The submission closed the next day and I had spent a week reordering the same three photographs. Most affirmations for self-doubt promise to remove the doubt first and let you act afterwards. That order is the wrong way round, and there is research saying so.
What affirmations for self-doubt can do at the moment of choosing
Lower the bar from certainty to a decision. They will not make you feel qualified, and the feeling of being qualified turns out to be a poor guide anyway. What a prepared line can do is separate two questions that get fused together. One is whether this is a good option. The other is whether you can be trusted to pick.
The thing you keep not sending
The deadline is tomorrow. The work has been ready for a week and you are still arranging it.
Deciding whether it's good enough isn't my job here.
They asked for what I have, not for better than this.
I can send this and be wrong about it.
After the fourth person you've asked
Everyone has now given you a view, and you are further from an answer than when you started.
Another opinion won't make this mine.
I have collected enough. What's left is a choice.
Asking again is how I avoid deciding politely.
The feeling runs the wrong way
A group of final-year students were tracked through a year of job hunting. Some of them searched the way a doubting person searches, comparing everything and unwilling to settle for anything merely good.
They did better. Their jobs paid about twenty per cent more than the jobs taken by the students who stopped once they found something decent.
They also felt worse. Less satisfied with what they got, and carrying more negative feeling right through the process. Better outcome and worse experience, in the same people at the same time.
That is worth sitting with, because it breaks the thing self-doubt quietly assumes. You are treating the unease as a reading on the quality of your judgement. In that study the reading pointed backwards.
The researchers traced it to two habits: leaning heavily on what other people said, and staying fixed on the options, including the ones never taken. Both feel like diligence. Neither improves the choice.
Choosing with the doubt still in the room
Nothing has resolved. The decision is due anyway.
I don't have to feel sure to be right.
The doubt can stay. It isn't the one choosing.
Unsure is a feeling, not a verdict on the plan.
An ordinary example
Our local library was collecting photographs of the area for a small exhibition. I had been photographing the streets on my phone for years and had a few frames I liked, but I kept putting the entry off. Every evening I picked different pictures and moved them around. It felt like everyone else would bring something real and I would send an ordinary courtyard with a puddle in it. The day before the deadline I had more or less decided to skip it.
I opened the announcement again. It asked specifically for how residents see the place, with nothing about equipment or experience. I read that and wrote down: "They are the ones doing the selecting. I can just send mine." I chose three and added the location for each. My finger sat over the button for a while, then I sent the email and went out with the rubbish.
When I came back I wanted to add a note saying I was an amateur and wasn't claiming anything special. I started that second email and deleted the draft. The next day a confirmation arrived saying the work had been received. An ordinary short reply, and I read it several times. It said nothing about the selection. That evening I looked at my picture with the puddle again. This time I liked it.
Two kinds of doubt, and only one of them is information
Some doubt has a fact inside it. You do not know what the contract says, or whether the room is wide enough. That doubt is doing its job and the answer is to go and find out.
The other kind has no fact in it. It asks whether you are the sort of person whose choices work out. Nothing you look up will close that question, and that is why the researching never ends once you have slipped into it.
The test takes about ten seconds. Try to name what you would need to know. If a specific answer appears, go and get it. If what appears is a feeling with no object, you have already finished the part that reading can help with.
This is also where the habit of asking people comes from. A fourth opinion looks like more information, and it is mostly a way of borrowing somebody's nerve for an hour.
The week after, when the other options come back
You chose. Now you are looking up the ones you didn't take.
The options I passed on are not a list of my mistakes.
I decided with what I had on the day I had to.
Reading about the other one tells me nothing about this one.
They are the ones doing the selecting. I can just send mine.
A line to return to
What this can and cannot do
A line that lowers the requirement from certainty to a decision can get a thing sent that would otherwise sit in drafts until the deadline passes. Over a year that adds up to a noticeable number of things. It cannot tell you whether the choice is good, and it should not: some doubt is pointing at a real gap, and this page is deliberately not in the business of talking you past those. The studies behind it describe how a decision style tracks with outcomes and feelings; they were not tests of saying anything to yourself. If doubt is stopping you doing ordinary things, or you have been unable to make routine choices for months, that belongs with a professional rather than with a better sentence.
Sources and further reading
These references support the research and practical guidance discussed in this article.
- Doing better but feeling worse: looking for the best job undermines satisfactionIyengar, Wells and Schwartz, Psychological Science, 2006. Final-year students followed through a year of job hunting. Those who searched hardest for the best option took jobs paying 20 per cent more and were less satisfied, with more negative feeling throughout.
- Maximizers versus satisficers: decision-making styles, competence, and outcomesParker, Bruine de Bruin and Fischhoff, Judgment and Decision Making, 2007. People who report wanting the best option also report leaning on others more, avoiding decisions more, and feeling regret more often. The behavioural shape of self-doubt.
- Positive self-statements: power for some, peril for othersWood, Perunovic and Lee, Psychological Science, 2009. Why no line here announces that you trust yourself, which is the exact claim the moment is busy contradicting.
