“Can confidence ever be a bad thing? What if it happens to be confidence in your own self-doubt? In a pair of mind-bending experiments Aaron Wichman and colleagues show that doubt layered on doubt doesn’t lead to more doubt but rather to increased confidence, as the initial self-doubt is undermined. The researchers say their findings have clinical implications – for instance, by turning a belief that one is definitely going to fail into a belief that one might fail, a therapist could help inspire a client to overcome the paralysis of hopelessness.
First off, Wichman’s team measured the chronic uncertainty of 37 participants (by testing their agreement with statements like ‘When bad things happen I do not know why’). Half these participants also completed a sentence unscrambling task designed to surreptitiously sow doubt. They had to organise jumbled words into sentences and many of the words, like ‘uncertainty’, pertained to doubt. The other participants performed an almost identical task but without any doubt-related words.”
Read more at BPS Research Digest
I was thinking about this a few weeks ago. Does make sense
this study looks rather doubtful…
(hey, somebody hadda say it!)
That’s called inner reasoning with yourself, checking it from more sides. My god .. don’t make that sound so complicated. We all do that. And no, it will not always lead to confidence, but it will give you a better feeling about the matter because you put reason back in their, established yourself back in there, back in control, although the situation might not always have changed.
Can lead to even more doubt too ofcourse … ehehe … but then you proceed with the same system .. eventually you normally will come up with the same conclusion .. you will need to make a choice (well, if it is something you will need to make a choice about/in).
Lots of options here .. very personal, the way we deal with these things and proceed afterwards, or not.
Oh, may I add that it is interesting that many I’s in the brain can communicate with eachother. You never have to feel alone, think about that, see the options .. Serious. Be your own reviewer, if possible.
i certainly have an oppositional personality, so doubt and skepticism do tend to be strong motivators. but upon experiencing any sort of success, making the transition from being doubt fueled to self-assurance is tough. real hard, in fact.
not to mention when those around you realize how you work and take to feeding you the fuel they know you flourish on. there comes a point when enough is enough, and support is what you’re looking for. which is sort of funky, ’cause folks who feel they’ve been part of any success might not understand they need to tweak their roles moving forward. so you’ve got to be ready to retrain them, as well as yourself, to be open to these new things. conversion.
tricky territory to navigate, especially for the first time