Overcoming Imposter Syndrome - Break Free from Self-Doubt
I was sitting with one of my colleagues, and my colleague started sharing his experience. He had joined a new organization, a very good position in the product management space, with a good pay scale and everything. But he was facing imposter syndrome.
The way he highlighted his mental thought process, I thought that he was going through imposter syndrome.
He shared a situation where he was working in his previous organization, and he was too busy firefighting and delivering a product in a wrong way after being overruled by senior stakeholders.
He had this belief that he could have done something to save the business from itself and the product from failure. Despite taking initiatives, he was not able to deliver it, and that’s when the imposter syndrome kicked in. He thought, “I was not able to deliver, I was not able to do it, despite getting a new job, but I could have done it.” That kind of dilemma goes into the mind.
He raised a point with me, whether he needed to go back to his drawing board in this new organization and start learning things, start reading books, start watching videos.
He wondered if what he needed to do that because he was not able to complete and deliver the product, and the product turned out to be a failure.
I told him that when you’re working in an organization, the success of the organization or the success of the product doesn’t solely depend on yourself.
Till the time you’re a freelancer or running your own business, the success of the product and business organization does not solely depend on one person. It’s a team effort. That’s why we say this is an organization.
There are significant examples where products do not succeed due to poor leadership, culture, or a combination of these two.
You won’t be able to save the business from itself most of the time.
It’s not your job because it’s a team effort with team leadership. What you need to take care of is that you work in any organization with true honesty, which is very important.
Some organizations hire you to drive, while some businesses just want you to take orders from the top, and you don’t have a good amount of autonomy to take decisions at your end.
When you’re facing this kind of situation, don’t be too hard on yourself.
Reflect on what you planned to do, what you were not able to do, what were the reasons for it, and then move forward.
Don’t repeat the same kind of mistakes everywhere in any kind of situation in the near future. The reason is that if something doesn’t work out, there might be multiple different reasons.
There might be short-sighted priorities jeopardizing the reputation of the product or something. You need to reflect back on the time you spent and derive some learnings out of it.
Don’t underestimate the learnings you’ve gone through by going through a wrong path. Deep dive into it, retrospectively analyze your experience at work, and understand what you can control and what you cannot control in the new organization.
Be the hardest working guy, good at collaboration, and have a team effort. Have empathy for the team members. These are the things that are very rarely found in organizations.
If you’re able to learn from your mistakes and have these qualities, I think these are the signs of improvement and self-correction after mistakes. If you think that you’re qualified and capable of doing the job, then you don’t face this imposter syndrome. And if you think that you’re not qualified and capable, maybe you’re not. That is also not an imposter syndrome too.
I want to highlight only two things.
In our life, in our organization, we’re always learning all the time. Nobody is perfect. Nobody knows each and everything.
People respect you more when you’re open enough, you’re not afraid to show them that you don’t know everything. Everyone is insecure to a degree and learning all the time, and that’s what you need to focus on.
So, don’t develop this imposter syndrome because it impacts your ability to do quality work at a later stage.
