Happy Tuesday!

Self-doubt—feelings of uncertainty about one or more aspects of the self—was a huge theme of my early academic career.

• I was one of the poorer-scoring students in my class for 6 years of elementary school.
• I felt inferior to my classmates in middle school until I started my personal development journey in 2015.
• I was plagued with imposter syndrome in high school.
  • I was the most inexperienced representative for my school at the national competition in web design and development.
  • When I won the national competition but returned empty-handed at a regional competition, I felt like I had just “gotten lucky” with my earlier win.

Naturally, my self-doubt also led to a lot of self-sabotage:

• Fear of getting started
• Analysis paralysis
• Fear of failure

In the past 8 years, these 3 solutions stood out:

1. Rewire your self-talk
2. Focus on what you can control
3. Be kind to yourself

💭 1. Rewire your self-talk

Self-talk refers to your “inner voice”—the way you talk to yourself.

Its contents are often a distillation of your subconscious beliefs and mindsets. To summarize its importance,

“Your brain is a supercomputer, and your self-talk is the program it will run.” — Jim Kwik

To rewire your self-talk:

1. Take stock of what your self-talk contains

Are they positive or negative thoughts? Empowering or sabotaging?

As always, you can create this awareness through any mindfulness practice like meditation and journaling.

Write down whatever you find for the next step.

2. Turn negative self-talk into positive ones

For each negative self-talk you find, rephrase them into positive ones that focus on what you can control.

Here are some of the rephrases I’ve had over the years:

“I’m the most inexperienced person here.” →
“I’m a go-getter; what I lack in experience, I make up for it using effort and persistence.”

“This failure shows that I’m not good enough.” →
“This setback shows where I can improve. If I learn its lessons, I’ll do better next time.”

3. “Install” the new, positive self-talk

The easiest ways to do this are affirmations and visualizations.

Affirmations are positive statements that you repeat to yourself consistently until it no longer feels fake.

With visualizations, you picture your success in a particular situation as if it were real.

This means generating feelings of success—joy, elation, and gratitude—when you are doing the visualization.

Using both methods daily helped me overcome crippling self-doubt in high school… until I faced a setback.

🧐 2. Focus on what you can control

Despite using affirmations and visualizations daily, my crippling self-doubt returned in tsunami waves whenever I faced a setback.

With the help of my mentors, I realized that I was deriving my self-worth from things I couldn’t control.

In general, you cannot control:

• The past
• Other people
• Event outcomes
• Birth circumstances

You can control:

• Your plans
• Your efforts
• Your response
• Your consistency
• Your mind and body

Once I changed my affirmations and post-setback response to focus on things from the second list, my self-doubt became more manageable.

❤️‍🩹 3. Be kind to yourself

The biggest realization I had in my university years?

Self-doubt will always come back.

• You will always be in new situations that create new fears.
• You will always meet new people to compare yourself to and feel inferior to.

In fact, if you're not doubting yourself every once in a while, it could mean that you're not growing!

Thus: Treat self-doubt like your health. Both require consistent, long-term maintenance, not a one-time fix.

Likewise, treat mindfulness like an exercise: Do it consistently to reap the benefits.

And when your self-doubt comes back from time to time, don’t beat yourself up over it.

Remember, it’s not a failure, but a learning opportunity. You got this ❤️