How to Overcome Self Doubt with an Expedition Mindset

Overcoming self doubt isn't about pretending the feeling doesn't exist. It's about building the competence to act despite it. The goal is to shift your focus from internal uncertainty to external, demonstrable skills. When you do that, doubt becomes just another variable to manage, like unpredictable weather on an expedition.

In a high stakes environment, self doubt is a tangible force, not just a feeling. It’s that quiet voice that whispers on day ten of a polar crossing, questioning if you can handle the team friction simmering inside a cramped Hilleberg tent. It's the flicker of uncertainty in a whiteout, when everything depends on trusting your compass bearing and your training.

This is not everyday anxiety. Out in the field, doubt can directly threaten safety and the success of the mission. We do not treat it as a personal failing. We treat it as a predictable variable, like hidden crevasses or shifting sea ice, that must be recognised and managed with a clear head and a solid strategy.

Healthy caution is what keeps you alive. It’s the internal check that makes you probe the snowpack before crossing a glacier or double check your stove connections at -30°C . It's a vital risk management tool, sharpened by experience.

Debilitating doubt, on the other hand, is corrosive. It eats away at your proven skills and paralyses decision making when you need it most.

• Caution asks: "Have I checked all my systems?" It’s procedural, focused on action.
• Doubt asks: "Am I even capable of doing this?" It’s personal, focused on perceived inadequacy.

This distinction is crucial. One of our core philosophies at Pole to Pole is that you cannot simply think your way out of doubt. You have to act your way through it. That process starts by understanding its true nature under pressure and learning what adventure teaches us about limiting beliefs.

The most powerful antidote to corrosive self doubt is demonstrable competence . Confidence is not a prerequisite for action; it’s the byproduct of it.

When you have practised setting up your tent in simulated blizzard conditions dozens of times, the doubt about doing it in a real storm gets much quieter. Why? Because you have a body of evidence to refute it. Your hands know what to do, even when your mind is screaming.

This is why our training is built on rigorous, deliberate practice. We systematically break down complex expedition skills into manageable parts, building mastery from the ground up. This method creates undeniable, physical proof of your capability.

This approach is backed by solid research. A recent study from University College London found that people experiencing anxiety often get stuck in self doubt because they disproportionately focus on tasks where they performed poorly, whilst completely ignoring their successes. This creates a distorted, inaccurate perception of their own incompetence.

For anyone preparing for a significant challenge, this highlights the need to deliberately acknowledge every small success. Every properly packed pulk, every accurately read bearing, every well pitched tent. This builds a more robust and realistic self assessment. It’s how an expedition mindset is forged, not through hollow motivation, but through hard won, irrefutable skill.

Motivation is useless in a blizzard. When things get tough, you do not rise to the occasion; you fall back on your training. To manage self doubt effectively, you need a toolkit of practical, repeatable mental processes that have been honed for high pressure situations.

This isn’t about just thinking positively. It's about having concrete cognitive strategies to keep you effective when your internal state is screaming at you to stop.

The need for this is more widespread than you might think. Over the last two decades in the UK, reported low self esteem has tripled, jumping from 7% to 20% of adults. In the workplace, a staggering 42% of men do not feel confident in their ability to do their jobs. Realising you’re not alone helps, but it does not solve the problem.

Let’s get into three core techniques we drill into our teams to build genuine, field tested resilience.

Picture this: your stove malfunctions at -30°C, or a ski binding snaps kilometres from anywhere. The first thought is often a threat. Your mind floods with worst case scenarios, triggering a stress response that kills your fine motor skills and clouds your judgement precisely when you need them most.

Threat re-appraisal is the conscious act of reframing that moment. It's about intentionally shifting your internal script from "This is a disaster" to "This is a problem to be solved."

• Threat Script: "My binding is broken. We're stranded. The trip is over. I've failed."
• Challenge Script: "Okay, the binding is broken. What tools do I have? What are my immediate options for a field repair? What's the procedure we practised?"

You are not ignoring the severity of the situation. You are simply redirecting your mental energy away from panic and towards a systematic, procedural response. That tiny cognitive shift can be the difference between a trip ending incident and a story you tell later.

Seasoned explorers like Børge Ousland do not just plan their routes; they walk them in their minds hundreds of times. They mentally rehearse the entire expedition, visualizing everything from routine tasks to full blown emergencies. This is far more than daydreaming, it’s a detailed, systematic practice.

You can do the same. Rehearse the feeling of the wind on your face, the exact sequence for putting up a Hilleberg tent in a gale, the physical movements of navigating a specific crevasse field on the map. This practice builds neural pathways that make the correct response almost automatic when you're cold, exhausted, and under immense pressure.

It primes your mind and body for the reality of the environment. This strips away the shock factor of adversity and quiets the voice of doubt that loves to feed on the unfamiliar.

The human mind has a powerful negativity bias. It clings to failures and glosses over successes. To counteract this, you have to become a disciplined collector of your own data, a simple, factual log of your achievements.

This is not a journal for your feelings. It's a logbook of your competence.

• Navigated 5 kilometres in low visibility using map and compass.
• Successfully field repaired a torn gaiter at -25°C .
• Melted 10 litres o f water and prepped meals in under 90 minutes .

When doubt starts whispering, you do not argue with it. You consult the log. The feeling of inadequacy crumbles against a written record of proven capability. This practice is a cornerstone of developing mental toughness for any challenge.

These techniques provide a solid framework for building an expedition ready mindset. They do not just help you manage self doubt; they give you the tools to prove your own capability to yourself, one action at a time. The table below summarises how these pillars work together.

Ultimately, cultivating an abundant mindset, believing you have the resources and skills to handle what comes, is a powerful antidote to doubt. These practical techniques are how you build that belief. They help transform doubt from a debilitating force into a manageable signal, freeing you up to focus on the task at hand with quiet authority.

Confidence is not something you just find. It's something you build, piece by piece, through action. It's the quiet result of putting in the work. The only way to truly silence that nagging inner voice of doubt is to give it less and less ground to stand on, and you do that by building a portfolio of undeniable, hard won comp etence.

This goes far beyond just being physically fit. It’s about mastering the small, critical systems that keep you safe, efficient, and moving forward when the environment is testing you from every angle. What follows is a four week framework designed to do just that to create concrete proof of your capability, which is the most potent weapon against doubt. To get this loop working, you first have to understand how to build self confidence with strategies that work.

Confidence is built on a foundation of small, repeatable wins. This week is all about mastering individual bits of kit until you can operate them on pure muscle memory. The goal here is to remove the cognitive load of basic tasks, freeing up precious mental bandwidth for the bigger decisions you’ll face later.

Focus on tasks that look simple on the surface but carry critical consequences if you get them wrong.

•  Stove Operation: Get your Primus or MSR stove out. Assemble it and light it. Again and again. Now do it with your thickest gloves on. Now try it with your eyes closed. You need to be able to troubleshoot it by feel alone.
• Knot Tying: Practise the essentials, the bowline, clove hitch, and prusik until you do not even have to think about them. Keep a short length of rope in your pocket and practise whilst you’re watching television or waiting for the kettle to boil.
• First Aid Kit Familiarity: Tip your entire medical kit out on the floor. Get to know where every single item lives so you can grab it instantly in low light and under extreme pressure.

These small acts of mastery lay down the first layer of evidence against self doubt. You cannot argue with hands that already know what to do.

This process: Turning practical competence into confident action, this is a mental drill as much as a physical one.

The flow is simple but powerful: you reframe a challenge, rehearse the solution until it's second nature, and record the success. This creates a feedback loop that builds on itself.

Now it’s time to introduce controlled stressors to test those micro mastery skills. This is where you deliberately make conditions difficult to simulate the friction of a real expedition. It’s one thing to navigate on a clear, sunny day; it’s another thing entirely to trust your compass when you cannot see ten metres in front of you.

• Poor Weather Navigation: Get outside in the rain and wind. Pick a route with well-defined features and navigate a circuit of a few kilometres using only a map and compass. Deliberately practise your pacing and timing between waypoints.
• Time Pressure Drills: Set a timer. Give yourself 10 minutes to get fully kitted up in your outer layers, pack a small daypack with essentials, and get out of your house or tent. This simulates a rapid camp departure or an emergency response.

This week, you start connecting the individual skills into a cohesive daily routine. The objective is to manage multiple systems at the same time over an extended period, just as you would on an actual trip. Self doubt often attacks our ability to handle complexity, and this week meets that challenge head on.

A key exercise is a full training day pulling a weighted pulk (or a heavy pack or even an old tyre) for several hours. During this session, you must actively manage:

• Layering: Constantly add and remove layers to manage sweat. Do not allow yourself to get damp.
• Nutrition and Hydration: Stick to a strict schedule, taking on a small snack and fluids every 60-90 minutes .
• Pacing: Maintain a consistent, sustainable pace. If you can, monitor your heart rate.

This forces you to think like an expeditioner, where every small decision about energy, heat, and hydration impacts your overall performance. Successfully managing these integrated systems for a full day is a huge deposit in your confidence bank.

The final stage of this protocol addresses the psychological component of endurance. After a long, physically draining day, your ability to make clear, rational decisions degrades. This is the moment self doubt loves to strike.

This week’s main session involves a long physical effort, a long hike, run, or pulk pull immediately followed by a series of complex, timed tasks.

1. After you finish your physical training, give yourself 15 minutes to plan a hypothetical route on a map between two complex points.
2. Next, calculate your water and nutrition needs for the next 24 hours based on a given scenario (e.g., temperatures are dropping, exertion levels are increasing).
3. Finally, talk through a critical choice scenario aloud. For example, deciding whether to push on to a planned campsite in worsening weather or make an early camp in a more sheltered but less ideal spot.

This exercise simulates the mental demands you'll face at the end of a gruelling day. By practising making clear choices when you’re tired, you prove to yourself that your judgement remains sound even when your body is spent. This is the final piece of evidence: you are capable not just of doing the work, but of thinking clearly whilst doing it. This systematic progression is how quiet competence is built.

On an expedition, doubt is contagious. One person’s quiet uncertainty can spread through the team like a virus, eroding morale and clouding judgement at critical moments.

But the reverse is also true. Quiet, demonstrated competence is just as infectious. A leader's job is not to be immune to doubt, it’s to manage it in themselves whilst building systems that make the whole team resilient.

This is where the principles of expedition leadership and high stakes business leadership meet. In both worlds, you’re managing a small team of specialists under intense pressure, working with incomplete information. The rules for managing doubt are the same, whether you're in a boardroom or navigating sastrugi fields towards the South Pole.

The most effective leaders, like our associates Jason Fox and Aldo Kane, get this. Their strength does not come from an absence of doubt, but from mastering the processes that keep it in check.

The bedrock of any resilient team is psychological safety . It’s an environment where people feel safe enough to admit they’re unsure, to voice a concern, or to own up to a mistake without being humiliated.

When a team member can say, "I'm not sure about this bearing," or "I think I packed the pulk wrong," it opens the door for a simple correction, not a potential catastrophe.

This does not happen by accident. It has to be built, intentionally, by the leader.

• Model vulnerability: A leader who admits their own uncertainties ("I'm weighing two options here, let's talk them through") gives everyone else permission to do the same.
• Frame challenges as learning: Every setback is a chance to improve a system, not to point a finger.
• Actively ask for input: Regularly ask, "What am I missing?" or "Does anyone see this differently?" This proves every perspective is valued.

Without this safety net, people hide their doubts. They’ll push on with a bad feeling in their gut, just hoping they’re wrong. That’s a dangerous gamble when the conditions are unforgiving.

Crippling self doubt rarely announces itself with a megaphone. It usually shows up in small, subtle shifts in behaviour, especially in a high stress, isolated environment. A good leader is a good observer, constantly tuned into the team's psychological weather.

Keep an eye out for these signals:

•  Withdrawal: A teammate who’s usually engaged goes quiet and stops contributing to decisions.
• Second guessing: Constantly re checking simple, mastered tasks, which shows a loss of trust in their own skills.
• Uncharacteristic irritability: Lashing out over minor things is often a sign of immense internal pressure.
• Procedural avoidance: Someone suddenly starts avoiding a specific task they used to handle easily, like navigation or stove duty.

These are not signs of weakness. They’re flares, signalling that a teammate is wrestling with their internal story. A quiet, supportive one-on-one is needed before the problem gets worse.

One of the most powerful tools for building team resilience and short circuiting doubt is the After Action Review (AAR) , a concept borrowed straight from the military. It's a structured debrief held after any significant event, whether it was a successful day's travel or a near miss.

The AAR is brutally simple but profoundly effective. It's built around four direct questions:

1. What was our objective?
2. What actually happened?
3. Why was there a difference?
4. What will we do differently next time?

Running these reviews consistently creates a culture where improvement is constant. It proves to the team that it's safe to try, to fail, and to learn. This systematic analysis provides concrete evidence of progress, which is the perfect antidote to the vague, formless feelings of self doubt. It shows a team how to overcome self doubt not just as individuals, but as a single, cohesive unit.

Mental frameworks are one thing, but their real value is only proven when the wind is biting and your fingers are numb. Reading about how to overcome self doubt is a start. Proving to yourself you can do it in the Icelandic interior at 64° 25' 24" N is another thing entirely.

This is where theory gets tested against the raw, unforgiving reality of snow and ice.

At the Pole to Pole Academy, we exist to bridge that gap. Our training programmes are designed to move beyond abstract concepts and forge genuine, hard won competence. It’s an environment with no shortcuts, one that demands you trust your training when you’re cold, tired, and under real pressure.

We start small. Not with grand, overwhelming challenges, but with the small, crucial details that every expedition is built on. Mastering the feel of a Gransfors Bruks axe in your hand. Understanding the subtle differences in your Fjällräven base layers. Learning how to consistently pack a 50kg pulk so it pulls true, hour after hour.

Once that foundation is solid, we start layering in complexity. We build scenarios that combine physical exhaustion with the need for absolute mental clarity. You’ll navigate in near zero visibility, manage your layering to stop sweat from freezing, and run through your tent routine with precision when your hands feel clumsy with cold.

This approach: Building resilience through real, tangible achievement is more important than ever. In the UK, the link between self doubt and mental health challenges, especially amongst young people, is growing. Research has shown that teenagers with low self esteem are 1.26 times more likely to develop depression by the time they’re 26. Successfully navigating a genuinely tough environment provides undeniable proof of your own capability, helping to interrupt that harmful cycle.

The Arctic is an impartial training ground. It could not care less about your past successes or failures; it only responds to what you do right now. This is the heart of our philosophy: we build competence before confidence.

Confidence is the result, not the starting point. When you successfully pitch a Hilleberg tent in a howling gale or ski for eight hours to cover 18 kilometres , you create irrefutable proof of your ability. That evidence becomes your best defence against the nagging voice of self doubt. You do not need to argue with it; you have the data from your own actions to shut it down.

The whole process is a series of practical tests, pushing you just beyond what you thought you could handle, all within a controlled, safe framework.

• System Mastery: Proving you can melt snow for water, manage your food, and maintain your gear efficiently after a long day on skis.
• Navigational Certainty: Taking a bearing from a map and having the guts to trust it in a complete whiteout, moving from one waypoint to the next with nothing but a compass and your training.
• Team Interdependence: Learning to truly rely on your teammates and, just as importantly, becoming someone they can rely on without question.

Every completed task is another deposit in your bank of self trust. Over the course of the training, these small deposits compound, building a robust self belief that is not based on flimsy motivation, but on a solid history of performance.

This is the definitive next step to mastering your own psychology. We provide the environment to do it.

You can learn more about how we structure this journey at The Pole to Pole Academy.

We get a lot of questions from aspiring explorers and leaders grappling with self doubt. Here are a few common ones, with answers grounded in what we’ve learned from years in the world’s most demanding environments.

Self doubt is usually specific. It’s that voice in your head on a stormy ridge asking, “Can I actually navigate this section in a whiteout?” It’s focused on a particular task or challenge right in front of you.

Impostor syndrome is a much broader, more corrosive feeling. It's the belief that you’re a fraud, that your past successes were just a fluke, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone finds out. Where self-doubt questions your ability to handle what’s next, impostor syndrome tells you that everything you’ve already done does not count.

When a big setback happens; a failed objective, a costly mistake, the immediate temptation is to beat yourself up. Do not. Instead, run a dispassionate After Action Review (AAR) on yourself. It’s a simple, powerful tool.

Ask yourself four direct questions:

1. What was the objective? (e.g., Reach a specific grid reference before nightfall.)
2. What actually happened? (e.g., I misread the map and ended up two kilometres south.)
3. Why was there a difference? (e.g., I was tired and rushed the bearing check, skipping a confirmation step.)
4. What will I do differently next time? (e.g., I’ll implement a mandatory stop to confirm my position every hour, no matter the conditions.)

This framework pulls the emotion out of failure. It turns a confidence shattering moment into a valuable piece of data, shifting the focus from personal blame to improving your process. The goal is not to avoid failure, it’s to learn from it with military precision.

The intense confidence forged in extreme environments can feel like it’s fading when you return to your normal routine. The key is to keep the practice alive through deliberate competence building .

Do not let your skills get rusty. Stay sharp with your kit. Practise your navigation, even on local trails. Find smaller challenges that demand the same disciplined mindset you used on the expedition.

This isn’t about reliving the past. It’s about making that expedition mindset your default way of operating. It ensures the quiet authority you earned out there becomes part of who you are, not just a memory of something you once did.

At Pole to Pole , we know the most effective way to beat self-doubt is to build undeniable proof of your own capability. Our training programmes are built to do just that. We provide the environment, the tools, and the expert guidance to help you forge genuine, lasting self-belief.

Explore our expeditions and courses at https://www.poletopole.com.