Episode 22: Making friends with your imposter

Person who recently told me the most transformational moment in their career was when a famous professor confessed to imposter syndrome because it meant she wasn't alone and her hero was as human as she was - if he could do what he did and feel the same way as her then she could do what he was doing too.

What I do in trainings - everyone experiences this, or perfectionism/people-pleasing at some point, many of us regularly, and it affects both early career and senior staff - new profs in particular, as the gulf between our perception of ourselves and the world's perception of us increases. Realising that you are not alone in this is the first step towards self-compassion according to Kristin Neff from University of Austin Texas. We need to talk about these issues and normalise them, and in so doing we can reduce their power in our lives and create a more compassionate culture that is more resilient as we empathise and act to help others struggling in the same way as us.

Recent examples from my experience - offering to help Colin and him saying yes and telling me a bunch of stuff I didn't know the meaning of. My response was to simply say my role would be to facilitate, gather questions from his team and analyse the answers - by the time I get there I'll have time to learn what all those acronyms mean. I'm a key expert - if I admit that I don't know what these acronyms mean, will he still trust me? Or in humility can I say we can learn together as we go.

If you've ever switched to a new discipline or topic, you are highly likely to experience imposter syndrome, and this is one of the reasons people stay in their lane. Many of the greatest discoveries however have come from people moving into a new unfamiliar lane and having the humility and courage to interact with and learn from others who know more than they do about how to swim in that particular lane. Building self-confidence, and having the humility to tell others you are learning, can contract the space between your perception of yourself and other people's perception of you, helping you overcome imposter syndrome.

I did this when I decided the only way to achieve impact from my peatland research was a peatland code, knowing nothing about carbon markets. More recently with the new centre I realised that to scale these markets across other land uses and habitats, we needed more robust policy mechanisms, but nobody knew what was needed. So I started talking to colleagues in SG and Defra about what they thought was needed, and started piecing together their quite different ideas with what I could find in the back of my own mind, based on my wider knowledge of environmental policy and governance, to try and come up with a governance hierarchy showing all the things you might possibly want in a policy framework and how they might fit together. The first version missed out crucial things, but I kept speaking to new people who pointed out the problems until I had something I could use to advise both Governments that fused academic and practitioner knowledge.

I've gone from a place three months ago where I felt totally out of my depth, to being blown away by what I was able to say on the Green Finance podcast, and the fact that policy colleagues are now pointing their new staff to me to get briefed on what they need to understand. I still have to remind them that although it might seem that I know more than anyone else about this stuff, I'm far from infallible, and still learning, but because that has been my posture from the outset, their expectations aren't crazy. And I have to keep checking my own self-confidence when people listen to me, to remind me that I am confident in the advice I'm giving, because of its basis in both theory and practice, despite the fact that I didn't know any of this stuff three months ago. Which takes me back to the recent challenge where I didn't even understand the request. I don't know what they're talking about yet, but I've proven that I have the capacity to learn this stuff fast and make a valuable contribution, so I'll do the same thing again in that same posture of wanting to learn.