My experience of Imposter Syndrome — from Gizmo to Gremlin.

Don’t know what you’re doing? No idea why people ask for your input? Waiting to be exposed as the fraud that you are? Your little Mogwai has soaked in the rain of negative thoughts and munched all those tasty little doubts for his midnight snack! Like me, you’ve got yourself an Imposter Syndrome Gremlin!

This isn’t an official diagnosis, but generally Imposter Syndrome is described as a psychological phenomenon characterised as self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments often among high-achieving individuals.

Those with Imposter Syndrome will often attribute their accomplishments to luck, good timing, the efforts of others, or an extra effort they couldn’t possibly expend again. Around 70% of adults are likely to experience this at some time. According to a video I watched recently about overcoming Imposter Syndrome, even Albert Einstein and Bill Gates have been affected!

So why the blog post? The purpose of this blog is to expose my gremlin to the sunlight — to talk openly about something that I know lots of other people experience, remind us we’re not alone and hopefully help some others kick their gremlins out too.

Recently I had the biggest attack of Imposter Syndrome I’ve ever had. This time the gremlin was loud, overwhelming and I found myself in an exhausting negative cycle of thoughts — reaching a point where I didn’t know how to do my job, because I didn’t know what I was doing or why I was even here. I struggled for weeks to get my head back in the game and I felt I was failing. The gremlin was telling me I no longer had Imposter Syndrome, now I genuinely couldn’t do my job. I had to put a stop to this and get myself out of this pit! I started to look online at Imposter Syndrome, and find suggestions for ways to overcome it.

This time around, the most helpful thing I’ve done to exorcise the imposterism, is to sit down and draw out a timeline of my career, highlight all my achievements, areas where I overcame challenges and then just take stock of what awesome stuff I’ve done. Including just getting up and carrying on when it’s felt almost impossible.

Being able to sit and look at this has reminded me that I do know what I’m doing, and I’ve earned (and continue to earn) my place.

As well as that, I’ve also looked for patterns and taken stock of what it is I need from my job to help keep Gizmo happy and quiet in his box. Armed with this information and a brilliant manager, I’ve been able to have some frank conversations and put in place a plan and tools that help me feel confident and good about my job again.

I know I’ll never be totally rid of the Mogwai, but by recognizing how to keep it happy I can hopefully avoid another extreme Gremlin attack.

So, don’t know what you’re doing? No idea why people ask for your input? Waiting to be exposed as the fraud that you are? That gremlin is talking trash and you shouldn’t listen to it. If you need some help to shut it up, maybe give the above things a go, and don’t for a second think you don’t have any achievements! Grab someone you can be honest with and talk it out, you’ll be amazed at the things people find impressive that you think are no big deal.

If you’d like to do some further reading, a google search will come up with a lot of articles. Here are some I read through that helped me, and I’ve used some of their info in my blog:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK585058/#:~:text=Imposter%20syndrome%20(IS)%20is%20a,accomplishments%20among%20high%2Dachieving%20individuals.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/basics/imposter-syndrome

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-identify-your-gremlins-yes-we-all-know-you-have-them-neel-bhatia/