affliction. I mean, people can get stuck for years at the crossroads of their lives. Often for so long, they forget that there was ever a crossroads at all, all because of doubt. Has this ever happened to you? Maybe it's happening right now, where you just cannot see a way out of a situation you're in. It feels like there are no good choices, no way forward. Like you are just stuck. In The Great Work of Your Life, the book that Stephen Cope wrote about the Bhagavad Gita, he takes both what we would call ordinary lives, like you, me, the postman, as well as extraordinary lives like Beethoven, Thoreau, Jane Goodall, oh, may she rest in peace. Such a loss to the world recently. And actually, her story in the book is one of my favorites. But anyway, he uses so both the ordinary and the extraordinary lives of people to explain the pillars of dharma. And we'll get into that some other day because it really is a wonderful, beautiful book. But for now, let's just focus on how doubt can manifest. In the book, he names three ways we tend to get sidetracked from our true calling: fear of closing the door, denial of dharma, and improper aim. So let's start with fear of closing the door. You've been living one version of your calling over your life for a long time, maybe a career, a role like motherhood, or even an identity like healer. You know that season is ending, but you can only vaguely taste what's next. To truly move forward, a leap is required, and doubt convinces you it's safer to stay where you are, or tells you that nothing will compare to who you are now. This is empty nest syndrome. It's putting off retirement, it's getting retired and then going back to work a year later. You know, this type of doubt can manifest when we know we need to transition in life, but we're just not quite ready. Cope gives the example of a dean at a college who knew it was time to move on to the next phase. You know, the joy she had and what she was doing was no longer there, but it was terrifying to shut the door without knowing what came next. And so she stayed an extra, I forget what it was, two or three years because she just couldn't pull the trigger to leave. You know, this feels protective, but it's really purpose doubt disguised as safety. It's the fear that if we let go of one identity, there will be nothing left. Then there's denial of dharma when we see our gift clearly, but dismiss it because it feels too small or too ordinary. We compare it to what others are doing and decide it doesn't count. Cope's example is that of an exceptional nurse who never felt like what she did was enough because her brother was a surgeon. Or maybe we say no to a calling without even really giving it a chance, thinking it doesn't make sense or we're not good enough. Often there's a critic somewhere in our past who has reinforced this. Maybe it's the art teacher who told you your drawings were stupid, or a parent who said teaching fitness isn't a real career. Those voices, they drown out our inner voice, our inner authority that's trying to lead us in the direction of our most fulfilling life. Those are the voices that say, Who do you think you are? You're not qualified, you'll never be good enough, you're too old, you don't have the time. This is really self-doubt questioning our worth. We tell ourselves, I'm not special enough. Everyone can do this, it doesn't matter. But of course it does. You know, the world does not need us to be extraordinary, it needs us to be authentic. And the good news is that our gifts are resilient. The light of what we're truly meant for never fully goes out. It might dim beneath the layers of shoulds and self-doubt, but it is always there, waiting to be rediscovered. And the last one he talks about is improper aim. You know, this is when we chase something that's looks looks right, but it isn't quite there. You know, we might be doing good things, even admirable things, but they're not our things. You know, sometimes doubt hides behind our competence. We do things because we're good at them. Maybe someone told us we're brilliant or that we quote unquote should keep going because others depend on us. But just because we're gifted at something doesn't mean it's our calling. We can be exceptionally good at something and still have that be misaligned. True calling isn't about how well we do it, it's about how alive it makes us feel. I'm teaching a class on authentic alignment right now, and something came up a couple weeks ago. We were talking about the idea that you can be anything you want to be, and I posited that this isn't actually true. You know, the reality is that it doesn't always work that way. We might desperately want to be a movie star, but if our acting isn't all that great, we're not gonna make it. We might want to be the next Pele, but if our soccer skills aren't actually up to snuff, it's not gonna happen. And so we do ourselves a little bit of a disservice if we fall into this, I'm gonna make it because I want it mentality. We can actually set our sights too high. No, let me modify that. We can set our sights on the wrong thing, which is what improper aim is referencing. I think about this America's Gut Talent uh episode many years ago, but there was a choir director, a children's choir director, and she actually had a really phenomenal voice. And she was saying to Simon Cowell that, you know, she had wanted to become a professional singer, but that didn't quite work out. And so here she was teaching children's choir. And that's a perfect example of someone who could have thought, oh, because I didn't become a professional singer, music isn't for me, and completely missed out on what was actually meant for her, which was, you know, being this children's choir director. I mean, she said something to that effect that she finds great fulfillment in what she does. She could have just as easily become bitter, thinking she had missed out, missed her chance to be who she was meant to be. But this improper aim thing, you know, this is a mix of path and timing doubt. It's the sense that we're missing it when in truth we just haven't trusted the right direction yet. You know, if we zoom out, all three of these closing the door, denial of dharma, improper aim, they're just different ways of saying, I doubt that who I am is enough. And sometimes that doubt shows up not as fear, but as busyness. We fail every moment. So there's no space to listen, no space to listen to our inner voice, to our inner authority. Because listening would mean hearing what's next. And that's often the scariest part. That's the part that would require us to do something that would be potentially destabilizing, where we might not know the outcome. It would force us out of our comfort zone. You might remember from the episode Unlimiting Beliefs, those stories like, I'm not creative, I'm too much, I don't belong. You know, those are simply belief-based doubts. They're the ways we've learned to question our own light. They're subtle but powerful, and they're often what keeps us living smaller than we're meant to. So often I have clients who are deep in timing doubt, you know, this sneaky belief that it's too late, that you've missed your chance, that you should have figured things out by now. It's one of the hardest to shake because it sounds so reasonable. I mean, we look around, we compare, we assume we've missed something, we see other people and we think, oh, they've got it figured out. And we wonder how much longer do we have to get it right, especially as we get older. So instead of realizing it's happening now because I'm finally ready and welcoming that and celebrating it, people get stuck into this cycle of just asking, well, why didn't this happen sooner? When we stop measuring our part progress against arbitrary timelines, something softens. We stop trying to be on time and start learning what it means to be in rhythm with who we are becoming. Jay Shetty actually spoke about this on his podcast, uh, and I thought it was such a powerful perspective. I'm gonna link that one below because he also talks about the dangers of being comfortable, which are key in this process of becoming. But anyway, he said that for the first 20 years or so of life, you know, everyone moves at roughly the same place, pace. We're all guided by that same external rhythm of school years, semesters, graduations. You know, we're all on one big shared timeline. But then we enter adulthood and suddenly that structure disappears. It's a free-for-all. Some people build careers first, others start families, and we begin hitting milestones at completely different times. And yet, so often we keep comparing ourselves to the old rhythm with the same people that we did all those other years with. You know, we look at someone else's path and think we've fallen behind, or that we somehow missed our turn, but we haven't. We're just moving on our own timeline, learning how to live in rhythm with the life that's meant for us, the timing that's meant for us. So, what do we do when we're in doubt? When our path feels foggy, our gifts feel uncertain, and we can't tell if what we're sensing is intuition or fear. It's been shown that clinging to outcomes, outcomes, outcomes, grasping actually hurts performance because it divides the mind from the present. You know, that grasping too is a form of doubt. It's refusal to trust the process, to trust the unfolding when we are constantly measuring, evaluating, comparing. Am I winning or losing, doing enough, falling behind? You know, we split ourselves away from the only place alignment ever happens in the present moment. There's this beautiful quote from The Life of Pi, a book I did not enjoy. I know blasphemy, but I really did not like it. Uh but I did get this one quote that I use all the time. And it says, to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is like choosing immobility as a means of transportation. We have to choose to make a leap, to jump, to do the thing. And so, how do we get ourselves to do that? Well, first we return to humility. We remember that we're not supposed to know the entire path, only the next step. Humility allows us to stay open. It lets us say, I don't know without giving up. I was just listening to Dr. Becky, um who wrote Good Inside, she's wonderful. And she was talking about how her, ooh, fifth grade, one of her elementary school teachers, taught her this thing that she uses to this day. And what that teacher taught her was that whenever something feels too big or too overwhelming, all it means is that the first step isn't small enough. And that's going to be something that I use all the time now. I love it. The first step isn't small enough. So if we can just come back into humility and not give up, but you know, say, okay, I just need to make the next step smaller, that might make a huge difference. Also, we have to practice courage, the willingness to act, even while doubt is still in the room, because courage is not the absent of doubt, it's the refusal to let doubt make our decisions. Courage is not absence of fear, it's action in spite of fear. If this happens, if you can feel doubt trying to sway you, try switching from perfectionism to playfulness instead of I have to get this right, try saying to yourself, I just want to see what I can get away with. That single shift from fear to curiosity to this feeling of cocky nonchalance invites creativity, trust, and movement because ultimately the antidote to doubt isn't certainty, it's action in alignment, taking this one brave, imperfect step at a time. And finally, we reconnect with trust. Trust in ourselves, trust in the process, trust that the timing of our lives is unfolding as it should. You know, doubt isn't proof that you're lost, it's proof that you're expanding. It always shows up right before the next version of you is ready to emerge. And if you can meet it with curiosity instead of fear, it becomes a teacher, not an enemy. As always, I want to give you a few questions to ask yourself to investigate your relationship with doubt. One, what if my doubt isn't trying to stop me, but to slow me down long enough to move with more intention? Journal on that, stream of consciousness right. It reframes doubt as guidance, not an obstacle, but a signal to check alignment rather than a signal to abandon the path. Question two, where might I still be following someone else's timeline instead of trusting my own rhythm? This is the question about shoulds. What shoulds are living in your life? This helps to uncover subtle comparison patterns, you know, the way we measure our growth against others instead of our inner readiness. And last one, if I trusted that nothing is wasted, not the detours, not the delays, how would that change the way I view where I am right now? And this one invites self-compassion and perspective. It is reminding you that every chapter contributes to becoming who we are meant to be. There are no detours. So maybe today, instead of asking, how do I get rid of doubt? you could ask, what is my doubt showing me about where I'm being asked to grow? Because often the places we doubt ourselves the most are the very places we're meant to rise. Thanks for listening today. If you have any questions or want to suggest a topic, please email me at Sarah at risingwithsarah.com. Have a wonderful weekend and remember, know who you are, love who you've been, and be willing to do the work to become who you're meant to be. Just a quick reminder this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist, and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist, or any other qualified provider. That said, I hope it inspires you to grow, heal, and seek the support you need to thrive.