The Quiet Cost of Self-Doubt: How Low Self-Esteem Shapes the Way We Live

Are you a person that second guesses many things you do, if not nearly everything you consider doing? Do you feel the need to get input from friends about decisions you contemplate? When you make a decision without input, small or large, do you emotionally hold your breath and hope (or pray) that you are making the right call?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you likely have self-doubt and perhaps low self-esteem – and it’s probably not news to you.

Self-doubt and low self-esteem are not new concepts, but if you answered ‘Yes’ to any or all of those questions I posed, odds are you are also a woman. While self-doubt and low self-esteem affect us all, men and women, but it affects women at a much greater percentage than men.

We are going to briefly discuss why that is, not as an effort to cause any controversy, but merely to understand some of the origins, which is necessary for our emotional minds to come to grips with the cause and where to place the blame.

Self-Doubt is a powerful weapon; low self-esteem is even more powerful as an assassin. If we imagine self-doubt to be a vehicle, self-esteem issues are the fuel. They really do go hand in hand. And by the way, when I am referring to self-doubt, I am not referring to the intellectual process we use to determine whether an idea we have come up with is a good one or one that won’t work. I am referring to the self-doubt that prevents us from believing we can do almost anything – at least anything well.

-

Self-doubt makes us second-guess nearly everything

When I was asked to write this article, I sat back and read the title my assistant and co-collaborator had come up with. I realized that it is a title with significant depth and immediate impact, because for those of us who have or ever have had self-esteem issues, it grabs our attention hard.

As an expert on emotional intelligence (boy, that sounds arrogant, but my assistant makes me write that) and a Personal Discovery and Development Coach, I have had countless clients over the last 20 years who have had these issues with self-esteem.

And before that, I had the same issue since childhood – big time.

Both men and women struggle with low self-esteem, but women tend to:
- Readily admit it more frequently
- Not hide it from themselves as often, or are more willing to acknowledge its existence
- Suffer more from societal, familial, and professional expectations of the ‘less than’ factor
- Apply to self directly before they can be analyzed and judged.

This certainly also isn’t news to any of you reading this who are women, let’s face it – our system has not helped.

I believe that peace, tolerance, and equality among our society cannot truly occur until we first ensure that women are recognized as equals, and so I focus intensely on both helping women to realize any hidden empowerment as well as awaken in men the system’s treatment of women that still resonates on top of and below the surface of our daily lives.

The only reason to discuss an element of the system, history, or concepts of equality is to provide the reason for the evolution of a lot of the low self-esteem in women.

In my coaching, I have discovered over the last 20 years that the easiest way to help my clients eliminate an element of their lives that they do not like or no longer benefit them is to get their unconscious emotional minds to understand the reason or the cause of the origin of the concept we are eliminating.

It’s really quite fascinating to me – the unconscious emotional mind, which is where all of our belief system exists and originates, will not free itself of a previously held belief without being explained why the belief must change and why the belief was there in the first place.

The unconscious emotional mind really hates being considered wrong – if you don’t believe me, go up to your partner or colleague and tell them they are wrong and watch their reaction. The negative response you receive from them will prove my point because our immediate triggering of emotions is controlled and held within our unconscious emotional mind. And those triggers evoke responses quicker than our intellectual brain can stop them.

That is why I have such success with my clients in helping them eliminate previous negative beliefs about themselves, because we must give their unconscious emotional mind a reason for the previous belief, as well as the origin of the cause. But this must be done sensitively, because while we must assign cause, we must provide it with an absence of blame. This is the most effective way of eliminating deeply seated self-limiting beliefs within us; otherwise, the new concepts won’t ‘stick’ because our unconscious emotional mind will revert to allegiances of the caretakers who unwittingly imprinted the beliefs upon us or provided an environment that supported the beliefs.

In a similar fashion to how cult leaders or cult-like politicians get their followers to believe anything, including entire reversals of policy or ideology, our unconscious emotional mind will do the same in allegiance to beliefs we forged in our early formative years and with those who helped form them.

In my coaching and writings, I call this Carried Generational Allegiance Deficiency (CGAD) – it’s a deficiency because we unwittingly adopt the concepts, beliefs, or ideologies without any true evaluation as to whether they hold merit. And unconsciously, our emotional mind holds to those beliefs in allegiance to our previous protectors and will not release those beliefs until provided a method to release them and with an explanation of how those protectors could have had those beliefs in the first place.

Understanding the origin of where low self-esteem originates is really the key to eliminating it. But until we understand and accept that our esteem was in large part forged by the caretakers we love or loved, we will not be able to raise our self-esteem, or, as I prefer to consider it, until we recover the esteem we were born with, before it was diminished by others.

Every single one of us who was born healthy were born with the origin of a strong and healthy sense of self-esteem. It is the reason that as soon as a child begins to understand their surroundings, they immediately begin to command their perceived dominion over it.

Every parent has seen that moment because every child is engineered that way – as a child, we don’t even begin to be able to gain a perspective from another’s viewpoint until around age 2.

From that early point in our lives, our caretakers attempt to provide us with rules and boundaries of action and behavior that allow us to fit within the familial unit. And that is the point at which our self-esteem begins to be modified. Those modifications are initiated by the child’s mind – the mind that truly believes they are in control or have the responsibility of everything and everyone’s emotions within their familial circle. Since no caretaker is perfect (as if we know what that would be), no family is perfect. So, whenever strife or conflict occurs, the child’s inherent and instinctual concept of control requires them to consider their ability to moderate the situation:

“Do I stay quiet?” Since I must be the problem
“Let me be the peacemaker” Since I must have started the conflict
“I’ll take on the emotions of them” Since I must be the one to solve it
“I’ll act out” Since I am the problem, I’ll see whether they love me enough to keep me around

Countless other internal conversations we have with ourselves unconsciously
And that’s how it starts.

And if you throw on top of that, the outside world tends to teach girls, minorities, and those with disabilities that in addition to those other developing beliefs of ineptitude, the outside world is pointing out that those other groups are additionally “less than” because they aren’t boys, white, or considered ‘normally’ abled. This is why it affects more women than men.

-

Why It’s So Hard to Fix on Our Own

Here’s the part most people don’t realize:

Our unconscious emotional mind will not release a belief — even a painful one — unless it is given a clear explanation for why the belief existed and why it is no longer needed.

As I noted earlier, our unconscious emotional mind will not free itself of a previously held belief without being provided an explanation for why the belief must change and why the belief was there in the first place.

This is why affirmations, positive thinking, and “just be confident” advice rarely work.
We can’t override an emotional allegiance with intellectual logic.

We must:
- Understand the origin
- Understand the purpose
- Release the allegiance
- Replace the belief with something true

And doing that alone is incredibly difficult — not because we’re incapable, but because we’re trying to use the same emotional system that created the belief to dismantle it; it is truly like trying to play chess with yourself while knowing what each side’s strategy plans to be.

-

The Quiet Cost of Living With Self-Doubt

Self-doubt doesn’t just make us hesitate – it truly shapes our entire emotionality. When we have self-doubt, we not only doubt ourselves, but we also have the ability to be prey to those who seek us out to convince and manipulate. Self-doubt is somewhat of a cancer that likes to spread – and it spreads a lot.

It influences:
The relationships we choose
The boundaries we do and do not set
The opportunities we don’t pursue
The apologies we give that weren’t necessary
The dreams we shrink to fit someone else’s comfort
The way we interpret other people’s reactions
The way we interpret your own worth

Self-doubt also:
Allows us to manipulate because we will tend to rely on the confidence in others, whether authentic or not
Requires us to believe the unbelievable because we don’t believe our own assessments
Can convince us that others are more worthy thus making our worth minimal
It becomes the lens through which we see ourselves — and once that lens is in place, everything we experience gets filtered through it.

But here’s the powerful truth:

Self-doubt is not who we are.
It’s who we learned to be.
And anything learned can be unlearned.

So What Do We Do Next?
I’m intentionally not giving a long list of solutions here — not because solutions don’t exist, but because this work is deeply personal, deeply emotional, and deeply rooted in our unconscious minds.

This is not work most people can do alone, not because people are weak — but because the emotional mind is designed to protect its old allegiances and to maintain those old belief systems we never had an opportunity to evaluate. To truly shift self-doubt, we need:

A guide who understands emotional origin
Someone who can help us uncover the belief without shame
Someone who can help us release the allegiance without blame
Someone who can help us recover the esteem we were born with

This is the heart of Personal Discovery Coaching.

It’s the work I’ve done with clients for more than 20 years and it’s the work that changed my own life long before I ever taught it. And it’s the work that allows people to finally see themselves clearly — without the distortions of childhood, society, or inherited emotional patterns.

The change due to growth is magical; it’s magical to experience and it’s magical to witness as your coach. I’m humbled each and every time I see the ‘light go on’ in my client’s eyes and feel the power come re-awakened in their being. It’s authority, it’s power, it’s permission to be seen and to be able to demand – it’s empowerment.

-

Final Thought

Self-doubt is not a flaw.
It is a story — one written long before you or I had the power to choose our own narrative.
But you can give yourself the permission to choose now.

We can choose to understand where our self-esteem was altered.
We can choose to release the beliefs that were never ours to carry.
We can choose to reclaim the confidence we were born with.

And we don’t have to do it alone.

If you’re ready to understand yourself more deeply — not just intellectually, but emotionally — working with a Personal Development Coach can be the turning point. The moment where the old story ends and the real one begins - that allows us to be the ‘me’ we were meant to be.

By David Jones, Personal Discovery & Development Coach
CAPTIVE Coaching and Empowerment