Self Doubt and Overcoming it over the years

Disclaimer: If you or someone you know deals with various mental issues, do not hesitate to reach out to professionals. We live in an era where the amount of resources and the awareness of the challenges to our mental wellbeing is better than ever before, and I am confident that many of the situations I will describe which were part of my formative years would have had easier solutions nowadays compared to (already) bygone days.

What is self doubt?

According to the definition, self doubt represents a lack of confidence regarding oneself and their abilities. As humans, all of us have various moments in our lives when we are not too confident in our ability to rise to the challenges we face and eventually overcome them, and one of the biggest questions we all face nowadays is how to build a mindset which is resilient to any potential setbacks while also seeking constant improvements when it comes to any potential goals we want to achieve in life.

Before I start writing about my experience and the challenges I faced and I am still facing when it comes to believing in myself and the various spells of self doubt I had, I want to start by asking the following question: Where does self doubt originate and what makes people doubt themselves?

Let's start with the beginning: Children do not feel fear or doubt at first -- they believe they can achieve anything and it is during the first few years of life when they accomplish some of the biggest achievements humans can earn (walking, learning how to speak, understanding basic human relationships, basic academic knowledge such as reading or writing etc.). However, as they get exposed to other people and their brains mature, they quickly learn that not everything they want to do is something they should do, but at the same time, they learn to fear things based on the surrounding environment. As an example, a child who always had positive experiences around dogs will love them, but someone who faced an angrier dog who bit them might end up fearing every single dog for a long time, potentially the rest of their lives.

The same thing happens with doubt and especially self doubt: At first, children believe they can do anything, but as they grow up, they start believing that certain tasks may not be that easy to accomplish or even doable at all. Therefore, self doubt creeps in and while we can't point at a singular event which causes this to happen (it is a gradual process), it is something that affects every single person out there and it becomes part of our psyche.

As people get older, their feelings become more complex as they know themselves better and naturally, there will be things they will be more confident in as well as things they are less confident in. To give a personal example, I have always been more confident in my prospects of doing some scientific related work than in my chances of becoming a professional football player, no matter how much I would try or love playing football. While we can't change our past anymore, we can shape our futures and I will show you first how I turned around my life and my set of beliefs after having suffered from self doubt and then what I learned from this that you can use in your journey as well.

My earliest experiences with self doubt

I grew up being a relatively typical nerdy child studying at first in the nearest primary school to home and while I always knew there is something special about myself (among others, I learned how to read at a relatively young age -- 4 years old and by the time I was in the first grade, I could have attended 3rd grade classes without a problem, mostly thanks to having had my family and especially my grandparents challenge me with various games when I was very little).

Ever since I joined my class in the first grade, I haven't been able to make too many friends, mainly due to not having known anyone prior as well as because of having dealt with a group of classmates who never liked me to the point where they would bully me in various circumstances. As a result, I found the safest place to be inside of me as I would do well at school and earn awards at school and local competitions (mostly, math), knowing that there is a school one of my family friends graduated from where the elite math talents from my town go to. Looking back at it, while I couldn't do much at that time to change my situations (I learned some years later that the head teacher of that class was a close friend of the student who hated me the most), probably I should have tried more to explore friendships outside of school, especially with the people I would go out to during afternoons or weekends.

Some years later, I made it there and as I would go on to become one of the greatest informatics talents who has ever lived in my birth town, I knew to some level that among others, the social awkwardness I developed while having to deal with these classmates affected my chances of having too many friends at first so I continued doing what I knew best, while also having an open mind about the various aspects of life I neglected in my primary school years. However, as much as I would try to overcome my traumatic experiences developed from the primary school years, it was an uphill battle where I had to overcome plenty of obstacles to succeed, and it wasn't really until around the beginning of the high school when I finally achieved a healthy relationship whenever I met a new person and I started having a few more friends or at least people I could talk about stuff regularly, which made my high school years a lot nicer to deal with.

One key factor which helped me as far as developing a better sense of social relationships was to start with topics that connect a lot of people (even things as simple as sports, pop culture, life events work) and as I developed relationships and felt more comfortable with some of the people I knew, I felt like I was catching up with what should have been familiar years before, but as the saying goes, later is better than never and looking back at these years, going through these experiences and getting out of the shelf I built to "protect" myself in the earlier years was a necessary evil which ultimately led me towards having a deeper understanding of various social interactions.

Self doubt and competitive activities

Disclaimer: Many of the insights I will present here were also featured in this video I made.

As I earned better and better results during middle and high school, I became a regular in the top 10 Romanian students of my age at the Informatics Olympiad and while the results became better and better, the dream of reaching the training camp was something I was hoping I could earn eventually. Unfortunately, near misses and upsets prevented me from achieving this goal, and as a result, self doubt and self deprecation slowly creeped in. The fact that the online contests have been always a hit or miss didn't help and I saw myself in a spiral of negative thoughts, trying to find the answers to the ultimate question which was bothering my mind for a long time: How to make the next step and how to become one of the elites?

During that time, I remember myself trying to find out what were the things the top students do that I don't, and in the midst of the search, I would see myself try various solutions, such as trying to emulate various sleep schedules, practice habits and at some point even habits top contestants at home and abroad made a habit out of online. Probably, one of the worst things I did in that time was starting to ignore anything good I did and only focus on what I could've done better, thus always rating myself lower and having a worse opinion of myself than I should have.

Even though it would seem unimportant and irrelevant, I could see myself perform worse and having a worse state of mind, but given that I was doing relatively well whenever mattered, combined with the last chance I had (I was in 12th grade at the time) made me go this path. There were times I felt so miserable that I would wake up, go to school, attend classes and do a lot of coding in the meantime, then go home, code some more, maybe play some video games later in the day and go to bed. I was ignoring most social interactions and even though not all of them were very pleasant, I think that I should have tried harder to preserve a balance both when it came to my parents and my brother, but also when it came to the various friends I had at the time. Thinking at it now, I was way too invested to think at finding other solutions, but maybe I should have spent more time developing a more supportive environment around me.

Then, disaster struck. The COVID-19 pandemic became a worldwide problem and from here, everyone knows the script. Lockdowns, delays, closures, everything was shut down, including any Olympiads (later on I learned that there was a selection for IOI in Romania but due to not having made it to any past camp, I wasn't invited there. While I don't think I would have made it to IOI, I think I deserved a place there as well since I was among the top 20 high school students if we exclude people who already graduated, but this is a different story and frankly speaking, it isn't relevant for the purpose of this blog). So I saw myself in a position where I invested so much time and energy into something that ultimately never took place because of circumstances outside of anyone's control, so I had to find some new goals, dreams and projects to pursue. Obviously, there were some goals I still wanted to achieve in my competitive programming career but also make the best use of this free time we all had because of the global pandemic and the suffering which was going on back then.

Overcoming self doubt

Thus, I started digging deep and asking myself some really big questions about who I want to be, what I want to do and whether all of this was worth the effort, the sacrifices and whether I paid too high of a price for everything I earned. Ultimately, I realized that the problem was never at the goals I wanted to have. I dreamed high, achieved very good results and while I wasn't the best, I became very good and I can proudly say I had a lot of success doing this.

I also realized the problem was also not at the surrounding environment either. Even though some people I met never supported me, most of the other people tried their best to support me in various ways and even to this day, going to Olympiads and going for international glory in a competition dominated by students whose parents can afford paying huge amounts of money for private education was already a very difficult task by itself.

Last but not least, I realized that the problem was not at myself either. I was still a teenager at the time and I was trying to explore the world and everything surrounding it. I am grateful to myself that I never went to extreme solutions just for the sake of some silverware and time showed me that I took the right decisions as you probably have seen if you ended up reading this blog.

As I started being involved in various projects, I realized that I have a significant impact for many people who were watching my content, reading my articles or as years went by, learned their skills thanks to having worked with me in some capacity. Over time, I realized that the inner walls I placed over my brain were only the result of my fears and my negative mindset, and I gradually became more and more confident about my ability to get things done, make dreams come true and end up in a way better position than I ever dreamed of.

All in all, it was a combination of several factors which were both within and outside of my tools at that time and without each of these experiences, I would have become a different person, with different ambitions who would have probably never done any of the things I did since then, including my YouTube channel, my tutoring career and any of the wonderful projects I created, that helped me meet many wonderful people across the world.

Having a healthier relationship with self doubt

Nowadays, even though I managed to overcome all of my career and academic related issues regarding self doubt, I realize that the journey of having a healthy relationship with myself as well as avoiding the toxic sides of self doubt is a journey where honesty and accepting that things come gradually are essential as I am now in a different stage in life, where my role is more of a guide and mentor rather than being at the highest stage of programming competitions. After all, not everything has to happen immediately and I am still in a relatively early stage of my life, with a lot of things to look forward to.

Whenever I work with students, I use my long term experience to guide them towards the best results and having this history of ups and downs has always been very valuable to me in order to guide them in the best way possible.

At the end, I want to thank everyone who inspired me to finally open up and have the courage to write about some of the topics I didn't want to share, but which have been essential towards becoming the person I am. If you ever want to reach out to me and you feel at a crossroad as far as some of the topics here go, do not hesitate to reach out. I've been in your place and having someone to listen to you is essential in order to overcome these struggles more easily.