I’ve been spending time with self-doubt lately. I guess it is inevitable, I have been learning and practicing new skills as a seer and energy tracker and stepping out of the spiritual closet as I start Wise Women Gathering. Plus I am crafting my own website instead of hiring someone to do it for me, and my rusty Word Press skills got me off to a bad start and sent me down the wrong path a few times as I have recovered from some early bad choices.
Of course, this is not my first rodeo. In these last five decades of circling around the sun have spent a fair amount of time working through self-doubt . I have developed some some ways to deal with it, or not deal with it, and I have developed some tools and strategies for not letting it get the better of me.
Last week during the Multidimensional Mentorship call, Ana Maria talked directly into my listening when she talked about developing a persona for self doubt. She talked about getting clear about how self doubt shows up for us, and she guided us through some questions to help us develop a persona for self-doubt. What does it feel like? Sound like? Are there patterns? This helped me see that self doubt was showing up like a grey fog that enveloped me, making it hard to see my strengths and identify the next steps for moving forward.
I have worked with turning limiting beliefs into personas before, but I think this time I was able to see the persona so well because I had been spending so much time noticing how self-doubt showed up for me. Once I was able to see self-doubt as a persona I could start to treat it as something outside of my true self. In the next exercise I saw the fog moving into an enclosed shape like a siren. This was a really powerful visual for me.
When we moved on to talking about strategies for dealing for self doubt I could see that in addition to some of I already had, like breathing through my heart and thinking of the tools I have and how much I had grown; since I could see the Siren of Self-Doubt as something separate than my true self. It was ego trying to protect me. I could thank it for the work that it was doing, and then ask it to step aside and sit in the comfy chair over there with a book as I moved forward.
I have been practicing thanking it and setting it aside when it shows up. And Balsamic moon is a great time great time to set aside what is not working for me.
I felt like my understanding was being validated when yesterday morning the Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip of the Day was about Talking to Your Inner Critic which suggests creating distance from it. But I could tell that I had really started to internalize these lessons when I found myself sharing them in a coaching session this afternoon and helping someone else identify their self-doubt persona.
What does your self-doubt person look like?
