What strategies can help students overcome imposter syndrome and self-doubt?

It doesn’t matter how small is the achievement, celebrate! Take notes about the steps you took to get there so you’ll see how much effort you put into the task/project. This will validate your work.

One of the pillars of a healthy level of self-esteem is the belief in your ability to endure life's challenges. While reflecting on and highlighting your achievements is central to building your confidence, one of the first steps towards a true sense of self-esteem is to learn self-acceptance. Learning to accept who we are and where we are in life at this moment, while difficult, is key to learning how to build one's self-esteem. Only when we can fully accept who we are and where we are in this moment, can we make those changes necessary to take us where we want to go.

Often, our negative thoughts about ourselves come from somewhere beyond our head or immediate experience. Curate your media intake to include both people you identify with and nuanced perspectives. Reading autobiographies is a great way to learn to calculate the type of ratio of attempts to successes you can anticipate as you strive towards your goals.

Learning to do cognitive behavioural therapy exercises is transformational when reshaping thought patterns and creating new and improved thinking patterns. Many self-help books written by psychologists and psychiatrists show you how to do your own CBT exercises with a journal or worksheet. 'Feeling Great', by Dr. David Burns is a good start. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is the gold standard when it comes to alleviating symptoms of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and even OCD, with some studies even suggesting that CBT can put sufferers of mild to moderate depression into full remission.

Studies suggest that one of the main determining factors in health and longevity is the extent to which one has a network of social support. When it comes to imposter syndrome, a healthy support network is advantageous, because much of the time, the thoughts and feelings associated with imposter syndrome can be easily challenged and refuted by external perspectives from other people.

Imposter syndrome is something that we all go through from time to time. When helping students build a sense of self-efficacy, it’s always best, as teachers, to adopt an asset-based approach to teaching students. In other words, highlight the strengths that students possess as learners and frame their challenges as opportunities for growth. Deficit-based mindsets and fixed mindsets don’t serve students well because they only perpetuate the imposter syndrome and self-doubt that students already feel internally. Sometimes, letting students know that we also make mistakes as teachers reinforces the idea that we’re all human and that mistakes are an essential part of the learning process that we all need to embrace.