Doubt. Particularly self-doubt. Do you suffer from it? If you’re like me, you may still have a healthy confidence in your abilities and yet still find yourself experiencing irrational yet powerful voices in your head, questioning your abilities and choices: “What will my audience think of this?” “Is this stupid?” “Will my students laugh me out of the room?” Now that I think about it, despite however many countless times I have felt that way or experienced those worries, not once has one of those attacks of doubt proved to be an accurate premonition of an actual disaster. The plaguing, paralyzing doubt has just never proven itself to be a valid or worthwhile use of my limited and precious energy, creativity, and intelligence. Nevertheless, the act of doubting remains a mental habit of sorts that’s incredibly difficult to break.
So, just today, as I was preparing a workshop for an important audience, the “Doubt Monster” paid me a visit. “Oh no,” I thought, “Here it comes again, with its words of worry, warnings of failure, and reminders of my own inadequacy.” I have noticed, though, that labeling the monster, giving it a name, recognizing its presence, and reminding myself of its accuracy rate of exactly zero percent, all truly help to minimize its power. But it still makes its presence known enough to be a bother.
So today, I thought, “Hmm… what if doubt can be a good thing?” What if I can work with this? What if the Doubt Monster can be rehabilitated into something useful and inspiring—a positive muse, perhaps?
No. I can hear what you’re saying out there. I am not referring to tired old clichés about how doubt can bring out your best, that it means you have high standards, or that it somehow keeps you from making mistakes. A few too many people have informed me that “it’s good to be a little nervous; keeps you on your toes!” I’m so sick of hearing that blatant lie. The truth is that no one is at their best when they are in the grip of anxiety. And anxiety is exactly the state that doubt invites in when it gets its foot in the door of our consciousness.
No, I don’t mean any of that when I say that doubt can be a good thing. I arrived at this novel thought today after spending a week wrestling with doubt as I wrote my daily Morning Pages. Yes, every morning, within a couple minutes of waking up (after coffee, of course!), I go to my pages and write for about 45 minutes. Doubt came up a lot this week. In addition to actually experiencing the self-doubt as usual, I also found myself writing open-ended questions “aloud” in my Morning Pages. “Is my doubt accurate?” “How do I keep it from getting in the way of my work?” “Why does it seem that finding success with my talents in the world only makes the doubt more pronounced and insistent?”
When I wrestle with such an issue in my pages, I do have faith (isn’t that the opposite of doubt?) that my brain is already working on the issue, perhaps unconsciously, and that an insight can be expected soon. It happens to me all the time. Sure enough, today I found myself even grateful for my doubt.
How is that possible? I got thinking about people I had encountered recently who are generally unhappy, sometimes downright miserable, and who are almost impossible to help. They can’t—or really don’t want to—change or see reality from alternative perspectives. They are convinced of their misery, convinced of the unfair cruelty of their situations, and even convinced that change or positive transformation or growth are either impossible or something to be laughed at. These people possess certainty in their misery. There is no room for doubt.
Hmm . . . Am I jealous of these people? The ones who seem to have no doubts about their place in the world? No doubts about what the day will bring? Certainly no doubts about their way of thinking. They are completely free of the very thing that I thought was my enemy! And yet, they remain miserable, stuck, and suffering.
So I think that doubt is somehow connected to flexibility of thought. Whatever cognitive capacities that allow us to imagine potential failures is also inherently linked to the capacity to envision alternative (and better) futures! What if my doubt does not need to be seen merely as an intellectual form of self-sabotage but rather as a show-offy performance of a vibrant, creative, and agile brain? If being certain means being stuck, then I would rather befriend the doubt. Of that, I am certain. I don’t doubt that. Ha ha!
So, how to befriend the doubt? What a fabulous new project to explore! At this point, I have inklings that it could be turned outward—that instead of doubting my own good ideas, I could somehow take the negative creativity that drives doubt and focus it on what I see as external blocks to success and growth. In other words, can I use my powers of doubt to undermine outside challenges instead of my own talents? That’s what I will obsess over this week!
The Power of Performance 