Enduring Imposter Syndrome

Because You Can Feel Out of Place When You're Exactly Where You Should Be

I’m suffering from a peculiar case of imposter syndrome.

Oddly enough, it’s not about my work, though I do occasionally feel a fraud in that role as well. In this case, it has to do with my writing. I’ve dedicated a long career to software, and picking up this blog has left me uncertain about what sort of person I am currently claiming to be. At times, I feel clarity and confidence in my writing. Others, I wonder if I am the right person to be doing this.

I’m addressing this with you because I suspect you’ll experience this too at some point – a change of career, a transition into the role of a parent, the leap to start your own business, or the shift to retirement. Reinventing yourself is one of the biggest challenges you may experience. There is no instruction manual. So, I lay out my thoughts – my process – a way of organizing the swirling thoughts around who I am and of what I am capable. Compare it to your own thoughts and experience, and hopefully you’ll be ready to become the next version of yourself, even if you, too, feel a fraud at first.

I am by trade, a software engineer. I don’t pretend to be anything else. Most days, I know I am a good one. Still, even a decade into the field, I have days when I doubt myself. I’m convinced that even CEOs, directors, VPs, and business owners have days when they feel as if they don’t belong. If they are anything like me, they’ll sometimes wonder if they’ve tricked everyone around them into accepting their current stature, and they’ll fear that the house of cards could tumble at any moment.

On days when I switch between programming languages, such as Python and Javascript, I make a lot of dumb mistakes as I acclimate back to one or the other language. Sometimes, I’ll spend an hour debugging before I realize I misspelled a variable name. There are some tasks that I encounter seldom enough that I have to look up how to do them every time they come up. During these instances, I wonder if I secretly have no idea what I’m doing. Have I even tricked myself?

Most of the time though, I feel good about software. After all, I’ve been the lead engineer on production scale software products with millions of dollars in revenue. I’ve built from scratch at least a dozen applications, many of which are still in use today. I am capable of independently setting up all components of a production software product. In large companies, that might usually involve a team of 3-5 engineers with specialized skills. I’m more of a tech generalist, but that fact has served me well so far. When I look at the facts, it’s indisputable that I have valuable skills, and am capable of producing a lot of value as a software engineer.

However, since starting to write this blog, I’ve been developing some serious imposter whiplash regarding who I am as a writer and what I have to offer. I want to write. Sometimes, I want it desperately. Words and phrases swirl in my head, waiting to be transcribed and made real. There are moments when I believe this is the most valuable thing I could be doing in terms of my impact on the world. There are also times when I almost throw it all away and devote myself solely to the software skills I’ve already honed.

On one hand, I think that I have some valuable things to say about life, the universe, and everything. If that last part didn’t make you chuckle, then consider checking out the book or movie Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you don’t… That’s okay, we can still be friends. On the other hand, I don’t usually share much about myself or my own life in my writing because the advice and lessons learned are the important part, right? I can even sum up my life in half a page.

I grew up a proud nerd in a medium-sized town, with a small, close group of friends. I went to college, studied abroad, met a boy, graduated, got a job – well, I went through several jobs, but that’s a story for another time.

Eventually, I developed an interest in computer science, finally got the job that started my career, stayed there for three years, then got a few more. I married the boy, who was by this time a man. We’ve traveled some more, moved a few times, bought a home, and adopted some pets. I tried to create a startup with friends, and it failed. I ran off to France for a few months. When I returned, I started a technical consulting business, which I am still running now.

Throughout all of it, I’ve faced challenges, lost friends, experienced heartbreak and joy. Most importantly, I’ve learned constantly. I’ve experimented with strategies to optimize my life, habits, and systems, even to extremes that have caused my husband some dismay. He didn’t always want to be his best self, but he’s on board now.

What I’m getting at is that I’ve spent a lifetime cultivating core qualities that I’ve come to believe lead to a fulfilling life: independence, confidence, discipline, and curiosity.

You need independence to develop an understanding of who you are and where your strengths lie. It allows you to establish a life for yourself which is not dependent on the opinions or judgments of others, but on your own values and desires. Where confidence comes in is the belief that you can continue forward to shape the person you are today into anything you would like to be in the future. Confidence is necessary to believe you can change, to acquire new skills, and to take risks.

Discipline is what allows you to actually make the changes you desire. I’ve often seen this concept described as consistency, but the meaning is the same. Discipline is doing what you should do, when you should do it. Curiosity is how you determine what you should do outside of the routine you’ve already established. It can lead you to discover a problem that becomes a new business, or can inspire you to move to a new city, take on a new hobby, experiment with your workout routine or diet. The force that causes us to grow beyond our limits is curiosity.

Discipline is what allows you to actually make the changes you desire.

The combination of open curiosity and steady discipline is all you need to continuously drive forward, and the combination of independence and confidence sets you up to decide where that drive will take you.

In my case, I’ve used these qualities to assess my journey and nudge it steadily toward a more desirable and fulfilling life. I identify the problems in my own life, take responsibility for them, believe that I am capable of changing, develop a strategy, and execute it. I hope that my writing might help others do the same.

If you’re reading this, it says something about what type of person you are, and I think I would like you. Anyone seeking to improve themselves is someone I want to support. Not that I wouldn’t support those who aren’t ready to help themselves, but I’ve found that to be near impossible. If you take the first step though, I’ll happily welcome you onto the journey and share my map.

I met one such person last weekend, and I’m still pondering whether there was anything I forgot to mention. Seriously, these things haunt me.

Walking down the outer aisle in an HEB near Austin, TX, I was summoned to a sample cart by the magic words “would you like to try some coffee?”

My husband and I chatted politely with the cart’s attendant, only to discover that he – a young man sporting a Renaissance Faire wallet and a hairnet over his beard and had been working at HEB for a few years – was looking for a career change. He was hoping to scale beyond the limits of retail, and asked for some advice. I responded with an enthusiastic and – seriously – not at all sarcastic recommendation that he “learn to code.”

I’m always eager to bring more recruits into our ranks, but I do genuinely believe this guy was a good candidate for coding. He had mentioned being pretty comfortable with math and logic, and that he had programmed some game mods in the past. Plus, if the Renn Faire wallet is any indication, this guy was like me, a huge nerd! He’ll fit right in.

We spent a good twenty minutes by the coffee cart, listing out free coding resources and recounting mine and my husband’s path into coding. We gave recommendations for the industry, potential degree programs, how to qualify for interviews, and how to get better experience than through tutorials alone, as he eagerly noted our suggestions into his phone.

People who want to better themselves are my favorite kind of people, and I’d like to reach more of them. I could wander around HEB in search of ambitious coffee cart attendants to help, but I suspect that strategy wouldn’t be very efficient. Instead, I’m hitting self-development with the shotgun approach, shouting my life lessons out into the void of the internet. I hope that someone hears them.

Yet, I wonder if my stories are worth sharing. Not all of the time, but during the times when I feel that I’m just masquerading as someone who knows what they are doing. I believe that self-improvement is a never ending journey, so I certainly haven’t “won” at it. I’m not an expert, and I’m not sure if my life is worth sharing. I don’t think I’m special. Millions of people have lived more interesting lives than I have, or faced harsher challenges.

I have no tragic backstory or comeback tale around which to sculpt my lessons. If this were a contest to choose the plot of the next big lifetime movie, I wouldn’t even place. If the only value I had to give was the story of my life, surely no one would want to read it. Right? I feel like a wolf in writer’s clothes. I sit, hands on keyboard, wanting nothing but to help people, but at a loss for how much of myself to stir into the mix. What’s your opinion? Is it helpful to you to see a glimpse of the writer behind these words, or would you prefer just the advice, filtered down to the most clear and simple prescription?

I don’t think I am special, but I do think I am smart, thorough, and focused.

How many of those millions of lifetime movie protagonists could say that they’ve tried out at least 5 distinct careers before they were 25? How many could say they’ve tried both Polyphasic sleep and the Pomodoro technique in effort to wrestle back more productivity from the unforgiving creep of time? How many could say they’ve dabbled in Intermittent Fasting, Keto, AIP, Bulletproof, low-FODMAP, sugar free, calorie-counting, and a few diets that don’t have names, all for the sake of progress? Was I more focused, more full of energy? How did my workouts feel, and how did I sleep?

My life has been a series of self-conducted experiments – experiments designed around the hypothesis that a given change would result in a better life. A “better” life, in my assessment being one in which you are free to spend your time as you wish, where you are working towards something meaningful every day, rather than running in circles on someone else’s hamster wheel.

A better life means being independent, willing and able to stand on your own, but happy as part of a community as well. It means having the confidence to know you can change the things that are wrong, and the discipline to change it. Finally, it means having all of your needs met so that your highest purpose and driving force is a relentless curiosity about the world and the impact you have on it.

There are a lot of issues that you might want to work on, and some of my advice might be able to solve what ails you. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to suggest a cure for clinical depression, PTSD, severe addiction, or the like. There are some solutions that you probably won’t find on the internet, despite how amazing of a tool it is. However, for most of us dangling along the arch of the bell curve, what I have to say can probably help improve in some way.

So here I am, fighting with this imposter syndrome as I try to write something you’ll want to read. Am I using enough whitespace? Are the jokes landing, or are they too much? Should I make the blogs short, to be easy to read, or longer to be sure there’s something valuable inside? Am I putting the right dose of myself in this article, too much, or not enough? How do I find the perfect balance to get my message across without sounding like a bad lifetime drama?

I don’t actually expect you to answer all these, but I thought maybe writing all the uncertainty would help me to sort it out. So far, it’s not helping.

I don’t think I’m special, and I don’t think I would have become the person I am today if I did. If I thought I was special, I wouldn’t have tried so hard. I wouldn’t have pushed myself. I wouldn’t have believed I could fail, and would have been crushed when I did. Perhaps, the very fact that I know I am not special, is why I feel compelled to write.

When I compare myself to Jim Kwik, James Clear, Chris Voss, and Malcom Gladwell, I feel so far from the right person for this, but if anything, my journey has taught me that our role models don’t have anything we don’t. There is no special sauce. Some people just do the things they dream of, and others hold themselves back.

I don’t want to be the person holding myself back. I remember some advice for shaking the feeling that you are impersonating an expert in your field, especially when you are new to it.

The advice was to label yourself as an enthusiast, rather than an expert. No one can argue with the idea that you are passionate about your topic. I certainly can’t convince myself that I am not passionate about self development. Even if I’m not special, if I commit to making this happen, I’ll learn a lot in the process. I may even become more of an expert in the process of it.

I feel strongly enough about this project to commit to it, and I feel confident in myself to figure some things out, and to learn from the process even if I decide not to pursue it in the end. The amount of “Jenn” in these posts will probably vary, as I continue to dial in my voice and style. Right now, I think I’m trying to be a little more myself when I write. I’ll still experience imposter syndrome, I’m sure.

For now, I’m happy to be an enthusiast, and share my journey with you.