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.