Here is what you need to know! Carl Jung explains what's happening.
Reader,
Ever feel like you’re holding back from showing up fully in your work or life? You’ve made some progress, learned new things, and felt growth, but something keeps pulling you back to your old self.
This struggle is actually more common than you think—it’s often because you don’t yet have enough evidence of who you’re becoming, and so you fall back into the comfort of your past identity.
Carl Jung talked about the retrogressive restoration of the persona —— when we try to revert to who we were because we can’t fully catalyze our new identity.
The truth is, confidence is built on competence. It grows as we gather evidence that we can be this new version of ourselves. But in the transition, when you haven’t fully experienced success in your new identity, the mind clings to the past. This makes it feel safer to stay small or revert to the familiar, even if it’s not who you want to be anymore.
Let’s say you’ve started working on your boundaries in relationships. You’ve made some progress, but every time a situation arises where you could speak up, you hesitate. Why? Because you don’t yet have enough experience of setting boundaries to feel confident in it. Without enough evidence that your new behavior will stick, your mind tries to pull you back into old patterns of people-pleasing or staying quiet.
And it sucks! Trust me, I've been there.
But you have to push through. You can't stay in between.
What happens if you stay stuck in this in-between? If you don’t continue building evidence of who you’re becoming, how will you ever fully step into that identity? What does your life look like in 5 years if you keep doubting yourself every time an opportunity arises to step forward? Without gathering evidence for your new self, you risk being trapped in a loop of doubt and hesitation.
Here is where microdosing can help
This is where microdosing comes in as a bridge. When you microdose, it quiets the self-doubt that comes from the lack of evidence and allows you to trust in your potential.
Microdosing gives you the space to keep moving forward, even when you don’t yet feel fully competent. Microdosing helps you lean into that blind belief period—where you have to act as though you are this new person, even if you haven’t fully seen the proof yet.
And here is where you say: "Yes, Ana, but...."
YOU: “I’m not confident yet, how can I act like I am?”
ME: The truth is, confidence isn’t something you wake up with. It’s built through small, consistent actions that accumulate into evidence of competence of being this new person. Microdosing helps you keep taking those actions without letting fear or doubt get in the way. It helps you build confidence, not because it magically gives you the skills, but because it supports you while you gather the evidence of your new self.
YOU: “What if I try and fail? I don’t have enough evidence of success yet.”
ME: Every step forward is an opportunity to gather new evidence of who you are becoming. Even setbacks can be reframed as learning experiences. Microdosing helps you move through these moments of doubt and fear, allowing you to keep acting in alignment with your new identity, even before all the evidence is there.
SO,
If you’re ready to stop doubting yourself and start building evidence of the new self, build that confidence; microdosing can be a powerful tool for this journey. The gap between who you were and who you’re becoming requires a leap of faith—but with the right support, you can confidently bridge that gap.
Let’s take the next step together and build the confidence that comes from competence.
During the next 30 days of microdosing, track daily:
- how is your old self trying to creep in
- the thoughts you have around taking unknown steps
- the emotions that come up
- the stories you tell yourself
- what would you need to do, be to step into the new self
- how does it feel being IN-BETWEEEN?
If you'd like, use ODIN, the journal I personally designed, is built specifically for this kind of tracking. It will help you see patterns that aren’t obvious at first.
And I promise you, once you see your patterns it's gonna be much easier to move past them.
Get the only microdosing journal for systematic tracking. This is the “30-Day Microdosing Observation Journal” that I created for myself when I started microdosing.
Get yours here! 👇
Send this to a friend who might need to do this exercise ⏭️
