Years ago, running an ESL centre, I nearly lost one of the best teachers I ever worked with before he’d properly started.
He was my first recruit, not long after I’d been promoted from teacher to centre manager myself. A few weeks in, he was ready to quit.
Not because he was bad at it. He wasn’t.
It was because he kept comparing himself to me, and by his own measure, he wasn’t good enough.
He knew I was a career changer too. That was never a secret. What he didn’t know was that I’d been exactly where he was, just twelve months earlier. Same doubts. Same feeling of not quite belonging in a classroom yet. So I told him. Not to suggest the mechanics of the job take a year to get right, they don’t, but to make the point that the person he was measuring himself against had been standing exactly where he was standing, not that long before.
That’s when something shifted.
Funny thing is, I was going through my own version of it at the time! Freshly promoted, managing teachers and running a language centre for the first time, quietly wondering if I actually knew what I was doing either. I just didn’t mention that part!!
He went on to become one of the most loved teachers in the place, before eventually leaving to run his own ESL school.
I don’t think anything I actually said to him mattered as much as that one fact, and it’s stuck with me since.
A lot of what helps with imposter feelings isn’t reassurance. It’s information.
Reassurance is easy to dismiss. ‘You’re doing great’ gets filed away as someone being kind.
A fact is harder to argue with.
A few things I’ve noticed actually help, based on that and a fair few conversations since.
Let people see where you started, not just where you ended up. The gap between someone’s first month and your fifth year is invisible unless you make it visible and left invisible, it just reads as evidence they’re behind rather than evidence they’re exactly where everyone starts.
Say “I don’t know” out loud, in front of them, occasionally. Not as a performance of humility, just because it’s true sometimes, and hearing it from someone they’ve decided has it figured out does more than any amount of telling them it’s normal.
Catch it early. By the time someone’s on the verge of quitting over this, the comparison has had weeks to compound. A five-minute conversation in week two does more than an hour-long one in week six.
And be specific when you tell someone they’re doing well. ‘You’re doing great’ is reassurance… ‘That thing you handled on Tuesday, most people two years in still struggle with that’, is information. Only one of those actually argues with the doubt.
None of this fixes the feeling completely, but it gives someone something to hold onto that isn’t just their own doubt talking.
Adam Tomkinson – Co-Founder, Global Career Advantage
