The Unexpected Wisdom of Self-Doubt
A few years ago, Beatrice stepped into my life. It was as if I set out to renovate my house, and the perfect project manager simply showed up on my doorstep. When I needed a drill, she was there, bit in hand. When I went to install the lights, she was already up on the ladder. She was one of those characters who show up in our stories right when we need them, with something we’re missing. Like an apparition, they appear.
Meet Beatrice
Beatrice is a 70-something kid at heart. Our paths have had an eerily similar arc and it made me want to tell her things. And so, one day as we talked away on the phone, I found myself confiding in her. I was struggling with this "awful" internal experience that I couldn't quite articulate, the one that was keeping me up at night and causing paralysis on the very long to-do list I desperately needed to tackle. Well, as she is someone that doesn’t let such things just go by in a conversation, Beatrice paused. "Tell me more," she probed, as though she knew something delicate was beneath the surface.
I explained that though I had always been a driven, "get stuff did" kind of person, I found myself losing my edge, giving in to waning energy and experiencing a plummeting inner mojo. It was not depression, I explained. It was more like a stuck, inner thinker, one that refuses to get off the proverbial pot. I had become a bit of a ditherer, a spinner of circles. She probed again. "And? What's the problem with that?" (ahem; let us stop here and notice the power of a good, disruptive question. One that knocks us back on our heels and destabilizes us).
I told Beatrice that I was frightened. "I feel like I've stopped thinking clearly. I notice myself second guessing, stepping back, conceding that other people know better than me. Even when they don't, and who the heck am I if I’m not a driver??’ I had no template for this part of myself, or at least not one that I could easily conjure up, and so I peppered her with questions. "How is one supposed to be a successful entrepreneur if she is low on "driver" instincts? What the heck happened to my get-up-and-go-at-top-speeds-self?" ALSO, as I fretfully explained, I had started to care less about things I would have previously insisted on. I disclosed my highly unhelpful, black-and-white thinking that only drivers with ambition really get anywhere in this world. I expressed feelings of worry. And most of all, I put words to the scathing self-judgement I was living with. They were words that my inner critic had been spewing for weeks, but that could not seem to whip me into shape.
Then She Laughed
Most people would empathize with some part of my story. They'd say "That sounds hard," or perhaps try to solve the "problem." Some of my more evolved confidants would even comfortably explore it with me. But, no. Beatrice started to cackle. Like, laugh out loud. And she did it without any apology. Had herself a nice little laugh at my expense, and without softening it at all, said "Yes, my dear; welcome to your 40's. Kiss your certainty goodbye, because it's not returning. It's not supposed to."
It stuck in my craw for days. WHAT WAS SHE TALKING ABOUT? I'd gotten everything I had in my life through sweat, grit and persistence (or so I was telling myself), and the one thing that had propelled me towards those things was a DEEP DEEP AVERSION to being told to "chill out." Ugh, shut UP! Don't even talk to me about chilling out, because—dramatic eye roll—the world doesn't spin because people sit on the sidelines and munch popcorn.
We Are All Hyper-Something
I see this differently now, many months later. Now, I have put together that one of the biggest problems we get ourselves into is when a well-loved value is put on steroids. Hyper-individualism. Hyper-innovation. Hyper-service. Hyper-everything. In my case, hyper-driving. Values are meant to anchor us for chapters (usually a decade or so), but evolve over a lifetime. And we don't usually realize that values have handcuffed us, until someone gently points out that we have become distasteful, controlling human beings that need to re-think our hyper-whatever.
It took me days, but I got there. I rehearsed my newfound insight that "my sense of certainty is not returning...and it's not supposed to" with my husband and some friends. I poked some of the assumptions I had been holding. I allowed some daylight to shine on the idea that maybe my hyper-certainty had at times been about my fragile ego, and that perhaps people achieve results through plenty of avenues other than ambition (stop the presses, because that one just about knocked me out cold). And here's where I ended up in my possibly permanent state of self-doubt.
Embracing Self-Doubt
Self-doubt comes in many forms. Most of them are unhelpful, like when we doubt our own lovability, or when we doubt our gritty selves to recover from setbacks. Unhelpful self-doubt also looks like doubting other people's intentions and generosity, when there is no solid reason to do so. Also unhelpful? Doubting our own wisdom and intuition—a particularly popular brand—which is almost never of good use. But, self-doubt can be deeply healthy at certain times of life. One of those is middle life. There is a certainty of the 30s that fades in the 40s, as it must. I hear that there is another wave of it around retirement. Notably, there is also a tidal wave of self-doubt that seems to surround the beginnings and endings in our lives, such as the end of a relationship, the arrival of a child, or the end of a career chapter. And, may you be unusually kind to yourself if your beginning/ending occurs at the same time as a developmental milestone. Will you be getting a divorce around your 50th birthday? Having a baby at 40? Well, that’s just a lot.
Self-doubt is not itself a bad thing. Many times it is something to overcome, a barrier that keeps us from taking important risks. But, every so often, it is a softening of a certainty that was—ever so subtly—misplaced. It can be a check and balance against unintended dogmatism, slowing us down to be more thoughtful, more reflective, and less pressuring to ourselves, to others, and to our circumstances.
The end of the story is that, in my case, it made me less interesting (bummer). Brashness and surety sure do make an interaction more fun and dynamic than hedging and spinning does, and so I am a little less entertaining for the time being. For others, their healthy self-doubt might hold other liabilities, such as permission to no longer say "yes" when they want to say "no." Perhaps it looks like giving up a familiar but thorny path for an enterprising new one. But Beatrice was right; certainty sometimes takes a hiatus, and it's supposed to. She told me her own story about how her dogmatism slowly eroded, and how over time, discernment, wisdom, and patience grew instead. And I admired her so much that it gave me what I needed to finish the process. If self-doubt looks like Beatrice...well, bring it on.
