How I Manage My Impostor Syndrome
Sharing My Personal Strategy
Hey, fellow Leader đ,
I am Artur, and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
Impostor syndrome is real, and it gets to every one of us. Especially if we keep adding changes to our lives that push us to new heights. I strongly believe there are two side effects to ambition: One is perceived arrogance by others and impostor syndrome. One is an externalized effect, while the latter is a constant conversation in oneâs mind. If someone is ambitious and tries to find new ways of achieving goals, eventually, given enough persistence, he or she will be successful. With success comes the pragmatism of knowing what is working and what is not. Therefore, the person could strongly cut through the noise and philosophies of how to accomplish those goals. This posture might be perceived as arrogance by others who didnât achieve the same goals.
Impostor syndrome is a conversation inside our heads, which is a reflection of the fear of failing. It is the construction in the mind that we donât have what it takes, and we are very keen to identify the gaps in our skills and mindsets to achieve a certain goal. What is interesting about this syndrome is that itâs a great self-analysis tool to understand which parts of us need work, and with constructive thoughts, we can even define a plan of improvement. This article will cover how I personally manage my own impostor syndrome in the hopes that it helps you in any way to manage it better.
Some Things Inevitably Will Go Wrong
If you thought this article would be all rainbows and unicorns, well, nope. If we are trying to achieve something challenging, it is impossible that every single step will go as planned. Reality is cruel, and it will hit us in the face. The mindset here is accepting and knowing in advance that some things will go wrong and trying to maintain peace of mind. That peace of mind is important to figure out other ways to navigate the issues that are occurring, and accept it as a normal modus operandi.
Even when following a detailed recipe in the kitchen for preparing a glamorous dinner, there will be some steps that will fail. Maybe you donât have enough cheese (criminal! ), maybe the brand of an ingredient that you are using creates a different texture. The main message here: Our plans will not go 100% according to expectations, and we need to acknowledge it and create a mindset of navigating through the problems.
I am a very âgather feedbackâ type of guy. If I am preparing some sort of plan, I try to have the input of colleagues before I present it to a wider audience. This methodology allows me to get ideas and inputs on what can go wrong, and have a small brainstorming on how to mitigate or address some events. Which means, I know who to consult and exchange ideas with when the bad stuff happens. Because it will happen. Itâs a matter of time.
But simply accepting that things will go wrong is only half the battle. We also have to learn how to emotionally handle it when they do. This is where I start the philosophical section of the article...
This Part Will Be A Bit Philosophical, But Hear Me Out
We are the sum of our experiences. One thing I learned in the past decade is about some philosophies around Stoicism and Karma Yoga. While Stoicism revolves around the ability to improve emotional intelligence, I think for this topic, I can share with you some words regarding Karma Yoga. Without entering the rabbit hole about what Karma Yoga is, I will just highlight a general misconception. Karma is not like the sum of our good vs bad deeds, in an effort to maintain a positive balance, as if it were a bank. The concept of Karma Yoga centers around the detachment from the ownership of the results of our actions.
Letâs go through an example. If you want to cook a fancy dinner, an idea would be to search on YouTube for a fancy dish that you would prepare and cook. Once the dinner is served, is the result of the cooking owned by you? Well, the answer is no. You own the effort put into that dinner, however, the end result is not owned by you. The result is the consequence of multiple variables that contributed to that result. It also includes the contributions of the chef who created the YouTube video, who he or she was influenced by someone else who created the recipe, and even the recipe itself was influenced by many other people. This is a mindset shift, first and foremost, that detaches us from owning the results of the actions (good or bad). Which comes quite handy for handling imposter syndrome.
One of the key aspects related to Karma Yoga is that we should put all our intentions and give our best in all our actions. This, in practice, is asking us to do our best and detach from the result of those actions. So, if we are doing a task and for some reason the result is below expectations, we should be mindful that we gave our best. This creates a detachment within ourselves and helps with a better emotional intelligence while analyzing events or tasks that didnât produce the desired outcomes. Therefore, it allows us to be more analytical and factual in addressing situations, without having the fear of whether we are good enough or not.
Challenges Improve Self-Awareness
Once we get more experienced and start to win some important projects and achievements overall, we start to get a track record of hands-on experience. With that, we are in a key position to analyse each context and determine which aspects of ourselves helped and which aspects we would need to improve to produce better outcomes. This helps build self-awareness of the aspects we are good at and others that we are lacking and need improvement.
When something goes terribly wrong, this self-awareness is a baseline to understand how we could improve and compare ourselves with different situations in our past. Letâs imagine a football coach who won several Champions League titles across different countries (letâs imagine, Jose Mourinho). He is, factually, one of the best coaches of all time in the history of football. However, if he failed miserably at a club, he has the experience to make a retrospective and analyse what went wrong this time. Maybe he was overconfident? Maybe he lacked the motivation of his previous successes? Maybe he didnât address situations in the best fashion?
The result is less about us feeling like impostors and more about having a factual analysis in our heads and understanding that past successes show us that we can do it, changing the focus to trying to understand what could have been done differently. Overall, the strategy is to move away from the impostor talking inside our heads and have a constructive conversation around what could have been done differently.
My philosophy is that the feeling of being an impostor is a sign that youâre ambitious. Youâre pushing yourself into new territory. My strategy is to focus on the work itself and accept that failures are an inevitable part of any challenging project, which needs to be overcome with facts and intelligence.
Thatâs it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur