When in Doubt

There’s never going to be a point at which your brain isn’t going to doubt you and question your ability to succeed, no matter how talented or capable you are or how many times you’ve succeeded or failed in the past.

Most of us are waiting for the doubts to go away. We think that if we could make our doubts go away then we would find our belief.  

But on today’s episode of the podcast, I’m sharing the idea that belief isn’t the absence of doubt—believing in ourselves is a choice we are allowed to make even while we have doubts.

It’s your brain’s job to doubt you. But you never have to let those doubts stop you. Doubt is what your brain does. Believing is what you can do and today’s podcast episode is all about how to do just that.

Transcript 

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it, but every result in your life is 100% because of the thoughts you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome.

Hello podcast universe! Welcome to episode 255 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price and I am your host and your coach this morning. I am delighted to have you here. Are you ready for this? We are going to have a really good little episode here today, and hopefully by the end you will feel really encouraged and determined and empowered and ready to get. After all the things that you want to be creating in your life.

So, I'm really excited about it. I just want you to know that, like I'm in the middle of it with you. I am doing this work myself, and so I'm doing all the practice on this to be able to believe in myself right alongside with you. Right? I am not here on this podcast telling you all of this, because I've got it mastered and I've got it figured out, and I never let my doubts stop me. But because I'm in the middle of the practice of it and these are the things that I'm learning while I do that practice. And I'm right there alongside with you.

And I just want to share some of the things that I have learned recently about doubt and about doing it anyway. All right. So, over the weekend I was watching the latest season of Full Swing, which is kind of a documentary style series on Netflix about professional golfers. And these are the people who are at the top of their sport, right? The top of the golf game, which is arguably, I guess, one of the most difficult sports in the world. Like, I don't really know a lot about it, and I've never actually even swung a golf club.

But I always find it so fascinating to watch people who are good at what they do talk about that experience and talk about what it's like, you know, because I find that their brains just work like all the rest of our brains, right? And so, you know, you might think like, well, what do I have in common with these elite golfers? Right. Who are the best in the world at what they do? But there was this part. They showed an interview with Luke Donald, who was the captain of the 2023 European team for the 2023 Ryder Cup.

And before I watched this series, I didn't even know what the Ryder Cup was. But basically Europe has a team of 12 golfers, America has a team of 12 golfers and they compete head to head in these matches. It's a little different than like a traditional golf game where they're all competing individually and they're competing as a team. And I just want to let you know that if you have not watched the 2023 Writers Cup or this season of full swing and you don't want a spoiler, you should probably stop the podcast right now because I'm going to spoil the ending for you.

But the European team actually won the Writers Cup in 2023. And at the end of it, they're interviewing the captain, the the European team captain, whose name is Luke Donald. And I want you to listen to what he says in this interview, and I'm going to play that for you and then talk about it. It's just been a wave of emotions, uh, you know, from really asking myself if I could do this and. I'm just proud. How proud moment for me. And. Can't wait to celebrate with the guys. You always doubt yourself, but I've, uh, a lot of my career, I've backed myself pretty much as well, so. And I had faith in these 12 guys. Is this the proudest moment of your career? Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Okay. Did you hear what he said? You know, the interviewer asked him. Was there ever any doubt? Did you ever have any doubts that this was going to be the outcome? And what did Luke Donald say? He said. You always doubt yourself. You always doubt yourself. And then he said, but I've also backed myself as well. And I think this is so important for all of us to realize. I just think it's so powerful that there that you understand that there is never going to be a point at which your brain isn't going to doubt you.

You're never going to become so accomplished and so good at at the things in your life that your brain doesn't offer you doubts. Like we're never going to get to a place where that goes away. That is normal. It's not going away. It's part of being a human. No matter how many times you succeed or fail. Right. But we don't have to stop there. Like once our brain has offered us the doubts, we still have an opportunity to move forward.

We can then make the choice to back ourselves, to choose to believe in ourselves, to choose to try anyway. And I think most of us are waiting for the doubts to go away, at least. Like I find that in my own life I'm just wishing and hoping and waiting for the doubts to go away so I can do the things that I want to do. And we think that if the doubts went away, then all we would be left with this belief and and the road would clear and we could accomplish everything that we wanted to. Right. But I want to point out and emphasize today that belief isn't the absence of doubt, right? Like if all your doubt went away, what you would be left with wouldn't be belief, right? Like if all your doubts went away, you would have sure knowledge, right? Like Luke, Donald no longer had doubts.

He had the sure knowledge that they won. Right? But before we get there. Before we get to sure knowledge. We are sort of in this battle between doubt and belief, and we have to make choices to believe in the face of that doubt, in the presence of that doubt. Okay. It's deciding that even with the reality of your doubts, we're going to believe anyway. So it's like recognizing that I'm gonna doubt and I'm gonna believe.

Doubt is what my brain does. Belief is what I do. And so that's really what I want to talk to you about today, about backing yourself and letting your brain out. That's totally okay, right? We don't need to make that part go away, but we need to spend more time backing ourselves. We need to spend more time deliberately choosing to believe in ourselves, even while the doubts are still present. So today, that's what I want to talk about. How do we doubt and do it anyway? So the first thing is that you don't need to pretend that the doubts aren't there.

So recently I was talking to my son. He had to take a lie detector test to get clearance for his job. And as he was going in to take that test, right, like the stakes were really high, he needed to pass the test so that he could get clearance, that he can move on and continue to perform in his job. And, you know, it's an important part of his, his job. And so he was feeling, you know, a lot of pressure. He never had a lie detector test. It was like the FBI was administering it. So, like it just felt like super scary, right?

And so, he was naturally nervous. And the guy that was administering the test to him told him, don't tell yourself to relax. Like, don't tell yourself to be calm and to relax because you're not relaxed. And the machine will read that as a deception, right? Like you're trying to pretend that you're relaxed when you're really not. And he was like, just allow yourself to be nervous and don't try to pretend that you are not. And I just thought that was so interesting, right? That that our, our brain and our body can read our deception when we're trying to pretend that we don't have any doubts. I think it's the same thing. And I think it's interesting to notice that any kind of like deception that we have with ourselves is going to take energy. Like, if I'm telling myself that I shouldn't have doubts and that I don't want to feel this way, that resistance against my doubts requires energy, and that is energy that I can't use to believe in myself. And instead of producing all that energy, what I want to recommend is that we just let the doubts be there. We just recognize, like, okay, brain, I see you.

I hear your doubts. You're scared. I see that you're scared of being disappointed or looking dumb or failing. It makes sense that you're there, but you can just observe them and let them go. Like let them just exist. Let your doubts just exist and stop spending so much energy like battling them, right? Like, if you think about it evolutionarily, your brain needed to be able to offer you doubts. It needed to be able to evaluate your ability to be successful, right? So that you could avoid dying, and so that you could use your energy in purposeful ways, like getting food and building shelters and making sure like you were going to use that energy for things that you could be successful at.

So evolutionarily, it made sense that your brain would offer you doubts and so that you would question things that you might not be successful at and increase your chances of not surviving. Right. But I just want you to remember that because that's true. Because your brain is just doing its job. You could just let it. You can just let it offer you those doubts, let it offer you its concerns that you might not be good at this thing, or you might not be successful at this thing, but recognizing that your brain isn't telling you facts, it's just doing its job to keep you alive.

And when the doubts come, it's not because you can't. It's not because you shouldn't. It's not because you don't have any business trying. When the doubts come, it's just my brain doing its job. Now it's time to get to work. And by that I mean like doing the mental work that we need to do to believe in ourselves so that we can continue forward in spite of our doubts. And I think that's a really powerful thing to recognize, to just stop battling the doubts and let them just be there. Right.

Those doubts are how your brain believes it is protecting you and keeping you safe. And you don't need to spend a lot of energy making those go away. You can use your energy toward building your belief, right? So how do we do that? What is that part of the work look like and and what will help along the way? So as you're building your belief, the first thing that I want you to think about is starting your belief at 50%. Okay. So a lot of times when we think about like we have to believe in ourselves, we start thinking like we need to believe in ourselves 100% and that we and then we can't have any doubts.

Right. So, I think it's really powerful to like reduce your expectations on that front and really think about, okay, what if I just believed in myself 50%? So I'm going to give you an example of this. Last Saturday I was supposed to run 15 miles in to do my marathon preparation, and that felt really, really far to me. In my mind, I had a lot of doubts that I was going to be able to do that. It was three miles longer than I've ever run in this training regimen, like in one long continuous training session, and it's like three times longer than my usual, like short runs that I've been doing during the week.

Right? And so, it was really intimidating, to say the least. And all week leading up to Saturday, my brain was doubting. All week my brain was like, I don't think you can do this. I don't think you can run that far. Right? And it started like really feeling like this was almost an impossible task that that I was going to face on on Saturday. And I started noticing that my brain was sort of like giving me odds of like 90 or 95% chance of failure, like it was just like, I don't think there's like there's a very tiny, minuscule chance that you'll ever be able to do this.

But notice the truth the odds of completing this task, the odds of finishing the 15 miles, like my odds, were not 5% or 10%, right? They were always 50%. Like, at the worst, there was a 50% chance of failure and a 50% chance of success. Right? All week my chances were 50% because I hadn't done it yet. And so there was a 50% chance I could, and also a 50% chance that I wouldn't be able to.

Up until I completed it. I had a 50/50 shot at it right now. Notice that my brain wasn't even giving me 50%. My brain was grudgingly giving me 5 or 10%, like maybe 25, right? Like maybe there's a chance. But like, my brain wasn't even giving me the actual odds, which were 50%. And so I think this is a really actually a good place to start in your belief. The truth is you have just as big a chance right now of doing what you want as you don't.

It is 5050, so at least give yourself that. Start with the facts that I have a 50% chance of winning here, of succeeding here, of accomplishing my goal here. All right. That's a really good place to start with your belief that before I even start, I have a 50% chance of being able to do it. Okay. Next, I want you to really increase the amount of time you spend thinking about your success.

So. Your brain is constantly imagining how bad it's going to be, how bad it could go, how many ways you could fail, how many ways that it could go badly. And it's actually using an enormous amount of imagination to imagine all the ways that it could go wrong. Right? Like, I can't tell you how many dreams I've had this year of my brain coming up with scenarios about like, why I didn't complete the marathon or why I didn't finish 29, 29.

And like, there's always like some catastrophic thing, like there's a plane crash or there's a snowstorm or there's like these absolutely incredible things that come up to stop me. One of my dreams, I broke my leg. Right? And so, like my brain has imagined all kinds of, like, worst case scenarios. And what I do is intentionally spend time thinking about my success, thinking about what it will be like when I cross that finish line. And even when I'm in the run in the middle of the run, in the middle of that 15 miles, I'm thinking about what it's going to feel like when I'm done, what it's going to feel like when I've finished that last mile, and how proud I'm going to feel.

And I spend time thinking about that moment. And my point is that you have a powerful imagination, and some of the time, at least half of the time, you should use it. Imagining your success and imagining the accomplishment of the things that you want. Okay, the next thing that I want to talk about to help you, like, believe in yourself and do it anyway, even in the midst of your doubts, is to be there for yourself. And so I know that I've talked about this before, but I love what Luke Donald said there.

He said, I've backed myself for years. I love this phrase so much. Like there's so much love and friendship and respect in that statement that like, like you can imagine the amount of doubts that he's had over the years in his golf career. You can imagine the doubts and the and the detractors that have been in the the media or in the press or the fans are on Twitter or whatever. Probably he's heard so many comments about his game, right? And probably a lot of them were not good at times.

And yet, what does he say there? He says, I've backed myself. And I want you to know, in a world where you can't control anybody else, you do get to control backing yourself. And I really want you to think about the power in that. The power of backing yourself. Like the power of, like going with yourself and being your fan and being your your cheerleader as you go and do these hard things. And so I think it's really important that you commit to how you're going to treat yourself no matter what.

Like, believing in yourself is so much easier when you know that no matter what, you're going to be friendly and kind and warm to yourself, that you are not going to be mean, right? Because that just increases our doubts. Like the stakes get so much higher if we know we're going to face our own criticism as well. All right. So I want you to imagine taking your doubts to someone that you love and that you trust when you're scared and you're sure that, like, you can't do that. And I want you to imagine them telling you, like, I agree, you probably can't write like I have no faith in you either, right? No, that person in our life is going to bolster us and encourage us and remind us of all the times we have been successful.

They're going to express our belief in us, and we want to have that same kind of relationship that we have with ourselves.

You know, on Saturday when. When my doubts were so strong. I woke up that morning. I woke up early so that I could get get the run in early. I knew it was going to take me a good long time because I'm not a fast runner and my doubts were so strong. I was getting dressed, I was putting on my shoes and my doubts were just like roaring right. And my brain had imagined like how bad it was going to be, how I wasn't going to be able to do it. And I just told myself, in that moment I'm lacing up my shoes and I'm like, no, like, I'm going to go with you. No matter what happens today, I will be with you.

I told myself, if we need to stop and cry, we'll do it. If we need to stop and walk, we'll do it. If we need to stop and throw up, we'll do it. If we need to sit down and rest and have another cry and throw a tantrum, then we're going to do it. Whatever it takes, we're going to do it. And I will go with you. I will help you. I will be beside you. Now, that might sound silly because like, where else am I going to go, right? If I have to go to a run, where else am I going to go? But there is something to it. There's something so powerful in emotionally going with yourself and being your friend and your support crew and telling yourself, no matter what happens today, I am with you.

I am on your side. And it was such a relief to me to know that like, no matter how bad this gets and no matter how ugly it gets, like I've got me and and we're going to get this done together. I had a friend who sent me a post by Corey Mascara, and the post read, if your desire to change is driven by self-hate, you will reinforce the pattern of conditional love. And I thought that was so powerful, you know, to recognize that, like, when we require ourselves to perform in order to love ourselves, all we're doing is reinforcing that pattern of conditional love.

And as you think about believing in yourself, I want you to recognize that believing in yourself and going with yourself and like backing yourself, you have an opportunity there to. Instead of reinforcing the pattern of conditional love, you can renounce that pattern and you can reinvent that pattern. You can reinvent the relationship with yourself to one of warmth and unconditional love. And this is an opportunity to do that. You know, I think this is one of the reasons that our doubts get so loud is because we're so afraid of the criticism and the self-loathing and the self-hate that might come when and if we fail, when and if we don't achieve what we want.

And so I think it's so important that you back yourself and that no matter what, no matter what it looks like, that you're going to be good to yourself. You're going to be a friend to yourself. And along with that, I think it's really important that you allow it to be hard. You allow yourself to be bad at it. You even allow yourself to fail to have it be messy without making an impact on the way that you love and care for yourself. So many of our doubts are being fueled by our self-criticism. Like what we're actually scared of is ourselves, our own expectations.

And so if you can really work on backing yourself, you can do so much to be able to have the doubt and move forward, instead of having the doubt cripple you and paralyze you. Okay. The last thing that I wanted to say is that another really good way to build belief in yourself is to find the smallest part of it that you can believe in and start there. Right. So when my brain is like, there's no way you can do 15 miles, I'm, I just break it down.

Can I do one? Can I do one mile? And then I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm so good at one mile, right? Like for sure I can you break it down into that smallest part and believe in that and start there. Can I run one more? Can I run one more right. What is the smallest part of what you're trying to accomplish and start your belief there? Can I run one mile? Can I run one minute? Can I write one sentence? Can I get one client? Can I plan one meal? Can I record one podcast? Can I think one positive thought about my body today? Can I choose love in this moment? Start with the smallest part and let it accumulate.

So many times I think think we have to like, you know, battle back our doubts and believe these big, huge, impossible things about ourself when instead I think the opposite is probably true. I think we can just let our doubts sit there and just build our belief one tiny moment at a time, one tiny task at a time. You know, I used to think that I would get to a place where I no longer had any doubts and that I could just feel confident all the time. But one of the most powerful, life changing things I've learned is that I can doubt and do it anyway.

I was just talking to my own coach about this, like kind of really wrestling with this idea of, like, whether I can or whether I can't. And I was really, you know, feeling like my doubts were disqualifying me before I even started. And I loved what she said. She just pointed out like that, that part of me that doubts, she said, that is a voice to nurture but not to make a decision from. And I just love that perspective. Like there is a good biologic, evolutionary reason for your brain to doubt, and we can nurture and appreciate that voice.

We don't have to fight that. But it is not a place to make a decision from. We got to make our decisions about our life from our belief. And so I really want to encourage you to just hold your doubts looser than you are right now, and hold your beliefs a little tighter than you have dared to until now, so that you can do it anyway. Doubt doesn't mean don't. There can be doubt and you can do it anyway. As Luke Donald said so beautifully, you always doubt yourself.

You always doubt yourself. But I've always backed myself as well. Doubt is what your brain does. Believing is what you do. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome. I love you for listening and I'll see you next week.

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If you're serious about changing your life, you first have to change your mind. And the best way to do that is through coaching. I work with my clients one on one to help them change their thoughts and their feelings about themselves, their lives, and their challenges so that they can live a life they love. If you'd like to work with me one on one, you can learn more and schedule a free call to try coaching for yourself at Aprilpricecoaching.com.