New Role Now What?

18 | How to break the cycle of self-judgment and increase your confidence

• Erin Foley

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In this episode, Erin explores the double negative mindset—how feelings of anxiety or uncertainty often spiral into deeper self-doubt through self-criticism and shame. She shares insights from her work with clients who unknowingly judge their emotions, eroding their self-confidence and trust. Tune in and unpack how to disrupt this cycle with strategies and mindset tips to break free from self-judgment and build a healthier, more confident self-concept.
 
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Speaker 1:

Today's episode walks you through how to decrease the anxiety that comes from sneaky self-judgment. It is so common to get in our own way of feeling calmer and more confident, especially when we're spinning in self-judgment. So keep listening and learn my process for helping you dial this way down. Okay, so let's dive into today's episode. I want to introduce you all to a concept I call the double negative mindset, and the double negative mindset is when you feel bad because your mind and your body is reacting to a circumstance. So you're leading a team meeting, you're feeling scared, you're worrying that you aren't doing a good job, your brain's panicked, so you're feeling anxiety. This is the initial negative mindset, and then you judge yourself for having these anxious feelings. This is the second negative mindset to arrive on the scene. So you have the initial mindset where you are feeling panicked. You have all these thoughts of fear, you have thoughts around your capabilities, you're feeling judged by other people, you're feeling like you're not doing a good job, and the double comes in when you have a bit of a pile on. So all of a sudden, you're feeling this negative mindset and you're judging yourself for experiencing it. So you not only have the difficult effects of having anxiety, but you now have a little bit of shame for even feeling that anxiety and I see this so often in my coaching and it's like a sneaky shame and it's a sneaky way of piling on to an already difficult mindset with a set of judgment. I feel very strongly about helping people ease the initial anxious mindset. I understand that it's exhausting. I understand why this leads to burnout for people. I know how much energy it takes to be in a state where you're feeling a lot of anxiety, a lot of self-doubt, a lot of second guessing. But I feel like, because that state of anxiety is heightened and we have such a strong desire to get out of it, people can often overlook this very, very important initial step, which is to decrease the shame and the self judgment around that mindset to begin with and let me explain this further so you can understand what this tends to look like.

Speaker 1:

So the double negative mindset often sounds like this I should be stronger than this. I thought I had worked through my self-doubt. Stronger than this, I thought I had worked through my self-doubt. A big one for many people in my coaching is I shouldn't be experiencing this at this stage of my career, like I should be better than this. I should have more confidence by now. You know I'm a leader, or I'm in this role. That requires a lot of competency and confidence, and so something's wrong with me because I'm not feeling that.

Speaker 1:

Another really common one that I often hear from my clients is no one else seems this anxious, no one else seems to be having this much self-doubt. So something is really wrong with me, something's wrong with, like, my own emotional resilience. And so what's really happening is your brain is creating a pile on. You already feel bad. It's challenging to carry the anxiety and self-doubt and now you have this other layer of self-judgment about those feelings, which actually can create a cycle that feeds the initial mindset. This is really important. The reason why I feel like it's so important to catch this is because I see it reproduce this lack of self-trust and lack of self-confidence over and over and over and over again. And I wanna be clear. I understand why your brain wants to pile on right, we've all been there. I've been there.

Speaker 1:

The reason the brain often wants to pile on and judge the anxiety, judge the second guessing is because it has a desire to move you to a more positive and productive mindset. So it's almost like that tough love strategy where it's like you're better than this. You shouldn't be experiencing this. You've come so far in your career, be stronger and I get it. My goal in coaching is also to help you be in a more productive mindset, but the lack of acceptance for the emotions that are coming up actually impedes and prolongs your ability to move through the self-doubt and the overwhelm. When you are judging yourself for feeling a lack of confidence and telling yourself I should be more confident, I shouldn't be so fragile, I should be able to handle this, you are communicating to yourself more reasons why you should believe that you're not confident, more reasons to not be confident, more reasons to feel more self-doubt, more reasons to second guess yourself.

Speaker 1:

So it's like this attempt to get out of it often just fuels it even further. It increases the shame, it creates a resistance and it almost creates like panic positivity, where I see people who are like panicked to get out of it because their feeling that they're even having it to begin with is saying something so strongly about who they believe themselves to be. And I will say that for some of you, the self-judgment, the what are you doing? You know, buck up, camper you shouldn't be feeling this way will get you moving. Initially, for about 60% of my clients it actually creates an avoidance. It creates a procrastination. For another 40% of my clients it creates quick movement where all of a sudden they're in this state of panic and they're really judging all of their emotions and so they will move forward really quickly to try to get out of it.

Speaker 1:

But even if it creates an initial movement, what I see over and over again is that in the end it just keeps reinforcing the self-concept that I'm broken, I'm weak, I'm feeling things I shouldn't be feeling, and it ends up disrupting your self-confidence and your self-trust. So I really want to talk about this today because I think it's a really sneaky mindset block. I see it get overlooked a lot. My clients will come to me and they will have worked with therapists or coaches or other people to try to kind of move through the second guessing or this self-doubt or this self-confidence issue, and I often see this piece missing. I often see people skipping over, not even realizing that they're doing this double negative and not giving themselves the time to develop the skill of being in the emotion without the judgment first, so that you stop reinforcing to yourself a shame around who you are, how you feel and how your brain and body is reacting to the world. So bypassing the first step plays such a big role in reinforcing a self-concept that we don't want. So I want to offer a couple of shifts for you to think about and consider to help you practice this first and initial skill of being in a space where you are not judging whatever feeling or mindset that's coming up for you. The first thing I want to talk about is a metaphor I use with my clients a lot that I think can help the brain have a different way of viewing this.

Speaker 1:

I like to think about emotions as it's just a reaction to something. The same way your body reacts to temperature outside. So you step outside, you feel physically hot or cold. Likely, you don't have a whole bunch of internal dialogue about you feeling hot or cold. You're not making it mean something about yourself. You're not making it mean that you are a weak person. You're not making it mean that something's terribly wrong with you, it just is. You're like oh interesting, it's like really hot or it's really cold outside. You are likely in some level of acceptance about it, right, I'm not saying you like it. I don't like that. It's freezing in upstate New York, but I'm certainly in acceptance that my body feels cold. Once you're in that space, it's easier to mitigate it, whether I'm going to put on more clothes or do something.

Speaker 1:

And for mindset barriers like anxiety, fear of judgment, second guessing, it is so important that you first allow it to be okay that it's coming up. And allowing it to be okay means really catching when you're shaming yourself for feeling it and when you are dismissing it and not validating it. So the first step that I walk people through is the importance of validating your emotions before you try to move past it. So whatever is coming up for you if you're having a lot of anxiety, before you're to move past it. So whatever is coming up for you if you're having a lot of anxiety before you're speaking up, if you're struggling while you're learning something in your new position and you find yourself in a lot of fear around judgment, it's always okay that you're feeling what you're feeling. The same way, it's always okay that you feel cold. When you feel cold and you feel hot. When you feel hot, it is a reaction to your brain's interpretation of whatever is happening. That's it. So your brain is stepping in front of a group of people. Your brain thinks this is unsafe, it thinks there's judgment, it thinks there's life or death involved and it's panicking. That's all that's happening and the shame around that only creates a disruption in your self-confidence.

Speaker 1:

To begin with, judging your negative feelings will create an additional barrier to moving through it. So I want you to practice the idea that it's okay that I am feeling what I am feeling, that it's first about accepting and allowing the feeling that's coming up to be okay. It's like okay, my brain's maybe more scared than it needs to be in this situation because it's not life or death, but it's okay that it's happening. My brain's just confused in this moment. My brain might be overreacting. My brain might be taking in partial information, but not all of the information. My brain might be really uncomfortable because it hasn't gone from point A to point B and seen a positive result yet.

Speaker 1:

Like any skill, allowing that negative emotion at first takes practice and sometimes, if it's really strong, if you have a lot of shame or a lot of self-judgment around whatever you're experiencing, you will need a person to model back to you that your feelings are valid and that you don't need to hold shame around it. So Brene Brown talks a lot about shame needing light, shame needing to be brought into the light. Shame needs to be held by someone else to help diminish it. Right that when you bring it into the light and someone else allows it compassionately, you suddenly see that you don't need to be secretive or hold it in or be quiet about it, because it's okay, it's normal. I'm not a bad person, I'm not weak, because I'm experiencing it. Developing the skill of acceptance, of allowing the feelings without judgment or shame, is actually going to expedite your ability to move through it. And once that clicks, for people it is often very freeing because you now can experience the suffering that's associated with anxiety, fear of failure, fear of judgment in a clean way, which means you experience it for what it is, but you don't experience it as more heightened than it is.

Speaker 1:

Many of you are trying so hard to avoid it, to push against it and to get out of it, which I completely understand why? Because it doesn't feel good. But I actually want you to do the opposite. I want you to relax your body and show yourself. I can handle the feeling. I can handle this thought coming up. I can handle the fact that I'm having anxiety. It makes sense that I feel this. My brain is just reacting to not feeling safe.

Speaker 1:

You can shift your self-concept to one that supports yourself, into feeling safe and confident and focused. But I don't recommend trying to do this by diminishing and judging your feelings. You first want to be in acceptance. You want to make your first step to be a space of accepting and allowing what you are feeling, without piling on. The pile on will just exhaust, you will create resistance and will further create this self-concept that you can't trust yourself, that you're not confident enough, that something is wrong with you.

Speaker 1:

So I wanted to hop on today and talk about that double negative. Like I said, I see it so much in my coaching and I see it as so sneaky and I see so many of my clients who are in it and they have no idea that they're even in it. They aren't even aware that they're judging their feelings. So tune into that, start observing yourself, start observing what you do when you notice you're feeling anxious, nervous, uncertain and notice if you are having a bunch of thoughts about why you shouldn't be feeling that way and a lot of shame around feeling that way, and I invite you to practice being in that acceptance so that you can move into the stage of then applying the work of shifting out of that mindset. But we don't want to make that mindset five times worse than it already is by piling on to it before we start to move through it. Okay, I hope you all have a great rest of your week. I'll be back with more great mindset coaching for you. Have a great week and I'll talk to you soon.