Living with Self-Doubt as an Online Businesswoman
The plan that morning was familiar. I needed to record a YouTube tutorial that would also form part of my weekly email. It wasn’t rushed or last-minute; it was just part of the ongoing work of running an online business and showing up in a way that feels consistent and useful.
I had everything open and ready when a message came through from a client. The words themselves weren’t sharp or deliberately unkind, but as I read them, something in me dropped. What landed wasn’t the sentence on the screen so much as the meaning my mind immediately attached to it.
What I heard was simple and confronting: you’re not good enough.
In the space of a few seconds, the ease I’d felt about recording disappeared. The confidence I’d carried into the day thinned out, replaced by that familiar internal questioning that can arrive without warning. I found myself wondering whether I had misjudged my ability, my experience, or the value of the work I offer, even though nothing concrete had actually changed.
When One Message Changes the Mood of the Day
That’s one of the quieter realities of self-doubt when you run an online business. It doesn’t always arrive after a dramatic failure or a public misstep. Sometimes it appears in moments that look perfectly ordinary from the outside, slipping in through interpretation rather than fact. What’s said matters less than the story you tell yourself about what it means.
That day, I told myself a story that carried far more weight than the situation required.
The setup had been straightforward. The camera was ready, Canva was there, waiting for me, and the tutorial itself was something I knew would be helpful. I’d done this thing many times before, and under different circumstances, I would have pressed record without much thought.
How Self-Doubt Slips in Quietly
But self-doubt doesn’t take experience into account. It doesn’t pause to consider feedback, past results, or the quiet accumulation of evidence you have built over time. It waits for moments when you care deeply about how something lands, then steps in and reshapes the narrative with surprising ease.
When Your Work and Your Identity Sit Too Close Together
When you work online, your work and your sense of self sit uncomfortably close together. There’s no office chatter, no quick reassurance, no external context to soften the edges of a message. A comment on your work can quickly feel like a comment on you, and without anyone else in the room, the internal conversation can spiral faster than you expect.
Self-doubt tends to get louder in silence.
It convinced me that perhaps I’ve been winging it all along, that someone has finally seen through me, and that the confidence I’ve built is fragile and conditional. It rarely sounds dramatic when it arrives. More often, it’s subtle, persuasive, and downright exhausting.
If you’ve ever felt your chest tighten or your shoulders creep upwards after reading something that unsettled you, you’ll recognise this. The reaction isn’t always logical, but it is deeply human.
Why Doubt Shows Up When the Work Matters
There’s a common assumption that confidence grows in a straight, predictable line. That once you reach a certain level of experience, the questioning fades, and things feel settled. In my experience, that isn’t how it works, especially for us women who care about the quality and integrity of what we put into the world.
Self-doubt doesn’t show up because we’re incapable. It shows up because the stakes matter to us. We don’t question ourselves over work we’re indifferent about. We question ourselves when we want to do things well, when we’re invested, and when the outcome feels meaningful.
That was the first thing I had to remind myself of that day.
Separating What Was Said from What You Heard
The second, more uncomfortable realisation was that the message itself hadn’t actually said I wasn’t good enough. That meaning came from me. A combination of tiredness, responsibility, and the pressure that comes with being the person who makes the decisions created a translation that felt convincing, even though it wasn’t necessarily true.
Learning to separate what was said from what we hear takes practice, and it doesn’t remove self-doubt entirely. What it does offer is space. Space to ask whether there are other explanations, other contexts, or other truths that our initial reaction may have skipped over.
Perhaps the client needed something different. Perhaps they were under pressure themselves. Perhaps the message had nothing to do with my capability at all.
When we allow those possibilities to exist, the grip of the doubt loosens just enough to breathe again.
The Weight Women Carry in Online Business
After years of running an online business and talking to women doing the same, one pattern has become clear. The women who doubt themselves the most are often the ones carrying the most responsibility. They are holding clients, content, income, family, health, relationships, and visibility all at once, often without anyone to share the decision-making load.
That kind of responsibility creates weight, even when things are going well.
So, when doubt appears, it isn’t always a warning sign. More often, it’s a signal that you’re stretching into something new, that you’re asking more of yourself than you have before, or that the work you’re doing matters enough to feel exposed.
The mistake is assuming that discomfort automatically means something is wrong. Sometimes it simply means you’re growing in directions that don’t yet feel familiar.
When Not Moving Forward Is Still a Form of Awareness
That day, I didn’t record the tutorial. What I did instead was notice what was happening. I recognised the pattern for what it was and understood that the hesitation wasn’t about my ability, but about the weight I was carrying in that moment. The doubt didn’t disappear, but it stopped being the only voice in the room.
Online business asks a great deal of women. It asks for visibility without certainty, decisions without guarantees, and confidence without constant reinforcement. And still, we women show up. We create. We offer value. We continue, even on the days when we question ourselves behind a screen.
That deserves acknowledgment.
What Self-Doubt Doesn’t Get to Decide
If you’re in a season where self-doubt feels close, where your inner voice is louder than you’d like, it doesn’t cancel out your capability. It doesn’t undo the work you’ve already done. And it certainly doesn’t mean you’re failing.
It means you care, and that your work matters. And most of all — it means you’re building something real.
And even on the days when doubt tries to convince you otherwise, you are still doing a fucking fabulous job.
Stephanie 🤍