You're No Imposter

Hello! In this post I will be talking about negative self-talk, the imposter syndrome, where it comes from, and how we can talk ourselves out of them using self-empathy. I will use examples that might be somewhat contrived or exaggerated, but my goal is to communicate how we tend to talk to ourselves, and how we can change the way we talk to ourselves.

The Landscape of Programming

The world of software development is vast and ever-growing, expanding quicker than any one person can keep track of. There are more programming languages than there are commonly spoken languages. People who have been in the field for decades know only a fraction of a percent of modern software. It's very intimidating, to say the least.

Ruby on Rails, a single framework, one I've been working with for years, in which I consider myself an expert (except ActiveScaffold 🤢), still confounds me from time to time. And there's so much more I want to learn, but there's so little time!

The Imposter Syndrome: A Product of Pride

We've all felt it at some point or another. That uneasy feeling that you don't think you're quite at the level you need to be, that there's something missing from your knowledge of software development that you must not let show to your colleagues. The fear of being exposed as a fraud. Imposter Syndrome.

It happens at new jobs quite often. We have peers that appear to be endlessly knowledgeable, that can make us feel inadequate. One of the best ways to make yourself miserable is to compare your abilities and accomplishments to others. We do it all the time and it feels bad. We do our best to hide these shortcomings of ours, to make it seem like we aren't worried about it.

Why do we do it? Well, it's our ego, of course! We have an understanding of ourselves and expectations built on those understandings. We find ourselves, perhaps, at a new position. We did so well in the interview, so we must be that smartest and best candidate they ran into. We can't fail! We can't show that there's something that is difficult, or that has escaped our knowledge thus far. We will accomplish all the things, all on our own! We have an image of ourselves to uphold.

As a brief non-software example, I recently joined a running club. I've been running for a bit now and I felt pretty good about my abilities. Thing is, some of these people have been a part of the club for a while now. Some of them even started the thing. Some of them live and breathe to run. I did my best to keep up, and I tried not to show how tired I was (the big sweat stain on my shirt wasn't helping), and I pushed myself very hard to keep up, until eventually I overworked myself and hurt my foot and was out of commission for two straight months. Why do we do these things to ourselves?

Behold, the sin of pride.

We sit in complete silence during that backlog grooming meeting, listening to our new crew talk about the work planned for this new thing-a-ma-jig. We hear the intern talking about a new JavaScript framework (an example I use because I know h*ck-all about JS) with such familiarity, as if they'd done it for years already, and we don't have the confidence to speak up and say "I have no idea what you're talking about."

We fear being vulnerable. We fear speaking on our perceived inadequacies, because we fear further what our peers will think of us. We're dirty little imposters after all, aren't we?

Negative Self-Talk

We have these inherent biases towards our own greatness. We know what we are capable of and we have done many things of this nature in the past. It should be fine.

But what if we fail? We push to production, as we have done many times in the past, and everything seems fine. But then twenty minutes later, one of the software leads sends us a message saying customers are unable to check out, and it seemed to happen just around the time we pushed our last commits in. And then, the self blame and torment come rushing into our minds:

"How didn't I see this coming?!"

"I am so stupid!"

"Why don't I know this already?"

"I'm such a failure."

"Maybe I'm not good enough for this."

Our fear of vulnerability affects how we project ourselves outwardly, and defines (to an extent) how we communicate with ourselves. We subconsciously hold ourselves to our own built-in standards, and when we fail to meet them, we can treat ourselves harshly for it as if our mistakes are inexcusable. We talk ourselves down and make ourselves feel worse.

Of course, it's natural to feel this way when we talk the way we have been trained. We have our values and we make moralistic judgements constantly without even realizing it. Often the word "should" signals these types of judgements; the English language is rife with these subtly forceful words and it's hard to catch them - but I digress.

Self-Empathy

How do we change the way we talk to ourselves? To begin, we must know how we talk to ourselves. Once we know that, we can start to think about the ways we can change.

The first step is to listen. We must recognize when we talk to ourselves with these negative thoughts, and we must listen to the language and tone we use with ourselves. From there we can start to grasp the emotions that lie underneath. It is important that we listen without judgement to the things we are saying -- to simply observe the thoughts and tone. From there we can understand what we are feeling.

This is what I know as "receiving empathetically". Listening to your whole self with no preconceived notion of how things should be, but rather how things are. It is important to keep in mind that we are humans; we have emotions, and needs, and thoughts, and we do things in line with our values. Sometimes we do things that are not in line with our values, and we judge those actions to be mistakes, and we judge ourselves to be less than perfect, but we must not define ourselves by these moralistic judgements.

Did you push to production and bring the entire site down for an hour? You must be angry with yourself for making such a stupid mistake! Or you could understand that it was caused by a missing environment variable that someone else was mostly in charge of. There was little chance you would have caught that anyway. Next time, if we rely on an environment variable to be present, we'll be sure to check for it next time.

Does the intern know a lot more about a JS framework, or infrastructure concepts than you do? You must be an idiot. Or you're a backend app developer. You simply have a different area of expertise, and if you really want to learn more about those other things, then you can go do that, friend.

The Real Imposter

The real imposter is the voice inside your head that tells you that you are not good enough, that you are stupid and you make dumb mistakes. They judge you, they make you feel bad about things you have done. This imposter's name is **shame, a product of negative self-judgement. We must speak to ourselves in a way that does not make us feel shame. We must make is easier to forgive ourselves for the things we consider to be mistakes. Once we can accept these things as part of our humanity, rather than to be ashamed of, we can start to focus on better things.

Being Content With Yourself

I guess what it boils down to is a matter of contentness with yourself - having the courage to accept failure, and expect it to happen on occasion, but not judging yourself for it. You are you, with all of your achievements and failures, your knowledge and lack thereof, your feats of "success", and your massive "mistakes". Life is a journey and we are all taking our own paths. It makes it harder when we hold ourselves back by letting our thoughts bring us down. We need to accept that we are human, and humans are not perfect.

Don't know something that you think you should know already? Ask someone a "stupid" question. It's fine that you didn't know. Thank the person who answers, instead of feeling silly for asking in the first place -- spread the good feelings you're giving yourself.

Go your path at your own pace, and don't beat yourself up when you fall, because above anyone else, you deserve your own compassion, empathy, and love.

Thank you for reading!