🙂‍↔️ How to overcome self-doubt

We often hear our internal voices when we are in the kitchen preparing our meals, washing our dishes, or alone. Some may be positive, others may cast self-doubts, “Will I make it?”, “Will everything in my presentation be alright tomorrow?”, “Will the new studio look exactly like I want?”, “Will the meeting be successful?”. As much as our curious minds are programmed, shutting down this unending stream of self-questioning is difficult. So, how should our conscious minds counteract these unintentional questions? Time.

Nature does not have time. Humans invent time. I don’t think cats and dogs share the sense of time like we do. Pets eat and sleep and repeat the whole thing another day. I rarely see a puppy will plant a tree or save a treat in a jaw. In this sense, time does not really exist in the natural world. In the human world, however, it is heavily interwoven into every second of our lives. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, processes have become standardized, economics of scale has become the best practice, and time and money have become subjects that can no longer be separated. We talked about passive income, work-life balance, hourly rate, and everything that makes a living is time-related. However, there is one thing we do not emphasize enough: however much we want, we cannot speed up or slow down time.

Knowing that the speed and the direction of time are, at least until now, practically irreversible, we should make use of this fact to counter our self-doubts about what is waiting for us in the future. Will I get the job offer tomorrow? Only time will tell. You would not know until you reach the time point when it happens. Will your presentation go well tomorrow? Again, only time will tell. Calming down your curious mind by realizing that we can’t speed up time and reveal what is waiting for us, like turning over stones, we should embrace the bitterness of the waiting in the meantime and the sweetness of future revelation.