“What’s funny about doubt?  We’re not born with it, it’s developed,” Loren Ridinger.  We need to remember this because anything we learn we can unlearn.  And if we have the habit of doubt, if we allow doubt to creep in over anxiety and fear, we need to ask why.  We need to evaluate what it is that gives us the illusion that we are out of control, powerless to not believing in ourselves.  Because when we have that doubt, it spreads like poison throughout our mind, body, and soul.  Doubt developed as a way to control people.  I’d like to say that it is innate but that isn’t true.  When we failed at something we would instinctively try again or we’d look for another way to do it or even ask for help.  We start to doubt ourselves when we hold ourselves to the standards someone else sets for us and when we feel there is only one right way to do something.  We doubt when we really just need to proceed with caution and look at all the information.  We need to control and eliminate this emotion because all it does is hold us back.  And once we plant that seed of doubt, it grows unbelievably quickly like a vine entwining itself throughout our entire being, tying us to the wall.

As I said, whatever we can learn we can unlearn.  It is up to us how we frame an event or an emotion.  It takes a lot of practice to sit with something and ask ourselves what it is and what we really feel.  For example, has anyone ever expressed anger when what they really felt was sadness?  Absolutely.  What about frustration when we really feel desperate for something to work out?  Of course.  So, what if we have labeled insecurity as doubt or fear and what we really need to focus on is building ourselves up enough to prove to ourselves we can handle anything that comes our way?  Eliminate the insecurity because insecurity is the pathway to doubt.  We need to practice keeping our word to ourselves and I can attest to that first hand.  As soon as we start to let ourselves off the hook for things because we don’t feel like doing it, it becomes a slippery slope of lowering that bar we talked about last week.  When we do what we say, we learn what we are capable of, the more we show ourselves what we are capable of, the less we have time or room for doubt. 

The mind is a really cool thing when we stop to look at it.  It’s a grey mass, a lump of tissue that has neurons and synapses firing through it and it is literally the operating system for our entire body—and even cooler, it tells us how we feel about it and how to get to a certain thought or feeling.  It tracks what we do, it remembers and we can access that memory.  Even cooler is our ability to channel the energy, the very palpable energy, generated by the brain toward specific goals—we transfer a simple neuron firing into a trigger for action throughout the body.  If we can learn how to do that we can train ourselves to learn anything.  Don’t let doubt be the marker that keeps us where we’re at.  Ask where it’s really coming from and address the source.  Most of the time we can find the source with some effort and address it head on.  We dig up that seed and put it where it belongs: in the garbage.  If it’s no longer there, it can no longer wind its way through our mind.  Once we remove that source and doubt no longer creeps into our lives, the path is clear and we realize there was never really anything funny about it at all and we could remove it all along.