What doubt is actually protecting you from

How high performers mistake emotional avoidance with the need for a better plan.

I’ve seen this pattern with so many people, from high achievers that look like they have 0 doubt in themselves. Someone is genuinely ambitious, capable, ready to do something significant, and then doubt shows up and stops them cold. Then in most cases this doubt is being intellectualised as lack of information, ‘I need a better plan’ or whatever. But is it?

In reality, this doubt doesn’t signal missing any critical piece of information but avoiding an emotion. Let me explain.

When doubt shows up

There are two moments where doubt typically arrives. The first is when you’re sitting with an idea you’re excited about. You’ve been handed a project or you’re starting something new, you’re energized, maybe a little thrilled, and then you sit down to actually work on it and suddenly uncertainty floods in. Should I really do this? Is this the right approach? Maybe I’m missing something.

The second is when you put your idea in front of someone, your boss or an investor or even your partner, and you watch them react and it’s not the reaction you wanted. They’re lukewarm, they’re skeptical, maybe they push back, and immediately doubt shows up. Maybe this isn’t as good as I thought. Maybe I got this wrong.

In both cases, what’s actually happening underneath is that you have ambition about something, you want to move something forward, and you’re scared there’s a feeling coming that you don’t want to experience. The doubt is showing up to protect you from that feeling by slowing you down so you don’t have to face it.

And there are typically two kinds of feelings the doubt is protecting you from: a feeling from your past that you don’t want to relive, and a feeling in the future, either in success or failure, that you’re scared will destabilize you.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The past feeling you’re avoiding

Here’s how the past version works. You learned early, maybe as a kid, that when you put ideas out there, something bad happened. You got criticized, maybe someone got angry, maybe your idea was dismissed or torn apart. And as a child, the only way you can interpret that is “I must have done something wrong. What do I need to fix?”

That pattern gets embedded over the years even if your rational self doesn’t find it logical. Now, decades later, when someone pushes back on your idea or doesn’t immediately buy in, you don’t think “maybe they don’t fully understand it yet” or “of course there’s resistance, it’s a new idea.” You go straight to doubt because your system is trying to protect you from the feeling of being criticized or dismissed.

That’s quite frequent with executives. Someone gets critical feedback or someone reacts with anger and they immediately go into doubt instead of assessing whether the criticism is valid or whether the anger is even about them. They just want to avoid the friction because friction learned to mean “I did something wrong” when they were eight years old.

The doubt is doing its job. It’s slowing you down so you don’t have to feel that old feeling again.

The future feeling you’re avoiding

The other source of doubt is about what you’re scared will happen if you actually follow through. This one operates in two directions: fear of failure and fear of success.

Fear of failure is straightforward. If I do this and it doesn’t work, I’m going to feel horrible about myself, and I don’t want to feel horrible about myself, so I’ll just stay in doubt instead.

Fear of success is less obvious but just as powerful. If I do this and it works, I won’t be the person I think I am anymore. I won’t be the person who’s struggling or striving. I’ll be the person who’s actually winning. And even though part of me wants that, another part is scared: will I lose my drive if I’m not chasing anymore? Will people reject me if I’m too successful? Will I become the tall poppy that gets cut down?

Both versions, fear of failure and fear of success, create doubt because doubt slows your ambition down enough that you don’t have to risk either outcome. You stay in the safe zone of being disappointed with yourself, which you’re already used to feeling. That’s the familiar emotion. That’s the one your system knows how to handle.

Why it’s not actually about ‘a better plan’

Right about now you’re probably resisting and thinking “no, I am not avoiding any emotions, I genuinely don’t know if this is the right move.”

But in most cases, you don’t know if it’s right or wrong. You can’t know. How could you? You haven’t done it before. If you’d done it before, if you already knew how to do it, there would be no doubt. You’d have already felt all the emotions associated with doing it. There’d be no issue.

So of course you don’t know the answer. There’s no way to know how to do something perfectly before you do it. The only way to get to clarity is to actually do the thing, learn from it, adjust, do it better and iterate. That’s how anything significant gets done.

But all of that stops if you’re worried about feeling a certain way. If you have doubts, you stop the iteration. You stop the process. You stay stuck in your head trying to figure it out intellectually, which you can’t do because the information you need only comes from doing it.

So intellectually you know this. You know that failure is part of the process, that you learn by trying things. But you’re still stopped, which is how we know it’s emotional, not intellectual.

How to prove it to yourself

There’s a simple test that shows you exactly what doubt is doing.

Pick something you’re doubting right now. It can be anything, a project, a decision, a conversation you need to have or just remember something from the past that’s still bugging you.

Now do this little mind hack. Close your eyes, control your breath and think of something you genuinely feel care and love about without a second thought. It can be a child, a puppy, your wife/husband, your mum or dad. But it needs to be something where there is no second thought, just warmth and care. Try to experience the feeling of care and openness in your heart.

Now, with that same openness and welcoming energy, look at the thing you’re doubting. Don’t defend against it. Don’t analyze it. Just look at it the way you’d look at that thing you love.

Take a breath, drop the defense and open your heart to it.

What happens to the doubt?

If you actually do this, you’ll notice the doubt starts to drift away. You might not suddenly know everything, but you know the next step. You can see what to do next. And if you don’t immediately, you know that if you sit there with an open heart long enough, the next step will become clear.

That’s how you know It was always a matter of having your heart closed to protect you from a feeling, not more information.

There’s an old saying: doubt is the sin of the heart. What that means is you have to have your heart closed to experience doubt. Heart closed means you’re defending against something. In this case, defending against an emotion.

If this feels familiar, you’re probably the kind of person I write for and work with. Learn more about my work and set a 60’ free consultation.

The longer-term work

Opening your heart in the moment dissolves the doubt temporarily, which is useful. But the real work, the thing that changes the pattern long-term, is learning to actually welcome the emotions you’ve been avoiding.

Learning to welcome criticism, to welcome the feeling of someone being angry at you or dismissive, to welcome the possibility of failure. But most importantly. learning to welcome success and what that might change about your identity.

There is a funny-not funny thing about emotions, when you resist them, they’re unbearable. It’s like resisting the need to go to the bathroom. It gets extremely uncomfortable. But the actual experience of the emotion, when you stop resisting it, when you get curious about it, when you welcome it, is not that uncomfortable.

You can approach this intellectually. You can recognize that every time you’re triggered, every time you notice yourself going into doubt, there’s something there that’s holding back your freedom. And you can actually get excited about that because if you do the work, if you move through the trigger instead of avoiding it, there’s freedom on the other side. It’s like finding the start of a gold mine. You have to dig a little, but if you know there’s gold down there, you’re going to do the work.

Or you can approach it more experientially, bringing genuine curiosity to the emotional experience itself. What does this feeling actually feel like in my body? Where is it located? What’s the texture of it? What happens if I just sit with it instead of pushing it away?

Either way, the work is the same: learning to welcome the thing you’ve been protecting yourself from. Doubt isn’t protecting you anymore, you are this child any more. You’re capable of feeling whatever needs to be felt. You always have been.

- Aggelos