Today I am going to be writing you guys a blog post all about having imposter syndrome. At work, all of the senior management team have access to councillors. Once a month, I meet with a woman, and I unload all of my issues onto her. It is a great opportunity to talk things through with somebody independent.

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a session, similar to all of the other ones that I have done. However, near the end of the session, she threw me a curveball. She wanted us to take some time and discuss my imposter syndrome tendencies. After speaking to her about it, I really do fall into the category, and it opened my eyes. Not only that, it made me realise how many other people out there are like it too!

 

 

What is imposter syndrome?

Having spent some time discussing having imposter syndrome, these are the main characteristics… Self-doubt, belittling your own performance, sabotaging your own success and fearing that you won’t live up to expectations. Every single one of those categories I fell into. There are many other things, some of which you can see here. After the initial conversation, when I was going about my day at work, I would notice the sheer amount of time that I spend worrying and falling into this bracket of ‘having imposter syndrome’. To be honest, in the end when I realised, it was incredibly debilitating, and I knew that I had to make a change.

 

What was I doing?

The main thing that I was doing, was just a general disbelief that I couldn’t do the job. I knew that there was a specific area of marketing that I wanted to do something in. I have done it before, but in my mind, I couldn’t do it. I thought that they needed somebody more skilled than myself to carry out that task. Then, once I had done a task and it would be a success, I would downplay it. I would make out like it wasn’t that much of a big deal. Or I would attribute the success to somebody else. That in itself was enough to not only sabotage myself, but it could potentially hinder any progress in the future.

 

Why I was acting like that?

For me, I think that many of the reasons regarding having imposter syndrome came from my upbringing. I am from the North of England. I have been born and raised in a very rural and down-to-earth part of the UK. Around where I live, you don’t speak about money and success. You get on with things, do a good job and call it a day. There is a culture of staying quiet about what you achieve and how you have done it. For example, my grandad was a multi-millionaire. He achieved that over his entire life by working hard and making smart business moves. He started from nothing and was literally on the breadline when he was born in the 1950’s. We didn’t know about the cash that he had in the bank until he died, and I had to close his accounts.

 

What I am doing to work on it?

To try and help me overcome and stop doing this, I am trying to help myself and calling on my colleagues. The people that I work alongside certainly noticed that I do this. They too want me to stop and take ownership of my accomplishments. To try and help, we are doing it in a humorous way. We have a chart on the wall in our head office. Every time I or my colleagues recognise an imposter syndrome trait, we put a line on the tally. When we get to 10 lines on the tally, I have to buy lunch. It is a funny way of making me recognise what I am doing and it has helped me hell of a lot!

 

I hope that you guys enjoyed reading this blog post. As I mentioned above, there are so many people that fall into the category of having imposter syndrome. It is easy to fall into the trap of wanting to stay humble but to the detriment of your own achievements. I am now at a point where I am incredibly proud of everything that I have achieve and I want to celebrate that. For that reason, I am making a conscious effort of calling myself out when I do self-destructive things. As always, I would love to hear from you guys.