Blog Posts For Our Practitioner Community

It’s easy to doubt yourself in this business. 

Maybe you want to launch a private coaching practice, but you’re afraid of failure.

Maybe you want to lead online group classes, but you’re worried you won’t have anything valuable to teach or that you won’t enroll enough people to make your efforts worth it.

Maybe you want to start a blog to generate business, but you don’t trust your writing skills or your voice.

Maybe you fret that you don’t yet know enough to work with clients or you feel like a fraud. You know, the proverbial, “Who am I to be telling others what to do and how to get better? I mean, at least once a month I still stand over the sink and shovel in leftovers for dinner. I’m a fraud!”

Self-doubt is practically universal — in the health coaching business and in the world more generally. If you show me someone who is completely free from doubt, I will give you my beloved Vitamix and all my vacation money.

If you’ve read some of the other posts on our Practitioners-only blog, you know that I’m currently training to become certified as a functional medicine health coach through the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy. In a recent lecture by positive psychologist Louisa Jewell, we learned about overcoming self-doubt. The topic resonated with me because I’ve wrestled with self-doubt — and I fall victim to its consequences more often than I care to admit.

I suspect I’m not alone, so I wanted to share what I learned.

Overcoming self-doubt starts with recognizing how it shows up in our lives. Then, it’s all about knowing key ways to combat it.

Here are the top five ways self-doubt shows up in our lives and wreaks havoc:

1. Self-handicapping. This is when you ensure you will fail by engaging in a self-sabotaging behavior or obscuring the reasons for failure. Say you’re doing an introductory session with a client on a Friday. So on Thursday night you go out and get drunk. You wake up hungover and are functioning at about 40 percent capacity that next morning. By having a let-loose Thursday night, you’ve ensured that if you perform poorly during the session and the client doesn’t sign on, you have an external factor to blame.

2. Imposter syndrome. This is when you constantly attribute your successes to someone or something else. “Oh, it was just luck.” “Oh, Sally, did most of the work. I was just the sidekick!” “I look nice today? Oh, gosh, it’s all smoke and mirrors.”

3. Procrastination. You chronically put things off because you fear evaluation.

4. Defensive pessimism. This is the process of setting very low expectations so that we always meet them. It’s a strategy that helps lower anxiety in the short term, but lowers overall wellbeing in the long term.

5. Subjective overachievement. You expend a heroic amount of effort to try to guarantee success. Overwork tends to be a hallmark of self-doubt, and while it may temporarily increase your work output, it has serious consequences for the rest of your life.

We all tend to have a dominant self-doubt coping strategy, and it’s not uncommon to have relied on all five at one time or another. So how do we tackle it?

Here are the five top strategies for subduing self-doubt:

1. Vicarious experience. When people like us do something we want to do, we begin to believe that we can do it, too. “She’s about my own age. She went through a similar health challenge, and now she’s feeling better. If she can do it, I can do it!” Look for role models with whom you share similar characteristics.

2. Performance experience. One of the best ways to overcome the fear that we can’t do something is just to go do it, says Jewell. She calls these “performance experiences” where we act like we can, take steps like we can, and, therefore, we can — and do! We prove we can do something by doing it.

This is harder than it sounds, of course, since doing it is the very thing we fear. So take baby steps, she advises, and inch toward the full project, whether it’s writing a book or teaching a group class. By taking even the smallest step in the direction of your dreams, you will gain confidence and then do it again — and again!

3. Mental rehearsal. Professional athletes know this lesson well. They use mental rehearsal to think through important plays for the next big game or to visualize victory. Do the same. Set aside some dedicated time each day to specifically and deliberately imagine yourself doing the thing(s) you most want to achieve.

4. Social persuasion. You know who makes a great ally? A coach! Bring in the help of a professional if you feel really stuck. Maybe you decided to become a coach because you know they play such an invaluable role in helping people make sustainable behavior change. So take what you know to be true and hire your own!

5. Power pose. Adopt the stance — literally — of a “person who can.” Put hands on hips, puff your chest out, and hold your head high. Research suggests that doing this for just two minutes can shift a person’s mindset from self-doubt to self-empowerment. So do your best Superwoman (or Superman!) impression, and then await the super results!