Immigrant Daughters & Self Doubt

Weekly Quote:

Be Kind to yourself – “The inner speech, your thoughts, can cause you to be rich or poor, loved or unloved, happy or unhappy, attractive or unattractive, powerful or weak”

Hello lovelies,

Hoping you are all well and putting your incredible selves first.
I’m writing this from my family home. I’m upstairs in my bedroom trying to drown out my sisters tick-tock songs with my thoughts.

Yesterday, I attended a confidence workshop because I want to get to grips with my feelings of self-doubt and learn how I can become more assertive in my personal and professional life. As part of the workshop, we spoke about our ‘inner critic’ and how our negative inner voice contributes to self-doubt.

As immigrant daughters, we have to perform to perfection all around the clock. Whether that’s at work or inside our homes. The fear of making mistakes and not being a role model for our younger siblings can be debilitating. A lot of this pressure is put on us by our society, communities and family. However, we do add to this pressure by being overly critical of ourselves. The need to be perfect is unrealistic and we have to allow ourselves to be human and make mistakes.

So what’s the solution, how do we become kinder to ourselves? The truth is that it’s a journey and one that we will be working on our whole lives. However, to get started I’ll invite you to assess where your inner critic comes from. I recognised that I had internalised many disruptive beliefs about my body and ability from my childhood. When aunties came over and told me ‘you’ve put a lot of weight on you?’. When I put on muscle and they’d say ‘be careful you don’t look like a man’.These voices are being inserted into my subconscious and when I look at myself in the mirror I hear those negative thoughts rather than my own thoughts. So ask yourself, would you teach those beliefs to others and is this belief helpful? The truth is I would never say such horrible things to others so why am I accepting it for myself?

Finally, another handy way of challenging negative thoughts is preventing overthinking. I’m someone who has a tendency to replay embarrassing moments at 3 am in the morning whilst overthinking every conversation I had that day. Granted this is so mentally draining and creates more self-doubt. So if you find yourself thinking about a conversation or a problem ask yourself is there a solution? Are you focusing on the problem or searching for a solution? What are you accomplishing by thinking about this? By asking yourself these 3 questions you’re filtering all the overthinking and actually beginning to problem solve.

If you would like us to speak about perfectionism, overthinking, imposter syndrome or confidence on the podcast let us know.

Until next week,

Take care and put yourself first.

Sway xx