Auteur: Linda

This blog is part three of three about impostor syndrome. Together these three blogs contain all the information I touch upon in my talk ‘I’m not the impostor, it’s all in my head!’, which I’ve given on various conferences as a track talk or as keynote.

Dunning-Kruger
Something I’d love to highlight in relation to impostor syndrome is the Dunning Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.

Hierarchy of competence
The Hierarchy of Competence model comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

This model is wrongfully credited to Maslow, it actually does not exist in his models. This will not be the last time I’m debunking myths in this blog!
The Dunning-Kruger effect exhibits behavior from the ‘Concious Incompetence’ layer of the hierarchy of competence: Wrong analysis. The problem here is the unconcious part, where with the Dunning-Kruger effect, the person exhibiting the behavior is fully unaware of their cognitive bias. Imagine listening to someone say something that, to you, is clearly wrong. Are you sure enough to stick to what you understand? Will you not doubt or consider their point of view? What if they’re right? It’s completely normal to think about what they are saying and perhaps to change your mind about something, or adapt your reasoning. The problem here is that you might be changing it into something that was wrong to begin with. Which in the end will make you more unsure about yourself. Talk about a catch 22.

IQ
I’ve never been good at school. For as long as I can remember, school was difficult. It was boring, it was difficult to stick to. It was a struggle, not very interesting, it lacked goal. From a very young age, I’ve been told (not in those exact words) that was stupid. I was forever missing information that was being shared in the classroom by the teacher. I don’t remember much about lessons, I do remember knowing in great detail what happened outside the school. There was a row of houses, and year after year I learned who cleaned their windows when, what time the mailman usually did his route. 
All through school I did just enough to able to get to the next year or to achieve the goal I set for myself. Not a step more, I didn’t really see the point, I’d much rather do things that I got joy from. In the Netherlands it’s mandatory to follow an education until the school year you turn 18. When I left middle school (that’s when most people will be near 18) I was only 16. At the time I thought about becoming a primary school teacher, so I went on to the ‘PABO’ where you could study to be one. My initial thought was: I’ll finish this, and then I’ll figure out if this is actually what I want to be. By the time year two started (this is the year I *finally* turned 18) the nightmares started. Nightmares that were filled with being locked up in a classroom with kids. To be honest, that’s not a great way to start an otherwise (to me) boring career, because there is little career advancement possible in teaching. So the second I was legally allowed to, I quit school and started working. At that point I was stil hoping to quickly discover what other study would be more my ballpark. Spoiler: still haven’t found it!
Then I turned 19. And two weeks of severe headaches, a bunch of different medications, very very many painkillers, and finally also the loss of motor functions and speech, the resulting diagnosis turned out to be ‘cerebral sinus thrombosis’. A bunch of blood cloths in the layer of blood vessels around my brain, making it difficult for the blood fuelling that layer, to actually leave my head. After this I was admitted to a specialty hospital and I spent the next 11 days there. The first few days were scary, it was unknown how I would come out of it, given the fact that I’d lost motor skill and speech. So when the time came to test how my ‘abilities’ had survived prior to my discharge, I was scared. I was afraid I’d lost whatever intelligence I had to begin with. My brain had a rough two weeks! The cognitive tests were all maxed out, and the result was: I am gifted. Three small words that put my life upside down, honestly. To that point I was convinced this brain of mine was nothing much. So yes, I am different, and I think different. But not because of being stupid. 
When you find out you think different from other people, the reason because is the least interesting part of it. Be happy you think different, you’ll be able to find creative solutions for things that others will not. Embrace it! 
Are we lost? No. In each of my blogs I will highlight different tips that have helped me greatly.

Prove yourself wrong
In all those years I thought I was stupid, I was never able to convince myself I wasn’t. Nothing in what I did proved me wrong, and that’s a missed opportunity! If you have a certain opinion about, well anything really, try proving yourself wrong! There’s nothing wrong in finding out you were right all along, and when you did prove yourself wrong, you’ve learned something!

Allow yourself to fail (better)
Are you allowing yourself to fail? When you fail, what happens? Well, you should learn! And you should try to fail as often as possible, to get really good learning from it. Do try to fail at different things. Repeatedly failing at the same thing is not really learning, that’s chastising yourself.

10k hours
To get exceptionally good at something, you need to put in the hours. Phyllis Lane wrote a book about this, it’s called ‘10000 hours you become what you practice’. In the book she outsets why you need to put in the hours, in the correct way. She later describes how family, culture and friendship are all critical in an individual success. Being successful is more than simply attaining those 10000 hours of practice. 
If I look at my personal saxophone practice. Only 10 minute of any practice session is dedicated to honing skills or learning new techniques. The rest of the (usually) 30 minutes is playing what I like to play. I need the 20 minutes of ‘unguided practice’ that will not help me progress, to be able to put in the 10 minutes of ‘correct practice’. It’s not going to help to beat yourself up about your practice if you don’t find the fun, and in the end the sustainable pace.

Flaws
Only you see all your own flaws up close and personal, all the time. Almost no-one looks at you as close as you might stare at yourself in the mirror. I recall a conversation with a friend about my pores. I confided in her that I’m really unsure about my huge pores on my face. She’d never seen them. We’ve known each other for over 20 years. Something you consider a flaw or something shameful, is likely to be something only you are seeing. Be nice to yourself!

Thank you for reading part three of three of my impostor topic. I’d like to hear what your thoughts are, or answer any questions you might have. You can leave a comment, or find me on one of the socials: Discord, LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok.

This blog is part two of three, about impostor syndrome. Together these three blogs contain all the information I touch upon in my presentation, which I’ve given on various conferences as a track talk or as keynote.

What is a limiting belief?
It’s a judgement about yourself that you think to be true and that restricts you in some way. If you think you’re going to be bad at public speaking, you’re likely to pass at a change to give a big presentation or speak at a conference. You might even withhold your opinion in a meeting. Limiting beliefs can keep you in a negative state of mind. Everyone experiences limiting thoughts at some point in their life. This includes thoughts like: I’m not good enough, I’m too old (or young), I don’t have enough time, I’m not smart enough. And many more. This has many repercussions.

Let me take you into your brain
Your brain is a complex organ that controls many process needed that regulate your body. It doesn’t always do these things logically, why is that? The brain goal is not much more than keep us alive. That’s a bit of a depressing thought, nevertheless, it’s true. The main function of your brain is to tell you if what is hiding in that bush over there is going to kill you. So when it identifies actual danger, that will result in you feeling fear, that will result in you making the decision: will it kill me or can I kill it? In our normal life, we don’t see as much danger that could quickly kill us. Our brain still functions in the same way, rendering it quite ineffective. In a way, evolution is not going quick enough.

You can quite easily influence your brain into making you feel something else. When you’re having an off day or if you’re just feeling a bit ‘meh’, it helps to smile. By smiling you’re signalling to your brain: I am happy. Your brain assumes this is correct and makes you feel happy.
When you identify something with your senses, your brain then looks into this huge library of possible responses. It chooses the correct response (or so it thinks), and then starts exhibiting this behaviour. Smiling when you’re unhappy is like saying: ‘look at a different book please, brain.’ This way we can trick our brain!

Something things you cannot resolve by ‘smiling’, I need to highlight mental illness, neurodiverse brains and hormones.
Being depressed is a mental illness that many people suffer from. This illness cannot be resolved or changed by smiling. No mental illness can be resolved by fooling your brain by smiling. When you’re suffering from a mental illness, please seek professional medical help. Don’t randomly smile and expect to feel better.
Neurodiverse brains are ‘wired differently’ than neurotypical brains. It also means that they are much more susceptible for impostor syndrome. Neurodiverse people are often seen masking. They try to exhibit the behaviour they think is right in that place and time, to achieve their goals or task. This is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’s their way of desperately trying to fit into a world that does not match them.
And everyone that deals with a menstrual cycle, and the logistics that you have to deal with when you have a uterus. On a (somewhat) monthly basis a host of difficulties that limits being able to function happens. In the book ‘Period Power’ by Maisie Hill, she recognises four seasons in a cycle. Spring, summer, autumn and winter. Every season means a rise or dip in various hormones. Imagine those seasons take one week. Everytime you’re used to something, it changes. And this is only the interior. On your exterior people might also be responding to your behaviour (or changes in it). By the end of the month, you’ve gone through such a huge host of feelings that you might feel like an impostor just trying to get through life and making sense of things.
So, does that make our brain the impostor?
Are we lost? No. In each of my blogs I will highlight different tips that have helped me greatly.

Pippi Longstocking
Everyone knows Pippi Longstocking. The girl who lives with her horse, two red braids standing out on each side of her head. The girl who’s famous for the phrase: ‘I’ve never done it so I think I can do it’. So the phrase is from Pippi (or her author, Astrid Lindgren), right? Well, wrong. Pippi never actually said those words. There was a scene where she is going to buy a piano. Tommy then asks her: ‘Do you know how to play the piano?’, where she honestly answers: ‘I don’t know because I’ve never done it.’. Somehow, somewhere, someone put the wrong quote to Pippi, and it stuck. The quote is a very good one though. Often we let ourselves be controlled by fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of what might or could be. But if you don’t yet know, why are you experiencing fear from it? You don’t yet know how it’ll go so there is no need to be afraid. Dissect your fear, find out what’s behind it. Maybe you’re afraid of that when you write the blog you make a typo. What happens when you do? Exactly, not much.

Dress for the job you want
This tip is quite old, and it used to have a different meaning. Back when it was still very important to wear a suit to work, you could actually advance in your career if you started wearing a suit preemptively to show that you were made of ‘good stuff’, to stand out. Today, if you always go to work in a suit you might get laughed at a little. You certainly will not be looked at as if you are made of ‘sterner stuff’. So why am I giving this tip? How you look and feel can influence your impostor syndrome.

Positively and negatively. When I have to do a meeting that I’m apprehensive about, I tend to wear red colours. Somehow for me, I find that it gives me strength. It makes me feel more self assured, and that helps battle my impostor syndrome (like: who the hell do I think I am pretending to be in this meeting). You can experiment and develop habits via your clothing that support you.

Most people just wing it
Those people that always seem to have everything in order, they never forget their keys. Everything they do seems to work. They stand in front of a group and easily explain exactly what they meant. Let me share a little secret with you: they probably were just winging it. Most people just wing it. And then it works, and they’re happy. They didn’t think about it too much. They didn’t over think as people with impostor syndrome might do with everything. What we, the over thinkers, the over preparers, and the overly nervous can learn from that: we can sometimes just see what happens. Maybe not for the big scary meeting that your promotion is dependent on (please prepare it, and get help preparing that, you don’t have to do it alone!). But for smaller stuff, you can totally sometimes not be prepared.

Thank you for reading part two of three of my impostor topic. For more tips and more information about the topic, please look out for part one and three.

This blog is part one of three, about impostor syndrome. Together these three blogs contain all the information I touch upon in my talk, which I’ve given on various conferences as a track talk or as keynote.

There’s different ways I could introduce myself to you.
Let’s start with what I tell my friends: They let me break software and I get paid for it!
What I tell my family: Please don’t give me your computer, I will break it, not fix it.
What I tell the people I work with: I am an experienced test manager and coach. Quality coach, agile coach, leadership coach.
Next to identifying as a tester, I am also an amateur saxophonist, I play in two amateur orchestras and have played in several bands. You could find me on Spotify, if you know what to search for 😉

My origin story
When I was 22, one of my friends told me it would be a good idea for me to start playing saxophone. As random as this sounds here, now, written. It felt equally random to me back then. My friend had just switched from playing the bugle to playing the alto saxophone, and she was absolutely in love with her new instrument. She invited me to her house to try it. It was.. just okay. Nothing sparked, it was just okay. She looked at me with her brow furrowed and said: ‘You know what? I have quartet rehearsal on Tuesday. The baritone is there, come listen to us, have a look at it!’. I had no idea what ‘the baritone’ was, other than that it probably was bigger?
I arrived at the practice space, and met the people who were going to be practicing their quartet. They were drinking coffee at the bar area, and were catching up with each other. My eyes darted around the room. Where is this baritone? One of them saw me search for it and said: ‘Shall I open the case for you?’. We walked towards a huge case in the corner. He clasped open the lid and opened it. There it was. It felt as if a light in me switched on. A smile crept across my face, and all I could do was beam and grin at this MAGNIFICENT and SHINY instrument. So this was ‘the baritone’. Honestly, me and this baritone saxophone, it was love at first sight. They helped me play my first note, and I’ve not stopped since.
Starting at 22 years old, without any experience or knowledge of music, meant that I needed to learn how to read music, and I needed to learn how to actually use the saxophone. And then when I had somewhat of an idea how to do that, I needed to learn how an orchestra works. Today I still feel like I ‘pretend’ to know what to do half the time.
The actual time it took me to go from zero to first-time-in-the-orchestra and doing good enough to participate in a concert was four months. Usually this takes a few years.
Being part of a society (as many amateur orchestras are), means you need to do volunteer work. In our case that meant there were the ‘Tuesday rehearsals bar shifts’. Another orchestra practiced in our rehearsalspace, and we did bar shifts. One Tuesday night I was doing the barshift with Joris. When the other orchestra was practicing we had time to chat a bit. He asked me what my job was. I was working with SAP at the time, as an end user. My job was to input hours into the system, but in reality I did a lot of the project administration with/for some projectmanagers that weren’t very SAP-handy. This meant I needed to work around a few bugs in the system. You could work around them if you knew what you were doing. He told me: ‘If you found those bugs and can work around them, you could probably become a tester!’. He then proceeded to tell me that he was a software tester. Everything he said sounded like it was a really fun job! He put in a good word for me (also containing the fact that I had done in four months where others take years) and after four interviews, some tests, and after getting through the training, I was a software tester.

What is impostor syndrome
What actually is impostor syndrome? The term impostor phenomenon was coined by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. They defined the impostor phenomenon as “An internal experience of intellectual phoniness”. They initially focussed their research on women in higher education and professional industries. Later the term evolved into ‘impostor syndrome’, along with the knowledge that it does not (only) affect women in higher education or professional industries. We currently describe it in the following way: “The persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills.” So, despite having actual evidence that someone is not an impostor, people still feel like one. How can that be?
Are we lost? No. In each of my blogs I will highlight different tips that have helped me greatly.

Your internal criticaster
That little voice inside of your head that is always telling you everything that you’re bad at. For different people this voice might show up in different ways. This has to do with how your brain works. Some people hear an actual voice, for others it’s a thought that grabs attention. Your internal criticaster is mean, very mean. It knows exactly what to say to make you doubt yourself.
Let me cut to the bad news: you cannot silence the voice. It’s going to be there forever and you don’t have much influence in what it says. Ignoring it doesn’t help.

What you can do though, is get to know the voice. Learn to distinguish when it’s talking and what it’s trying to do. The voice probably is trying to keep you from doing something. Something scary perhaps? One of the things I can strongly recommend doing is giving the voice a name, a metaphor if you like. That way you can address it when you’re listening to what they’re saying and if it has any logic or reason. I’ve named mine ‘Hannibal Lecter’. My internal criticaster says very nasty things to me, in a soft voice, with a slight smile on his lips, and an evil glint in his eyes. Having given him a name, I regularly find myself thinking: “Yes Hannibal, I’ve heard you. Thank you for sharing, I’m not going to follow up on your critics.” Strangely, that really helps put the voice back in its place, and to the background.

Get good feedback
You have probably at some point in your life been sent to a communications training or seminar, where you were thought how you should give feedback. Maybe with the sandwich method “good news, bad news, good news”. Or with the A, B, C method. A: I see, B: that makes me feel: C: how about you. This tip is not about how to give feedback. This is about who you ask for feedback. A topic that is often skipped in those trainings.
An example. I was contemplating switching jobs. I knew exactly what I was dealing with at the old place. I knew my career was stagnant, but I knew my colleagues all very well. It was comfortable to stay. I asked my parents for feedback. They are from the generation where you stayed with the employer for as long as you could. That was normal for them. Just keep your head down and work very hard. They said staying is safest. Who knows what the new place would bring? They wanted me to do well, they love me so logically, they said ‘Stay where you are, this is okay’. Their advice was loving advice, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. So I asked another test manager I was working with at the time. He gave me career specific advice, and basically said: stay there and this is it. Move, and you get growth. He was right. Both advices were right. But my parents came from love, and the other test manager gave me some ‘bad news’ I really needed to hear. Stay there and you stop. When you want to get feedback, think about who you ask and why you’re asking it.

Comfort zone
We all know the image of the square with the x outside it, with the text ‘this is where the magic happens’. While it’s true that magic often happens outside your comfortzone, I don’t think it’s as binary as that.
I like to look at the comfort zone as a rainbow with different layers and colours. When you’re not yet used to being or acting out of your comfort zone, going entirely outside it might be too big of a step.

So instead of going outside it, why not just try to move along the boundary, maybe across just the first colour of the rainbow? It doesn’t have to be threatening or scary to try things outside of your comfort zone if you can allow yourself to do it one small step at the time, at your pace. The image is right though. Magic is outside the comfort zone. And once you get acquainted with feeling uncomfortable, you’ll find that at times you might even quite easily step outside of your comfort zone. And other times it’s just your little toe across the first colour of the rainbow.

Thank you for reading part one of three of my impostor topic. For more tips and more information about the topic, please look out for part two and three.