On self-doubt

I’m new to following Formula 1, so I haven’t even reached the “claiming expertise” level of long-term sports fans. I don’t have any insight, pretend or otherwise, into what went wrong for Lewis Hamilton yesterday.

What I did recognise was the tone of the brief press conferences he gave over the weekend. Hamilton is exhausted and depressed and he believes he has come to the realisation that the only common denominator in his fall down the leaderboard in recent times is him. He thinks, as he said on Saturday, that he’s “Just shit.”

Seven world championship wins, a lot of money in the bank, global adulation; none of those things are relevant right now. They are either in the past and might as well have happened to a different person, or they were some kind of clerical error. Now is all that matters and now things are going badly and that must be the new reality for which he alone is responsible.

When I see a bad movie (and I have seen a lot of bad movies this summer), a big part of me is frustrated that inferior talents got paid oodles of cash to create something sub par. “You could have done better,” says an over-confident voice in my head. But there is another voice which points out that I am probably not as good as I think I am; I am probably not even as good as the goons they hired. Who am I kidding? Whatever I would have done with this movie, it would have been even worse than what I just watched.

A lot of jobs, not just those in sports or the creative sector, require a degree of confidence and self-belief. But with that confidence there is often a counter-balancing voice eager to remind you that you are faking it, that you are not, in fact, as good you are pretending to be. Your success, your track record, is fluke and it has fed this notion of exceptionalism that has no basis in reality. When luck or circumstances go against you, and you find yourself on tilt, this presents as a necessary correction - this is the way things were always supposed to be, this is reality finally seeking you out and revealing you as the mediocrity that you always were. Past successes cannot be repeated because they were never meant to be yours.

Conan Doyle said “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius.” That's an argument in favour of self-doubt; mediocre people don't have it - it's very presence is an indicator that you are aware that there is room for improvement. But self-doubt can be, and often is, crippling. So how do you defeat it, how do you silence that nagging voice?

The short answer is that you don’t. None of the voices in your head can be silenced because they are all you. Accepting that is, in itself, often a breakthrough. The voices in your head are there for a reason, but that reason is not always obvious, and they should not always be taken at face value. If you think of them as members of a team, then maybe it becomes easier to understand that, as team captain, you might need to get them all working towards the same goal.

Self-doubt can be a really valuable player. But if it isn’t given the right role, it will do what it’s doing at the moment; it will sit on the bench, criticising everything that’s happening and destroying morale. So you need to engage with it. Instead of desperately searching for a way to tune out the whining, try asking it “OK, so what did I do wrong, how could I have done it differently?” Immediately you start to change the conversation; don't give me problems, bring solutions.

Nothing is ever executed to perfection so asking how you might have done better is a necessary step in the internal debrief, even after a big win. And if it becomes a part of every debrief, then that nagging voice starts to take on a different tone, because we’re exercising constructive self-criticism, not just in identifying weaknesses, but in figuring out and then implementing strategies to overcome them. "What could I have done better?" is a question that you could be asking multiple times per day, not to make yourself feel bad, but to do better next time. That, beyond all the woo-woo and positive thinking nonsense, is the very definition of self-improvement.

That movie WAS badly written or badly directed. Could I have made it better? In isolation at a keyboard, yes. In the mix with all the other moving parts? Maybe, maybe not. But the first step would be getting hired for the job and that, clearly, is where the effort needs to be channelled. “I could have done that better” is always easy to say, getting yourself into a position to prove that point is the real trick.

In the example of the bad movie, skill is only a small part of the hiring process, a long way behind professional relationships and a track record that can be measured in box office numbers; because the “safe” choice in Hollywood is the known quantity, not the most talented individual. My focus on being better at my job is important to me, and it’s certainly worthwhile, but it’s a completely different game to getting a gig as a script doctor on a blockbuster movie. Could I have done a better job? Maybe, but that's irrelevant. What do we need to do to have a chance at finding out?

So the initial stab of self-doubt prompts a bigger internal conversation about something more productive, something that starts to resemble a plan of action, the existence of which, in turn, promotes confidence rather than undermining it. When you acknowledge self-doubt and engage with it, it starts playing with you, not against you.

Sometimes we can’t help but get caught up in the negative wave. It feels like that’s where Lewis Hamilton is, and he has talked about being prone to this in the past. But hopefully, with some time for reflection, he will start to take apart recent races and come up with a plan of action. It may not be a quick or easy fix, because it rarely is. But listening to the voice of self-doubt and treating it as something that is trying to help not hinder, is a good first step.

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