How to Work Through a Crisis of Confidence

I hope you all had a great holidays!

We had a blast 🙂

I’m a little under the weather this week. You know when one of your kids gets sick that the chances are pretty high it’s going to work its way round the family.

Last Monday I was busy at work when suddenly I had a wave hit me that completely took all my confidence away.

No exaggeration either. It smashed me hard and came out of nowhere.

To the point where I questioned everything and doubted myself in every way.

– I’m useless at my job

– This weekly e-mail is pointless

– Stop trying to help others when you are no good yourself

I have struggled with anxiety and self confidence a lot in my life. I usually set high expectations of myself and sometimes that doesn’t always have a positive result.

But I cannot remember getting hit that hard, that quickly and that suddenly.

I saw no signs.

The next day I woke up feeling like I had barely slept and just drained of energy.

It took me 3 days to move past it.

Here’s what I did, and if you ever go through this (I hope you don’t) then hopefully it can help you

I had to accept it, fighting it wasn’t going to solve what happened and why it happened. I used my energy in other ways that could help me. From past experience fighting it only delays it and I end up feeling more exhausted.

I had to slow down and re-arrange my plan for the week. Having so many tasks to work on felt overwhelming and I was doubting my ability to do it. I re-prioritised to focus only on what I needed to that day.

I gave myself smaller tasks to do, or if it was a big task I broke it down into even smaller tasks than usual. This then didn’t feel overwhelming and also helped build up my confidence bit by bit.

I wanted to understand why it happened as I didn’t see any warning signs. It felt like it came out of nowhere, but really I knew that wasn’t true. There are always signs, it’s just whether we are curious and ask the right questions to see it.

For me I realized that I had been working really hard and was also dealing with a lot of pressure and stress. Building a business is hard, lots of stress at work with job insecurity and changes, busy social life etc etc.

This helped me answer the question of why did this happen. But also helped me answer the question I was countering my negative thoughts with.

Am I truly useless, and if I am in what way?

Of course the real answer is that I am not useless. But I needed to go through that process to get there.

A big part of me wanted to stop everything and just hide away for a bit. But the steps mentioned may have been slow progress, but it was still progress. It helped build me up bit by bit.

Just accepting it and stopping would have been a disaster.

Hope that helps if you ever find yourself in that situation