Thanks so much for writing this! It’s really good to hear from other members of the community who have struggled with this. It sounds like there are a lot of shared elements, and I think talking about it openly makes it easier for other people to do so. It’s certainly been easier for me to bring up my imposter syndrome now that it’s widely understood to be a problem in the community and bringing it up helps with recovering from it.
Some things I find are helping in my case:
- Getting a lot of feedback. I find that my doubts flourish and grow in “the gaps” when I don’t have much feedback. I sort of automatically convince myself that my work is terrible unless there is good positive evidence that it isn’t, to reducing the situations where this can happen has been very valuable. This includes what you said about being more open with things like first drafts and the amount of time I spend on tasks. It’s difficult because you reflexively want to avoid doing this when you have imposter syndrome because you don’t want to be “found out”. So imposter syndrome blocks off its own solution.
– Paying special attention to positive feedback to increase its salience and make it more difficult to rationalize away.
Thanks so much for writing this! It’s really good to hear from other members of the community who have struggled with this. It sounds like there are a lot of shared elements, and I think talking about it openly makes it easier for other people to do so. It’s certainly been easier for me to bring up my imposter syndrome now that it’s widely understood to be a problem in the community and bringing it up helps with recovering from it.
Some things I find are helping in my case:
- Getting a lot of feedback. I find that my doubts flourish and grow in “the gaps” when I don’t have much feedback. I sort of automatically convince myself that my work is terrible unless there is good positive evidence that it isn’t, to reducing the situations where this can happen has been very valuable. This includes what you said about being more open with things like first drafts and the amount of time I spend on tasks. It’s difficult because you reflexively want to avoid doing this when you have imposter syndrome because you don’t want to be “found out”. So imposter syndrome blocks off its own solution.
– Paying special attention to positive feedback to increase its salience and make it more difficult to rationalize away.
– Psychotherapy for guidance during this process.