In late 2020, The Body Shop carried out some market research in partnership with Ipsos and created their Self Love Index. It said that, globally, around half of us have greater self-doubt than self-love.
Their self-love index averaged out at just 53 out of 100. They found that 60% of people wished they had more self-respect, that 40% of Gen Z accounted for those with the lowest self-love, and that 1 in 3 people who used social media for upwards of 2 hours per day had the lowest self-love of all.
However, there was a glimmer of hope. 70% of people said they bounced back after hard times, and it is high self-love that gives us this resilience. Could there be a clue in this seemingly contradictory statistic?
Why we doubt ourselves
A common symptom of self-doubt is asking ourselves “am I good enough?”
We hear about imposter syndrome, parenting guilt, and the cancel culture. It’s often just not acceptable to fail in society’s eyes.
We’re conditioned to fear failure. We’ve seen what happens when people fall from grace. (This is particularly bad when it comes to the way people are treated in the British tabloid media)
And so we are almost conditioned to expect failure as the more likely outcome.
What if this could be changed? I’m reminded of the book called The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. In it, Zander runs an experiment with his music students by giving them an A grade at the start of their studies and telling them all they have to do is keep it.
I wrote a more detailed explanation of how this worked in a previous post (link at the end), but, for the purposes of now, I’ll share that the results of the experiment were tangible. Students went from “a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance…” to being more creative, displaying greater flair and taking more risks. There were no constraints or pre-conceived outcomes. They performed amazingly.
It’s all in the mind
We’re back to that resilience stat I shared earlier in this blog. How come, if so many of us are wracked with self-doubt, we still feel we can bounce back? Resilience, or the ‘art of bouncing back’ is built from self-love.
I believe this contradiction, especially when consider the Zander experiment, shows that our self-doubt is mindset driven. For this reason, it is temporary; it comes and goes. That doesn’t make it any less damaging for us, but it does hint at the solution.
Think about a time you felt you’d failed. This is when self-doubt is at its highest. We’re really not good enough, we’ve just proved it. How can we carry on as an imposter in our career or life?
Now think about a time you were successful, gained a new client, got some wonderful feedback. The euphoria is tangible. You feel like you’re flying, you’re the best, you’ve got this!
See the difference? I wonder if you could even feel the flutter of excitement when you remembered the positive encounter?
What we need to do is learn from all these situations. Our brains are wired to focus on the negatives. They want to keep us safe from feeling bad so they will encourage us not to stretch, not to put ourselves ‘out there’.
But by documenting what we’ve learned from both the positives and the negatives, we can teach our primitive brain that a lot of good stuff comes from failure. It’s really the only time we learn.
I will leave you with a quote from Elizabeth Day, who is an oracle of the subject of failure. She says “just because you fail does not make you a failure.” We need to open our minds, train our thoughts and learn not to be weighed down by imagined expectations.
Follow this link for my blog post From Predictability to Possibility – https://mindvaluesleadership.co.uk/2020/12/15/from-predictability-to-possibility/