Imposter syndrome is a term used for doubting your own professional ability, despite having pretty decent evidence that you’re capable (and half expecting someone to eventually work out you shouldn’t be doing the job you are doing).
I’ve felt like a fraud at work. Early in my career, sitting in rooms with people who all seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
Then again years later when I changed career completely and suddenly found myself working in a field I knew almost nothing about.
And again, when I co-founded a business. You’d think by that point I’d have grown out of it, but no!
The thought was pretty much the same every time: Everyone else here knows what they’re doing and I’m doing a reasonably good job of making it look like I did too.
But looking back, I never really had any evidence that was true. What I had was a completely unfair comparison.
I knew every doubt I had and every question I was too embarrassed to ask. Every meeting I walked out of wondering whether I’d said something stupid. Every time I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing.
With everyone else, I only saw the outside, and of course, they looked more confident from there.
Recently, one of the previous companies got back in touch and asked me if I would deliver training for them, which I guess means that I was probably doing an OK job as an L&D Director back then!
But imposter feelings don’t tend to wait 15 years for the evidence.
I’ve been working on developing content around imposter feelings recently, particularly how they show up for people at the very start of their careers, because when you’re new to work, you’re surrounded by people who seem to understand things you don’t.
They know the language. They know who to ask. They know which things actually matter and which things everyone pretends matter.
They’ve had years to build up context that you simply don’t have yet.
It’s very easy to mistake that difference in experience for a difference in ability and I would suggest that’s the bit we need to get much better at helping people understand.
Feeling out of your depth doesn’t necessarily mean you are. Sometimes it just means you’re doing something you haven’t learnt how to do yet.
I’m not sure that feeling ever disappears completely, but maybe what changes with experience is that you get better at recognising it for what it is, and you build up a few ways of dealing with it.
