Ask Che: Stop negotiating with doubt

“Dear Che,

How do I know the difference between what I should doubt and what I should feel confident about? — Trying to Tell the Difference”

“Dear Trying to Tell the Difference,”

First, I want you to notice what a courageous question you have just asked.

Most people never investigate their doubt and the anxiety it causes. They believe doubt is objective, and it is not.

Doubt tells you what you are afraid to become, and there is a truth hiding inside your question: doubt and confidence are not strangers to one another. They have a relationship. They live on the same spectrum, and what moves you along that spectrum, away from doubt, toward confidence, is doing the thing you care about. In some way. In some shape. In some form.

Take a deep and compassionate breath here and imagine that you are holding doubt in one hand and confidence in the other. Which one is heavier for you? Keep that answer in mind, because one of the biggest lies we have ever been told is that confident people do not experience doubt. They do.

Every entrepreneur. Every athlete. Every artist. Every parent. Every leader. Every person who has ever loved deeply or dreamed boldly has questioned themselves.

The difference is not that confident people have less doubts. The difference is that they refuse to let doubt make the decisions.

I think we have misunderstood doubt for an exceedingly long time. We tend to treat it as the enemy. I do not. Doubt began as one of our greatest protectors. For centuries, our ancestors lived in precarious situations, and doubt, like fear, is a protector from uncertainties. It makes us pause when we do not feel safe and informs us when facing risk. Our culture is hard-wired for fear and protection; doubt is essential to our safety, but we must know when doubt is real and when we need to interrogate it, because doubt can prevent us from reaching for something new and possible.

Sometimes doubt is the voice of the world, and not the internal knowing that says let us try. It rings like a fire alarm before we do something important. It rings before writing your first book. Before asking someone out. Before applying for a promotion. Before starting a business. Before speaking the truth. It sounds the same.

Doubt is not lying to you. Sometimes doubt is valid, but sometimes it is an overbearing parent. The real danger comes when protection never knows when to step aside. Protection is beautiful. Every parent protects a child. Every immune system protects the body. Every instinct tries to preserve life, but protection that never goes off duty eventually becomes imprisonment. Doubt begins as a guardian. Left unchallenged, it can become a prison. That is the moment we stop living our lives and begin living inside our fears.

So, we must always ask the question: is this self-doubt mine, or someone else’s voice? Watch a four-year-old. She does not wonder whether she can become an astronaut. She simply announces that she will. Our entire society is designed around being evaluated, and somewhere between report cards, comparison, and expectations, we learn to put more trust in the external world than in our own.

Eventually, we make mistakes with those borrowed voices for our own inner voice. The tragedy is not that we learned to doubt. The tragedy is that we forgot what our own voice sounded like before the world became so loud.

Years ago, a teacher I admired told me, “You are a wonderful storyteller, but you are not a very good writer.” I believed that sentence for years. Today, writing is one of the central parts of my work and my life. The teacher was misinformed and did not know how to teach me and certainly did not know how to help me. Sometimes a person will try to dissuade you from doing something because they do not know how to do it, or how to help you.

For so many years that teacher’s statement played in my head until I erased it.

Never allow someone else’s opinion to become the author of your future. Most of us believe confidence comes first. We think, “Once I feel confident, then I’ll begin.” Life rarely works that way. Confidence does not come before action. Confidence comes from action because confidence is something we build. It is not something with which we are born.

So, the real question is not whether you feel doubt. You will. The real question is what you do when it arrives.