Category: Self Doubt

    Entrepreneurs Won’t Get Validated By Anyone But Themselves

    Validation is important to your self-esteem and can help lift you to new heights. Without it, self doubt sets in and you begin to lose belief in your ability to meet your goals. A child hopefully receives validation from his or her parents.

    Positive reinforcement nudges the child to reach higher and try new things. Online entrepreneurs, however, usually have to validate themselves to feel good about themselves and what they’ve already accomplished.

    The reason could be that not many people know how Internet marketing works and how much an entrepreneur has to plan and prepare to get the results he or she wants. There are ways to get what you need when it comes to validating your efforts.

    Sometimes praise and gratitude come to you unexpectedly, but there are ways you can celebrate yourself and what you’ve accomplished. A gratitude journal can help you recognize all of the positive things that happened in your day or week.

    Make notes of decisions or accomplishments you’re proud of or those goals you’ve reached with your time and efforts. Even the simplest achievements can be a triumph you can celebrate.

    Avoid judging yourself harshly. Those are negative thoughts you don’t need and can affect your emotions and decision-making. Find the positive in what you’re accomplishing and don’t let anyone else have a part in judging you too harshly.

    Ask yourself what you need right this moment to help you feel healthier, more motivated or energetic to reach and surpass the goals you’ve set for yourself. Try to provide what you need rather than rejecting or depriving yourself.

    If you feel down and depressed, your body may need exercise or the proper fuel for you to feel more energetic. When you ignore those feelings, it’s easy to become mired in negative thoughts and forget all of the good things that you’ve accomplished.

    Validating yourself reinforces self-confidence and boosts the knowledge that you can do or be anything you set your mind to. Remember that validating yourself isn’t a form of self absorption.

    It’s a way to renew your spirit of entrepreneurship and carry on to reach the success you long for. You’ll gain strength and be better able to calm the negative and debilitating thoughts when you find ways to reassure yourself that you’re worthy of the success you seek and extremely able to find the path to reach it.

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    Free Yourself from the Exhausting Task of Self Doubt

    The fallout from self doubt can be devastating and render you incapable of continuing to make rational business decisions. It’s like flailing yourself with a whip day in and day out – a torture so blistering that all you can think of the pain it’s causing.

    When you let the exhausting task of doubting yourself take over your life, you’ll be less likely to seize opportunities and have a more difficult time in beginning or finishing tasks that could bring you success.

    Moving forward can be difficult as the voice of self doubt becomes louder and drowns out the reality of who you are and what you’re capable of. Standing up to the chatter and telling the chaos and loudness to stop can help you break the destructive pattern of self doubt.

    It’s like turning the flame down under a pot of soup that’s about to boil over. You take over control of your thoughts rather than letting your mind overflow with doubt and take those thoughts where you want to go.

    Remember past times that you’ve doubted yourself or that fear kept you from taking part in a venture that turned successful. You likely ignored your instinct and gave in to the negative voices in your mind that told you it wouldn’t work.

    This time could be different if you don’t allow the voices to take control. Each time you leave your comfort zone and ignore the self doubt torture, you come closer to realizing a positive outcome to your efforts.

    Self confidence will replace self doubt and you’ll finally be able to focus on your future success rather than past failures. Silencing the exhausting torture of self doubt will also boost your optimism about the future.

    You’ll become more confident about your abilities and motivated and enthused about your ideas. Take action even though you don’t feel like it. Freeing yourself from the loud and destructive self doubt voices – if only for a few minutes – can calm the voices and help your mind find clarity and creativity.

    You can always tweak the immediate actions you take later on. The real task of the moment is to get feedback, knowledge and experience so you can build your self esteem and empower yourself to success.

    Conquering self doubt frees you to stay on the course and reach the goals you’ve planned for yourself. Don’t let the voices of self doubt exhaust you to the point of abandoning your future success.

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    Have You Become Your Own Worst Enemy?

    It’s one thing to hear negative talk about yourself from your enemies, but quite another to come to the realization that you’re your own worst enemy because of what you do to undermine your self confidence and sabotage your efforts.

    You may have experienced so much self loathing that you come to believe what you’re saying. That’s a dangerous place to be because you’ll be frustrated, indecisive and unmotivated to follow a path that will lead you to success.

    Imagine talking to a good friend or child with the same negative and hateful words that you use to talk to yourself. If you love that friend or child, you’d never think of using those tactics.

    So, why do you berate yourself? The answer is that the demoralizing voice inside your mind has its own game plan – and that is to make you doubt yourself so much that you fail miserably.

    You certainly wouldn’t want a friend to fail because of what you said. When you begin to acknowledge and understand the power that the thinking process has over you, it’s time to do something about it.

    To overcome your own self, you have to be able to discern which inner words are unrealistic and begin to discard them from your vocabulary. During the self analysis process, ask yourself if you appreciate the small things in your life.

    It’s great to have grandiose goals and dreams such as a new house, car and plenty of money in the bank, but have you thought about the pleasure of a cool breeze on a hot summer day or the way the rain makes the world seem clean again?

    Those are the small things in our lives which must also be appreciated for what they are and what they add to your life. When you learn to appreciate the smaller things in life, the satisfaction and pleasure you feel can make the negative thoughts easier to see for what they are.

    When you’re focused on the important things in life, such as your health and all of the blessings that have come your way, it’s more difficult for negatives to take root in your mind.

    Selling yourself short by practicing negative self talk can damage and perhaps annihilate your full potential. You’ll hold yourself back from experiences that can make you happy and fulfilled and make excuses about why what you want to do will never happen.

    Try not to focus on things you have no control over and concentrate instead on your capabilities. Pat yourself on the back once in awhile. When it comes to Internet marketing, every day you show up to serve is a day worth celebrating!

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    How Much Time Do You Waste Listening to Your Self Doubt Shout?

    Procrastination is one of the many weeds that can grow in the garden of self doubt. And just as a beautiful garden can become overgrown with weeds that choke out the life of other plants, your business progress can come to a halt if you let self doubt take root in your mind.

    You can become your own worst enemy when you let the negative musings of self doubt ruin your creativity and your ability to take action on an idea or goal you’ve set for yourself.

    When your own self doubt begins to shout you down and out from creativity and progress, it’s time to shut it up so you can get back to work. Put it in time out just as you would a two-year old having a temper tantrum and teach negativity that it can’t play an active role in your life.

    When you know you’re wasting time on giving in to self doubt, it’s easy to feel defeated and worthless. You may have deadlines to make such as an important launch. Your affiliates and list are waiting to see what you’ve created and you’re paralyzed by those thoughts that you can’t do it or are unworthy of doing it.

    Self doubt rants can discourage you to the point of losing all that you’ve been working for all these hours, days and months. The correct method of silencing the rantings of self doubt works differently for everyone.

    You may be able to suppress them by taking your own time out to meditate. For others, it may take surrounding yourself with positive people – others who experience the same problems you do – or family and friends who tend to build your self esteem rather than tear it down.

    Past failures or discouraging comments from others can make the negative voices inside grow louder and louder until you’re sucked in to the realm of complete self doubt and all of your efforts come to a halt.

    It’s a battle of the wills – will you give in and cry into your pillow about how incapable you are of success? Or will you do everything you can to start believing in yourself again, dust yourself off and take much needed action?

    Don’t let the rantings of self doubt slow you down and render you helpless to realize your dreams of success. It may take several tries before you can mute the self doubt monsters, but you can do it.

    Realize that when self doubt shouts, it’s really an inner voice that’s afraid and lost and needs help finding its way back. Taking action shines a light on the path and keeps you from wasting any more time on fear and lies.

    Categories: Mindset, Self Doubt, self-doubt

    Is Your Self Doubt Due to Previous Failures?

    How many times do you think Thomas Edison failed in his attempt to bring light into our lives by inventing the lightbulb? Likely, he failed more times than we can count. Imagine how he felt when he worked so hard (during daylight hours or by candlelight) to find something that worked, came so close each time – and then failed with each attempt.

    Then, finally it happened. One path Edison took led to the invention of the lightbulb and all other attempts were forgotten. We’ve been bathed in iridescence ever since. Edison and other successful entrepreneurs have all suffered from self doubt, but trudged on through the lack of confidence to make their dream a reality.

    Think about the times in the past (even as a child) that you’ve persevered through disabling doubts that you could do something, only to find out that it wasn’t within your grasp even though you gave it your all.

    Either you shrugged and went on to something else or withered away in self-pity that prevented you from possible future successes. Virtually every successful person in the world has failed many times before.

    It’s doubtful those failures are even remembered because the success is so bright that they aren’t visible. Online entrepreneurs are highly susceptible to self doubt. There’s so much to learn and so many ways to go about each venture that it may seem overwhelming – especially to newbies.

    Rather than wasting time stewing over each failure and making yourself miserable, make a firm decision to move on – and then do it. Begin on the new project immediately by setting short and long-term goals and really dig deep into how you’re going to ensure it’s a big success.

    Each success will spur you on to the next project – and the next, until you have some firm accomplishments under your belt. Next time a failure happens, you can focus on the successes you’ve had to break the cycle of self doubt and begin again.

    Before you begin a project or new venture, think about all of the possible scenarios that can happen. Make sure you include the worst-case scenarios along with the rewards that will happen when you succeed.

    After you face your fears of “what if,” you can use those fears as challenges. Looking at fears as challenges rather than obstacles can only help boost your self confidence and help you begin to see success in your future rather than failure.

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    Learn How to Drown Out Negative Thoughts

    Negative thoughts are the nemesis of creating a successful business – and life – for yourself. It’s difficult to drown out the thoughts that corrupt your thinking and prevent the flow of energy to make yourself better, but there are some ways to calm a racing mind and stop the flow of negativity that threatens to bring you down.

    Perhaps you just need some quiet time – time for yourself to ruminate on the positive things you’ve accomplished. Meditation is one way to achieve the quiet time you need to get your thoughts under control.

    Whether you meditate in the forest, next to a babbling brook or in a quiet place in your home with the television and other devices turned off, the quiet you’ve created can be a catalyst for more creative and positive thought patterns.

    When you’re meditating, you may want to try positive affirmations as a way to quiet your brain and push out negative thoughts and feelings. An affirmation can be as simple as repeating to yourself that you’re stronger than all of the negative thoughts that come your way and that you can and will overcome them.

    Journaling is also a good way to get your negative thoughts out of your mind, onto pen and paper and see them for what they are. Journaling lets you get and keep in touch with your deeper inner self and create an awareness that you haven’t experienced before.

    It’s a fact that writing is an exercise that seems to reinforce and help you understand things better than typing or even speaking. Journaling helps you work out problems that may have cluttered your thinking in the past.

    Reinforcing the positive messages you receive from yourself or others is an important and viable way to drown out negative thoughts. The above methods of affirmations, meditation and journaling are valuable tools to ensure that negative thoughts and feelings don’t remain in your life and that you can continue progressing to a more positive inner state of mind.

    When weeding negative thoughts out of your life, make sure you surround yourself with positive people whenever you can. It’s easy to be influenced by people who always spout negativity and seem to want everyone around them to feel the same way.

    Of course, it’s impossible to feel upbeat all the time. Life is sure to get you down once in awhile. But find a way that works for you to silence the negativity and stop being so hard on yourself.

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    Let Go of Your Ego That Says a Spotlight Is On You

    Finding yourself in a room full of people and suddenly getting the sinking feeling that every eye is on you is a nightmare that most of us have lived through. You instantly begin to doubt how you appear and begin to examine yourself for smudges on your face or a clothing malfunction.

    It’s likely that you were mistaken that everyone was suddenly looking at you. It was actually a form of self doubt that creeped in at just the right time to make you feel you were in a spotlight of scrutiny.

    You might react in a couple of ways during a scenario like the one above. Panic might make you instantly doubt yourself and frantically begin looking for the problem others are seeing.

    Or, you might wonder, but decide to dismiss everyone else and return confidently to the conversation you were once enjoying or whatever you were focused on at the moment. Rather than your fear of failure, it may be your ego that’s causing you to think everyone in the room is looking at you.

    Your ego may also be detrimental in business, too. You might worry that even success will bring more people to the table to watch you – which means even more self doubt creeps in.

    The same ego that assumes people are watching your every move is the same one that fears ridicule if you happen to falter or fail with a project or idea. Until you let go of the ego and self doubt that accompanies it, you’re wasting precious time and energy on worry or frustration.

    One way to bash the downside of your ego is to stop the need to win every battle and be successful with every venture. When you’re winning, there’s no need to consult your inner voice about the actions you’ve taken to get to the finish line.

    Losing, on the other hand, makes you stop and think about what you need to do next time to make it happen. Competition is always present in Internet marketing ventures, but you don’t have to think you need to knock it out of the ballpark every time or else people will make fun of you.

    Losing a challenge or being wrong about a product or person is a learning experience which can help your future success. Rather than letting ego take over and ruin your life and your business chances, focus on improvement in all that you are and strive to be. Be happy with what you’ve accomplished so far and take action to improve and grow.

    Categories: Self Doubt

    Look Around You and Notice How Imperfect Everyone Is

    While it isn’t always good to compare yourself to others, it can be a boost to your self esteem and give you a true picture of marketers in a way that lessens your own anxiety. Some of what you see will be good and encouraging and some might be eye-opening to your own struggles.

    At the very least, you should learn that no one is perfect or always experiences success. As a marketer, it’s likely that you follow many other marketers. Dig a little deeper into some of those you subscribe to and try to pick out a few things they might be doing wrong.

    Maybe they have some gaps in their products or their video marketing could use some polishing. It could be that even those you admire constantly have some ideas and strategies that you don’t agree with. No one is perfect and gets it right every time – even the most successful of online entrepreneurs.

    All suffer from failures and setbacks, but you’ll soon learn as you peer into the online lives of your fellow marketers, that the failures don’t define who the successful ones are. The successful marketers view failures as a chance to learn, pick up the pieces and try again.

    The successes will likely far outweigh the failures. And some marketing strategies may appeal and work for others, but not for you. When you see your fellow marketers as humans who have different tastes, ambitions and talents than you, perhaps you won’t compare yourself unfavorably to them.

    Online marketing is no different from any other part of life – different strokes for different folks. Striving for perfection can undermine everything you want to accomplish and set you up for failure because absolute perfection doesn’t exist.

    Chasing it can only add to your sense of failure and inadequacies and cause unhappiness and great disappointment in your life. It’s best to think of your efforts as striving to be the best you can be.

    If you can view your self worth by knowing that you’re living up to your own standards rather than someone else’s, you can live the life that was meant for you rather than seeking perfection, which is only an illusion.

    You may be waiting for the perfect time, place or scenario in your life to begin seeking success. You’re poised and ready, but the world isn’t – so you’re stopped in your tracks. Realize that there’s never a perfect time or place and move forward where you are right now in life.

    The most successful entrepreneurs among us have begun on a small scale – refusing to wait until they had time, money and energy to begin their venture on a larger scale. Each success gave them more confidence to try something bigger and better until true success – not perfection – was within their grasp.

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    Self Doubt Is Understandable, But Crippling

    Even the most confident person you can think of has an occasional bout of self doubt. The trick is to recognize it for what it is and then get on with the business of being successful.

    That’s how successful entrepreneurs beat the self doubt plague. Consistent self doubt is as crippling as clinical depression and you may soon find yourself in a rut that’s difficult to extract yourself from.

    As a fledgling – or seasoned entrepreneur, you have a lot riding on your ability to stay focused. Your ultimate level of success and satisfaction with your chosen career depends on it.

    It’s imperative that you develop the resilience to overcome self doubt you’re sure to experience and replace that negativity with other thoughts designed to build your confidence rather than bringing it down.

    Self doubt can cause indecision and procrastination – both lethal detriments to your ultimate success. Yet, every challenge you face in your quest as an online entrepreneur brings with it old hauntings from your mind that may prevent you from overcoming the challenges and achieving your goals unless you can get a grip on them and see them for what they are – lies.

    The higher you climb on the ladder of success, the more self doubt you’re likely to have. What can you do to alleviate some of these obstacles and direct your energy in a more productive manner?

    It begins in your mind and progresses to taking action as you learn you really are capable of facing and overcoming any challenges that come your way. First, you should know and be comforted that you’re not the only person (successful or not) who has suffered from self doubt along the way.

    Acknowledging that others have felt as you do and became successful in spite of self doubt can alleviate your worries and help you get past the feelings more quickly. If you haven’t already set some personal and business goals for yourself, do it immediately.

    It’s part of the plan that you’ll use as the map to the magic kingdom of success. It’s perfectly okay to set lofty, long-term goals. Just make sure you set attainable, short-term goals, too – so you can experience success in small increments along the way.

    Short term goals are important because they provide continuous realization that you are moving along quite nicely and are well on your way to meeting those long term goals. It lets you bask in the sunshine of the smaller wins, while waiting for the big payoff at the end.

    Some things will happen along the road to success which is beyond your control. It’s important that you recognize this and keep from blaming yourself. In all lives, a little rain must fall. Be prepared in every way you can and press onward to your goals.

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    Self Doubt Stems from a Lack of Belief in Your Abilities

    If you don’t believe in yourself, who will? Successful entrepreneurs have all experienced moments of self doubt, but also have an amazing ability to move past the lack of confidence and force themselves to go on.

    That ability comes from experience and knowledge that even failure provides an advantage of knowing that you tried. Newbies to online marketing can sometimes find themselves in a perpetual state of self doubt.

    They lack the experience to know they can overcome obstacles on the way to becoming a successful entrepreneur. That self doubt can make or break even the most successful entrepreneur and paralyze him or her so that no action is taken and failure is imminent.

    Remember your school days? You were required to sit at a desk, learn, turn in homework and take tests to see what you’ve learned. Now, you have to take that initiative on your own.

    Learning, experimenting and brainstorming new ideas is a bit like learning to ride a bicycle. You’ll likely fall several times, but eventually you’ll get on that bike one day and move on down the path like a pro.

    After you’ve ridden the bicycle a few times, you don’t even think about how it works – you just do it. As an entrepreneur, you know there’s always something new to try or think about.

    You can either choose to give it all you’ve got – or leave an idea by the wayside and move on to something else. An idea may work for some, but it may not be for you. You’ll learn to be discretionary in latching on to new ideas or different ways to do things.

    Eventually, that ability will be so innate that you won’t even have to think about it as you move forward to meet your goals. Sometimes, you’ll try something that backfires or simply doesn’t work out the way you thought it would.

    Rather than doubting your ability and becoming paralyzed by the situation, take a step back and remember what got you where you are in the first place. Even newbies can think back and remember what decisions led them to take action and become a marketing entrepreneur.

    It’s likely a decision based on goals you’ve achieved in the past or a deep interest or appreciation you have for the possibility of making more money and having a business of your own.

    And then forgive yourself for any mistakes you may have made. These mistakes give you the advantage of knowledge and you can now move ahead knowing you won’t make that mistake ever again. Your ability to succeed has just increased.

    Categories: Self Doubt