Self-doubt is the opposite of confidence. When you were five or six years old and maybe you learned to ride a bike, there are very few kids who actually suffer from self-doubt when wanting to ride a bike. Kids just want to ride the bike, they want it, they want it. It didn't matter how many times I fell off, my father was kind enough to give me another shot. I wanted it and I did it. Now when I did it, when I rode the first time around, it was great. So as a 6 year-old I was a "big" kid, I could ride a bike. I had confidence. I then rode my bike for a few years and I had confidence that I could do it, I had no self doubt when it came to riding a bike.
Now, when I was about 29, I hadn't ridden a bike for quite a while, about 5 or 6 years, and we were staying with friends and they offered for Rosemary and I to take their bikes for a ride. We thought that would be a good idea. But then I saw the bike and this thing had 18 gears yet my old bike only had 3. So a bit of doubt arose. I hadn't been on a bike for 5 years, could I even balance on those skinny wheels, they were really skinny wheels, and what am I going to do? So I must admit when I first got on it there was a bit of doubt. But after I had been on the bike for a little while, after learning those gears, after figuring it out, I came back after one hour and it was no problem. I had confidence, riding the bike. So self-doubt can be conquered so to speak, by developing more confidence.
Now what happens for a lot of people which creates self-doubt is that sometime is their life they had tried to accomplish something that was too much. You have heard me say that in one of the talks, trying to accomplish something that was too much for us. This brings a lot of doubt because you normally fail when you are trying to accomplish something that is too much. So depending on how often a person failed at something, they would start feeling doubt about what they can do..
Now, what if you have self-doubt in your meditation? You might have to adjust your expectations. Buddhism has this really, really high, really high goal, enlightenment, free of all desire, free of all aversion, perfectly pure in your heart and mind, a wonderful human being. Uh, you are not going to make it tonight, I am sorry. And we may not make it this lifetime. But as long as a person has that as an expectation, their desire, they want to achieve that, they are probably going to fail. And then doubt will come about what they can achieve. Instead of having these high expectations we can work with the Ten Paramis, can we increase them? Not can we make them perfect. Can we increase them? There is a difference there.
When you think of increasing say your Generosity, what do you have to achieve? You only have to increase your Generosity to be more than it was before. You already have a certain amount of Generosity, can you increase it? It is as simple as that. So you try to increase it and if you do, good. Isn't that going to give you some confidence that maybe you can increase it again, later? But if you think to yourself, "my Generosity is no good, I should be giving all my money away. I should be working for charity 24 hours a day, I should, I should...", if you have really high ideals about what you can achieve with Generosity, then normally you are going to fail and self-doubt will come. But if you only consider "can I increase it?" then you are only asking for a little bit of growth, you are not asking for a lot, just a little. It might be a lot later but that is not what we are asking for. Can we increase it little by little by little? And then it will add up to a lot.
Probably all of you know this classic example, you have a bucket, you put it underneath a dripping tap, drip, drip, drip. One drop at a time the bucket eventually fills up. It may take a long time, but it will fill up, just one drop at a time. So self-doubt often comes from wanting to achieve too much. Can we adjust what we want to achieve, to make it more realistic? Then as we achieve little things we gain more confidence. With that confidence, we will then feel that we can increase again, and increase again and increase again.