An Expected Journey to an Imposter's Lair

Deconstructing the psychology of doubt that often holds us back

Have you ever felt you aren’t as smart as those around you, and that soon enough, you will be found out? That this opportunity which befell you is undeserved? That you must fake-it-till-you-make-it through each single day?

If you are like roughly 70% of professionals, chances are you have already experienced this - psychologists call it the Imposter Syndrome. A feeling of inadequacy and self-doubt, where you believe that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be, consumes you. You constantly compare yourself to your peers and feel like you don't measure up. This in turn affects your ability to focus on what you really need to be doing, as you find yourself focusing on not being found out.

When all eyes are on you, but you wish they weren’t.

Looking back at my own life, I can find myself suffering from this multiple times and I hope to share reflections on what one can deduce from these patterns so we can learn to deal with these situations. Mind you, this is all hindsight and I don’t pretend to have been exceptionally wise at a young age. I only intend to show you one can get through this, and that you can help others around you deal with this too.

A New Context

I remember moving to a new city - Mumbai, the City of Dreams - and switching to a new curriculum at school. My first few report cards as an 8th grader were a horror show as I coped with my new reality.

I remember enrolling into IIT Bombay as one of the last batch of engineers admitted, and wondering how I will match up to the toppers in my batch. After all, as someone ranked 107 in the entrance exam, I was sharing classrooms with someone ranked 7.

I remember joining Freshworks from IBM, and staring at a chasm worth over half-a-decade in technology. My early discussions around technology were peppered with terminology I could not latch on to. I would choose to be silent lest I open my mouth and give away my ignorance.

Today I realize it is natural to take the time to find your feet in a new setup and build your context anew before you can start performing at your best. Despite this being obvious to most people, this is exactly where the same people will label themselves an imposter.

Comfortable Success

I moved to Mumbai from Hyderabad, where I was regularly top of class in primary school. Watching myself gravitate to the middle of class felt like a slide down the abyss.

Prior to joining IIT, I was once again used to floating around the top of class across 4 years of engineering. Coming in now as one of the lowest ranked felt like squeezing through a rapidly shutting trapdoor a la Indiana Jones. Except I didn’t feel like an adventurous, kickass archaeologist.

Barely making it through and wondering what to make of it.

I used to be the youngest engineer on my team at StoredIQ before we were acquired, so there was no pressure coming in to IBM. By the time I switched allegiances to Freshworks, my seniors from the startup days had all departed, and I was already the seniormost engineer on my team at IBM responsible for its future direction. And then here I was at Freshworks, fumbling with the basics of SaaS and PaaS, and wondering what the hell FaaS is.

When you have settled in, learnt the tricks of the trade, and started to receive validation for your work, you tend to get used to the rarified air at the top, basking in all the glory. But then you carry this heavy crown over to a completely new context, destined to see yourself a failure, even beginning to question your past successes.

In The End

All is well that ends well, and I want to assure you it can. So let’s do some more time travelling in the style of Christopher Nolan.

While I struggled through grades 8 and 9, the board exams in the 10th grade saw a turnaround as I drew surprised “Who? Him??” stares from classmates who saw my name displayed on the school’s list of toppers.

While I struggled with theory at IIT, I learned that I was doing rather well with courses involving lab work, so I decided to play to my strengths by carefully picking electives to end up brushing shoulders with the top of the class when it came to CGPA scores.

At Freshworks, I was fortunate to be surrounded by young engineers who were happy to teach me everything they already knew in return for what they had been craving for - being able to bounce off and whet their ideas with someone senior, someone who gave them time. Together we had great fun solving a number of problems over the years as we were able to hold our own as a highly reliable SaaS platform within Freshworks.

So, that’s how it ends. But what can we learn from it all?

Deal With It

How you see yourself as an imposter typically varies by your default setting for self-awareness, how you measure yourself, your upbringing, and your prior brushes with success and failure. Being aware of how you look at yourself, certainly helps.

But most of us aren’t fortunate enough to be as keenly self-aware. As hard as that is, it is certainly not easy when we are consumed by the fact that all eyes are on us. So, let’s try to dumb this down to a few general rules of thumb.

• Give yourself a break: Don’t be too quick to label yourself in a new context - new job, new role, new team. You need time to find your feet. Could I really have prepared to cover missed lessons in biology and physics coming from a different curriculum? Or magically covered 7 years’ worth of Marathi having never spoken it?

• Appreciate the chasm: What do you need to learn or unlearn? Where do you struggle? Facing my own chasm, perhaps grokking the common concepts in AWS might help. Or getting familiar with Jenkins to help deploy often. Or how NodeJS is different from the more familiar Java or Python.

• Invest in learning: Fortunately, expectations are likely to be low early on. Stay curious and use this slack to double down on being deliberate about closing that chasm. Nothing beats getting hands-on with the new skills you need to pick up. Create your own learning backlog and cross it off one by one.

• Lean in: Find fellow journeypeople who would be glad to show you what you are missing. Shed your inhibitions about appearing to be ignorant. Remember that you are slowing your team down when you don’t ask for help in a tight spot. You will get a chance to repay them in spades down the line.

• Develop your personal strategy: Even if your role demands being a generalist, play to your strengths in the early days to help rack up a few quick wins. Confidence can do wonders with learning and going down dark alleys you’ve never been down. My own confidence came from acing lab work - and not the “C” I earned with Quantum Theory - that eventually helped me take up a new challenge in Computer Vision as my Master’s thesis.

• See the bright side: Growth happens on the fringes, when you are uncomfortable. Try to see this phase as the knot in the gut that tells you something good will come out of this struggle.

Offer a Hand

When my scores at school were crashing and burning, I was confident I had lucked out big time back in Hyderabad. Maybe being a teacher’s pet was my hack. Maybe I was a hack. My parents however never once flustered. They would simply urge me to work harder and continued to believe in me. I wonder how things would have worked out if they hadn’t been patient and empathetic.

You can be the empathetic supporter for another imposter.

As a manager, you could -

• Create a deliberate roadmap for your new team member to navigate their first 60 or 90 days that provides a map, milestones, and guard rails for this new journey.

• Have frequent check-ins early on to encourage, and gauge what the gaps are so that the right help can be aligned during this critical phase.

As a team member, you could -

• Reflect on what helped you in your early days and point out the minefields and the hacks that might help them settle faster.

• Connect them to important people who might help them access information and resources faster.

We are likely to find ourselves facing the same friction and inhibitions someday. In the spirit of paying it forward, or just to get the best out of this new colleague because it is a joy working with someone firing on all cylinders, be someone they can lean on.

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Thanks to Vivek Kannan for recommending I write about this topic. If you would like me to address something of interest to you, please leave me a comment below.