As the business stage changed, so did the experience of self-doubt.

• For very early-stage founders, self-doubt often centred around narrowing down options, finding new clients, and being visible.

• For established founders scaling impact, self-doubt was common in adapting leadership, bringing on the right people, and making decisions.

• For leaders hired into existing organisations, self-doubt came up around influencing others and uniting stakeholders.

With that in mind, here were the areas (in no particular order) that climate entrepreneurs most often shared as minefields for self-doubt:

(1) Facing uncertainty and slow progress

As mentioned above, uncertainty is part of the deal in any type of entrepreneurship. We’re dealing with a bigger scale of uncertainty when it comes to the systemic self-doubt, and we’ll come to that below. But when it comes to the venture itself, climate entrepreneurs are always sitting with a lot of ambiguity around what might happen next, and they have to adapt to this uncertainty.

• “It’s like this Innovators Dilemma where you never quite know, if you make it over this hill, what's behind it. You don't see it. When you're on the way, you don't know. Are you going to have a breakthrough idea in two months? Or is someone going to cross your path next week, and it's going to change everything, and you're going to be on the fast track to success, whatever that means to you? I feel this a lot.”

This was also connected with learning to be okay(ish) with the process taking longer than hoped.

• “One of my biggest challenges is patience. You know, things take time. And a lot of what you do doesn’t have an immediate payoff. You will launch your business. And then it will struggle, because it does because it's new. You know, if you hit a home run, people write books about that. So if there’s a whisper of self-doubt, the patience doesn't really go so well.”

Especially at the very start of entrepreneurship, some people reported struggling to make decisions without all the data:

• “I’ve got so many ideas. That's part of the problem: I don't know which way to go. And I'm terrified of making the wrong decision. I’m bouncing ideas all around the place, trying to find the nugget that doesn’t give me self-doubt. So I'm very solution-focused. I want the thing that alleviates this fear. I’m looking for the one answer. Except that, you know, there never is a one answer. There are always routes to go down and try but I become very impatient. I start flitting from idea to idea.”

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(2) Not fitting in / belonging

Climate entrepreneurs didn’t always feel they were the ‘type’ of person who was an entrepreneur:

• “I don't have experience as an entrepreneur, I've never tried to start up my own business, I don't feel I'm financially equipped, like it’s in my skill set. I don’t have access to people with finance. So it's all those kinds of things, like: how do I build up that skill set to make my business a success?”

They didn’t always feel comfortable networking in the kinds of communities where they knew change was made. This was especially the case if they were from a different culture, and didn’t grow up with some of the norms of their now-host country.

• “I feel like you have a certain type person to be an entrepreneur, or you have to come from a certain background, or you have to have certain contacts. And because I'm lacking all of those, I think that's probably why I've been equipping myself with so much knowledge. So I go in armed that, you know, I'm really serious about this. I see how high net worth individuals interact, and and I've been on the outside of those circles, so I understand how they operate. But I still feel on the outside. And here [in the UK], there's so many more clubs and networks. My home country is a lot less hierarchical and classist. I don't feel like I understand those, because I haven't been brought up in this country.”

There was also some self-doubt around how they were perceived by ‘non-climate’ people. (We’ll look into this more when we get to the systemic self-doubt, below.)

• “I’m very clear on my values, and I’ve often been in an environment where I’ve felt completely misunderstood, you know? It happens less and less because of who I engage with now. But it certainly has happened a lot in the past. “

Often people reported falling back on credentials to shore up their confidence in being taken seriously.

And so, linked to this, a huge area for self-doubt was…

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(3) Not knowing enough climate science

This came up a lot. Most people I spoke to weren’t climate scientists. There was a very clear awareness of just how much there is to learn (and how little they knew).

This often led to their trying to consume as much content as possible so they felt like they could know ‘enough’ to be taken seriously, but this was a slippery slope: the more they learned, the more they realised how little they knew. And there was always someone who was more of an expert than they were. Who were they to share their opinion?

• “There’s a lot of confusion around the term ‘sustainability’. Making sense of it is not very easy. And self-doubt creeps in for me when I know that I don’t have a PhD in biology or something like that. But I have my own definition of sustainability, my own understanding, which probably a lot of people would agree with, but also a lot of people would disagree with. It makes you question your own perspective, make you question whether everybody is right, and you're wrong.”

• “I really struggle with my ability to keep up with all of the developments in the net zero world, it's just gone completely mad. And it's great. And I struggle to give that adequate time during the day, when I've got other stuff happening... It's not conducive, I think, to getting into a topic and feeling confident that you can talk about it or raise things. I think I'm just not doing enough to keep abreast of new developments and new ways of thinking. I feel like everybody else is just galloping ahead, and I'm just falling further behind.”

• “I think that the field of ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] is very wide. It's very difficult to make things concrete and to be an expert. There are a lot of things that you need to study, and you need to learn, because it's a field in total change.”

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(4) People skills

Broadly, this fell into two categories: managing key relationships (stakeholders, partners, funders, customers, etc), and managing others (outsourcing, delegating, managing a team).

This seemed an especially prevalent trigger for self-doubt among those who were originally trained as technical experts — engineers, researchers, scientists, etc.

• “I'm an engineer, and in the past the only thing that mattered was a one or a zero. So that's something I struggle with … trying to be a bit more grey, trying to be a bit more ethereal…I'm good with things but not with people. I don’t often understand the way people work and what their motivation is, because I think everyone should be like me.”

• “I was technically gifted, but when I became a manager I spent six months failing at virtually everything I touched… So, I personally might know what the right answer is 10 times out of 10. But if I can't influence somebody remotely to do that thing, then that's a completely different skill set….  I considered quitting. And a mentor of mine just shrugged his shoulders, looked into his coffee, and said: ‘just see it out, everybody has that crisis of confidence. This is normal. You're not as special as you think you are.’ It's humbling.”

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(5) Leading through transition

Often, the people I spoke with found themselves in a period of transition with their organisation. They were at an inflection point. They experienced self-doubt around trying to adapt as the business evolved. They often felt overstretched, or like they were leading others forward in the dark.

• “I need to be just stepping so completely into the strategic stuff, in order to make as much change happen as possible. And yet that's just such a struggle because I've got so much management stuff to deal with to get the organisation to a place where we've got the right capacity and the right skills, the right funding, the right systems, in order that I can just concentrate on the strategic stuff. I'm feeling so stretched and torn between those two things. And I don't think that helps with my self-doubt or thinking. I ask myself: ‘am I the right person to do both of these things?’ I have good days and bad days.”

• “I really doubt that I have a proper sense-making tool of how to integrate new people into the organisation in a strategic way. I don’t see how to scale our organization over the next two, three, four, or five years. I don’t see the path.”

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(6) Pitching and interviews

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a common trigger for climate entrepreneurs was when they were put in front of others and required to sell themselves (or their idea). People compared themselves to others (especially to the entrepreneurs who seemed so confident and charismatic). There was also some ambivalence around a system that can sometimes reward bravado more than execution.

• “The more I seem to go through the pitching process, the more my self-doubt grows. I have a track record of pitching for things and then not succeeding. I know how to run a business that does make money, but it’s having the balls to say: yeah, I'll make 200 grand in year three, and things like that. There was this guy in my incubator cohort, and he was amazing. And I just thought, oh God, I wish I had that sort of self-confidence.”

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(7) Providing value and becoming visible

This area felt especially tender for early-stage solopreneurs: people whose business brand was very interwoven with who they were as people. For these people, marketing and online visibility felt especially vulnerable. This led them to lose confidence in sales conversations, and to undercharge.

• “If I post stuff related to any of my content, and it feels like it falls flat or doesn't go anywhere, or there's very little interaction, that’s when the voice of doubt really gets loud in me. And so then I keep going, but I'm moving against that resistance. And, like, inside of me, I just want to cry. Like, crumble and fold. You know. But there's the other tenacious ‘doing this anyway’ part, and I keep going. But it’s like, holy God.”

Listening to my interviewees, I noticed that — even on the worst days — climate entrepreneurs' strong sense of purpose kept them going, and could sometimes trump even their self-doubt.

As the adage goes: "If not us, who?" If not now, when?”

That takes us to our next section.