Living a life of self-doubt—How I learned to believe in myself and how you can as well

After a major setback in my company nearly ten years ago, I was told by a business partner how worthless I was. He blamed me for the problems we were facing. He told me in no uncertain terms how worthless I was. He said that my friends had abandoned me, my family had abandoned me, and that I was a complete failure.

The setback nearly crippled me financially. For the next five years, I would have to work my way out of a hole. Those words stayed with me for a long time. I was a failure. My family had abandoned me, and all my friends were gone. Logically I knew this wasn’t true but in my weakened state of mind, I couldn’t help but give heed to those words and they played over and over again in my mind.

Those words followed me in every aspect of my life. With every minor failure I encountered, I heard those words, “You’re worthless, you have no friends or family.” It affected my relationship with my wife and children. I started to think that my family would be better off without me. I became very depressed and had thoughts of suicide. I really thought that I wasn’t loved and didn’t have any worth. I couldn’t pick myself up.

Along my journey to regain my self worth I found three things that made a huge difference in my outlook and recovery. After implementing these three things my life started turning around and I started to see myself in a different light.

Set Goals

A lack of goals was the biggest driver of my unhappiness and lack of self-worth. After the business problems I faced, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I didn’t have anything to work for. I was just existing. I decided it was time to go back and earn the bachelor's degree I put on hold to start a company. In that time my wife and I decided it was time to time move to Guatemala as we had wanted to for some time. We set goals for our children. We had something to work for together.

Without goals to work for you are just existing. This point is illustrated in the book Alice in Wonderland. “One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the Cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”

Setting goals helped me to have a clear vision of what I wanted to become. I could set smaller goals of how I was going to accomplish the vision of my life. If you are struggling with self-worth, the first step to recovery is to set goals.

Find someone who supports you with positive reinforcement

When I entered Graduate school those thoughts still plagued me. I remember the very first class assignment where I was supposed to explain a paper about historical linguistics. Not only was the paper very technical but it was in Spanish. It was a 30-page paper. I read that paper seven times trying to figure it out. I had to learn a whole new vocabulary and in the end, I was still confused. I thought to myself if this is how grad school is going to be, I don’t have a chance.

As I was lamenting to my wife about my situation she told, “You can do this. Nothing worthwhile ever came easy but you are very capable of doing this. Everything will be ok.” When I went to give the summary of the paper I apologized to the class and told them that Spanish was not my native language and that the paper was difficult to understand for me. I gave my summary and when I was done, one of the people in the class who was a lawyer said to the class and to me, “I read that paper 3 times and I still don’t really understand it and I am a native Spanish speaker so don’t feel bad at all.”

My wife was right. Things did work out and school became more manageable. I’ve become more confident in my language and scholarly abilities. This was largely due to the fact that every time I had a doubt about myself or my abilities my wife was there to give me an honest assessment and encourage me to do better. She believed in me many times when I didn’t believe in myself.

Surround yourself with positive influences.

There are so many distractions that can railroad us in reaching our goals. I’ve learned to avoid things that bring my energy down or are negative in nature. This for me has been music, movies, and social media. When I was a young man I was a DJ and I quickly learned that I could control the crowd with the type of music I played. If I wanted them in an upbeat mood, I played a certain type of music. If I wanted them in a sexual mood I could put another type of music on. I could manipulate emotion by the type of music. It had nothing to do with the lyrics of the music. It had everything to do with tempo, instruments, and style of music.

Making sure that I listened to the right type of music was a critical aspect of changing my vision of my own self-worth. Watching the right type of movies and programs was key as well. I stopped watching movies that I could relate to my own poor self-worth. Any movie that expressed a negative portrayal of people in bad situations that I could sympathize with I avoided. It wasn’t worth reinforcing those negative stereotypes in my mind.

Doing those three things helped me to go from a broken individual with little vision of my self worth to being realistic about my life. There are still challenges, there are still times I feel inadequate but I know what I am working for and I know that I can overcome those inadequacies because I have a vision of what I want and what I want to become.