Doubt

As a young child exploring your world, you were fearless and confident. You had an inner knowingness and innate abilities.

Programmed within your DNA was all you needed to learn to crawl, walk, and talk—granted you had a little help along the way. Yet you were tenacious and you kept trying—pretty much undaunted. You also learned to feed yourself and to draw, color, paint, play, and tell stories. You accomplished and mastered many things.

And then you started to be told how to do and how not to do things. Rules came in and shoulds were imposed on you—mostly to make you a functioning member of society and to fit into the good-better-best rating and ranking comparison systems at school and eventually at work.

It was around that same time that you began to lose your self-confidence and doubt your abilities. You began to transition from bold and sure of yourself to awkward, shy, and unsure about so many things: your intelligence, your creativity, your worth.

To survive, you learned not to trust yourself or your gut feelings, which slowly shut down parts of your heart and your imagination. And it was then that you began to look to others for all your answers rather than looking within yourself for guidance and inspiration. Looking externally means always needing the approval, permission, or opinions of others.

One step to restoring your faith in your abilities to reach your goals entails reconnecting your heart with your mind—for they both have their own wisdom and work best in concert with each other. You do have innate powers to manifest what you want; it’s just a matter of giving yourself permission to take back that power.

Also, it’s essential to your peace of mind and productivity to recite inspiring affirmations to remind yourself that you are smart and capable of achieving what you set out to accomplish. Each word you write, page you fill up, and draft you complete helps you remove doubt from your beliefs about yourself.

As a writer, you can choose to use the power of your pen or keyboard to let doubt simply be something that your characters are confronted with. And if you can write about your characters transforming their doubts to succeed, then you can certainly allow yourself to live that way too!