#045 Stop Self Doubt

If you’ve gone through your life struggling with doubt, self-doubt, doubting other people, doubting your relationships, your work, doubting your worth, doubting your Creator.

Subhanallah, no one likes to say that but that’s actually what people do.

I don’t mean doubting whether or not there is a Creator. 

What I’m talking about is doubting whether or not Allah has you in his plans, and if he’s taking care of you. 

That doubt often happens because of the struggles that we’re going through. 

So I’m going to address key, fundamental issues that every human being needs to deal with so that they can have a good quality of life. It’s all jam-packed in here. 

Let’s look at it from the angle of problems. 

So, the doubt that you probably have to deal with on a regular basis. 

That doubt keeps you in a state of flux, and emotional highs and lows. 

When the doubt is reduced and you don’t have as many doubts as on the worst days, you feel better and more stable, and you feel like your life is alright. 

Whereas when the doubts increase, that’s when we actually struggle with ourselves. 

We start to struggle in our relationships. We struggle with our mental and spiritual well-being. 

Allah (swt) says it right at the beginning of the Quran,

ذَٰلِكَ الْكِتَابُ لَا رَيْبَ ۛ فِيهِ ۛ هُدًى لِّلْمُتَّقِينَ

This is the Book about which there is no doubt, a guidance for those conscious of Allah 

This is the Book Where There’s No Doubt

Think about it. 

What we do is we become focused on trying to gain achievements. We try to attain more and we set goals for ourselves when we’re younger.

We don’t do it consciously. 

Okay, sometimes we do it consciously. But we say we’re going to grow up and become engineers, doctors, lawyers or footballers, or whatever people decide.

You’ve set yourself some goals, either consciously or unconsciously. 

As you grow up, when you lose sight of what you’re trying to do in your life, and you get derailed, or you have excessive negative thinking, what tends to happen is that you make mistakes.

We don’t realise our achievements or our goals. 

Or we have bad experiences. 

You get married, and you have a really bad experience in your marriage, or you go to university and you have a bad experience at university.

People have all sorts of bad experiences and those bad experiences create all the negative internal chatter.

Add the Waswas from Shaitan, add some habitual thinking to that, and add some negative comments from the people around us. 

Before you know it, you’ve got a vicious cloud of negativity. And when you find yourself in the middle of that, you begin to doubt everything. 

You doubt everything and it affects your connection to Allah.

It affects your connection to people around you. 

You go into a state of insecurity and doubt.

And when you fall into that state of doubt, then it affects your work. It affects the way you see yourself. 

You second-guess everything that you do. 

SECOND GUESSING AND SPIRALLING

When you second guess everything you do, that really throws your life into turmoil.

A lot of times, my clients, my trainee coaches, and my therapists, come into the programme with so many doubts.

The worst of those doubts is that they doubt themselves.

They doubt every decision they make, and just about every area of their life.

Falling into that level of doubt affects your mental well-being.

And when your mental well-being is off kilter, you’re not feeling it. You’re spending most of your time in these negative emotions.

So, you find yourself in that constant struggle, then you think that you don’t make the right decisions, you’re messing up all your relationships, and you think that the people around you are not helping you, or they’re not supporting you enough. 

You start thinking they don’t care about you. 

You think that Allah (swt) isn’t taking care of you. Now, in that state, often we act out. 

We start shouting, we get defensive, and we just find ourselves on edge. 

When you find yourself on edge, you’ll make all of your worst nightmares, all of the things you’ve been fretting about, come to fruition.

You’ll get into disputes or arguments with people. Or you’ll withdraw from people. 

When you’re in a state of withdrawal, you start to feel disconnected, because you’re not communicating with the people around you.

They’re probably walking on eggshells around you. 

Things just get worse. And we stay in that state for a long period of time. This is the kind of stuff that leads to long-term depressive thinking.

This is the kind of stuff that leads to anxiety and always feeling like we can’t cope with life. 

When you feel like you can’t cope with life, then life will become unbearable.

In case you’re thinking, this guy’s really depressing me, here’s some good news for you.

Go right back to the beginning of this where I’m telling you what’s actually happening. 

THE WAKE-UP CALL

This is the line of events. This is the trajectory.

The way it begins and where it takes us. Just be aware of it. 

If you’re aware of what’s actually happening, you can do something about it. 

Let’s go back to certainty. Because that’s what you really need. 

If you’re in a state of certainty, you’re not going to be plagued with this indecision and with all these doubts.

It’s not going to affect your relationships. If you’re in a state of certainty, you can actually do well in life. 

You can find your way out of any type of depressive thinking, anxiousness, and even panic attacks.

Many of my clients who go through panic attacks, find their way out of panic attacks when they gain that level of stability. 

Stability comes from that certainty of, “I’m going to be alright.

I am alright and Allah (swt) is taking care of me.” 

How do you know that you can do this? 

This is the key thing you need to understand. 

When I train people, I take them through the psychological transformations, and what we focus on, is pure, 100% through the Huda (Guidance). 

Why the Huda? Because Allah (swt) says that this is the Book where there is no doubt.

So the Science of the Nafs, this spiritual psychology model, is a model of therapy and transformation. And it’s not just that.

It’s about doing well in life, it’s about excelling in life, it’s about really getting yourself to a place where you can love life.

To do that, you’ve got to have a level of stability and certainty, and you’ve got to feel like you can do okay in life. 

The way that you do that, is by applying this Huda (Guidance). 

This is different from traditional Islamic Studies, because we’re focused on therapeutic intervention, mental health, and wealth. 

When we take you through the Science of the Nafs, this is what we’re doing. 

So as you read through this, I want you to see the trajectory I painted for you. My guess is you probably resonate with a lot of it. 

You probably know this through your own life experience. 

If you know it, and I know it, then the One who created you and I, knows it better than us. 

He has a solution better than the one that you and I can come up with.

So if we can rely on that, then we gain that level of certainty. 

We gain that level of trust, we gain that level of knowing we’re going to be alright. 

If you could feel okay and supported, not lonely. 

If you could feel like all of your life is being taken care of, and you had that stability, if you could wipe out the doubts, then what would that do for you? 

The reality is that if you could wipe out the doubt it would actually wipe out your problems.

The reason you’re having those problems is because of the doubts. And if you could wipe that out, then Subhanallah, you would have the most wonderful life because you’re no longer in a state of insecurity.

You’re no longer in a state of constantly second-guessing yourself. 

That’s what this is all about. 

Think about it and just go back to the trajectory of what’s happening in your life. 

If you can become aware of what’s happening, you can wipe it away and get rid of it.

If you can get rid of that doubt, then your life becomes stable again. You get onto a trajectory of stability and you do well.

When you can do that, you’ll begin to thrive, and you’ll start to love your life. 

Pay close attention to what I’m sharing because these are not just little nuggets. They will transform the way you’re experiencing your life if you take action on it. 

If you do it, you can love your life again. 

You can truly love your life again.