Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Real Stories and Practical Strategies

00:00:00.000 | You're listening to Let's Talk Jobs, where we give you practical insights into jobs and

00:00:11.360 | careers.

00:00:12.360 | Today, we're going to talk about how to deal with imposter syndrome.

00:00:15.360 | Now, if you're not familiar with what that is, it's defined as feeling incompetent or

00:00:20.400 | unqualified, even though there's evidence to the contrary, right?

00:00:25.440 | And so for me, that happened at LinkedIn, where prior to LinkedIn, I had to experience

00:00:32.980 | all facets of web marketing, whether it's on the strategy side, user experience, design,

00:00:38.680 | testing, development, I had enough under my belt to allow me to succeed at all the previous

00:00:45.000 | companies.

00:00:46.000 | The difference at LinkedIn was I joined a group that was essentially a startup.

00:00:50.960 | Now it's LinkedIn Learning.

00:00:51.960 | Everyone knows what LinkedIn Learning is, it's part of the Talent Solutions portfolio.

00:00:55.920 | When I joined LinkedIn, they had just acquired lynda.com.

00:01:00.680 | And so there was a need to A, transition to brand, and B, build a new enterprise experience.

00:01:07.280 | And the challenge there was you have a very strong entity in lynda.com, you're building

00:01:13.160 | a new brand from the ground up, and there's things like SEO to take into consideration,

00:01:18.600 | and there's like your website, but there's also the product.

00:01:20.960 | So all of them are competing, right, for SEO visibility.

00:01:25.360 | There's also building the web experience from ground up.

00:01:27.400 | So when it came to building web experience and SEO, like that was no problem at all.

00:01:34.160 | Where I ran into an issue was about seven or eight months into my job, I had launched

00:01:40.880 | everything.

00:01:41.880 | And now LinkedIn, as you guys all know, probably, or not surprisingly, it's a very, very data

00:01:46.960 | driven company, which is fantastic.

00:01:49.240 | It's probably one of the best companies I've worked for where the data is so robust.

00:01:53.720 | The data hygiene is pretty valid, like you can trust it to make decisions.

00:01:58.480 | So the expectation of insight was really, really high.

00:02:02.840 | Prior to joining LinkedIn, I've always leveraged data and gotten insight out of the data.

00:02:09.920 | What I had not done up to that point was pull the data, right?

00:02:14.880 | So you're talking about pulling data out of Google Analytics, pulling data out of Tableau,

00:02:20.760 | looking into SFDC.

00:02:21.760 | I had experience with Google Analytics, very little exposure to SFDC and Tableau.

00:02:27.440 | And so my fear was always that if I'm pulling the data incorrectly, then all of my conclusions

00:02:37.760 | will be off mark.

00:02:39.800 | Or I'll be pulling the data set in a way that other people are not.

00:02:44.500 | And it'll be very, very clear that I'm looking at a different data set, right?

00:02:49.240 | And there are a few meetings where I was exposed, where I would present a slide.

00:02:53.640 | And like everyone's smart enough where they could say, "Hey, look, that slide doesn't

00:02:57.640 | jive with something I saw 10 slides ago."

00:03:00.080 | Or "Yesterday I saw a slide from a PMM and they're using something totally different.

00:03:04.120 | Like what's going on?"

00:03:06.680 | And so I was always feeling like I was behind the ball.

00:03:11.600 | And it came to a point, it was about the one year mark, where my manager, he pulled me

00:03:16.760 | aside and he was like, "Look, man, we hired you because you're supposed to know everything.

00:03:23.480 | And your ability to deliver analytics and dashboards is just not up to par."

00:03:29.180 | And that hurt me so deeply because I thought I was actually making positive progress on

00:03:34.360 | my dashboards.

00:03:35.360 | And what I realized was I was just delivering what he was asking for, sometimes correctly,

00:03:41.940 | sometimes not.

00:03:42.940 | What I was not doing was bringing anything additional to the table.

00:03:46.200 | And so I felt like I wasn't providing value.

00:03:48.480 | So I really questioned the value of my employment at that time.

00:03:54.200 | And remember, this is a company where when I came in and interviewed for the job, the

00:04:01.640 | senior director interviewed me as well.

00:04:04.120 | And the questions that they asked were so in the weeds and specific, they clearly understood

00:04:10.520 | my role.

00:04:11.640 | And so essentially, I was surrounded by people who I looked to my left, looked to my right.

00:04:17.000 | I basically came to the conclusion that everyone could do my job.

00:04:20.480 | And I wasn't sure why I was there.

00:04:23.200 | And so I entered a period of depression.

00:04:26.760 | And that was the first time in my career that I felt this way.

00:04:32.520 | And it wasn't until a change of managers where it totally flipped around, where he came in

00:04:38.080 | and I decided to kind of, like in a previous episode, we talked about kind of getting to

00:04:42.640 | our know our limits when you're feeling in over your head.

00:04:45.400 | I kind of drew on that where I came to him, I said, "Hey, look, let me tell you what I

00:04:49.960 | think I'm doing good with my job.

00:04:51.520 | And being my new manager, let me tell you why I'm struggling a little bit.

00:04:55.720 | Here's what I'm trying to do.

00:04:58.400 | And here's the output I've been creating.

00:05:00.280 | And here's where I think I'm doing it wrong.

00:05:01.720 | And here's why I think I'm doing things not so well."

00:05:05.160 | I could really use some advisement.

00:05:07.560 | For him, it was also his first time running a digital organization.

00:05:11.680 | So he was doing PMM before, now he's in web.

00:05:14.720 | And so now the situation is a different, we're kind of self-discovering it.

00:05:19.760 | He sent me to a lot of resources because I was very articulate about my shortcomings.

00:05:24.040 | And then got proactive.

00:05:25.040 | I was like, "Hey, I was like, you know what, you know, for my OKRs or objectives and key

00:05:28.560 | results of which my performance is measured by, I want to add some things on there that

00:05:33.600 | are skills-based because I want to be held accountable to this.

00:05:36.440 | And I also want you to know I'm serious about overcoming these shortcomings."

00:05:40.760 | And so part of it was like presentation, pace of speech, slide design, and then analytics.

00:05:49.080 | So those are all things I ended up putting on my OKRs.

00:05:52.640 | And that was the way that I was able to kind of break through that.

00:05:55.600 | And he said something to me that really broke me out of my imposter syndrome mindset.

00:06:01.400 | And he literally sat down to me and he said, "Look, Tim, you were hired because you knew

00:06:07.120 | what you could like, wait, sorry, you were hired because you knew how to do the job.

00:06:11.560 | The only person who's telling you that you can't do your job is you.

00:06:15.640 | So get out of your head, pull yourself together and just be you and do you."

00:06:21.400 | And so that was just so, I needed to hear that.

00:06:25.800 | And so every time now when I talk to someone and they're struggling with them, I usually

00:06:29.880 | throw that piece of feedback first because they just, you know, like, "You're hired

00:06:32.960 | because you know how to do your job.

00:06:34.880 | Don't set yourself short."

00:06:35.880 | That was my first, like, that was my example.

00:06:43.720 | It sounds, you know, the thing I take away from your example is how our professional

00:06:53.360 | lives can, we can, I think the sense is that they're somehow dispassionate that we apply

00:07:01.960 | objectively our skills.

00:07:04.640 | We objectively apply our skills and experience to solve problems in a rational and reasonable

00:07:09.760 | way that were logical, you know, that the plans are logical and proceed in a logical

00:07:15.960 | fashion.

00:07:16.960 | But in fact, so much of this is underpinned by emotions.

00:07:21.560 | And so when things go awry, why wouldn't we take it personal?

00:07:27.760 | And I think that's okay because that's a reminder, if we have ever forgotten that, that emotions

00:07:34.560 | are really at the heart of so much of who we are as people.

00:07:39.680 | And yeah, it just really struck me how, you know, clearly you have a lot of experience,

00:07:46.640 | Tim, and you've achieved a lot of success in your career.

00:07:50.280 | And yet you had this experience that hurt you deeply, as you said, pain, it was painful.

00:07:56.760 | It was mostly painful.

00:07:59.080 | I can imagine, you know, you sought out, you know, various ways to kind of both find answers,

00:08:07.240 | but also find consolation for that.

00:08:09.240 | And I think it's just something for folks out there that feel like they need to be perfect,

00:08:15.640 | that, you know, perfection is really impossible.

00:08:21.400 | It's sort of a non sequitur when it comes to just people in our careers anyway.

00:08:27.200 | Do you want to share your imposter experience, Troy?

00:08:34.520 | Yeah.

00:08:35.520 | Well, I mean, just thinking about it a little more, I mean, honestly, it's every day, right?

00:08:42.400 | And what I have been doing almost exclusively for the last five years is ghostwriting.

00:08:49.000 | And that means basically pretending to be somebody on some level, right?

00:08:55.400 | And, you know, that process is always a little bit uncomfortable, but it's especially uncomfortable

00:09:01.040 | at first.

00:09:02.040 | You know, over time, if I have a long-term client, that's always the best because I get

00:09:05.440 | to know them and I can really start to sort of hear their voice in my head, right?

00:09:11.680 | But the first time can always be a little bit daunting, painful, nerve-wracking.

00:09:18.160 | Like, can I really pretend to be this person?

00:09:22.760 | The best example, maybe the most overwhelming example was this article that I wrote that

00:09:29.600 | ended up getting placed in the Financial Times, which I'm really proud of, but it was writing

00:09:37.160 | for a really well-known British philanthropist who had started an institute that focused

00:09:45.880 | on digital access back in the early 2000s, but I wasn't working with her directly.

00:09:53.480 | So I was working with a VC that sat on the board of that foundation with this person.

00:10:01.120 | And so she was basically my point of contact for ghostwriting for somebody else.

00:10:05.040 | So it was like the old game of phone, right, where you pass the phone and it's, you know,

00:10:14.400 | two generations later, the story is totally, totally different.

00:10:17.620 | And anyway, so it was a really uncomfortable process, but I had to keep reminding myself

00:10:22.600 | that even though I'd never met this woman, I was writing for a different dialect of English,

00:10:30.840 | in British English, I knew a lot about the evolution of technology from the period of

00:10:37.760 | this institute because I'd been working in technology ever since then and certainly was

00:10:42.560 | aware of the rise of social media and the big challenges of misinformation, disinformation

00:10:51.040 | and some of the things that we wanted to cover in the piece.

00:10:53.800 | And so, and I had to let go of the like, you know, the tone of this might not be perfect,

00:11:01.000 | but I know how to put, I know how to string together a story.

00:11:04.040 | And so that's what I did.

00:11:05.040 | And I submitted the draft and to my VC contact that was here, and it eventually worked its

00:11:14.120 | way to the philanthropist and, you know, the feedback I got was, was really positive, still

00:11:19.080 | never had any direct interaction with her.

00:11:21.960 | They did change a little bit of the, you know, the California English, if you will, to British

00:11:29.920 | English, but the core of the story, the thread was there, and I'm pretty proud of how that

00:11:36.720 | worked.

00:11:37.720 | I guess that, you know, the takeaway is, again, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, it's easy to

00:11:45.160 | feel like an imposter, it's a very emotional and natural response to being uncomfortable

00:11:50.640 | in certain situations.

00:11:51.640 | But again, I was hired for a reason, for my experience and my abilities, and I had to

00:11:58.640 | let go of the idea that I was actually going to be this person that I'd never met, right,

00:12:02.720 | and just do the best that I could with the tools that I had.

00:12:08.840 | My experience, just if I could jump in, is maybe more of a view of my experience over

00:12:20.280 | many jobs, as opposed to like one job where, Troy, you felt perhaps that you weren't sure

00:12:27.240 | how you were going to show up for it, and then you overcame that.

00:12:32.120 | I had an experience a few years ago where Snapchat wanted to hire a content strategist,

00:12:38.360 | and in their kind of world, content strategist is sort of like a creative director, copywriter

00:12:44.080 | person who comes up with campaigns and concepts and manages teams of writers and designers

00:12:51.320 | and producers to create the assets, and so whatever they might be, digital ads, email

00:12:58.920 | campaigns.

00:13:00.920 | So I was recruited at one point, and the rate was too low for me, so I turned it down.

00:13:07.200 | And then they came back to me maybe six months or nine months later, and they said, you know,

00:13:12.200 | the hiring manager loves your experience, you had all this experience at Google, they

00:13:17.240 | want you.

00:13:18.240 | So I asked for like twice as much money, and they agreed.

00:13:23.520 | And so I was given a contract, I wasn't hired full time, I came in through an agency, but

00:13:29.160 | essentially it was like a six-month contract.

00:13:33.080 | And I started contributing, and feedback was great, you know, check-ins with my manager,

00:13:39.800 | and they were always positive, they were happy with my performance.

00:13:45.540 | They brought in a new manager at like a level below the VP or the director, I forget what

00:13:52.080 | the title was.

00:13:54.000 | And this person was great, I think they had great instincts and experience, and all the

00:14:03.760 | people at the management level had come in from Facebook, Facebook had like laid off

00:14:08.400 | many, many people in the content group, and they all kind of, and this team had been staffed,

00:14:14.280 | many of them at the managerial level by ex-Facebook folks, so they all had a certain, like, approach

00:14:18.880 | to management, which was consistent positivity, but I always felt like I wasn't really getting

00:14:26.040 | the full story.

00:14:28.380 | It was sort of always framed, but never really honest in a way, I don't want to necessarily

00:14:35.520 | put that out there, but my sense was there were things that were framed in a way that

00:14:41.080 | were not necessarily the full picture, and that proved to be true in that over the course

00:14:46.760 | of a few months, you know, my contribution, I felt, was still at the same level, I was

00:14:53.040 | running campaigns and, you know, sort of a lead with a number of contributors that were

00:15:03.360 | working with me on specific projects, and I remember I had a meeting with my manager,

00:15:08.240 | this new person, on maybe a Thursday, and checked in on my performance toward specific

00:15:14.360 | goals and things like that, and she's like, you're doing great, you're doing a great job,

00:15:19.000 | keep doing what you're doing, and the very next day I got fired.

00:15:24.160 | And I was devastated, and it wasn't as if I had never been fired before because of the

00:15:30.760 | creative things happen, business climate changes, it's the subjective, your work and the reception

00:15:43.080 | of your work is often based on subjectivity and bias and all sorts of things, so I really

00:15:49.000 | never know, and I don't to this day know why in fact I was fired, and I had talked to other

00:15:53.840 | people in the group that had stayed on and they didn't know either, the fact is I won't

00:15:58.880 | ever know unless this person reaches out to me, which I doubt they will, because I tried

00:16:02.800 | to connect with them on LinkedIn and they never accepted it.

00:16:07.120 | So whatever the case may be in terms of the managerial approach, right or wrong, they

00:16:12.320 | did what they had to do, but I was left with this feeling like despite all my, at that

00:16:17.520 | point I had been in the business for more than two decades, I had lots of wins, lots

00:16:21.520 | of achievements, lots of successes, won awards, things like that, started a business, an agency,

00:16:27.360 | and yet for some reason it didn't work out, and it made me feel like a fraud, it made

00:16:33.400 | me feel like I didn't know what I was doing, even though I had all this success that maybe

00:16:38.920 | it was all a lie, maybe it was all just somehow manufactured but it wasn't real, and you know

00:16:48.560 | I've come to realize that that's part of my perfectionism and my need for everyone to

00:16:54.160 | like me, and in business that is a really hard, you're going to be disappointed if you

00:17:00.320 | go into a job with the expectation that you're always going to do everything right and everyone's

00:17:04.600 | going to like you, let alone love you, it's just never going to happen, some people will

00:17:08.760 | love you, a few, a few maybe if you're lucky will really love you and love what you do

00:17:14.480 | and you'll stay in relationship with them over many jobs, or you know you two are great

00:17:20.960 | examples in terms of my career when we started working together, I know I was at Logitech

00:17:26.800 | from 2006 to 2012, and you know I met both of you there in that time period and we're

00:17:34.200 | still talking, so it does happen, I just think the imposter syndrome, if it is a syndrome

00:17:41.720 | I guess that's more of a clinical term, but I don't always have these persistent feelings

00:17:46.960 | of self-doubt like I'm going to be exposed as a fraud, they come and go, I have experiences

00:17:52.720 | where they're more poignant than others, there's probably you know good reasons why I wasn't

00:17:58.280 | meeting whatever objectives they had, maybe I was too expensive, who knows, but you know

00:18:05.040 | the thing is, is they become part of your story, and I think they become part of your

00:18:12.520 | story of resilience, and whether it's imposter syndrome or feeling like you're in over your

00:18:19.040 | head or fear of failure, these things help demonstrate how you can walk through the fire

00:18:24.360 | and come out you know a little bit burned, but a little bit more experienced in the process.

00:18:31.400 | Yeah you know I really appreciate you guys as examples, because actually this topic of

00:18:35.320 | how you deal with either failure or feeling of inadequacy or with this imposter syndromes,

00:18:41.680 | I always use these stories actually to break the ice with people, to build relationships,

00:18:46.360 | and I always bring it up during job interviews, why?

00:18:49.640 | Because it makes you human, makes you relatable, and there's acknowledgement of growth in going

00:18:57.520 | through this process of building your own story, right?

00:19:00.200 | And so for anyone who's dealing with this, just remember like you were hired because

00:19:06.520 | you are capable, now circumstances may make you feel like you're struggling, or your emotions

00:19:14.760 | might be tied to the circumstance, but always come back to your core self knowing that you've

00:19:19.400 | got what it takes.

00:19:21.560 | In all the feedback you received, search out for the truth nuggets, and then ignore the

00:19:26.200 | packaging of everything else, right?

00:19:28.040 | And then figure out what those core truths are, and use that as a starting point, right?

00:19:33.640 | Because there's always going to be some truth to harsh feedback, and some of it not.

00:19:38.260 | But know that you have value, and don't ever let a circumstance dictate your sense of value

00:19:43.560 | or self-worth.

00:19:44.560 | Don't be so tied into this immediate outcome such that your perception of yourself is impacted.

00:19:50.520 | Hey guys, thanks again for watching and listening.

00:19:54.720 | Next week, we'll be talking about how to deal with failure.

00:19:57.880 | So make sure you hit like, subscribe, and the notification bell so you don't miss the

00:20:01.560 | episode.

00:20:01.960 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Real Stories and Practical Strategies

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