Imposter Syndrome

I grew up taking excel, Honors, and AP courses, and excelled in these courses. I was praised for my academic achievements, along with my success in golf and my leadership skills. Then college came around and entered Imposter Syndrome.

Imposter Syndrome is doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. It occurs in high achieveing people, who don't feel like they deserve their achivements.

College brought this out because I would see people staying up late to complete tasks that I had completed in a few hours. I thought to myself, 'ok maybe I didn't put in enough work, I should try harder.' But I would still receive excellent grades on the assignments. That thought that I didn't deserve it never went away though. I never thought anything was good enough, and that I didn't put in enough work, even though I couldn't have possibly done anything more.

To this day, I still feel like a fraud in the things that I do. The job that I do isn't what I studied in college and I know there are people out there who could do it better than me. I see other people my age having successful lives and I think that I'm a fraud, I'm not working hard enough, I should be doing more. This is all the Imposter Syndrome talking.

My writing, this post included, will never feel good enough. I'll always assume that it could have been better, I could have researched something more, could have expanded on a thought, used a different word. Despite these thoughts that I have someone else will read my work and they won't see those mistakes, they will praise it.

Part of getting over Imposter Syndrome is accepting these praises. Building self-confidence and knowing that you did in fact work hard to get to where you are. I know that I have put in the time to improve myself, and that I do in fact know what I'm doing, thats why I'm doing it. Especially when starting something new, I get hit with Imposter Syndrome, but I know that I have the ability to learn new skills, and everyone does. Will I always be perfect at it? No, definitely not. But I can put in the work and be proud of what I have done.

I don't think I'll ever forget when I received a message from my boss saying "Small piece of advice to help with the imposter syndrome. We judge ourselves by what we don't know instead of what we do know." He had meant to send this to a co-worker of ours. While the advice is wonderful and provides true insight on what Imposter Syndrome is like, my main take away was that another one of my co-workers, someone that I looked up to and took a lot of advice from, was also struggling with Imposter Syndrome. Even my boss admitted to having Imposter Syndrome from time to time. I realized at the moment that we all are too hard on ourselves and are judging ourselves based on unrealistic expectations. We think that our peers know all, and so we should know all, but in reality, we are all just trying our best to get along.

Imposter Syndrome affects a lot of people as the idea of excelling and the idea that we are high achievers is instilled in us at a young age. It can detrimentally impact us as adults. Overcoming it requires a strong amount of self-confidence and requires us to believe in our abilities and to accept that we may not be perfect at everything, but that we do in fact deserve the things that we achieve.