Overcome impostor syndrome

“Impostor syndrome” is a belief that you don’t deserve the success or luck that you enjoy. In the tech world, it is often a sense that you aren’t “living up to” the title you hold, or team you lead, or something like that.

Impostor syndrome can be quite crippling, because it robs you of the confidence to take risks, make mistakes, and grow as a person and an employee.

These are some of the tricks that I’ve discovered for overcoming impostor syndrome and freeing yourself to grow, learn, and create.

Recognize your inner impostor

Impostor syndrome is called a syndrome because it’s a “collection of symptoms.” These are things that you, the impostor syndrome sufferer, feel. The first step to overcoming impostor syndrome is understanding that it is inside of you, it is internal to you.

As with most internal struggles, the next step in managing it is recognizing it. If you can come to recognize when your inner impostor is speaking, telling you that you don’t “deserve” what you’ve achieved or that your success in a task is uncertain, you can reframe it.

In a 1978 paper on the subject by researchers Clance and Imes, participants were prompted to simply change thoughts like “I might fail this exam” to “I will do well on this exam.” Simply rephrasing it to yourself before the event improved imposter feelings in participants.

It may also help to review positive feedback or other objective data and lean into the cognitive dissonance of observing your success and feeling like an impostor at the same time.

Let it out

Another way to grapple with internal struggles is to externalize them. This is where a mentor, peer group, or another social support system can be very helpful. Consider sharing your impostor feelings with people you trust and hear their feedback and their personal experiences.

Even simply knowing that others have the same feelings that you do can go a long way to rob those feelings of their negative power over you.

A coach could also help you observe what is happening, reframe it in a productive way, and take the next step forward toward your goals. Sometimes that calibrated external signal makes all the difference.

Don’t “fake it till you make it”

This all-too-common advice is more likely to make your feelings worse than better. First, if you convince yourself that you’re “faking it,” you will fail to recognize your successes as valid. Second, projecting inauthentic confidence is going to create a bigger internal tension that can feed into your spiral of self-doubt.

Instead of “faking it,” realize that everyone is faking it. We’re all doing the best we can with what we know and the opportunities available to us, and guess what? That’s not fake, that’s how the world works.

Well done!

With these few tips in-hand, you should be able to take the first step toward vanquishing your impostor syndrome!

So, how is it going? Please let me know how you’re doing managing your impostor syndrome, I’d really like to hear about it.

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