5 Things Imposter Syndrome
https://medium.com/five-things/5-things-imposter-syndrome-54f2cfc59ada
1. All it takes is one small trigger
All it took was a remark from an acquaintance of mine, and a friend of my employer, heard via another friend (grapevine gossip is the worst and nothing good ever comes of it) to send me spiralling: “He’s nice, but he’s not a very good designer”. One little comment, a needle to the I-have-no-right-to-be-doing-this cortex.
These triggers are varied and numerous and can literally be anything. But often they are microaggressions. What you think is something you can brush off, has actually laid an egg in your chest and can come bursting out at any time.
I think the best way to deal with these kinds of triggers is to counter them with positive triggers of your own. Something that a friend of mine and I used to do almost every Sunday was meet up at the market and just chat about what we were working on at the time or, plans for future projects. No matter how insecure I happened to feel at the time, I would always come away from those chats feeling great about myself and inspired to do more. Often just sharing your creativity with others that positively validate you can go a long way to helping fight the feelings of inadequacy that can often overwhelm us.
2. The great equaliser
There is this adage that usually goes something along the lines of “never meet your heroes, they will only disappoint you”. I would have to disagree. Where possible seek to meet people you idolise. Embrace the disappointment if they do disappoint you. It’s probably healthy. Everyone looks up to someone else. Our heroes are often our biggest sources of inspiration even though they can also be our biggest stumbling blocks.
It is so easy to write yourself off as never being able to attain the level of work that the people you admire output, or even just your regular peers sometimes, especially if you find yourself in a bit of a creative rut.
This comes largely from the fact that all we see of other people is the glossy facade they present to the world. Yet, as an individual you are always profoundly aware of your quirks, kinks and shortcomings. Meeting people you admire helps make them more real.
I am personally a big fan of seeking out behind the scene moments and capturing footage or imagery of people in these situations. Seeing the really bad first drafts and weird outtakes makes work relatable and banishes the notion that these people just shit great work.
3. Own your success
This is something that I have a particular problem with. I really struggle to accept compliments. My immediate reaction to a compliment of a photo I posted to Facebook was to say “The sky did most of the work”, brushing off my involvement in the process almost entirely.
This is the exact wrong thing to do. I keep having to tell myself that brushing off accomplishments helps no one. Good work does not happen by mistake. It comes from hard work and it is important to acknowledge that.
It’s really important to just pat yourself on the back every now and then. Give yourself a proverbial Scooby Snack. It’s hard work to achieve anything and there are enough people along the way that will criticise you without you joining in on the roast yourself.
4. Enough with the perfectionism
This ties in quite strongly with owning your success. One of the biggest reasons I struggle with owning any of my successes is that I have always been pushed hard to do better. At school no matter how well I would do in a test or essay my mum would ask me where the next 5% was. This came from a good place and a want for her kid to do better but, the net result is that now later in life I am hyper-critical of everything I do. I really love having people over for dinner, but never ask me what I think of my own food… actually don’t compliment me either because without blinking an eye I will respond with 5–10 things I could do better next time.
Just like owning your success, and perhaps this is the first step, it is important to recognise that there is such a thing as ‘good enough’. Yes, there will always be something to improve upon but the difference is that it does not need to be improved upon right now.
This is most important when bouts of hyper-critical thoughts crop up mid-project. Rather focus on getting through it first, with a ‘good enough’ result and then working to improve it later. A finished work holds infinitely more value than something that never sees the light of day because you couldn’t get it just right, and not finishing things is one of the biggest feeders of feeling like an imposter. How can you be what you portray if you have nothing to show for it?
5. Be both Mr Miyagi and Daniel San
People often say that teaching is the most fulfilling thing they have ever done. I used to think it was one of the tritest banalities. That was until I actually had to teach somebody something. Teaching can be extremely valuable in affirming that you are not useless nor a fake, because it puts you in a position to see exactly how far you have come. The people you are teaching probably know very little about what you are about to teach and in the process of conveying knowledge, you cannot help but realise how much you actually know and how far you have actually come.
Conversely, continuing your learning is another great way of gaining the perspective needed to deal with feelings of being an imposter by taking back a lot of the agency these feelings remove from you. One of the biggest triggering thoughts of imposter syndrome is that ‘there is so much I don’t know or know how to do’. Continual learning is a salve to that. You might not know it now but you will soon.
By both teaching and learning, you very quickly realise that you do actually know your stuff and are not the imposter that weird part of your brain tells you that you are.
5 Things Horde
We’ve all read at least one of those self help ten steps to success articles. Something that crops up, again and again, is that they tell you to surround yourself with people that push you to succeed. I have always found that a bit trite. I have yet to meet anyone that willingly spends time with people that put them down or are a drag on their lives.
But these articles all generally target people trying to climb to the corporate ladder and earn their 4th Dan black-tie — corporate power structures are the same as karate right? Maybe in an office environment choosing with whom you associate is more important? For us freelancing ronin, things are a bit different. That doesn’t make the advice any less pertinent, but for a very different reason. A reason that throws back to Nick’s very first 5 things article.
1. Home Alone
We spend an inordinate amount of time home alone.
This hermit life can really make you lose touch with reality. Case in point. I was in a serious slump over the holiday period (an ever-recurring slump to be honest). I was so caught up in just trying to keep up with my master thesis and coursework, and freelance work that I was squirrelled away and hadn’t really spoken to anybody in almost two months.
As a result, I was hit by a serious bout of depression and all my creative side projects came to a halt. It wasn’t until I had a skype chat with a friend that I was able to identify just how deep in the hole I was. It’s not like it was anything profound. We were just arguing about random things vaguely orbiting the creative sphere, but it gave me the kick up the arse I needed to get out there and do shit again.
2. Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup
It’s so easy to get locked into yourself. Especially when you are your business and you’re trying to ‘find your style’ and differentiate yourself from everyone else out there also hustling. But we’re all different, who would’ve thought, and because we all see the world in different ways we approach problems completely differently. Exposing yourself to these different modes of thought can trigger flashes of unexpected inspiration. I always think of one of my favourite scenes in the kids' movie Big Hero 6. It’s the car chase scene, Wasabi stops at a red light and Go Go screams at him, “There are no red lights in car chases!”
We get caught up in following our rules of the road because it’s comfortable, and because we become so entrenched in them it’s difficult to even begin to break out. When was the last time you actively thought about the way you drive?
This links intrinsically with back to point one. You spend a lot of time alone, and you think you are just on your daily commute, but maybe you’re actually in a car chase. Do you even know how to be in a car chase? What’s the speed limit for them? You may have no idea but somebody you know probably does, or even if they don’t they can help turn the car chase into a Sunday drive.
3. See and Be Seen
It’s all well and good saying you need all these people around you but actually finding them can be difficult — especially if you’re anything like me and incurably shy. But sometimes you just gotta pull up your big boy/girl pants and put yourself out there. It is scary how just going to things you think are fun and interesting can rapidly lead to meeting those people that will eventually form part of your power ranger squad.
When I finished university and returned to Joburg I was faced with what is probably an all too common situation. Most of my friends had scattered to the far reaches of the country and earth and I was stuck in a job that was not as rewarding as it seemed at first glance. I needed a release. I needed to have some people I could blow off steam with or work on something that at the end of the day I actually cared about, but I had very few friends around and trying to make schedules work while hustling can sometimes be nigh impossible.
There was no choice but to get out there somehow and hopefully find some interesting people.
A daunting prospect.
Having made the weirdest life choice to study journalism while being the most introverted insular person I know, I had developed a few tricks to transform myself from "shy Alex" into “Journalist Alex”. The key one being to take my camera and notebook everywhere with me. As long as I have those I can convince myself I am not just there trying to awkwardly convince people I am interesting enough to spend time with; I have a greater purpose to being there. So I would be at every event either alone or with those one or two friends that happened to be around — that weird guy in the corner that clearly doesn’t belong there but is there anyway.
Eventually, people start noticing that you’re always there. It was how my first massive shift to belonging in Joburg again happened. I was at a speed dating event hosted by a now-defunct blog I used to read. The event was terrible. I spent far too much time talking to people who had never seen Star Wars and in retrospect were just there to perv over the ‘celebrity guests (I am pretty sure one of them was Matthew Mole), but at the end of it Nas and Jordan came up to me and basically said: “Hey we see you around a lot, how would you like to write for us”. I went from "pretend journalist" to real journalist and made some pretty rad friends.
I am pretty sure I met Nick in a very similar way.
Pretending you’re a journalist might not work for everyone, but the key is to find that talisman that makes these situations more comfortable for you and brandish it like a torch as you step out into the darkness.
4. Making 1 + 1 = √42
So you’ve found your squad, crew, whatever you feel comfortable calling them. And you’re firing up the perpetual motivation machine and gathering new ideas, but now what. It’s easy to leave it at that and sometimes that’s okay, but it is also an aspect of creative squads that I find really annoying. It gets stuck in a cycle of purely positive feedback and pats on the back. If you’re trying to grow and push yourself you need someone to tell you what you’re doing is kak and you should rethink some things, but in a way that doesn’t make you feel worthless.
Once you’ve found your people you need to work on those relationships to make them into something more. If you’ve been following 5 things you already know that Mentorship and Collaboration are important. It is from your crew that you will find these people. Once you’ve gathered people to you it’s time to evaluate. Who do you look up to? Who seems keen to start up a new project together? Single out these people and work on these connections even more.
I think this is possibly the hardest part because complacency and life are always at your door ready to wash away your hard work. The fact that I am writing this piece almost a quarter of a year after I first mentioned it to Nick is proof of that. It’s also just as easy to pick up the pieces as long as you are willing to rearrange them a little differently.
5. Disconnect
This is the hardest part. Building up your social capital is addictive, even for the most insular among us, and once you start you’re not going to want to stop. The world is bursting at the seams with amazing people and if you’ve done a good job of building those connections they will just keep leading to more. And therein lies the greatest danger. New ideas, perspectives, and Collaborations are amazing and the projects that arise out of them are almost always better than what you can achieve in isolation, but it is so easy to fall into a rhythm of talking about projects and making plans… and then never actually following through.
It is important to retreat and actually sit down and put in the hard work and produce something. Whether it is your contribution towards your collaboration or something you are working on your own. This is your contribution to your tribe. Nobody likes a freeloader. If you just leech off the creative energy of those you have gathered they will eventually notice and at that point, they will start distancing themselves from you. Then you’re back to square one.