Obliterate Imposter ‘Syndrome’
The Daily Dave episode above is only about two and a half minutes long but if you are unable to read it, I’ve summarized below.
Here’s one way to start tearing down the walls behind this buzzword psychobabble we can’t avoid hearing about with imposter, “syndrome.”
Step 1: Smash the language
It cannot be a syndrome if every person in the world has it or is capable of having it. That's just called life. It ain't a syndrome. It's a part of life.
Step 2: Replace with the wisdom of the “Rookie Experience”
What is also a part of life for 99% of us is a rookie experience. At one point or another, we have either made it past tryouts, or interviews, or we have been invited onto the team. So we're allowed and we are entitled to be in the room. We also just don't know anything about what's going on in that room, yet. That's a totally normal starting place for any experience. It's called being a rookie.
One of the ways to get out of being a rookie is you get mentorship, you get coaching; you make friends, you find your place, you work really hard in the off-hours to improve yourself. You create and seek out resources and eventually you're not a rookie anymore. You're a pro, you're a player, you're a captain, you're a veteran. That takes time and it’s time well-spent rather than spinning around the anxiety of fearing you’re an imposter.
What I really like about this rookie experience philosophy is that it takes the sense of a lack of control that we might feel we have about impostor syndrome and it just totally obliterates that. And it says, no, I'm at the normal part of any person's journey into something new, something foreign, something different, and I can gather resources to improve my station, improve my position.
There's another layer to it, I suppose, which is if you have gotten to a place where you feel savvy, and then something knocks you off kilter and you lose confidence, and then you have waves of what may be considered impostor syndrome, you could draw back to this notion of the rookie experience and go, well, maybe what I am experiencing is the newness of this kind of discomfort, this kind of unknowing uncertainty being out of the loop. Okay, so I'm new to this experience as well. That’s life.
And the cycle of newness - which is in fact evidence of your growth - continues.
Know and Go.
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