Managing Self-Doubt

What is self-doubt?

• We all have opinions, ideas and thoughts. We sometimes also have to make decisions.
• Sometimes, we are happy and confident in our decisions, ideas or thoughts. Other times, we may worry about these.
• When people worry about these things, they may be doubting themselves. In other words, thinking that something they have done is not right, or the ‘correct way’.
• While self-doubt can be a normal human experience, when we experience this a lot of the time, it can make us feel anxious, sad or not very confident.

Self-doubt and LGBTQ+ people

• There can be lots of reasons why lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) people experience self-doubt.
• Often, messages we get from other people make us feel like our decisions aren’t correct, or properly thought about.
• For example, we may hear things like “how can you be sure you’re a lesbian – you’ve never kissed a girl”. This can sometimes lead to self-doubt.
• We may also dress or act differently, or like different things to other LGBTQ+ people. This can make us question if we are ‘queer enough’, leading to self-doubt about our identity.

Tips to manage self-doubt

Writing self-doubts down

The first step in tackling self-doubt, is to understand what self-doubts we are having, and get them out of our heads.

Use the box below to write out any self-doubts you have.

This information is not collected, saved or stored – this is simply a place for you to jot down your thoughts.

Sometimes people feel better just by writing self-doubts down on paper! Come back here to write any self-doubts down later, if you need.

Understanding identity in context

Now we have some of our self-doubts out of our head and onto paper, let’s try understand more about them.

A good way to manage self-doubt, is to understand in which situations this occurs. Some of the questions below may help you think about this:

To help you track when self-doubt is creeping in, perhaps rate on a scale of 1-10 how confident you feel in different situations, to help understand this.

Positive self-affirmations

Sometimes, self-doubts can grow and grow when there is nothing else to replace them. Often, this replacement needs to be something that is directly opposite to the self-doubt, to balance it out. These are called ‘self-affirmations’ – we are ‘affirming’ ourselves! Write down some positive self-affirmations in the box below (there are some examples underneath).

This information is not collected, saved or stored – this is simply a place for you to jot down your thoughts.

Examples of positive self-affirmations: