Skyler's Thoughts #6: Self-recognition in the Face of Imposter Syndrome
Everyone has felt it, but how do you deal with it?
It’s been a little while since my last edition, I’ve been busy with the end of summer, birthday celebrations and interviewing for a new job.
Question for you reader, have you ever been in a situation where you felt inadequate or undeserving? What was the last time you felt that way and why?
I can tell you I’ve been in that situation many times, and since you are in fact reading my newsletter you know I’m about to dive into it.
Welcome to imposter syndrome
The Oxford dictionary defines imposter syndrome as:
The persistent inability to believe that one's success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one's own efforts or skills.
I would characterize this as feeling like someone else would be better suited for a job you’ve been given or an opportunity that came your way is too good to be true. It’s a lack of confidence in yourself.
I have basically felt like an imposter at every step of my professional career as a software developer.
I felt like an imposter when Lightspeed took me over anyone else as a web development intern when I had 0 experience working as one, was studying making video games, and was scared that I wouldn’t know anything and how could I be productive? Well, I would simply behave as a sponge and absorb the information from those around me. I’d ask lots of questions and make plenty of mistakes along the way to learning new skills needed to be successful as a developer.
How did it turn out? I received a full-time job offer after my internship and even a promotion in my time working on the Inventory team at Lightspeed. I felt comfortable suggesting solutions to large problems and working through it mostly self-sufficiently. I’d learned dozens of new technologies, concepts, and tools. Who would have imagined!
I felt like an imposter when I was asked to join the Lightspeed Payments team to help build the foundations and launch it all across North America. Payments was considered the future of the company, why would they give that type of responsibility to a chump like myself? I knew nothing and had to learn new systems like Laravel, Google Cloud Platform and plenty of tools within it that we used regularly like cloud logging, pub/sub, queues and workers that at the time were all new concepts to me.
How did it turn out? I thrived on that team and learned to celebrate the good and survive the bad. I carved out niches of interest to me that would contribute to the overall platform and the customer experience or internal employee experience like helping our CS and fraud teams. When I left the team I felt that the challenges that were once insurmountable were now pretty much par for the course and it wasn’t that difficult to create solutions to problems we faced. Who would have imagined!
I felt like an imposter when I had 2 job offers from 2 very prestigious companies, neither that I thought I’d actually end up getting. I had a lot of help from amazing people at those companies along the way to prepare me for my interviews but preparation only goes so far. You have to have some real skills to lean on at the end of the day.
I accepted one of the offers and I’m still feeling like an imposter...
But do you know what skills have allowed me to reach this point in my career and recognize myself in the face of self-doubt? All the ideas that I’ve spoken about in previous newsletters and more newsletters to come: being kind, empathetic, humble, curious, listening to others, making colleagues feel valued, allowing yourself to make mistakes and learn from them.... These core competencies have allowed me to gain the technical understanding needed to succeed in any role I’ve had but at the time that I was given the chance to try that new role all I kept thinking was:
I’m an imposter, surely there’s someone better suited for this role than me, what are they thinking?
How did it turn out? Well that story is still being written today, and I’ll be sharing more updates in the future about it ☺️.
Who would have imagined!
Actionable Tip
Most of us feel imposter syndrome every now and then. It can be for big and small opportunities alike. I want you to try this next time you’re doubting yourself:
When you feel like an imposter, think of some positive skills or behaviours that you know you have and don’t let the things you do not possess ruin all the hard work you’ve done to get where you are.
We are all imposters
Fake it til you make it is more like fake it until you have some semblance of thinking that you know what you’re doing and even then always stay humble.
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I’ll release a new edition with an approximate cadence of once per 2 weeks (sometimes less, sometimes more)
Love your updated "fake it till you make it" quote. Some of the best advice I've gotten on this topic is to feel the fear and do it anyway. The more you face the hard things in life, the easier it gets :)