How I got over imposter syndrome
Listening to @brianne2k's #brandjam space, there's a lot of discussion about imposter syndrome. Here's a on the top 10 ways I got over my own imposter syndrome:
1. I had to believe that people I respect have hired me and recognized something in me. @mmoulton gave me advice I'll never forget: "If you disparage yourself, you give other people permission to do it also. I wouldn't have hired you if you had nothing to offer."
2. I learned about the spotlight effect. https://yourbias.is/the-spotlight-effect… I stopped overestimating how much people noticed me. Other people are more worried about themselves than they are about me, so I was believing a lie of my own fabrication.
3. My "failures" were just mistakes. And it's impossible to learn without making mistakes. I've spent 20,000+ hours playing guitar. Probably a few thousand hours simply working on correcting mistakes. That made me a better guitarist and mistakes make me a better person.
4. No failure thus far had been so great as to ruin me. If I was such a failure, how did I end up in places I liked so often? How did I make a salary that increased every year? None of my failures ("mistakes") actually had a tangible effect on my growth.
5. Believing I was an imposter discredited the people I loved and respected. (This isn't quite the same as #1) I'm not so clever as to be able to fool so many people that I'm good at anything. I can't be both an amazing coverer of problems AND be an imposter.
6. Only one person was calling me an imposter: me. I've received a lot of difficult feedback in my life, but only one or two people had ever said I didn't deserve to be where I was. If I was an imposter, more people would have recognized it already.
7. I learned about Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) from this book: https://amazon.com/Mindfulness-Acceptance-Workbook-Anxiety-Commitment/dp/162625334X… · Accept there will be discomfort · Commit to doing it anyway · Value the effort more than the outcome
8. If I have been wrong about so many things in my life, why couldn't I be wrong about being an imposter? This is a Serious question requiring humility and admitting to hard truths about oneself. I had to accept my wrongness as well as my not-being-rightness. They're different.
9. Even if I'm wrong about everything and I am a total imposter, I might as well enjoy it while it lasts. If I'm going to be found out at some point, it's not like my employers were going to ask for their money back and my former clients were going to want refunds.
10. I knew too many great people who suffer from imposter syndrome. It had to be a bigger problem than me stinking at what I do. In all honesty, I'm wealthier and luckier than I ever imagined or felt I deserved. There's probably some part of me (and others) that was just coping.
Hopefully some of these ideas can be helpful to even just one person. If you're dealing with imposter syndrome, it's probably because you're more talented than you want to give yourself credit. You don't have to let that grow your ego. Just accept that people value you.
Also worth mentioning, it took me ~8 months of serious work to get through this process. It was transformative, for sure. The good news is I emerged with a healthy sense of confidence, humility, and self-awareness. Obviously I'm still a work in progress! :)
