Ten minutes later, someone else said it

Here's an example. It's Monday, and the team is trying to work out why sign-ups fell last month. You noticed something on Thursday. The form doesn't load properly on a phone. You start putting the sentence together, and then other thoughts arrive. Someone must have checked that already. If it mattered, one of the senior people would have raised it. You might be wrong about what you saw.

You say nothing. Ten minutes later a colleague says, "Could it be the form on mobile?" The room turns to her, someone checks, and she's right. You knew the answer on Thursday.

A second example. A job advert has been open in a tab on your laptop for four days. You meet most of the list. There are two lines you don't meet, and those are the two you keep rereading. On Friday you close the tab, and you tell yourself it probably wasn't the right time anyway.

A third. You write an email to a client in fifteen minutes. It says what it needs to say. You then spend fifty minutes changing "I think" to "I believe" and back again, and in the end you forward it to a colleague with the message "does this sound OK?"

And one from outside work. You've been going to a drawing class for two years. Your drawings live in a folder under the bed. When a friend asks to see them you say "oh, they're not really anything", and you change the subject.

If some of these are familiar, look at how each one went. A doubt arrived. It may have come as a thought, such as "who am I to say this?", or as a drop in the stomach with no words at all. Within a second or two you'd done something about it. You stayed quiet, or closed the tab, or rewrote the email, or checked with someone, or kept the folder shut. I'm going to call that stepping back, because in each case you were on your way towards something and you withdrew.

The doubt and the step back feel like one event. They're two. The doubt is a thought and a feeling, and it arrives without your permission. The step back is something you do. This book is mostly about the second, and my argument is that it's a habit.

The usual explanation is "I lack confidence", said as though confidence were a substance and you were born short of it. I don't think that survives a close look at your own life. You probably don't doubt everything. There are things you do without a second thought that would frighten other people, such as calming a furious customer, driving in a strange city, or looking after a sick child through the night. Your doubt is selective. It turns up in particular places, around particular people, about particular kinds of task. Something that selective is more likely to be learned than built in, and I'll come back to where it was learned in chapter 11.

Habits last because they pay, and this one does pay. When you step back, you skip an exposed moment in which you could have been wrong in front of people. Nobody can find fault with a point you didn't make or reject an application you didn't send. The extra checking sometimes does catch a mistake. The doubt itself feels like modesty, and like protection against being the fool who was sure and wrong. These are real benefits, and I'll go through them one at a time. I'll try to show that each is smaller than it looks, and that each has a cost you've stopped counting. The colleague who got the credit is one of those costs. The job somebody else now has is another.

Let me say what this book isn't arguing. It isn't saying you should be certain, or loud, or that you should stride into rooms. Plenty of loud, certain people are wrong, and you've noticed that, which is part of why confidence advice puts you off. It also isn't saying that doubt is always mistaken. Sometimes you doubt a piece of work because there's a fault in it. Chapter 3 gives a way to tell that kind of doubt from the other kind.

The aim is accuracy. I'd like your view of what you can do to match the evidence, which I expect is better than your view. And I'd like what you do next to be decided by you, with that evidence in hand, and no longer by a feeling that hasn't checked anything.

I should add that doubt isn't always homemade. Some readers work or live among people who do question them more than they question others, because of their age, sex, accent, colour or background. If that's your situation, part of your doubt is an accurate reading of the room and not a fault in you. Chapter 11 deals with this, and I've tried not to write the rest of the book as if it didn't happen.

One more thing before we go on. Ordinary self-doubt attaches to tasks and situations. If what you have is a sense of being worthless in general, and it has come with low mood, poor sleep or a loss of interest in things for more than a couple of weeks, that may be depression, and it's worth seeing a doctor. A book isn't the right tool for it. If you're having thoughts of harming yourself, contact a doctor or a crisis line today, or the emergency services if you might act on them.