Imposter syndrome and how to deal with it

Imposter syndrome is when a person doubts his or her skills, talents, and achievements and constantly fears that at any moment he will be exposed and accused of deception. At the same time, he is actually good and has earned the respect of others.

In other words: a person is objectively a great guy, but he doesn’t consider himself such and is afraid of being exposed.

More often, impostor syndrome can be found among successful people who, despite the circumstances, have achieved good results. I came across him too. But I'd like to start with a story that shows how easy it is to confuse impostor syndrome with incompetence.

It happened when I was no longer a newbie to freelancing. A potential client approached me with a request to help design a startup: a web portal, an aggregator on a medical topic. I studied the problem and, not seeing anything difficult or interesting in it, talked about my design approaches, made an estimate and got to work.

But something went wrong. For the first time, I encountered a client who, from the very first demonstrations, began to give feedback showing that I was not doing my job well enough. I had to redo more than half of the screens in the prototype, look for additional information about the design, and also swallow my pride and come to terms with the fact that the client understands many issues related to interface design no worse than me.

This incident served as a clear illustration of the fact that I have room to grow, something to learn, and it’s too early to call myself a professional. On the one hand, I was upset, but on the other hand, I thanked fate for such a “fit.” After all, this was not my first client and not my tenth. Before this project, I had already made at least fifty prototypes, but I had never encountered a client who was objectively dissatisfied with my work. And if this had not happened, then I would probably have remained at that mediocre level for many more years and been sure that I was really good.

After that project, I lost confidence in my abilities for a while and began to fear that another client would come along and expose me. But the beauty of this whole story is that it wasn't actually impostor syndrome. After all, I was objectively not good enough, and it just so happened that I came across a competent person who was able to rub my nose in this.

Nobody accuses people with impostor syndrome of incompetence; they invented it for themselves. Unlike me in the story above. Therefore, many years later, in situations where I am not sure that I am worthy of being called a specialist, and I am afraid of being exposed, I ask myself the question: is this an objective conclusion or does it seem to me because of a distorted perception of reality?

I've often come across people who claim to suffer from impostor syndrome, only to find out that their skills really aren't good enough to keep their clients happy. And they could be excellent sellers and good specialists, but customers did not turn to them again.

How to avoid such a misconception and learn to distinguish one from the other? After that incident, I made a habit of not only asking clients how much they liked working with me, but also wondering what the future fate of my prototypes was. Is it convenient for designers, programmers, and managers to work with them? Plus, I tried to more clearly formulate for myself the criteria for evaluating results.

Here are good examples of incorrect criteria. Should a new packaging design increase sales of a product? Should sales texts influence potential clients' decision to make a transaction? Answer: no. They can help achieve these goals and are intended to do so, but they should not.

Design and texts are just some of the necessary things related to sales. If the product is of poor quality, no design will help it. If the seller is rude when concluding a deal, then no sales texts will save the situation. If you bring tens of thousands of visitors to a page with text selling cat food who have never had a cat, they will not read this text to the end, much less follow the links and place an order. That's whydemandfor a designer or copywriter to improve sales-related metrics is simply stupid. And I have seen many examples when such requirements were presented to performers. Those, of course, couldn’t cope, began to consider themselves insufficiently competent and developed impostor syndromes.

There was a fairly long period in my career when I sincerely believed that the final result, that is, the finished developed project, directly depends on the work of the designer. But practice has shown that this is not so. One will be changed at the design stage, the other at the layout stage or during programming. Then real users will come to the first version of the project, give feedback, and a lot will be redone. Yes, the prototype will serve as a foundation that will allow participants to look at the project before it is implemented, estimate development resources and reduce risks, but the final version is the result of teamwork, and the designer should not overestimate the importance of his role.

Once I understood and accepted this, I became much calmer. I refocused on teamwork and stopped considering my solutions to be ideal, because I had already seen many times how real people used them in a completely different way than originally intended.

My impostor syndromes most often manifested themselves in places where I took on far more than was actually required. When a client wanted to receive an interactive prototype of a future website to evaluate and start development, and I believed that he was hiring me in order to increase the company’s profits using interfaces. And so I submitted the work on time and in acceptable quality, so that it could be passed on to the specialists following me. The client was happy (because in our industry, simply delivering work on time is a reason for joy), but I felt that I had not completed my work and had not taken into account a lot. And in the future, near or distant, when the client does not receive the expected additional profit due to my interfaces, some much cooler hired specialist will appear and give me a dressing down.

You can start getting rid of impostor syndrome by making a list of simple and understandable criteria. Was the work completed on time? — if not, was the client warned about this in advance? Does the result meet the requirements agreed upon at the beginning of the work? — if not, have new requirements that emerged during the process been agreed upon? And so on and so forth. Each profession and each specific case will have its own set of parameters. The main thing is that it exists, and that everyone understands it equally well. And most often it will come down to such a banal formulation: “The work must be completed within the agreed time frame and with acceptable quality.”

When I started publishing articles and tutorials on design, there was another reason to doubt my abilities. This reason was given by people who left comments. And it took quite a long time to learn to distinguish constructive criticism from empty words, insults and trolling. Moreover, for every one person giving objective feedback, there were several who liked to “climb into someone else’s monastery with their own rules.”

After a couple of years, I learned to talk about my work in such a way as not to provoke people who like to argue. To do this, I got rid of the edifying and self-confident tone - and did not teach how to do it, but simply shared stories from my professional life. And then comments with thanks and interesting questions began to prevail. At the same time, when one of my publications unexpectedly received a barrage of negativity, I already knew for sure that the problem was on my side, I figured it out, corrected it and became better.

What helped me calmly accept negative feedback from strangers was the understanding that these people do not actually know the context of my work and results, but are starting from their own vision, within which their perception is distorted so much that my words cause outrage. For example, a designer working in Yandex most likely will not understand the specifics of freelance interface design. And at the same time, I’m unlikely to understand the processes built during the development of Yandex corporate products. Therefore, the opinion of such a specialist about my work will be of very little value to me, in contrast to the opinion of my clients or more experienced fellow freelancers.

But once upon a time, the opinions of such strangers worried me and fueled the impostor syndrome. I began to evaluate my work using someone else’s criteria, divorced from reality, and, of course, this did not lead to anything good. By the way, in fairness, I must note that I myself liked to comment on someone’s work without knowing its context. But with the advent of the skill of not spoiling people’s mood where I was not asked, this habit disappeared on its own.

The following conclusions were drawn:Firstly, impostor syndrome is generally a good sign. It shows that a person cares what others think about his work and skills. At first, this syndrome forces you to look for ways to improve. It is not without reason that it is more often characteristic of successful people and is partly associated with their success.

Secondly, if impostor syndrome manifests itself without objective reasons, you need to put things in order in your head. Write down your achievements somewhere, look at this list and make sure that they are based on the results of work, and not deception and luck. In the same way, write down a list of criteria for assessing your skills and success. It may turn out that they are distorted by the opinions of people who do not understand the issue. Or that they do not exist as such at all, and the person relied on something incomprehensible and saturated with emotions.
Thirdly, it’s worth periodically checking whether this is really impostor syndrome, and not an attempt to justify your own incompetence.