How Self-Doubt Can Lead to Missed Opportunities
By: Joy Stephenson-Laws, JD, Founder and President
Many of us have walked into a room already thinking no one would want to talk to us. We stay near the wall, avoid eye contact, and leave early. Then we go home thinking, "I knew it. Nobody wanted to talk to me."
But there is another possibility. The thought we carried into the room may have changed what we did once we got there.
What we believe about ourselves, and what we expect from other people, can shape what we notice, the choices we make, how long we keep trying, and how we interact with other people. Those actions can influence what happens next. They do not control everything that happens to us, but they can have real power.
Psychologists have studied parts of this process for decades. In an experiment at McGill University, 147 students were randomly assigned to play one of two short computer games: find the one smiling face in a grid of frowning faces, or find one flower among other flowers. Then they took a test. Pairs of faces appeared on the screen, one frowning and one neutral, followed by a dot where one of the faces had been, and students pressed a key as fast as they could. Among students who played the flower game, those with lower self-esteem responded faster when the dot replaced the frowning face than when it replaced the neutral face, which the researchers read as their attention going to the frown first. Among students with lower self-esteem, those who played the smiling-face game showed less of that pattern. How people saw themselves was linked to where their attention went, and practice changed where it went.
Another study followed 184 seventh and eighth graders from about age 13 into their mid-twenties. At 13, they were asked how classmates would react in everyday situations, such as making a suggestion during a group project. Teenagers who expected more rejection tended to become more submissive with their closest friend over the next five years, letting the friend do most of the talking when they asked for help, and their friends rated them as less romantically appealing. At 24 and 25, they rated their own close relationships and social lives as weaker. The researchers described this as consistent with a possible self-fulfilling process. Because the study observed the teenagers without assigning them to groups, it could not establish that the expectations caused what followed. The researchers' models also accounted for only 5 to 22 percent of the variation in outcomes, so other factors mattered a great deal.
FEEL.
The first step of the Feel. Pause. Act.™ method is to notice what is happening inside us.
Say we applied for a position we want and have not heard back. We think, "They probably looked at my application and decided I wasn't good enough," and we feel embarrassed before anyone has turned us down.
FEEL asks us to identify the feeling as it is: I feel embarrassed. Then to identify the thought attached to it: I am telling myself that their silence means I wasn't good enough.
Naming the emotion on a person's face can change how the brain responds to it. In a study at UCLA, 30 adults looked at photos of faces, most looking scared or angry, while a scanner recorded their brain activity. When they picked a word for the emotion, such as "angry" or "scared," a part of the brain called the amygdala was less active than when they only looked at the faces or sorted them in other ways. The amygdala helps the brain pick out threats and other emotionally important information.
The adults named the feeling on someone else's face, not their own. The study recorded brain activity only; it reports no ratings of how the adults felt.
The feeling may still be there after we name it. What we gain is one named feeling and one named thought to look at in the next step.
PAUSE.
Now we examine the thought. What do I know?
We know we applied, and we know we have not received an answer. We do not know why. They may have turned us down. They may still be interviewing, the position may be on hold, or another applicant may have more experience.
The pause separates what happened from what we concluded about what happened.
Changing how we interpret a situation can change how we feel about it. In a brain-imaging study at Stanford, 15 women were trained to reinterpret upsetting photographs, for example by deciding that women crying outside a church were at a wedding instead of a funeral. On the most upsetting photographs, their average rating of negative feeling was 3.5 when they let themselves react and 1.9 when they reinterpreted the photo, on a scale of 1 to 4, and the negative feeling did not disappear entirely. The instruction in that study was to make each photo feel less negative. The pause in this method uses a stricter test: the new explanation has to fit what we know.
Replacing "I am going to fail" with "I am definitely going to succeed" trades one guess for another, since we know neither. A more accurate thought is:
"I don't know what they will decide. I can decide what I do next."
That thought is useful, because it names the part we control.
ACT.
Now we act on the part we control. We cannot make an employer hire us, make another person become our friend, or guarantee that we will win a game. We can follow up on the application, start a conversation, accept an invitation, ask someone to lunch, tell a friend when something is bothering us, practice, prepare, listen to our coach, and play the next point.
A plan that names when and where we will act can help us follow through, if we already want the goal. Psychologists call these plans implementation intentions: If X happens, I will do Y. In one study, 85 students at a British university were randomly assigned either to write down where and at what times they would study on each day of the coming week or to skip that step. A week later, the students who wrote the plan reported more hours of study, but only if they had intended to study a moderate or large amount. Among students who had intended to study little, the plan made no measurable difference. A second experiment in the same paper reached a similar conclusion. The plan helps most when we already want the goal.
A vague intention such as "I need to be more confident at networking events" becomes a plan: "If I walk into the event and feel like standing by myself, I will introduce myself to one person."
"I need to believe in myself more" becomes: "If I see an opportunity I meet most of the qualifications for, I will apply and let the employer make the decision."
Doing the work can also change what we believe about ourselves. In 1981, Stanford researchers studied 40 children, ages 7 to 10, who were far behind in math and did not like it. Each child worked through a set of subtraction lessons on their own. The children were randomly assigned to four groups:
One group was encouraged to aim for a small goal each session: finish at least six pages.
A second group was encouraged to aim for one big goal: finish all 42 pages by the last session.
A third group was told to do as many pages as they could, with no set goal.
A fourth group took the math tests but did not do the lessons.
The children with a small goal each session learned the most subtraction and were the most sure they could solve subtraction problems. They also finished lessons faster than the children with no set goal. Later, the children were free to work on subtraction problems, a symbol-matching task, or both. In the small-goal group, 9 in 10 did some subtraction, compared with about 4 in 10 in the other groups. The children with only the big goal did no better than the children with no set goal.
Children who mastered more of the lessons tended to feel more confident. The researchers wrote that skill and confidence can each increase the other, and cautioned that their data could not fully separate which came first. The children's confidence came with evidence they could see: pages finished and problems solved.
What Beliefs Cannot Do.
We do not control every outcome. Other people's choices, health, money, opportunity, skill, timing, and chance all matter. We can walk into an interview prepared and confident and still not get the job, treat someone well and still lose the friendship, or train hard and still lose the game.
The Feel. Pause. Act.™ method asks a narrower question:
Is something I believe about myself changing what I notice, what I attempt, or what I do next?
FEEL what is happening. PAUSE before treating the thought as a fact. ACT on the part we control.
Our thoughts can change what we do when we walk into the room, and what we do can change what happens next.
Joy Stephenson-Laws, JD, is the founding and managing partner of Stephenson, Acquisto & Colman, a healthcare litigation firm, and the founder and president of Proactive Health Labs, a national nonprofit focused on evidence-based health literacy. A healthcare attorney for more than forty years and a certified holistic wellness coach, she writes about how people can partner with their doctors without surrendering their own judgment.
Her books include Your Labs Are Fine. You're Not., Advice on Trial: The Beliefs You Inherited but Never Examined, From Chains to Wings: A Poetry Revolution for Healing,Secrets That Sparkle (and Secrets That Sting), and Minerals - The Forgotten Nutrient: Your Secret Weapon for Getting and Staying Healthy.
(This article is for general education and is not medical advice. It is meant to help you ask better questions, not to replace evaluation by a qualified clinician).
RESOURCES AND REFERENCES
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