Awareness and imposter syndrome

Today I have attended the first Dell STEM Aspire event of the year hosted by Dell Tech on awareness. It is very important to understand its main role both in our personal and professional development. 

I particularly appreciated Jessica Coxall’s insight into the imposter syndrome, which is something I believe affects many of us without being aware of it.

It is the feeling of unworthiness of our position, task or accomplishment and that our success is only due to luck or circumstances. The individual hence doubts their skills and talents and develops a fear of being tagged as a “fraud”. This leads to the shifting of our personal limitations from high standards to perfection, which is by definition something impossible to achieve.

Jessica has explained many ways in which we can ease this sense of inadequacy and fear, for example by learning to balance positive and negative feedback instead of focusing only on the latter. This can help us in acknowledging our efforts and achievements instead of being unnecessarily modest - it may become harmful in the long term! Understanding that our success is due to hard work, effort, dedication and good decisions is very important.

When looking at others, we often mistake arrogance with experience and confidence with knowledge, but the truth is that people are often too incompetent to even realise their lack of experience. We should get into the habit of evaluating ourselves against the Dunning-Kruger curve and understand whether our lack of knowledge and experience is real of it is just a matter of time before we can actually see the results.

We must be aware of our potential and always keep in mind that building skills and experience takes time and effort.