Ep #111: Normalizing Self-Doubt & Making it Your Ally

Get Six Figure Job You Love | Normalizing Self-Doubt & Making it Your Ally

 

I was talking with two of my clients recently while recording an upcoming episode of the podcast, and self-doubt was something that came up a few times. I know a lot of you out there are struggling with self-doubt as well, so today, I’m presenting this topic of self-doubt and helping you see it through a new lens.

 

When it comes to self-doubt, one of the biggest problems is that we choose to listen to it. We think self-doubt is a problem, so we either quit whatever we’re doing to make the self-doubt stop, or we try to ignore it and shut it down, usually unsuccessfully. But what if we just normalized self-doubt and made it an ally?

 

Tune in this week to discover why self-doubt isn’t a problem, and how you can move forward despite it. I’m sharing how to know when it’s the right time to take the self-doubting voice in your head and turn it into a strategy, but I’m also showing you how your self-doubt might just be trying to give you a new level of insight which shouldn’t be ignored.

 

 

We have a four-day training coming, starting Monday, September 5th,, 2022. I’m teaching you the strategy, mindset, and behavior required to create demand for you as a candidate, whether you’re looking for a new job, switching industries, looking for a raise, or any other change you’re making in your career. Plus there will be an opportunity to be coached by me! Click here to join me.

 

Are you tired of going from job interview to job interview and not getting an offer? I’ve put together a free download that breaks down the reasons this might be happening. It’s called The 8 Reasons You’re Not Getting Hired and I will help you figure it out. Click here to get it!

 

 

 

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

 

  • How self-doubt creeps into our brains and stops us from doing things we know deep down we’re capable of.
  • Why self-doubt is a normal part of the human experience that everyone experiences at some point.
  • The power of acknowledging your self-doubting voice and even giving it a name.
  • How to translate everything that your self-doubting voice offers you into a strategy for success.
  • Why self-doubt is especially noticeable when you’re doing something new.
  • The value of having a coach to help you with your self-doubt.
  • How to acknowledge when your self-doubting voice is giving you useful insights, learning and moving forward from there, instead of pushing through.

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

 

 

SUBSCRIBE FOR WEEKLY INSPIRATION ON

APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | STITCHER

 

Featured on the Show:

 

  • Did you love this podcast episode? This is only a tiny fraction of the kind of breakthroughs, mind-blowing explosions, and career upgrading magic that happens when you join the 6-Figure Curriculum. Best of all, it’s all available to you RIGHT NOW! Click here to get immediate access to the curriculum and get started.  I cannot wait to start working with you!
  • Check out my  YouTube Channel!
  • Let’s connect! Add me on LinkedIn.
  • Leave me a review, send me a screenshot, and I’ll send you the 50 Examples Story Guide full of detailed stories from my clients and myself that will help you nail the interview!
  • Click here to download your free copy of The Ultimate Guide To Acing Behavioral Interview Questions

DOWNLOAD  TRANSCRIPT

 

Page 1 of 6
Hello. Hello. Welcome to the Get a Six Figure Job You Love podcast. This is Natalie and this is Episode 111, Normalizing Self-Doubt and Making It Your Ally. Let’s get into it. Hey there. Welcome to the Get a Six Figure Job You Love podcast. I’m your host, Natalie Fisher. I’m a certified career mindset coach who also happens to want to skip all the BS and get to what it really takes to create real results for you and your career. On this podcast, you will create real mindset shifts that will lead to big results and big changes in your career and your income. No fluff here. If you want to get a six figure job you love and create real concrete results in your industry and make a real impact, you’re in the right place. Are you ready? Let’s go.
All right. So this episode was inspired by an episode with two of my clients that you will be hearing in a couple weeks time, so not next week, but the week after that episode will be coming out and I’m very excited about it. But they were talking about the process and what it’s like to be inside the six figure curriculum, and that’s my signature program. And they’re talking about working through their self-doubt. And this episode was inspired by that because I know that a lot of you out there are struggling with self-doubt as well. And it’s one of the most popular topics that I cover and the one I get the most feedback on. So today I want to present it in a bit of a different way, because I feel like it’ll be really, really helpful.
So the main problem is that there’s a few problems with self-doubt. So the first one is that we don’t realize that it doesn’t mean stop. The problem is formed when we listen to it, when we give it priority, and we think it’s such a problem that it actually has to stop us. And then when we try to shut it down or ignore it or shut it out, sometimes we’re not successful at doing so. And then when we end up listening to it or we try to ignore it or shut it down, we end up not being successful at doing either. So we don’t end up successfully ignoring it because it keeps nagging at us, and we don’t know how to manage it. We don’t really know what to do with it. So we end up not moving forward because of it. And it gets in the way and it doesn’t allow you to do the things you’re capable of doing.
And the reason why it’s there, it’s human. It’s a human thing. So part of it is instinct protecting us from scary situations, dangerous situations, telling you you shouldn’t go in there. You can’t handle that. This is too big for you. Don’t do that. Can you really do that? All the self-doubting thoughts, they’re there for a reason. There is a reason why they’re there. Could be from past conditioning. A lot of my clients, myself too, had authority figures, teachers, people in our past that we really valued their opinions telling us that we shouldn’t do things. Basically they were putting their self-doubt on us not knowing that that’s what they were doing. And at the time we didn’t know that they were just that person’s opinion, not truth, not fact. We didn’t know because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. So it exists for those reasons and it’s normal.
It’s just a thing in our brain that we’re going to have to live with and manage and it’s not a problem at all. And in this episode, I want to get more clear on how you can move forward despite it. I’ve used some metaphors in the past. I’m going to expand on those metaphors today and give you an even bigger picture of how to manage your self-doubt. So let’s use an example. I’m going to use several examples, but what we try to do is normally it just goes unchecked. And so one of the examples that I’ve used in the past is, and you can give it a name. And when I made a YouTube video about this, I called the self-doubt Max. Max was the doubter and he was sitting in the passenger seat and you were the driver. So if you’re the driver and you have a Max in your passenger seat, if you say you want to drive from Vancouver to Las Vegas, and you’ve never made that drive before, and Max is coming with you because he’s your buddy and he always goes with you everywhere you go. He’s self-doubt.
And he says, “But we’ve never made that drive before. What if we run out of gas? What if there’s an accident? What if we get stranded? What if we get in an accident? What if we run out of water? What if our car breaks down? What if the transmission breaks? What if we get a flat tire? What if we get lost?
Page 2 of 6
What if we overheat because the AC in our car broke?” Or, “We don’t have AC in our car. We can’t go. What if we get too hot?” All these things. It could be a bazillion things that Max and whoever. You can name your self-doubting voice whatever you want. I had one of my clients name her Dora. So whatever you want, but just recall that this person, and it’s like a different part of you, another part of you, another person, see it as a separate entity, is going to be there.
And he is going to keep telling you these things that these thoughts are going to come up when you want to do something new, especially when you want to do something new. And the bigger and more exciting the new thing, but the more Max is going to be talking, the more thoughts he’s going to have. So when that happens, the way that I had taught it before was to say, Okay, we’re just going to turn everything that Max says into a strategy.” But this worked for a lot of people. And it can work. It depends where you’re at with it, but I’m going to share a different way as well. So everything that Max says, you’re going to give it an answer. So you’re going to say, he says, “Well, what if we get lost?” You can say, “Okay, well we’re going to program the GPS and we’ll have the GPS.”
He’s like, “Well, what if the GPS breaks?” Like, “Okay, well buy a map book. We’ll have that as a backup.” Okay, done. What else? What if he says, “Well, what if we run out of gas?” And then your mature voice, the one that wants to go says, “Okay, well we’ll map up the gas stations along the way. We’ll make sure that we’re always going to be on a route with a gas station.” And then he says, “Well, what if the car breaks down?” Be like, “Okay, well we’ll go make sure we get an inspection and we get it checked out before we go to make sure that there’s nothing that could go wrong. We’ll make sure it’s got a full service and everything’s ready to go.” He’s like, “Well, what if the AC breaks?” You’ll be like, “Yeah, we’ll get that taken care of in the inspection. And we’ll make sure that it’s working before we go. And if we need to, we can get it fixed along the way. We can even check to see if there’s car garages that can help us along the way if that happens.”
This is just going into the extreme. But you can come up with a strategy for everything that your self-doubting voice wants to tell you. And so that is one way to do it. And that can work. If it resonates with you and it really works, then that can be a really good way to go. But sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes your self-doubting voice is just too loud and it’s like, “But no, what if all the gas stations shut down? What if there’s another pandemic or something?” It goes nuts and it just keeps coming up with more and more. And it’s really loud and you can’t shut it down. And the strategies don’t work. So then what you’re going to need is a different way to manage this self-doubt.
Because what ultimately happens when you don’t manage it or when that strategy doesn’t work is you won’t go to Las Vegas because the self-doubting voice will win. Or you will procrastinate and be like, “Yeah, we’ll do it later. We’ll do it later.” That’s a sign that your self-doubting voice is winning. If you’re saying, “We’ll do it later,” that’s avoiding and it’s coming up with a reason why you shouldn’t do it now, meaning you are doubting yourself that it’s possible. Because if it’s something you want to do, why would you put it off? So if we’re thinking about getting a new job, for example, and you want to get a new job and your self-doubting voice is coming up, it might be a different case.
So this is a different example I’m going to use. Say your plan is to get a new job. You want to switch industries. You want to get a raise. You want to make a big jump. And say you’ve gone through this thing where your self-doubting voice came up as expected. It said, “But you don’t have the skills. You don’t have the experience. What about this? What about that? What about this?” And say you were able to not listen to any of those thoughts and you decided you were going to apply and you were going to go in an interview. You were going to go for it anyway. So say you overcame your self-doubting voice. Maybe you used the strategies and you went ahead and did it anyway. So say that happens. And then you get rejected at the interview and you fail. Then your self-doubting voice is going to get even louder.
Page 3 of 6
And it’s going to say, “See, I told you, I told you we couldn’t do it. I told you this wasn’t going to work. I told you you didn’t have enough experience and they just confirmed it.” And so your self-doubting voice is going to get louder and louder. And the strategies that you had developed before, it’s going to be easy for you to say, “Yeah, but that didn’t work. That didn’t work.” And then it’s going to be easy for you to go down the spiral of, “This sucks. Nothing works. I’ve been rejected so many times.” Even if you motivate yourself to keep going and be like, “Okay, I got to go do another one. I got to go push through.” Then your self-doubting voice just gets louder and louder and louder unless you have this next piece to manage it.
So this is what I’m going to teach you is when that happens, your self-doubting voice is still trying to protect you and now it’s got some good points. Now it actually is basing it on something. It’s saying, “But we did fail last time. I don’t want to go through that again. I don’t want to have to be rejected again. I don’t want to have to put all that work into preparing for an interview and only to be told no. I don’t want to go and embarrass myself again. I don’t want to be let down again. I don’t want to feel that disappointment.” And you can listen to it at this point. You can say, “I hear you. I get that. I know it feels dangerous.” And at that point is where coaching comes in and why it is so important. Because at this point, what people will tend to do is push through. And what I hear people saying is, “You got to keep going. You got to push through.”
And what’s happening is there’s a lot of forcing yourself to push through when you don’t want to. And people thinking that’s the answer being like, “I just got to keep pushing through. I just got to keep going.” And they’re doing it from a place of really forcing themselves instead of a place with new insight, which is just as available, but might not be as available on your own. This is where coaching really comes in is to say something like, “Okay, I get that that sucked. I get that we put everything on the line and we didn’t get that. And I understand that you don’t want to go through that again. I totally hear you on that. Acknowledge it. Say, “You do have a good point there.” And now just if that voice, that part of you was the child, and then the adult mature part of you is going to tell it what it needs to hear. And it’s like, what does it need to hear?
So for example, for me, I tried something a bunch of times it hadn’t worked and I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want to keep going. This sucks. Nothing I do works. Feels helpless.” And the mature part of me who was like, no, but we really do want to do this, had to say, “But remember. That was a long time ago. Since then you’ve had a lot of mental upgrades. You know so much more than you did before. You are in a completely different space now. You don’t even know what the likelihood of you succeeding is so much higher now. You don’t even know how you’re viewed, but this is just so much different now.” And that’s the thing. I couldn’t even be aware of how different I am because I can’t see myself. I’m not perceiving myself. But it’s the same for you. When you do this and you get new insights every time, you are increasing your chances at success exponentially. The problem is people, they don’t get new insight so they don’t change their thinking.
And they think that just pushing through over and over and over is what is going to do what they need to do. But pushing through is like saying, “I’m going to keep going with the same crappy thinking. So this isn’t going to work. This sucks. No matter what I do, I can’t get the job. I just don’t have enough experience. I don’t have what it takes. I don’t have the education. They’re intimidated by me.” Whatever it is that your brain is telling you. And it’s like saying, “Okay, well I just got to keep going because maybe there’ll be somebody who doesn’t think that, but I got to keep going. I just got to push through.” That’s pushing through with the same crappy thinking is not the same as changing your thinking and proceeding with new insight. That is very different. And that’s the difference between the people who get rejected a hundred times and say, “You just got to keep going. You just got to keep pushing through,” versus the people who get coached, the people who get those new insights and seek those new insights out.
Page 4 of 6
Those people are going to be successful much, much faster. And it could even be the difference between two interviews and 10 interviews, 20 interviews. It’s huge. So don’t underestimate the power of new insights, and the power of acknowledging your self-doubt, acknowledging that person and saying, “I hear you, Max. I understand why you’re scared. I understand why you think that’s dangerous. I totally get it. Makes sense.” Now how could we look at this in a way where you could see that the truth is also there that is helpful to us? The truth that we are farther along now. The truth that we have learned so much from those other failures. The truth that we have a lot of successes that we haven’t even seen. The truth that we are farther ahead than we thought. The truth that we actually do have more insight if we just looked for it, if we understood it, if we sought out the insight that we need to move forward differently.
So that is how you approach it differently in order to have faster, more efficient, more laser focused success. The strategies part, that is very effective. Take your self-doubting thoughts. You know they’re going to be there. And then map out strategies for them. Execute the strategies. And then if you fail after doing so, that’s totally fine. It’s not a problem. What needs to happen is you need to create safety within yourself so that you can keep trying again. But when you try again, you want to be excited to try again and be like, “I have this new thing now that I know. And I can’t wait to try this out. I can’t wait to try this mindset on during the interview. I can’t wait to share this new thing with the people I’m going to talk to right.”
Instead of, “Oh, I have to push through. I have to keep going no matter what, even though I’ve been rejected the last few times, even though I don’t have enough experience, nobody seems to want me. No one’s going to hire me. It’s very competitive out there. The other candidates have more to offer than I do, but I got to keep doing it. I got to keep going anyway. Maybe someone will be different.” Very, very different mindsets. And that is essentially the difference. And I really want to drive that point home is pushing through with the same crappy thinking is not the answer. So why it works so well, because it’s literally a foolproof thing. You can’t fail if you proceed efficiently. And if you do it, then you’re able to do it faster. You’re not going to take so much pain in the rejection. It’s not going to be a gut wrenching knife through the heart thing.
It’s going to be totally different. It’s going to be like, okay, I’m really curious. What happened there? What did I do? What did I think? And you get to gently take yourself out of the place where the child would be, or the Max, the version of yourself that’s doubting yourself. You get to gently partner with that version of yourself. Make it your ally and be like, “Okay, tell me what’s going on. Tell me what you’re thinking. Tell me what you’re feeling. Okay. You have a good point. I see why you’re bringing that up. I get you. Okay.” And then reason with that part of you from a loving place being like, “I totally see what you mean. Yeah. I understand.” And then as the adult, as the mature version of yourself saying, “Okay, but we still want this. Right? We still want to do it. Okay. This is how we can approach it this time.”
And the coaching aspect of it is so important. That’s where you often cannot get those insights on your own. Now if you’ve been coached a lot, you might be better at finding them. You might be like, “Okay, this worked last time. This helped me last time,” because you will have had new insights. But if you’re not getting coached, then it’s easy to just fall into the same trap of going the same over and over without really knowing that you’re not getting a new insight or changing. You’ll know if you’ve gotten a new insight when you are excited a new to take action again. If you’re not, then the likelihood is you are pushing through from a forceful place with the same crappy thoughts. So what’s going to be required of you is the awareness that that’s happening. You’re going to need to watch yourself think. You’re going to need to be very aware of where you are in managing your self-doubt.
Page 5 of 6
And the one part is going to need to talk to the other part. You’re going to need to understand each other and become an alliance, not in battle. So you don’t want to be shutting it down. You don’t want to be telling it to shut up. Go away. You want to partner with it. And so the result is that you do create safety within yourself. And there’s nothing you can’t do. You’re not afraid anymore. You get to teach your doubt. You get to educate your doubt in a loving way like you would educate a less mature version of yourself, or like you would educate a child, how you would lovingly teach a child. The doubt is the kid that’s scared and you are the more mature adult that can enlighten the child about the world and what is also true. The part of you that wants to go forward and wants to do big things, that’s the grown up more mature part of you and it still wants what it wants. So it can’t let the less mature part of you win.
So with that, that’s what I wanted to share. And one last thing. So a lot of people say to me that they have invested before and they don’t want to be burned again as far as they didn’t get the results they wanted when they invested in a career coaching program or with a coach or whatever in the past. And I want to say, I get that. And this is kind of the self-doubt coming up. It’s like saying, “Well, I did this before and it didn’t work. And I don’t want to go through that again because I felt like I wasted money. I felt like I wasted time. I didn’t feel like I got what I wanted and I don’t want to feel disappointed again.”
And it’s kind of the same as what I was talking about. It’s like you get to hear that out. You get to say, “I understand that. I hear that you have a good point. I understand why you would be scared, why you would think this is dangerous.” And then if you feel called, if you feel like this resonates differently with you than the other thing you signed up for, the other thing you paid for, because I guarantee you this is different. What we do inside my program is different. And I know because I signed up for literally 30, 40 programs that I did not get the results for, but I kept signing up, and until I found the work that I am doing now, and I was able to get the results that I wanted and be the testimonials and the success stories now, because this is really different work.
And you get to decide whether or not this resonates with you, whether listening to the podcast has really resonated with you, and you’re like, “I really have learned a lot. I feel a lot different, but I haven’t applied it yet. I haven’t got the results that I want. I haven’t really gone deep to apply and execute what you’re talking about on the podcast.” Then is this different? And you get to tell yourself that. You get to be like, “I know I invested in the past. I know we didn’t get what we wanted. I know it’s dangerous. It feels dangerous. But I can actually make a better, more educated decision now because now I have an investment under my belt that didn’t work or maybe two or maybe three.” And I have literally 40. I’m not even exaggerating/ but you can do that. And if you feel called to, because you will be in a better position to make a better decision now than you were before. Because the younger, less mature self didn’t know what it didn’t know. Now you know differently.
And what I want to say about that is that you get to listen to your inner self and you get to have that decision feel good for you. And the reason why I do the podcast the way that I do is because I want people to feel really comfortable. I like for you to know I’m here. I have been helping you this whole time. I have been giving you everything that I could give you without actually coaching you. So when you come in and you actually get coached, that’s just going to be the next level of what you experience here by passively listening. And yeah, there’s value in passively listening, but there’s a hundred times more value in actually getting coached, having your own brain with your own thoughts actually getting coached. And I look forward for you to hear what my clients have to say about that.
I interview two of my clients and you’ll be hearing about their milestone results and their experiences, not next week but the week after. So they will be able to kind of explain and describe what it feels like as being longtime podcast listeners as well who have now had the benefit of being coached. So creating safety within yourself so that you don’t have to be afraid and you don’t have to be the child that is stopping yourself from doing what you want. Because it’s like if we look at the child’s situation, it’s like
Page 6 of 6
we want what’s best for the child. We want them to have amazing experiences. We want them to learn how to ride the bike. We want them to learn how to swim. But of course they are scared. And if it were up to them, they wouldn’t do any of it. Maybe some kids would.
I know I wouldn’t have. I remember the first time I rode a bike and I had those training wheels on the back. I had to have my dad hold the back of the bike for me because I was scared that I was going to fall. It felt really scary anyway. It makes sense and we got to acknowledge that part of ourselves, especially if we have fallen down a whole bunch of times and it has hurt. We have to acknowledge ourselves. But the one last thing that I want to say is that if we did fall down and then we just stayed down, never got back up again, it would literally be saying, “Well, I tried a new food. I didn’t like it. So I’m never going to try a new food again.” Or it would be like saying, say I hired someone in my business and it didn’t work out, like saying, “I hired somebody and it didn’t work out so I’m never hiring anybody ever again.”
It’s like, no, it might take a few hires to figure out what works for me. It might take a few hires for me to get the experience to be able to interview efficiently to know who’s going to be the right fit. And I have hired sometimes contractors who have just completely ghosted me and been like taking the money and just been like, “Okay, well see you later.” And if I took that experience and said, “Okay, well I’m just never hiring again,” that would completely stop my growth. Yet that is a choice I could make, but why would I want to? It’s like saying, “I fell down. I don’t want to get back up. I don’t want to get hurt again so I’m just going to stay sitting here.” You get what I’m saying.
Anyways, you get to create the safety within yourself. You get to have your own back every time you get up again. And that is where the great freedom is. So with that said, we are welcoming new clients into the six figure curriculum and we have a four day training coming up. It’ll be starting on Monday, September the 5th. If you want to join us for that, you’re going to want to go to www.nataliefisher.ca/createdemandforyou. I’m going to be teaching you the behaviors to create demand for you as a candidate. And this applies to you whether you’re switching industries, switching jobs, whether you want to get a new job in the same industry. It’s all going to be very applicable for you whether you want to get better paid, you want to make a career jump, big pay jump, little pay jump, switching careers, switching industries, you’re going to want to be a part of this because I’m going to be sharing powerful examples of clients and how they’ve applied this work.
I’m going to be sharing the steps for how to do this and the mindsets for how to do this. And I’m going to approach it in a way that you haven’t seen before. And it’s going to be a blast. And I will have the opportunity for you to get coached by me as well. So go to that link. I’ll put it down in the show notes as well, www.nataliefisher.ca/createdemandforyou, no spaces, just how it sounds. And we will be going through everything you need to know. And yeah, I will talk to you about joining me inside the program because there is so much more inside the program. Getting your job is just the beginning. And I hope to see you there. All right. Talk to you next week.
If I were to sum it up, I would say the most common thing people come to me with is I’m going on interview after interview after interview and I’m not getting the offer. What am I doing wrong? So I’ve put together a freebie where you can get this download completely free. It has the eight reasons that this is happening. And I break down each reason very specifically and how to fix it. So to grab that download, the link is in the show notes. You can click on that link. You just have to enter your information. It’s called The Eight Reasons You’re Not Getting Hired, and I will help you figure that out. I will see you in the freebie. Okay. Talk to you soon.

 

Enjoy the Show?