Drop Kick Imposter Syndrome
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I started, like a lot of developers, from ground zero. I taught myself HTML in the GeoCities days and, when I discovered open source software, the first thing I did was started ripping apart code to customize it for my site and my own personal use. I now write code for global enterprise businesses with thousands of users and millions of visitors. In the intervening time, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to confront feelings of inadequacy, of feeling like I’m not actually that good and that no one would ever listen to me. Everyone suffers from imposter syndrome at some point, for a variety of reasons. The key to overcoming imposter syndrome is understanding your own skills and what you’re fantastic at. Learning how to manage imposter syndrome could be the difference between taking the skills and knowledge you’ve acquired through years of experience and training and applying to that awesome job, or being too afraid to hit the apply button because you don’t believe you actually have enough experience, recognition or some other artificial excuse. This talk will share some of my personal experiences and how I tamed my own imposter syndrome and will suggest some strategies for overcoming yours.
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Drop Kick Imposter Syndrome
- 1. Drop-Kick Imposter Syndrome CHRIS REYNOLDS chrisreynolds.io @jazzs3quence hello@chrisreynolds.io
- 7. Impostor syndrome is a concept describing high-achieving individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a "fraud".
- 8. Despite external evidence of their competence, those exhibiting the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved.
- 9. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.
- 15. Story time My first WordCamp
- 16. Senior Engineer What? Me? Senior? That’s an age thing, right?
- 19. Two Neils… Imposter Syndrome affects everyone
- 20. “If Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.” — Neil Gaiman
- 24. Thanks, Captain Obvious. Imposter Syndrome disproportionately affects women
- 25. imposter syndrome can’t just be turned off
- 26. “Easy for you to say.” You are not alone
- 28. WordPress community Open source projects Working with a team Get involved
- 29. Know what you’re good at Know what you’re bad at Celebrate your successes Know thyself
- 30. Acceptance Give it a name Understand where it comes from — it might actually be because you’re really good at something! Invite the demon to tea
- 32. Sources • https://qz.com/984070/neil-gaiman-has-the-perfect-anecdote-for-anyone-with- impostors-syndrome/ • http://www.upworthy.com/you-may-suffer-from-impostor-syndrome-lots-of-smart- people-with-signs-of-high-achievement-do • http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/05/imposter_effect_women_feel_li ke_frauds_at_work_because_they_are_high_achieving.html • https://bronsonquick.com.au/blog/2017/04/04/im-lucky-dont-suffer-impostor- syndrome-heres/ • https://sonjaleix.com/blog/community/impostor-syndrome/ • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself • https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/your-money/learning-to-deal-with-the- impostor-syndrome.html • https://wordpress.tv/2015/08/20/peter-wilson-dee-teal-and-gary-pendergast-im- an-impostor-because/
Editor's Notes
- When I was tossing the idea for this talk around and pitching it to my colleagues for feedback, I was having a hard time coming up with a good title. I knew I wanted to talk about imposter syndrome but I needed something compelling to grab your attention and make you want to come to my talk. After all, a lot of things have been said about imposter syndrome already and I’m just another white dude.
- One of the titles that was thrown out was “dropping the imposter”
- but that didn’t quite express how I feel about it. If you’ve ever watched “professional” wrestling, you’ll be familiar with this
- dude jumps up, twists his body so he’s perpendicular to the mat, and kicks out at another dude
- Sometimes this happens while running
- sometimes off the top rope. I honestly don’t think as a fighting move it’s very effective -- if it was, I’m sure people would be getting drop-kicked all the time in UFC -- but it looks cool. I decided that I didn’t want to just drop the imposter, I wanted to kick his ass.
- Wikipedia defines imposter syndrome this way: It is when you are unable to internalize your accomplishments and live with a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud.
- It goes further to say “despite evidence of your competence, if you suffer from imposter syndrome, you remain convinced that you’re frauds and do not deserve the success you’ve achieved.”
- and any proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing or the result of deceiving others into thinking you’re cooler and smarter and better than you actually are.
- One of the people I follow on twitter is Jesse Von Doom, who, besides having the most awesome supervillian name ever, is a phenomenal human being. He is a developer and one of the founders of CASH Music, a nonprofit organization developed to build tools for independent musicians to market their stuff. The idea being that marketing is hard. It’s even harder when you don’t have a major label to back you up and do all your marketing for you. And it’s harder than that when you know nothing about the internet or building websites or basically any of the stuff we do on a day-to-day basis. So CASH has a platform that anyone can install on their own server and it immediately gives them tools that are like your own private bandcamp — with everything you need for digital music distribution, mailing list management, you name it. And they have a hosted solution they’ve been building where you can access all these tools on their server. It’s fantastic and makes almost zero money because they are funded almost entirely by the generosity of other people making donations and large contributions to ensure that they can still do what they are trying to do. So he tweets this. “imposter syndrome is bullshit. what do i even know, i don’t deserve opinions about imposter syndrome.”
- So this is funny right? It’s also a perfect example of how imposter syndrome works. So I say, “hey, I’m planning on giving a presentation on imposter syndrome and it would be awesome to use this tweet in my slides.” and, after a pause, he responds “every possible reply i’ve thought of is essentially ‘sure but i’m no expert’”. I love this because this is what feeling imposter syndrome makes you do. You constantly doubt and second guess yourself. About everything. Even about talking about imposter syndrome. Maybe especially about talking about imposter syndrome.
- It feels like coming out whenever anyone gets up in front of a group and talks about imposter syndrome -- “hi, I’m Chris and I, too, feel like an imposter” -- but it shouldn’t. Stand up if you have ever felt like you weren’t good enough for a job, for a client, for a class you were taking, and that eventually, somehow, someone would find out and expose you. Now stand up if you were too afraid to stand up. Research done in the 80s found that 2 out of 5 people felt imposter syndrome and more recent studies suggest that this number is higher in millennials.
- It’s not just work stuff either. Parents compare themselves to their own parents and seek their approval as parents and comparing our awesomeness to the awesomeness of others on social media creates an echo chamber where everyone is projecting their best self to the world while secretly feeling like their actual self is so much less cool than everyone else.
- If you were at WordCamp SLC last year, you would have heard my story about being hired at and my subsequent first week at WebDevStudios where I was working with people who, in the WordPress community, are literal rock stars. It’s tough to feel adequate in a room (Slack or otherwise) with several people who’ve written books on WordPress and my first project was for the National Park Service.
- But rewind a few years. In 2010, I attended my very first WordCamp. I had recently quit my job as a support analyst at Albertsons and had been trying to make my way freelancing as a web designer. I taught myself HTML and CSS back in the GeoCities days, and I didn’t really know much about PHP. When I was in college, I studied graphic design, and, being familiar with HTML and learning CSS, I considered myself a theme designer, not a plugin developer. I was starting to venture into more complex stuff, though, building themes with options pages, and it was a talk by John Hawkins, who you may have heard speak today, that convinced me to try writing a plugin. It wasn’t much different from writing functions in your theme’s functions.php file, he said, and you can add custom functionality to your own site in a plugin rather than a theme. So I did. And it was easy. And there are lots of reasons to write custom functionality as a plugin than in the theme including making it easier to debug if there is ever a problem.
- Fast forward to this time last year, when I was trialing for Human Made as a Senior Engineer. Really? Me? Senior? You’ve got people who’ve helped shape the WordPress REST API, who’ve worked on building WordPress as a platform with projects like HappyTables, and you think I’m senior?
- What happened in between WordCamp Utah 2010 -- because it was Utah back then -- and today is a lot of little things that contributed to earning that title of “senior engineer”. They didn’t look like much at the time. It looked like taking that first step after John Hawkins’ talk to write my first plugin. It looked like taking on a project as a freelancer that was entirely back-end development for a friend of mine who was a designer. It looked like enduring the arduous, yes I said it, process of getting a theme approved for the WordPress.org repository and sticking with it, and learning WordPress best practices along the way. So, yeah, I am senior, and yeah, I’ve worked really hard to earn that title.
- Imposter syndrome can affect anyone, no matter your accomplishments.
- There’s a great story that was floating around recently about Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors, he wrote the Sandman series on DC/Vertigo comics, as well as a few other series like Miracleman and the Eternals, and he moved onto books becoming a bestselling author and having several of his books turned into films -- like Stardust, Coraline, MirrorMask -- and TV shows -- American Gods and Neverwhere. He said that he was invited to a party of amazing people, scientists, artists, writers and discoverers of things. He’s chatting with an older man and they’re joking about their shared first name. The man says: “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”
- That man was Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon. And Gaiman says: “if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.”
- The other interesting thing about imposter syndrome is that it disproportionately affects smart people. Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “wait, I don’t suffer from imposter syndrome, is Chris saying I’m dumb?” No, you’re not dumb. You’re probably just lucky. For the rest of us though, let me know if this sounds familiar: you’re good at something. Like really good at something. So good at something it’s easy for you. People may have told you “oh you make it look so easy” but to you, it’s just something you do. You discount its value.
- Imposter syndrome lives in the venn diagram where making it look easy and discounting its value meet. I do this all the time.
- My partner injured her knee recently and is doing physical therapy and they keep putting her through these exercises where she has to balance on top of a sort of half-ball shaped platform thing and lift one leg off the ground. And, she says, obviously they expect you to be leaning against a wall or holding onto something but she just doesn’t. She has really good balance and can do it without holding onto anything. And the physical therapist is like “look at her making it look easy” and she’s like “yeah whatever” and tries to shy away from the attention because she’s also an introvert.
- This is actually quite common among women, in particular. And yes, I realize that I am male and I’m not going to mansplain why women feel imposter syndrome more than men, I’ll let you tell me that. However a common thread in my research of imposter syndrome was that women, particularly high achieving women, feel imposter syndrome more frequently than men because women frequently feel like they have more to prove than men do. This should surprise exactly no one and if you are shocked by this come see me after.
- Imposter syndrome isn’t something you can turn off. A colleague and friend of mine wrote a blog post called “I’m lucky I don’t suffer from imposter syndrome, here’s why”. He had a lot of good things to say but one of his points struck me as off-key. He wrote with the viewpoint that you could simply make a choice to not live with imposter syndrome. Here’s some easy steps to follow and at the end, you’ll be free and clear. But it’s not that easy.
- One thing he said was “you’re not alone.” But it’s hard to not feel alone if you’re a solo freelancer trying to scrape by doing jobs on elance. And it’s hard to not take it personally when the design shop in Bangalore with a staff of 12 gets the low paying gig over you who’s working by yourself and needs to put food on the table for your family.
- So how do you drop kick imposter syndrome? A lot has been said and written about it.
- At WordCamp Europe in 2016 Sonja Leix suggested that to overcome imposter syndrome, you should get involved in things. For her it was becoming involved in the WordPress community. This might be true, or true for her, but I would extend that to working with other people, in general. Because it’s not always easy to break into the WordPress community and contribute in a valuable way and many of us -- myself included -- feel so much imposter syndrome that even getting involved in some small form is overwhelming. I would say instead just work with other people -- if you’re freelancing, find a project, a plugin or a theme, that you use and start contributing to it. Contributing can come in many forms and usually it starts by looking at the issue tracker and/or submitting bugs or feature requests. If you’re a developer, and there’s a feature you really want, try building it and then showing it to the developers of the plugin. Working on teams helps you understand what other people are good at that you aren’t, what you are good at that others aren’t, and your overall value and contribution to the team at large. For me, that was working in an agency setting for the first time at WebDevStudios and realizing, hey, these folks are just like me.
- There’s a very old saying of “know thyself”. When it comes to dealing with imposter syndrome, I find this self-awareness pretty crucial. Understand what you are good at. Don’t know what you’re good at? Usually liking something is an indication that you are good at it. I discovered that I really liked back end development far more than front end development when I worked on a project that was exclusively back end. And, it turned out, I was pretty good at it, too, and since I had done tech support for many years, I had an understanding of user experience interacting with the things I was building that was valuable in building things that were more user friendly. Also, understand what you are bad at. What things do you always struggle with? For me this has been javascript -- having been entirely self-taught, javascript is always some magical layer added later that never had any interaction with the stuff I was working on and, when it did, it was an opaque jumble of single letter variables and an infinite number of interconnected external libraries. Knowing what you’re good and bad at helps you acknowledge your successes like when you do something you’re typically bad at and pull it off or when you are able to quickly knock out something you really love doing because you’re so good at it.
- There’s a story about Buddha and the demon Mara. This comes from a NY Times article which sourced it from a book by Tara Brach. The story goes like this: One day, Buddha was teaching a large group of students, and the demon Mara was moving around the edges, looking for a way into the group. She says “I envision Mara rushing frantically back and forth in the bushes and trees, making plans to wreak havoc.” One of Buddha’s attendants sees Mara, and runs to Buddha saying “Master, master, Mara is hiding in the bushes!” Buddha says, “Oh good, invite her in for tea.” The article uses this story to illustrate another way to deal with imposter syndrome: acceptance. Understand that you are feeling it, understand why you are feeling it, give it a name, and accept it. Accept that other people -- it’s probably safe to just assume everyone -- also feels the same way and this is normal. We often hesitate to believe that something that comes naturally to us is actually a valuable skill.
- 1. What? Me? Senior? 1. I taught myself HTML in the GeoCities days 2. I went to school to study Creative Arts in the Digital Revolution 1. Basically different forms of art that was made on a computer 1. I took programming classes, and I hated them 1. BASIC 2. C++ 3. Assembly 3. When I graduated I never wanted to do web development 1. I’d seen artist friends take design jobs that sucked their soul and creativity away 4. After graduation, I envisioned myself wearing sunglasses and working a low paying job at a comic book store or a music store 1. This led to several horrible retail jobs 5. I started doing tech support because I was everyone’s tech guy 1. This led me to hate being everyone’s tech guy 2. Also reinforced why i didn’t want to do web design as a job 6. I started freelancing because I didn’t want to spend my life away from home and my kids 1. Worked as a remote web development sweat shop worker at HWS 1. This was good because I didn’t need to deal with managing and acquiring clients but bad because it was low paying and incentivized web developers as salespeople and producing the lowest grade crap possible over actually building good sites and delighting clients. 7. Broke away and started working for myself 1. Had to deal with clients 2. No initial client base meant no money 3. Went to horrible sites like elance and freelancer.com for jobs and competed against developers in other countries who could produce far more, with more resources than I could, by myself 4. I did a couple purely development jobs for a designer friend of mine 1. Learned that I really really like doing development more so than design and letting someone else worry about design. 8. Meanwhile I started working at Whole Foods 1. Worked in grocery stocking shelves 2. Learned that I enjoyed creating displays 1. Doing something creative 3. Eventually doing cool displays led to getting transferred to the specialty department 1. Specialty is the greatest department in a grocery store, it’s all the good things in one place -- coffee, cheese, chocolate 2. I discovered that I was really good at not only the normal tasks involved in working the cheese counter but also recognizing what sorts of things sold well, what things I could sell directly through talking about it, and what things needed to be demoed to sell better 9. I started working for Event Espresso because I wanted a steady paycheck. 1. At Event Espresso, I wore many hats 1. I did tech support 2. I did development, mostly customization 3. I started doing plugin development, adding code to existing add-ons 4. I started doing project management 1. I hated being a PM 10. I started doing videos for Pluralsight 1. Contacted me at a WordCamp, needed WordPress content, I gave them a demo video and they signed me up 2. I have produced 12 courses for Pluralsight 3. After the first couple, i needed to actually do research in order to produce the course 4. Quit EE so I could focus on Pluralsight 11. That leads to working at WebDevStudios 1. I was convinced that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance that I would get the job at WDS 2. If you follow the trajectory, it makes sense 1. By the time i got to WDS, I was fairly accomplished. I’d done a lot of things and learned what I was good at and what I was bad at.
- In conclusion work with people, learn from people. teams are incredibly valuable know what you are good at and where you still need to learn. celebrate your successes. invite the demon for tea. accept and acknowledge your imposter syndrome and move on