When it goes wrong

It will, in two ways. Sometimes you'll act against the doubt and it will go badly. And sometimes you'll step back again, after you'd decided not to. They need different responses, so I'll take them in turn.

When you acted, and the doubt was right

You made the point, and it had been dealt with last week while you were on leave. You applied, and didn't get an interview. You sent the report on the second draft and there was a mistake in it, and the client noticed.

The general doubt will be on to this at once. "There, you see. This is what happens." It will treat one result as the verdict on the whole approach, and on you. The belief on offer is that the doubt was protecting you all along, and that you were a fool to stop listening.

Start by putting the event next to the prediction you wrote down. Predictions made by doubt tend to be dramatic. "I'll look foolish and they'll remember it." What happened in the meeting was that someone said "yes, we picked that up last week, thanks", and the conversation moved on in four seconds. The point was redundant. The predicted humiliation didn't happen. The doubt got the small thing right and the big thing wrong, and the big thing was the part that had been stopping you.

Then treat what happened as an event, with a cause you can look for. A failure nearly always has a specific doubt inside it, and that's the useful part. Why was the mistake in the report? Because the refund figures come from a different system and you didn't reconcile them. Good. That's now a line on your checklist for next time, in the way chapter 5 described. It's a fact about refund figures. It isn't a fact about whether you're fit to write reports.

With rejections, there's often nothing to find, which is frustrating in its own way. You can ask for feedback, and sometimes you'll get something usable. Often the honest answer is that there were many good applicants and someone else fitted slightly better. Count the attempt as the success. You were trying to become someone who finds out, and you found out.

Sometimes the failure does show a real gap. You gave the talk and it was muddled, because you aren't yet good at structuring a talk. That's useful to know. A skill gap is a specific doubt on a larger scale. It can be closed by a course, by practice, or by someone showing you how they do it. The general doubt would have you read it as "I'm not a person who can give talks", which sounds similar and is a completely different claim. One of them comes with a to-do list and the other doesn't.

Keep the proportions in view as well. If you now speak up ten times where you used to speak once, you'll be wrong in public more often than before, in absolute numbers. That's arithmetic. You'll also be right in public far more often, and the people around you are judging you on the whole run. Everyone whose judgement you respect has been wrong in front of you at some point. You didn't cross them off.

When you stepped back again

You decided on the rule, you wrote your plans, and on Tuesday you sat through an hour's meeting and said nothing. Or you caught yourself on the sixth reread at eleven at night.

The general doubt has a line ready for this too. "You can't even follow a self-help book." I'd ask you to notice that this is the same voice making the same move, and not to give it more weight here than anywhere else. A lapse in a habit you've had for twenty or thirty years isn't evidence of anything much. It's what changing a habit looks like for nearly everyone who does it. It doesn't mean you misunderstood the argument, and it doesn't mean you didn't want this enough.

There's also some evidence that going hard on yourself is the less effective response. In a set of experiments by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, people who were prompted to treat a personal failure with understanding were afterwards more motivated to improve, and spent longer studying for a second test after doing badly on the first, than people who weren't. Being harsh with yourself feels like taking the matter seriously. It seems mainly to make people avoid the subject.

So look at the lapse with some curiosity. Here are the questions I'd ask.

Is there still time? Very often there is. The meeting is over, but you can send a two-line message. "One thought I didn't get to raise. The form seems broken on mobile." You can reopen the advert if the deadline hasn't passed. A late step forward isn't as good as a prompt one, but it's far better than none, and it still goes in the record.

What was different about this time? Look for the circumstance. Perhaps the most senior person in the building was in the room. Perhaps you were tired, or it was the week after a mistake. Perhaps you waited, and by minute forty the silence had set hard. Most people find they have two or three conditions under which the habit wins. Once you know yours, you can plan for them specifically. "When the director is in the meeting, I'll speak in the first five minutes."

Was the step too big? If you keep failing to do a thing, it may be a rung too high for now. Drop down to something you can manage, do that for a fortnight, and come back.

Then let it go. One thing I'd avoid is counting unbroken streaks. A streak turns a single lapse into a collapse, and then the lapse becomes a reason to give up. What matters is the proportion over months. If you stepped back nine times out of ten last year and it's six out of ten by the summer, the habit is changing, and you'll see it in how quickly the record fills.

When to get more help than a book

Self-doubt is ordinary, and a book is a reasonable place to start. Nobody has tested this book's approach in a trial, so I can't tell you how often it's enough. Some situations call for more. See a doctor as a first step, or a qualified therapist, if any of these apply.

• The doubt comes with low mood, loss of interest or a sense of worthlessness that has lasted more than two weeks.
• You have panic attacks, or you're so anxious about being judged that you avoid ordinary things such as phone calls, eating with others or going to work.
• The checking has become something you can't stop even when you want to, and it takes up hours of your day.
• The doubt goes back to abuse, bullying or another experience that still intrudes on your life.
• You've worked at this for some months and nothing has moved.

For severe anxiety about being judged, which doctors call social anxiety disorder, the health guidance body for England recommends individual cognitive behavioural therapy as the first choice. It uses more thorough versions of several things in this book. If you take prescribed medication for anxiety or depression, don't stop or change it because of anything you've read here. Talk to the person who prescribed it. And if you ever have thoughts of harming yourself, contact a doctor or a crisis line that day, or the emergency services if you're in immediate danger.