I'm just not confident enough as a veterinarian 🤷🏻‍♀️

By Gunila Pedersen • March 30, 2026 • 3 min read

Just because you think something often, it doesn't make it true.

Have you noticed how in some situations you’ll default to the same thoughts over and over, and instantly you feel just a bit ”less than”, or anxious, or defeated…?

I used to have the default thought “I’m not confident enough”, that would come up in specific situations, for example with a specific type of client, or going into some surgeries, or specific social occasions. And as soon as I would think it, I felt less powerful, less enthusiastic, more defeated and inferior to other people

I would then go into the situation feeling like that, and so ended up finding evidence for that thought, reinforcing the neural pathway like scratching an even deeper groove in the record of “not-confident-enough-not-confident-enough-not-confident-enough…”

For you, it could be any thoughts like “others are doing better than me”, ‘I’m just not that good-looking”, “I’m just not so good at that”, “those people don’t really like me”, or whatever it is.

And, most likely, there are 3 things happening:

You’re not even aware of thinking the thought over and over, you just don’t feel that great.
You are aware of some of the thoughts, but because you’ve thought them so often you just adopt them as facts and don’t question them at all
You don’t think you have any choice in thinking them or not, because - they just happen, right?

Our brain offers us 60.000 thoughts a day, and some of them we notice and ponder on.

But our brain is busy doing its job of being efficient; saving time and energy. So whatever can go on autopilot, like sitting on a toilet or changing gears, will get allocated to automation and not questioned again. BUT, brain makes a lot of mistakes filtering through the thoughts, because it basically “guesstimates” in order to move on quickly and save you energy.

So if there are thoughts that don’t serve you at all, like the ones I just mentioned, you really, really want to check in and see if they’re actually true. What does confident, good looking, or being good at stuff even mean? And why is your brain jumping to those conclusions?

When I discovered life coaching, where my thoughts were challenged and examined, I realised that I don’t have to believe I’m not confident. I can decide to feel confident in any circumstance and situation, and act as such, no matter what.

Sometimes your thought can change in an instant, as soon as you realise it’s just a thought you’ve thought over and over, believing it to be a fact. Other times it’s more sticky, and we have to get coached on the thought as it comes up in different situations, before we are able to see that that’s all it is: Literally just a sentence your brain is offering because it’s used to it.

It is almost impossible to catch these “thought errors” without an outside perspective, because we’re so stuck in that groove in the record of our own brain. I read a million self help books and talked to friends, who were sympathetic: “You SHOULD be confident, you’re amazing!”, but as friends are not neutral they can’t hold space for you and help you examine the thought. That’s why life coaching is such a game-changer.

In your corner,