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This is Five-Minute Friday on Managing Imposter Syndrome.
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Two weeks ago, in Episode 498, I detailed a tendency I’ve noticed in myself as well as in many early-career data scientists to feel very confident — perhaps excessively confident — as a beginner. We may even tend to feel that we know everything about some challenging field, only to discover when we later develop a bit of expertise that there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we do know.
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At the end of that episode, I mentioned that many folks at any stage of their career feel the opposite: Many people feel like an imposter even though they are in fact well-suited to the challenges — say, the data science challenges — they’re being presented. This situation, called Imposter Syndrome, is the focus of today’s episode.
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Imposter Syndrome is a sense of feeling overwhelmed and not sure what you’re doing — or a feeling like you don’t deserve to be somewhere, say at a job that you already have or on an educational program that you were already accepted onto.
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People suffering from Imposter Syndrome often fear being exposed as a fraud. Despite objective proof of success, they dismiss accomplishments and override them with negative self-talk. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this negative self-talk can make decision-making difficult and the condition in general features persistent unpleasant anxious feelings.
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Some well-known personalities who have disclosed experiencing Imposter Syndrome include former American first lady Michele Obama, Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
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Ok, so Imposter Syndrome is common but it’s also pretty unhelpful. How can one manage it? Well, three ways are reframing the narrative, being authentic, and faking it for now. Let’s go over these in turn.
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So first, we’ll start with reframing the narrative. With this management technique, you try to reframe the anxious feelings and negative self-talk. You say to yourself that these feelings you’re experiencing are normal in the course of leveling up your skill set or rising to a new challenge. The point with this one is not to diminish the reality of the situation but to manage it by viewing negative thoughts from a more positive vantage point.
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Second is to be authentic. With this one, we try to distance ourselves from the common thought pattern that we “should” be some kind of professional or “should” do something. We try to turn the “should” into a “could” or “want”. So instead of, I should be this way, we change the word to I could be this way or I want to be this way, thereby making whatever you are doing or however you can perceive yourself in your career as a choice instead of something we feel guilty or shameful about. A big thing that can help here is gaining clarity on what’s important to you so that you’re behaving in a way that is attaining what’s best for you as opposed to primarily reflecting others’ expectations of you.
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Third is to fake it for now. Remind yourself that everyone is making up what they’re doing as they go along. Eventually, by repeating some task or some level of responsibility enough times, it can, it often does become easier to embody the task or the responsibility more fully.
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In addition, two things you can do immediately to begin tackling imposter syndrome are writing down a highlight reel of successes you’ve had and asking friends or coworkers for clarity on your strengths.
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Thanks to Nikolay Kurbatov, an A.I. product manager and data scientist from Moscow, for the idea to have an episode on Imposter Syndrome. And thanks to my partner, Micayla Ryan, the chief of staff at a fintech start-up called Novo, for doing most of my homework for this episode’s content!
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All right, hope you learned something from this one. To all you good folks out there, keep on rockin’ it and catch you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon.
