Am I suffering from Impostor Syndrome?

Imposter Syndrome (IS) is something that seems to be increasingly prevalent in Millenials and generations after that. If you’ve never heard of Imposter Syndrome, which you’d have to be living under a rock not to, I’ll give you a little rundown of what it is.

Imposter Syndrome is a pattern of behaviors where people doubt their accomplishments and have a persistent and internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.

Some tell-tale signs of IS are: self-doubt, berating your own performance, sabotaging your own success, feeling disappointed when you fall short of challenging goals that you’ve set for yourself and being terrified that you won’t live up to your own performance. I don’t know about you guys but I’ve never related to anything more in my life. Any achievement I’ve had I’ve felt like this was a wild stroke of luck.

IS can fuel spurts of insane motivation which is contrasted by constant anxiety about the situation that you’re in. You may find yourself going harder than you really need to prepare yourself because you think you’re going to be “found out” as a phony. This puts so much unnecessary stress on you.

The biggest issue with IS is that no matter how well you do on something, it won’t change the way that you feel about yourself. You still feel like you don’t have the right to be where you are.

I’m sure you’re wondering “well how the hell do I get rid of this feeling?”

Well, I’m sure the hell going to let you know.

Speak up about the way you feel. There’s a lot of shame associated with the feelings that come with Imposter Syndrome. Shame that is really misplaced in the first place.

Create a new response to making mistakes and be kind to yourself if you do fail. I think we all default to feeling like, well, like a fucking loser when we fail at things. It’s natural to want to beat yourself up. But don’t. You can only learn from your mistakes, and as hard as it is for me to do that myself, it’s true. You can always start again with more knowledge and more grace.

Write your own narrative. Whenever you start off in something new, for example, me getting started in the WILD world of entrepreneurship, you will NOT know everything. Hell, you may not know anything. We all start from somewhere, more often than not, you’re starting from zero and building from the ground up.

Fake it til you make it, but not really. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of this yet or not. Because faking it til you make it works sometimes, it’s worked for me once or twice for damn sure. You might look at it as having to fake it because you really don’t have a clue what you’re doing, but I think that being able to come up with something on the fly, is actually a life skill that more people probably wish they possessed. The lesson in all this is, don’t wait until you feel like you’re ready to do something to do it because you may never be as prepared as you’d like to be.

So I guess maybe we all feel like imposters at some point, there’s always going to be a scenario in which we feel like we don’t belong. You move forward from that by coming to terms with the fact that you aren’t where you are for no reason, it wasn’t some insane stroke of luck, it wasn’t someone being blinded by your intoxicating charms, it was you busting your ass to get there. That’s the tea on that.

Love, peace & chicken grease

- Kaitlan