So I want to talk to you about self doubt. I know awesome topic, right? Feels awesome to feel self doubt, but it's something that really comes up. And I was thinking about this topic and how it shows up for my clients when I work with them and how it shows up for myself.

And I wanted to create a podcast that spoke specifically to the how of overriding self doubt. Like what can we do step by step to get out of feeling stuck when we're doubting every move that we make. If we don't know if we're doing it right, or we don't think we're getting what we want, because even though we've overcome self doubt before in so many other areas of our life, most of us haven't thought about exactly how we did it. So if you're stuck right now in any area of your life, although I'm going to talk all about a lot of business examples here, I want you to really listen to this podcast. Okay? Because chances are, you have self doubt and what I want to do here, my goal is to give you a different way of thinking about your situation in a really easy to digest way.

So first, we're going to talk about exactly what self doubt is and how it's created in our life. Then I'm going to share you share with you how to override self doubt in three steps that I have seen, like in this process of overcoming self doubt. And I'm going to share some examples with you in this practice, like how to do this. So you can see these steps more clearly, including a personal story or two. And then finally, I'm going to walk you through how you can apply these steps to whatever goal you have right now, no matter whether it's business, whatever it is, and share how I've used this process to create my business. My examples are particular to business here, but remember, you can use these steps to override self-doubt in any area of your life. Before we get started, I want to invite you to download the free busy lawyers guide to getting five hours back.

I have broken down things to do and not to do, but really what is most important in this guide is the mindset work that I talk about. So if you are a mindset nerd like, and you know that this is the fastest, best way, the best track to get what you want and to create what you want in your life. You're going to want to download this guide. Now you'll get the easy wins. So if you're not in the mindset, which if you're listening to this, I highly doubt that that's the case. But if you just want like a quick, easy win, I've got that in there for you too. But the most important thing is, is the mindset work inside of it. So if you go to Dina, cataldo.com forward slash busy lawyer, you can download that guide. It's 10 pages. It is chock full of stuff, but it is very well organized.

So you'll be able to pull a couple things out and use those. Even if you don't use the whole thing, you'll be able to pick out the most important things. So go to Dina, cataldo.com forward slash busy lawyer so that you can grab that and get started because you really will start to make huge shifts in how you're using your time, how you're prioritizing, how you're thinking about your time when you begin implementing what I talk about there. All right. So let's jump in. What is self doubt really? Right. I looked at this up online. I wasn't entirely satisfied with the way self doubt is described. In essence, self doubt is a deficit in belief in ourselves. It's a fear that we're not capable of having what we want. Another part of it is. And I noticed this wrapped up with some of my thoughts and I've had to overcome those is this belief that we won't be taken care of.

That I, that like the universe doesn't have our back, that we won't be able to accomplish what we want to accomplish. That it's, it's this doubt that we're not enough to create what we want, that we're not enough to take care of ourselves. And so we're always looking outside of ourselves in order to feel better in order to feel taking care of in order to feel confidence that we can have what we want. We manipulate the world around us so that we can then feel better. We do this a lot of times in relationships, we do this you know, like for having doubt around how somebody else feels about us in a relationship, we want to manipulate that relationship so that they do what we expect of them, what we want them to do. So that then we have outside evidence to prove to us that we are valuable, that we are enough or that they are taking care of us. I mean, there's all of these different ways that we do this in relationships. And we do this in every area of our life. It shows up in business, it shows up in our legal profession, it shows up with, with everything. When do you start looking for it? You will be able to see it. The important thing here is that you notice that you have this self doubt and you start building this self sufficiency, and I'm going to teach you how to build that today. This is what I work on with my clients.

This is how they begin

Achieving their goals. If we don't do this practice, we can end up stuck, spinning, and wasting our time on all kinds of things that don't matter. And we can find ourselves blaming other people for not having what we want for not creating the relationships we want for not creating the love we want to feel or not creating the business we want to have. We can also see this happening just in the way that we behave in the world towards other people in a way that isn't as of service to them, that isn't as loving that isn't as supportive as we show up as a different person. When we allow ourselves to be filled with self doubt and spin in the self doubt. Now self-doubt is normal, especially when you've never done something before, right? You've never done it before. You don't know how to do it.

It's new to you. Your brain's never worked this way before. It's okay. I'm going to show you how to leverage what you have done before in the past to help you break through any self doubt that you have in this, in one particular area of your life that you're struggling with right now. So how does self doubt come about? Well, it comes about in a million tiny imperceptible ways. We want something is when we're a kid, let's say we want like a candy bar and we can't have it, right. Or we get, we get yelled at, we get snapped at, and we can't have it. We have a dream in our life. And someone tells us that we need to leave it behind. And then we believe them. Usually these things come along when we're really young and we either misinterpret something or we have such a visceral reaction to the way someone has spoken to us or, or has told us no, that we can't do something that we internalize that.

And it becomes truth for us. Now, you also, it could show up when you see other people have what you want and you wonder why you can't have it. Like, why can't I create that kind of a practice? Why don't I have a relationship with my dad like that with my mom like that with my sister, like that, we see other people who have relationships that we want businesses that we want engagement on social media that we might want. And we wonder, and like something that's not a super helpful thought. Why can't we have that? Now we also might do things like we might have heard our parents talking about money when we were kids, excuse me. Maybe they talked about vacations

Houses

Kinds of things. And they always said things like, well, those are things were not meant to have. Those are not things that we can have for lawyers. It could be not feeling like we belonged in the cliques in the office. So all of these little tiny imperceptible things can undercut our self confidence and they create self doubt. And in all of these cases, it's just about what we learned and the people who taught these things to us, they learned it somewhere too. So they're just passing it on without thought to them. It's fact, if we internalize it and we don't break it down, it's going to seem like fact to us. And so what we have to do is we've got to break it down. We've got to understand what's going on in our brain. And once we get an objective perspective of it, it's easier for us to start understanding why our brain is working.

Like it's working and start building, like using it to our advantage, to build the self confidence that we need to have to create what we want. So then when you set your sights on a goal that you've never achieved before your brain, you're going to see that it bumps up against all the reasons why you can't have it. And it really thinks that these are the truth. So some of the things that you might believe is that you don't have enough time. You don't have enough money. And I went through eight common thoughts to stop thinking in the last podcast, that was episode one 21. So you can dive into more of those there, but these thoughts really seem like truth. And what we have to do is start proving to our brain otherwise, or we're going to stay stuck. And I don't want to see you stuck.

I've been stuck. I don't like stuck. It's not productive. It doesn't create what you want. It's not useful. So we're gonna start busting out of that to override self doubt. We've got to retrain our brain to believe in ourselves, like wholeheartedly believe in ourselves that we are sufficient and not just sufficient in like, yeah, we're good. But, but in this way that we are taking care of and we've taken care of ourselves, we've survived. We don't have tigers chasing after us. We are sufficient in the sense that we have a we are always taken care of. We are always going to have that sense of love for ourselves. And that sense that we are caring for ourselves, not necessarily looking to the outside world, but we can find evidence that the outside world is also taking care of us. I have on Instagram the other day I posted my, I was in my office and I had my coworker. If you're just new to this podcast, I am a full time lawyer and a coach. So during my full time job, I was in my office and I had this really long day in zoom court. And I shouted out

Cookie, a chocolate chip cookie,

My, my neighbor, my coworker, next door. I have Sam and she came out and she gave me some cookies. And it was just one of those things that I've trained my brain to do this. And you can do it too, but I just trained my brain to see, look, I am so taken care of like, look, the universe is providing me chocolate chip cookies. All I had to do was ask, and there was a chocolate chip cookie for me there. So I am constantly looking for how I am provided for by the universe. All right, by everything around me, how I also provide for myself, because I ask for what I need or want, right? So these are things that we can begin doing. And I'm going to talk to you about this in a different way during this podcast. But I just kinda wanted to show you that little example of how we can just start training our brain in little ways to start seeing that things.

Aren't just a coincidence that they're not just dumb luck that we are actually creating them. So for example, you can begin by looking at the accomplishments you've created for yourself. I'm going to give you a personal example here. So it's really easy to think. I am so lucky to have this house and yeah, I am right. I can look at the house that I own and I couldn't totally ignore all the mindset work that had to be done to make it real for me. All right. But I'm going to show you how I make it real for myself. I have to take a sip of water here, guys. Sorry.

So my parents, they never owned a house. They always rented the cheapest place they could afford in an okay neighborhood that would always go downhill because there was major construction plan for the neighborhood. We would rent houses from Caltrans and my parents lived in San Diego and that's really the only way they could afford to live in San Diego with all the prices as they were. Unfortunately, these neighborhoods were really to put it nicely areas where there was no investment. There was zero investment in the houses. Everything was going downhill. Gangs started to take it over. I mean, it was, it was really like, I, it was in a mindset of, okay, well, I'm just going to move from house to house, to house, and I'm never going to own a house and it's never going to be in a great neighborhood. And you know, like I could choose to believe all these things because that's what I learned was true.

So we moved house to house about four, yeah, four or five times when I was a kid, until I moved out of college and my parents moved into an apartment. So the evidence I needed to create for myself was imperceptible at the time. But looking back on it, this is how I really did it. And I broke it down into three steps because in order to go from, I can't own a house. I'm not from a, like a society that can own houses, right? Cause my parents never owned a house. I never saw that kind of pride of ownership of a home. I never, I never got any of that. So I started to, I had to create some things for myself in order to get to the point where I was seven years ago, eight years ago when I bought my house. So these three steps were one, see that it was possible.

Or I have a model for me to create a path to get it and three make it happen. And I'm going to break this down even further with what I had to do here. Okay. And what I want you to do. And the reason I'm giving this example is because in order to bust through self doubt in any area that you're having self doubt in right now, wherever you feel stuck, you've got to look to your past, to see where you have already done it so that you can begin accumulating proof for your brain, that you can bust through self doubt because you've done it over and over again. So what I had to do was see that owning a house was possible. And when I was in college, all the houses, I saw that my friend's parents owned seemed impossibly huge and weren't homes.

I could see myself ever affording. They were like next stratosphere houses. And the only ones I was seeing were in LA and the Bay area. And then I moved to Sacramento for law school. And I saw a young lawyer, friends beginning to buy homes. And I started to see it was possible. Like I started to see a path. Like I had a legal career. I had the ability to maybe buy a home. If I saved, if I did some things, then I could see a path. I saw other people doing it. I didn't necessarily like the path, always that I saw them taking. Cause it didn't sound financially responsible to me cause they were doing like adjustable rate mortgages. And that did not sound sensible to me. So I didn't take that path. But I had to see that there was a path. So then I had to figure out a path for me to do it.

I didn't like that path. That didn't seem reasonable to me. So I had to look at what I needed to do so that I could create that for myself. I knew I needed to have some cash. So I made sure I saved every month. And I looked for a realtor was a really great review on Yelp. And I chose her immediately. Now I decide. And then I go, I don't waste time. Once I've decided I want something. It saves me a lot of time and energy that way. See a lot of people, clients when I talk to them, wasting a lot of time on decisions, just deciding to go and make it work. Okay. Okay. That was a side note. So she showed me homes. I looked for homes. I found a place. And then I, you know, there's a lot of mind drama I'm going to get into in a second.

And then third, I made it happen. It's done. I signed the mortgage. Right. But what you didn't see in there with those three steps, seeing it's possible, creating a path and making it happen where all the struggles my brain, my brain came up against. Okay. I had a ton of self doubt I needed to navigate along the way. I was scared to put the money down. I couldn't see myself owning that particular home. Was that really the home that I wanted to have. I was asking me all these questions. Should I take this house? Is this the only house out there? Should I keep looking? I mean, I talked it over with friends and they were like, bye bye. It's the bottom of the market. It's in a great neighborhood. And still my brain had all of these arguments about why I shouldn't do it.

Why I had doubt about doing this? Why I wasn't the kind of person who should have a house right now? Why should just be happy with my apartment? I had to reconnect constantly with what I wanted and refocus on what I wanted. It would have been really easy for me to do nothing and just stay in my nice apartment. So that's really the default our brain wants to go to because it's easy because when you have a lot of self doubt built into your brain and certain areas of your life may not be housing in this area. It might be money in the area that you're, you're thinking about or building a business, whatever it is, this is the kind of back and forth in our brains. That is normal. The important part is refocusing on what you want and all the evidence about how it's okay to have it.

In fact, other people have it and you can have it too. And you can create a path for it. I had to look for evidence that I could afford this house, that I had a job that I, they had money that I could put aside. I had to actually create that for myself. I had to keep telling myself that this was a good, reasonable decision that I'd be saving money in the long run because I was renting an apartment that was as much as the mortgage could take care of the house that I could figure it out. Yeah. How to find people to help me take care of the house that I had. Friends who could help me navigate things that I didn't know about home ownership, that I could do something that I had never done before. And I had never seen done before, except on the periphery, right?

Like I didn't have an inside scoop on how to work. You know, buying a house. I just saw other people had done it. So this is one example of odor overriding self-doubt to create something that you want. So before I start on the next section, which is really focusing on an example about business, I want you to think about I forget his name. I bring it up every once in a while, but you've probably heard of this. So before this, there was a man who ran the four minute mile. And before this man ran the four minute mile, everyone doubted it could be done. I think everyone thought it was impossible. There was nothing out there. There was no model. Nobody had ever done it before. And then somebody broke the four minute mile, right? No one could do it under four minutes. I think that's what it was.

And once he busted through that four minute mile Mark runner, after runner, after runner, after runner started breaking through the four mile, four minute mile Mark. And that's because they had a model that was something like they had self doubt and that model helped them bust through that self doubt. And then they could see a path to create what they wanted to create and then they did it. Okay. So that's the same model that we're talking about here is busting through that self doubt. That is just societaly driven, right? Like our society tells us certain things are possible and certain things are possible. And we also have family members who reflect this at us. So you may have had family members in the past reflect to you that is not possible. This dream is not for us. Why don't you look at this other dream?

It's much more reasonable. They are driven by those same societal factors, all of that societal brainwashing. So what we're doing in effect is rebrand, washing ourselves to clean up all that crap so that we can create what we want. All right. So now I want to focus this conversation on your business. I've created two businesses now while working full time as a lawyer. So I know that navigating the self doubt about creating your business while having other plates in the air can feel almost impossible. Sometimes self now will show up and a lot of thoughts you have like it's not working. I don't know how to fill in the blank. And definitely in procrastination, if you're procrastinating, you have self doubt.

No, that it is okay. It is

Normal. And that's one of the big things I help my clients with. I help them process the self doubt and create evidence that it's working. And then they start to shift their focus. Things begin to shift in their business and they begin hitting their goals on purpose. And you can do this too. That's what I'm showing you here. So imagine your legal practice as it is right now. How did it come into being one you saw that it's possible to, you created a path to get it. And three, you made it happen, whether you're just getting started or not, whether you're making money or not, it doesn't matter. You have made it happen. So how did you see that it was possible. Maybe you saw someone you admired or people you could help, whatever your story is. And you saw the possibility of the lobbying, the Avenue for your future.

And you saw there was a possibility for you to do it. How did you create a path for you to get it? Even if you didn't know exactly what kind of law you wanted to practice, you found a way to get into law school. You would always worked hard. You got into law school, figuring out all the student loans, the housing, the L sat along the way, and then you figured out, okay, how do I open shop? And then you made it happen. And let's even go back through law school. When law school was hard and you wanted to give up, you didn't give up. When they threw the bar exam at you, you studied hard and you passed. Then you found a job or maybe you open shop right away. Maybe you went through several interviews and you totally bombed, but then you found a job or maybe you decided, you know you just were gonna, you were gonna branch off right away and go out on your own.

In any case, you successfully navigated your brain. And it was telling you, it was hard that you should give up. Maybe you have people in your life along the way telling you it was okay to give up. Or maybe you even had people actively telling you that you should give up. Each of our paths are different, but if you made it this far, you made it happen. So good. I think ourselves credit for every step along this path is the first way to override self doubt. You have to really see, okay, every time someone told me, no, I said, no, I can do this. Every time somebody threw something at me that was hard. My brain said, yes, I am able to do this. What I see a lot of clients do when they're not familiar with the model. Cause that's what I teach my clients to really start seeing their thoughts in a very clear, focused way.

What they tell me their perception is is that they had self doubt and they, they didn't think they could do it. And then they worked really hard. And then they made it happen. Like that's not what happened. Okay? You all the thoughts that cause self doubt that creates nothing that is productive or good. What you actually did was change your thoughts, refocus your thoughts too. I can do this. I'm going to figure this out. This is going to happen. And that's where all the productive action came from. Because remember our thoughts, generate our feelings, generate our actions and create our results. So if you have doubts of self doubt, like if you have few of self doubt and you are procrastinating, if you are spinning in your thoughts, that is not going to generate anything, that's productive. In fact, that's going to stall you out and keep you from getting where you want to go faster.

What I find people doing is that they stay stuck. Like if they're not coached, they get stuck in self doubt. They're not looking at their thoughts. And then when they start looking at their thoughts and breaking it down, they recognize they're spending way too much time in self doubt and that they need to bust their thoughts. Move their thoughts over to this is happening. This is working. I'm figuring this out. I know this is possible. And that is what's generating their productive results. That would, that's what takes them out of procrastination. That's what takes them out of stalling out in their business is they're refocusing their thoughts. So notice if this is happening for you and you think you're actually getting drive and energy from that worried energy, that place where you're worried and anxious, that's not where your power is. Your power is feeling ease and confidence and certainty.

And so that's the shift you need to make in order to make things easier in your business. In fact, anything in your life. Just notice that. So that's a side note, little side note on mindset there. All right. So, so here's where we talk about how you can apply the structure, this three part structure that I've been talking about into any area of your life. First of all, ask yourself what you really right now prioritize. What's most important to you, not to your family, not to your friends, but to you. If you don't know what you really want and that's normal, if you haven't thought about this in a while I want you to really think about like what things you that drive you. Okay. I'm going to share with you what was driving me when I started my business, because I didn't know what I wanted.

So let's, let's break this down. So step one is seeing that it's possible. All I knew when I started my business is that I wanted to help people. I loved learning. I wanted to create a business and I wanted to learn how to make money. Those were the four things that I knew that I knew that I wanted. I just didn't know how they went together. So then what you need to do is be open to seeing possibility. And that is enough, right? Just being open to the possibility of things and seeing where life takes you. So when I was figuring out what a business would look like for me, while practicing law, full time, all I knew were physical products. My dad grew up with well, I grew up with my dad having a store. It was all physical products. Okay. I had no conception of learning products, coaching, anything like that.

All I knew was brick and mortar, but I knew I couldn't have a brick and mortar because I had a full time legal job. So how was I going to make this work online? So I was always in the process of how do I figure this out? What can I do? I know what's possible. How can I do this? So I picked a product for me. It was loose leaf tea because I loved tea. I knew it was healthy and it was relatively easy to sell online. So as I learned how to create a physical product business, when I stayed open to seeing possibility, I learned about online learning and then about coaching. And I saw different styles of coaching and I saw good coaching and bad coaching and everything in between. And I'd never come across this world before. And when I saw it modeled and I was open to possibility, I could see how coaching really ticked off the boxes for me in a way, selling a physical product.

It didn't quite do. I wanted to help people check. I loved learning check. I wanted to create a business check and I wanted to learn how to make money check. So that is all you need to do in step one is know what you want, have a model for it, or at least be open to possibility, have like a general idea of what you want and then be open to possibility and looking for how you can find a model of what you want to create. Step two is creating a path to get it. That means taking action. Any action on what you want. So I say any action here with a caveat. I say any action right here, because usually we're so stuck in our head about getting, moving that anything is going to do like any fricking thing. But remember you have overwritten yourself doubt naturally, without even thinking about it before, what I want you to do is think about all the times you were scared and you did it anyway all the times.

It was hard and you did it anyway. You got what you wanted because you were willing to feel all the negative feelings that come with breaking out of your comfort zone. The self doubt, fear and all, all of that stuff. But if I were starting over and I was making a list of actions for myself and my business, I would narrow this action down. First of all, I would listen to self-help daily. It keeps your brain open to possibilities and you'll be living and breathing better thoughts. So just listening to this podcast, you've got that checked off. Yeah. The second thing I would do is focus my attention on two to may, two to three main actions that move your business. Number one, networking, number two, creating one main form of content podcast, blog, video, whatever it is. And the third thing for me, it would be mindset.

And here's what I mean by mindset examine the thoughts that you already have seriously journal every day. I talk about this in almost every podcast now, because I am such a firm believer of it. I talk about uncovering hidden thoughts and episode number one 11. And that podcast can help you with thought downloads and understanding how that works, but journal every day and then practice believing the thoughts you want to believe daily. And I give you some examples in episode one 21. That's just before this podcast, but here's a tip. Imagine yourself in the position of already having what you want, really feel it in your body as if you are that person already. And then write down all the thoughts she thinks about having what she has practice those thoughts. This is a really powerful practice that I walk my clients through each time they set a new goal in their business because it's essential for rewiring your brain to get where you want to go.

This is the practice I do for myself. When I want to create anything to one of the big self doubts. I'll tell you about that. I had about my business was showing up on video. I didn't like the way I looked. I felt awkward. I was nervous. I had all the thoughts, like what will people think? Or they're going to think I'm too big for my britches. And what if it's awful? I had to feel those feelings of self doubt and fear and remind myself it was okay. And I had to keep putting myself into the shoes of someone who was already the kind of person who made videos and was super comfortable doing it. And that was the person who didn't need the approval of anyone. And I knew exactly what I was doing. And I knew that this video was going to help someone and that I was explaining this really simply so that someone could understand a concept in a different way.

That I was, I was, you know, somebody wanted to hear this. Like I was putting myself over and over again in my brain, in the shoes of someone who is already the kind of person who made videos regularly. And I saw the development of myself creating those really early videos for my tea company. Like it's funny thinking about them and how nervous I was and how fearful I was of how I thought people are gonna see me and the develop a development of myself. As I shifted my thoughts and shifted my persona into the person who does videos. Like it's not even a doubt now. And I don't let like the, the fear or any self doubt stop me. And it it's much easier. Even if that comes up to say, Hey, that's not the thought that's helpful for me. Like that. Doesn't take me anywhere.

And it's easier for me to shift right away and get more action done so I can complete what I want to create and I can reach the goals that I want to make. So that's another example where self-doubt might show up that you can then move through it. Okay. So those are, those are my tips for that. And then step three is that it's done. You've made it happen. It bears repeating that you already know how to do this. Okay? You are reminding your brain with this process that you create things on purpose, that you are the one in control of creating what you want and that you do it all the time. Okay. I hope this was helpful for you. Conjoin me on Instagram at [inaudible]. I love seeing when people share the podcast with their networks and be sure to tag me in any of your posts.

So I see them. And if you are on iTunes or somewhere like right now, listening to this and you have a moment, I would really appreciate it. If you left me a review, that is how I tunes really measures, engagement, and how other people can find this podcast and get this kind of message too. So I would really appreciate it. If you would do that, I will talk to you next week. Bye. If you love what you're learning on the podcast, imagine how you'll evolve. When you start implementing what you're learning, you can learn how to work with me to do just that by scheduling a free strategy session, go to Dina, cataldo.com. That's Dina cataldo.com. Talk to you soon.