"If I doubt it, there must be a reason"

This is the belief that holds the rest up. You feel doubtful, so you assume the doubt has noticed something. Feelings often have. Unease on a dark street is worth listening to, and so is the sense that a deal is too good. It seems reasonable to give self-doubt the same respect.

And sometimes it deserves it. You doubt the figures in your report because you put them together in a rush on Wednesday. You doubt your French because the last time you used it was at school. That kind of doubt is useful, and I don't want you to lose it.

The trouble is that the feeling of doubt doesn't come only from faults in the work. Look at when yours is loudest. For most people it rises when the task is new, when the stakes are high, when someone senior is watching, and when the thing matters to them. It rises when they're tired, and for a few days after any mistake. It's often worse in a room where nobody else looks or sounds like them.

Go down that list and ask what each item measures. None of them measures your ability. They measure how exposed you are and how much you care. That explains something odd you may have noticed. You often feel the most doubt about the piece of work you prepared most carefully, because that's the one that matters most.

Your own history will have counterexamples in both directions. You've doubted things you had done well fifty times. Plenty of people who passed their driving test twenty years ago still can't park with someone watching from the pavement. And you've been calmly sure of things that turned out to be wrong, as everyone has. If the feeling tracked ability, neither would happen.

There's a piece of research that speaks to this. In the 1990s a Dutch team gave anxious patients and other people short written scenarios, some describing danger and some not, and some mentioning that the person in the story felt anxious. The patients rated a scenario as more dangerous when the character felt anxious, even when nothing in the facts was dangerous. The other group mostly went by the facts. The researchers summed it up in their title, which was "If I feel anxious, there must be danger". I think self-doubt runs on the same inference. "I feel inadequate, so I must be." The feeling is treated as a witness when it's really just the thing to be explained. That comparison is mine, and the study was about anxiety, not doubt.

So the feeling alone can't tell you whether there's a fault. What can is the content of the doubt, and here there's a distinction I'll use for the rest of the book.

A specific doubt names something you could check. "I'm not sure the March figure includes refunds." "I haven't tried this page on a phone." "I don't know if the client saw the earlier version." A specific doubt points at the work. It can be settled, usually quickly, by looking something up, testing something, or asking a question that has an answer.

A general doubt names you. "I'm not good enough for this." "Who am I to say?" "They'll see through me." It points at the person. There's nothing to look up. No amount of checking settles it, because it wasn't about the thing you checked. When you deal with one worry it moves to the next.

You can sort them with a two-word question. When the doubt arrives, ask it "what exactly?" If it answers with something you could test, look up or ask about, it's specific. Treat it as you'd treat a note from a careful colleague, and go and check. If it answers with an adjective about you, it's general, and it has told you nothing about the work.

There's one trap. General doubt is good at dressing up as specific doubt, by producing an endless run of small worries. You check the figures, then the formatting, then the figures again, then the wording of the second paragraph. The sign is that the check you've just done brings no relief, or relief that lasts a minute. A specific doubt, once checked, stays checked. If you're going round again, the work isn't the problem.

That leaves the hard question. "Perhaps I really am not good enough." You might not be, for a given task. Ability is real, and people differ. But you can't answer that question by consulting the feeling, for the reasons above. You can answer it with results, with the judgement of people who know the work, and with your record. Chapter 8 looks at what you've been doing with that evidence, which I suspect is throwing out most of the good part.

It also helps to make "good enough" specific. The general doubt says you aren't up to the job. The job, looked at plainly, is a list of things to be done. You can do most of them now, and you can ask of each remaining one whether you could learn it in the time you'd have. That's a question with an answer, which is more than the feeling ever gives you.

For now, the practical step is small. The next few times doubt arrives, ask it "what exactly?", and notice which kind you've got. You don't have to do anything different yet. I expect you'll find fewer specific doubts than you expected, and that the general one says nearly the same sentence every time.