Battling Imposter Syndrome

I want to talk a little bit about imposter syndrome today. Imposter syndrome, if you’re not familiar with that term, it’s something that’s kind of been doing around a lot lately where it’s maybe where people don’t feel that they’re adequate for whatever the job is that they’re doing. Maybe they didn’t take the traditional route to get a college degree in whatever the field is that they’re working in or whatever, but they still work in the field, they still do a pretty good job in that field, but they don’t necessarily have the same credentials that some of their peers might have. So that’s kind of the background and what imposter syndrome is and you may be one of those people who are kind of dealing with imposter syndrome yourself. So I talked about this a little bit at Loop Conf. If you kind of scroll through my channel, I’ve linked to the video there. But so when I was in the Army, I was in the National Guard. And for anyone who’s unfamiliar with the National Guard, the National Guard is a part-time soldiers. So they usually have civilian jobs and then they go and they do Army training for one weekend a month and then two weeks out of the year. So they’re not full-time soldiers. They still are soldiers, but they don’t train all the time. Where on the other hand, active duty soldiers, they train full-time. That’s pretty much all they do. They train, they go, if they’re deployed, they go to whichever, wherever they’re deployed to and things like that. But when they’re home, they’re usually training. So to active duty soldiers, the National Guard was somewhat of a joke. They came up with these funny names for us, and it kind of was one of those things where it kind of like brought us down a little bit because they kind of wanted us to feel almost like we weren’t really soldiers. And so calling myself a soldier to an active duty soldier sort of felt like a little bit like imposter syndrome. We didn’t go the traditional route necessarily. We don’t train quite as frequently as the active duty soldiers. But we still were soldiers, right? And since we had also had civilian jobs for the most part, there was a high chance of the soldiers that we had in our unit in our National Guard unit did things other than kicking in doors and shooting at bad guys and all that kind of stuff that the regular active duty Army would do. And so a diverse set of skills from our civilian jobs actually proved to be somewhat invaluable. We had mechanics, we had an AC repair guy, I was an accountant at the time that I was also a soldier. We even had people who were barbers, they worked at barber shops and they cut people’s hair and stuff. So when we were deployed, having these things kind of in our back pocket was pretty useful. So if one of our vehicles went down, we didn’t have to necessarily wait for a mechanic to come by and diagnose what was wrong with it. One of our mechanics actually worked on vehicles that use the same engine that were in the trucks that we had while we were deployed. And so he was very familiar with these engines. He kind of knew what was wrong with it and he was able to tell the mechanics by the time they got there, hey, this is what we need, these are the parts we need, things like that. As an accountant, I was able to help people a little bit with their taxes when tax time came around and stuff and what do they need, paperwork they need to get in order and stuff like that. So it wasn’t like we had to take time away from our regular activities that we were doing. We didn’t have to send someone to go talk to the finance people to go figure out what they needed to do for their taxes. Like I was there, I could kind of help ’em out with that stuff. Now enough about me, let’s think about what it is that you do. Do you have a degree or formal training in the field that you’re in? Chances are, these days a lot of people don’t go that formal route, going to get a four-year degree or whatever the formal training is for your particular industry. But so what? Like if you don’t have that degree or that formal training or whatever, are you still able to do the job that you do? Do you have some other unique perspectives that maybe someone with who went that traditional four-year degree path maybe doesn’t have in your field? Do you have some other work experience or life experience or whatever it is that you bring to the table that makes you better at what it is that you do? So think about it that way. If you’re feeling like maybe you’re inadequate or you don’t have what it takes to do whatever the job is that you’re doing, think about it as you have some sort of unique perspective to bring to the table. Don’t worry about anyone else’s backgrounds and how they got to where they are. Focus on what makes you uniquely qualified to do what you do. That’s how you get rid of imposter syndrome.