How to Beat Imposter Syndrome
This is the final part of my Imposter syndrome series, how to beat imposter syndrome.
How to Beat Imposter Syndrome
This is the final part of my Imposter Syndrome series, how to beat imposter syndrome.
If you want a recap on the series:
👉 Is it really Imposter Syndrome?
👉 5 Key Influences Behind Imposter Syndrome
👉 My Imposter Syndrome Story
Let’s recap what Imposter syndrome is, with a definition.
Imposter Syndrome: A psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalised fear of being exposed as a "fraud", despite evidence of their competence.
To Summarise Imposter Syndrome
👉 It’s caused by HOW you think.
👉 This way of thinking is persistent.
👉 Evidence exists of your competence.
With that covered, let’s kick on...
Let’s recall the five key influences of imposter syndrome and how to use each one to beat it.
The Subconscious Mind (You AI)
I previously explained how you can think about your subconscious mind as your own version of Chat GPT.
Your AI assistant runs on autopilot.
It constantly sends you thoughts or suggestions about how it thinks you should think about a given situation.
It can do this based on the data you’ve trained it with.
When you give your attention to something, you are training your AI…
So, it has a lot of data to work with.
Being trained on that data leads to your imposter syndrome responses.
Worse, if that data has been repeated often, it probably now lives in the cache used by your AI.
That means it has priority over other potential thoughts.
Knowing this, you can be more purposeful about what you expose your AI to.
You can actively avoid negative and unhelpful data and start training your AI on quality data, resulting in more helpful and constructive thoughts.
The rest of this issue is focused on training your AI with tips from high-level actions to low-level thoughts.
It takes time and patience, but for me, this is how to beat imposter syndrome.
Habits
Habits can be big or small.
They’re most powerful when we know them and most dangerous when we don’t even realise we have them.
Self-Talk
Self-talk is a habit many of us don’t realise we have.
It’s how we tell ourselves stories about our capabilities and how others perceive us.
I like to say:
There are two types of people in this world… Those who talk to themselves… And those who don’t realise they talk to themselves…
Self-talk provides vast amounts of data to your AI.
Unfortunately, most people’s self-talk is critical... of themselves.
It’s estimated that you’re engaged in some form of self-talk for up to 70% of your waking day!
That’s a lot of repetition and a lot of data.
Look out for three main types of self-talk:
Informal self-talk:
This consists of informal statements you make to yourself and others.
Here are some examples:
From:
🔴 “I was just lucky…”
🔴 “Everyone else is smashing it…”
🔴 “Everyone knows more than me…”
To:
🟢 “I created this opportunity”
🟢 “I just need to focus on me”
🟢 “I’m improving; that’s what matters”
Primary Questions:
We send our AI down a particular path with the questions we ask.
When you ask questions like:
🔴 “Why am I so stupid?”
🔴 “Why do I always mess up the interview?”
🔴 “Why would anyone follow me as a leader?”
Your AI makes it its mission to find evidence of all the times you’ve been stupid, messed up an interview or failed an attempt at leadership as if trying to prove your suspicion correct.
However, replace them with questions such as:
🟢 “How can I be better next time?”
🟢 “How do I improve as a leader?”
🟢 “What can I learn from this interview?”
And you’ll send it on a very different mission, a more positive and helpful one.
Affirmations:
Affirmations are statements about yourself.
If you recognise these:
🔴 “I’m a failure.”
🔴 “I am always late.”
🔴 “I’m not good enough at…”
Try switching them for these:
🟢 “When I fail, I always learn.”
🟢 “I’m improving my punctuality.”
🟢 “I’m trying my best.”
With enough repetition, you’ll provide your AI with quality data and also start to believe it.
So, start to build awareness of your self-talk.
Out loud and in your head…
If you don’t think you talk to yourself, pay extra attention…
Here are a few more examples of more constructive self-talk.
👉 “I can learn”
👉 “I can improve”
👉 “I tried my best”
👉 “I’m a hard worker”
👉 “I have a history of great work”
👉 “I worked hard to get where I am”
👉 “My skills are an asset to any company”
👉 “I worked hard to create that opportunity”
👉 “Becoming a senior or leader is a journey”
Negativity
Many of us entertain too much negativity.
It can take various forms:
🔴 Always complaining
🔴 Scrolling social media
🔴 Constantly checking the news
🔴 Listening to conspiracy theories
🔴 Always looking to blame someone
🔴 Talking about others behind their backs…
Again, this is all data that is fuelling your AI…
It’s not hard to imagine what kind of thoughts would be produced when exposed to this stuff all the time.
Here are a few suggestions to improve the quality of your AI’s training data.
🟢 Don’t speak ill of others.
🟢 Stop complaining all the time.
🟢 Spend less time watching the news.
🟢 Spend more time supporting others.
🟢 Spend less time with negative people.
🟢 Spend more time with positive people.
🟢 Spend more time learning and improving.
🟢 Focus on what you can control, not what you can’t.
🟢 Seek out good news and opportunities to congratulate others.
🟢 Spend more time with people who encourage and support you.
🟢 Don’t go looking for people to blame; try to improve the situation.
🟢 Spend more time with people who have done what you want to do.
Beliefs
Your beliefs have much to answer for.
They inform many of your decisions and shape how you see yourself and the people and world around you.
Many people don’t realise this:
YOU CHOOSE WHAT YOU BELIEVE.
And you can choose not to believe something in an instant.
Remember that 👆👆.
It’s super powerful when you realise just how true it is.
To help yourself here, you must build awareness about what you believe about yourself.
I am… I often…
Try this exercise; finish the sentence “I am… or I often…” in as many ways as possible about yourself.
Consider the way you are, act, think and feel. Consider what you like to do and what is important to you.
Be honest with yourself.
Now, reflect on your list.
What you’re looking at is several things that you believe about yourself.
Consider how many of those sentences are helpful ways to think about yourself…
You’ll no doubt recognise that some of those beliefs are not helpful.
Here are some options to turn those limiting beliefs into something more helpful.
Validating
It's essential to validate what you’ve written down.
Just because you think it and wrote it doesn’t make it true.
Look for evidence that contradicts what you’ve written.
It could be something recent, or it could be something from your past.
Seek feedback from other people.
Do they see things the way you do?
Or do they have a different perspective on things?
This is important; many of us are our own worst critics, and we are often far too harsh on ourselves.
If you can find evidence to contradict what you’ve written down, scribble it out and don’t accept it.
Reframing
Reframing is simply exploring different perspectives of something and choosing a perspective that is more helpful to you.
For example:
Given the belief: “I often leave things unfinished.”…
Believing this will hold you back from starting new projects because you ‘know’ you’ll probably never finish them.
You could reframe this: “I am always experimenting and learning”…
Suddenly, everything you never finished can be seen as experiments and learning.
You won’t hesitate to start a new project since you love experimenting and learning.
The reality of the situation hasn’t changed.
Your perspective has and will be so much more helpful to you.
Your Wellbeing Processor
Your wellbeing processor takes thoughts as input and produces an experience in the form of feelings, actions, and results.
Most of those thoughts come from your subconscious mind or AI assistant.
Few come from your conscious mind.
This is why it’s so important to train your AI to supply positive and helpful thoughts.
When you understand the importance of your Wellbeing Processor, you’ll recognise the extra influence you now have over your feelings, actions and results.
This leads us to an important realisation:
YOU are NOT your thoughts…
That’s right; you’re not your thoughts.
The best way to think of this is that you are the observer of thoughts served up by your AI.
It’s made millions of connections between different subjects and concepts and throws thoughts your way that it thinks you want… based on previously supplied data.
However, you are still in control.
You can:
👉 Look at them
👉 You can question them
👉 You can give them your full attention and believe them
👉 Or, you can treat them with distrust and ignore them entirely…
More importantly, you can inject your own thoughts into your Wellbeing Processor and observe how they impact your feelings, actions and results.
With a little trial and error, you’ll soon see how powerful being more purposeful about your thinking can be and how much more in control you feel.
Thought Recursion
We've talked about unhelpful thought recursion and how it leads to catastrophising and the feelings associated with those catastrophies.
But Thought Recursion can also be helpful and, over time, lead to much more positive and constructive results.
The key is to spot unhelpful Thought Recursion as early as possible, interrupt it and inject conscious thoughts that will send you towards helpful Thought Recursion.
We can use reframing for this.
Reframing
Step one:
STOP - Halt your unhelpful Thought Recursion by yelling STOP! in your head.
This is an interrupt; it interrupts your flow of thinking and creates space.
Think of it as a short call to Thread.Sleep();
Step two:
BREATHE - Now that you’ve interrupted those unhelpful thoughts, take a deep breath and give it all of your focus.
This will start to reverse things such as shallow breathing and sweating.
Step three:
REFRAME - Now, ask yourself, “How can I think about this more constructively?”
How can I think about this more constructively?
Look back at the Wellbeing Processor and decide whether there is a more helpful perspective you can take.
How might someone more compassionate, empathetic, confident or successful think about this?
By answering this simple question, you will inject those thoughts into your Wellbeing Processor and provide your AI with quality training data with every repetition…
High-Level > Low-Level
We’ve covered a lot of low-level detail here.
Here are a few examples of how some common high-level advice maps to the low-level details we’ve discussed.
High-Level
Speak to a manager, colleague, friend, family member or coach for support.
Low-Level
Improving your habit of surrounding yourself with positive people rather than negative ones.
You can use other people’s perspectives to validate or reframe your unhelpful thoughts or beliefs, training your AI with alternative perspectives.
High-Level
Acknowledge your hard work and achievements by creating an achievement or positivity log, and give yourself credit for what you’ve done to get here.
Low-Level
Documenting your achievements and giving yourself credit acknowledges your success and provides evidence to counteract thoughts of "I'm not good enough," training your AI with proof of your competence.
High-Level
Be kind to yourself, and stop trying to be perfect.
Low-Level
Change the voice in your head that puts you down when things don’t go your way.
Create more positive and constructive self-talk, training your AI on what you want it to produce more of.
High-Level
Seek feedback
Low-Level
Validate or question your own thoughts and beliefs with different perspectives - training your AI with alternative perspectives.
High-Level
Build self-awareness.
Low-Level
Recognise people, situations, events, thoughts, self-talk and beliefs that trigger you.
This helps to validate or reframe them and spot unhelpful Thought Recursion as early as possible.
Rich’s Recommendations
Check out my recommendations to improve your wellbeing, mindset, leadership or tech skills:
👍 Jade Wilson - Senior Sofware Engineer at Microsoft.
Newsletter: Tech Unfiltered
👍 Ryan Murphy’s weekly newsletter, The Software Engineering Times, is simply a place to help you grow and learn as a Software Engineer.
Newsletter: The Software Engineering Times
👍 NK’s weekly newsletter to learn system design:
Newsletter: System Design Newsletter
👍 Dev Leader’s weekly newsletter to help you level up as a software engineer!
From a Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft.
Newsletter: Dev Leader Weekly
👍 Mayank Ahuja - Subscribe for Software Development Insights (under the hood).
Newsletter: The Curious Mak : A Developer's Perspective
Conclusion
I’m sure you’ll agree this isn’t your typical “How to Beat Imposter Syndrome” article.
I wanted to give you the low-level details so you can understand why the high-level advice is essential and how it can ultimately help you.
What I’ve discussed here is powerful because it can be used in any situation, not just to beat imposter syndrome.
There's not much in this world that you can control, but you have much more control over your thoughts than you realise, directly or indirectly.
I'll leave you with a quote that sums things up pretty well...
People who don’t feel like impostors are no more intelligent or capable or talented or qualified than those who do.
The only difference between them and us is that in the exact situation that triggers an impostor response in us… they are thinking different thoughts.
That’s it.
VALERIE YOUNG - co-founder of Impostor Syndrome Institute.
Remember
There's nothing more important than your own wellbeing!