Think of Yourself in the Third Person so You Don’t Doubt Yourself
You spend more time with yourself than anyone else. This gives you a better chance of finding flaws. If you find yourself doubting yourself too much, try phrasing your inner thoughts in a third person.
As the productivity blog 99u points out, a third-person view of yourself can help clear up some of your worst self-criticisms. You’re used to saying things like “I screwed up,” but you’ll probably be less harsh on someone else. You can also advise or encourage someone else on how to get better, rather than pounding them mercilessly in the head with your failures. You deserve the same understanding:
When you get out of “me,” “yourself,” and “me,” you mentally move away from yourself and out of your own head. Just as you can gain insight into a work of art by stepping back a few feet, you can gain additional insight into your thought process by establishing some mental distance between your current thinking and your typical nervous, anxious self. In other words, calming down the harsher inner critic gives you much-needed space for thought and, therefore, perspective.
No matter how much you think you’ve screwed up, you probably deserve a little more respect than you give yourself. Bypassing this instinct, talking about yourself in the third person, you can understand how you would react to the situation if it were someone else. This does not mean that you will never criticize yourself in a third person. Sometimes the complaints are valid. However, you may be less inclined to overdo it if you are thinking about yourself from the outside.