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Balancing Confidence and Imposter Syndrome

Caitlyn Greffly on November 16, 2019

I am a month into my career as a developer, which is pretty much as new as you can get. I was reminded of this when I received a very direct commen...
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Matt Eland

If it helps at all, this is something you'll continue to deal with in waves throughout your career. I wrote about my encounter with it as a first-time manager recently.

I might write again in the new year as a first-time conference speaker. I know I'll continue to fight it at points throughout my life.

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Josh Michielsen

100%. When I started speaking at conferences I got hit HARD with imposter syndrome. It made me want to give up!

I think the most important thing is to let your achievements speak for themselves. Try not to rely too heavily on external validation. Rather, ask yourself - if this feeling I have about myself was true, would I really be able to fool anyone? The answer is probably not.

My therapist introduced me to something recently called "self-schema". I recommend looking it up and having a think about your own self-schema :)

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Caitlyn Greffly

Awesome! Thanks for sharing your experience as well

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Heather Hill-Leider

Thank you for this. I have felt impostor syndrome on a deep level and honestly had never heard of it before coming into this industry. It makes me feel much more 'normal' and better about the whole thing knowing I'm not alone in feeling this way. And that its common.

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John McLem Adan

Hi Caitlyn! Thanks for sharing this! I definitely can relate to your situation and experience as I'm also a month in my career as developer and a former bootcamper as well. πŸ‘

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Erik Dietrich

Sorry for the complete non-sequitur, but did you make that featured image in the header?

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Caitlyn Greffly

I did not! Got it off Freepik πŸ‘πŸ»

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Erik Dietrich

Interesting. That's a resource I hadn't yet seen, and will have to give it a look -- thanks.