business.tutsplus.com: Does your professional success scare you? Do you ever want to throw your hands up and say, "I feel like a fraud?" If you answered yes to both questions, you may be suffering from the imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is an obstacle that affects many successful and creative people—causing them to doubt their own abilities.
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I identified with this article a surprising amount. I definitely think I suffer from doubting my own abilities, especially when it comes to engaging in a task I’ve never completed or completed successfully before. I think most people tend to feel like this in at least some small way, particularly when they are in a field unfamiliar to them. But I really appreciated this article in that it not only defined what “Imposter Syndrome” is, but how to deal with it as well. The third tip of “surround yourself with people who believe in you” particularly resonated with me. I’ve been in countless situations before where I noticed my confidence in myself was raised or faltered depending on who I chose to be around. As the article mentioned, you can definitely hinder yourself and your success by the people you are surrounded by and how they either uplift your talents or ignore them.
I don’t like the fact that I relate to this article so much, its unsettling to me. I have felt “imposter syndrome” more than I like recently. I think this is because I am surrounded with amazing and talented people every day and I am comparing myself to them. After reading this article and looking at the suggestions on how to overcome this feeling I think I need to try to get in the mindset and the implementation of the mindset that “yes I am surrounded by amazing and talented people, but that doesn’t mean that I’m any less.”. This will come when learn to stop comparing myself to others. I think because we are in a place that is so selective we tend to ask all of the time why, we, out of all the people who wanted to be here, were selected, especially when we feel like we are not living up to what we believe is “the CMU standard”. I think this also added to the fear of making bad work because we feel like everything we make has to be perfect to live up to that standard or else we are proving that we don’t deserve to be here. I think being in theater also adds to this feeling of being in costume and playing dress up and not being who or what you say you are.
I think everyone at Carnegie Mellon should read this article because the amount of times someone here says that they don’t belong here or they should be rescinded in probably at least once a day. The only person in “authority” during orientation who mentioned this idea was a residential advisor in passing. This is something that needs to be addressed for all Carnegie Mellon Students. This article does a perfect job of explaining imposter syndrome because it uses explains of successful people who have it/had it. I think this is the perfect way to show that this is common occurrence/something that can be dealt with. There are so many articles about issues people face that just talk on and on about the condition but having case studies to go along with articles are much more reassuring, at least to me. All these tips both from the article writer and the quotes from the successful stars are useful and hopefully, phenomena like the imposter syndrome get talked about more often.
Particularly in a place like Purnell, where everyone is accomplished and talented it can be easy to experience imposter syndrome. Even when I talk about the program, I find myself saying, “I got lucky”, which diminishes my work and what got me here. Often in Purnell it is easy to look at your quality of the work rather than the learning involved. Particularly, freshman year when you are being tested in so many areas it’s easy to feel as though you are not good enough as opposed to focusing on the things you are good at. In order to stay healthy in a competitive world, you have to think more positively and celebrate the successes. I had a teacher in high school, who reminded me that if a lot of people have imposter syndrome, they can’t all be “imposters”. I find that reassuring because it means that you can change the narrative that you tell yourself.
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