Imposter Syndrome: I Don't Feel Like Who You Think I Am

the besides DC 2017 videos are brought to you by threat quotient introducing the industry's first threat intelligence platform designed to enable threat operations and management and data tribe a new kind of startup studio Co building the next generation of commercial cyber security analytics and big data product companies it says 230 by my watch so how about we start thanks everybody for coming to my talk on impostor syndrome my name is Micah Hoffman and in case you didn't know who I am I am a person that's been very involved in the information security for for quite a while now and it has really helped my career my personal life and so I love the opportunity to come and and share

some of the things that I've learned along the way with you all in hopes that you know it reaches somewhere inside of you and it helps you understand maybe yourself or a friend or a colleague a little bit better so um I want to start off the talk telling you that every day I feel a little bit like an impostor it's just who I am but I don't want to talk about me just today I want to talk about this guy you all know who he is right yeah who is he Newton who said Newton where have you been alright so Albert Einstein yes you got the first part right did you know some of the cool

things he did right I mean he created the theory of relativity he he came up with that whole equals mc-squared thing he Nobel Prizes and so on gravitational waves which were unprovable they were all in theory until recently when they actually could detect these gravitational waves he was a man like a hundred and fifty years ahead of his time he was amazing the things that he came up with in fact if I was to ask you to think of the quintessential physicist I bet many of you would come up with Einstein as that that representation you know how I know Wikipedia tells me no but seriously Einstein who did all these amazing amazing things I mean really was

ahead of his time he felt like a fraud he felt like people were we're putting too much weight into what he was saying into what his thoughts his ideas it's like I'm just putting down what's in my head you know anybody can figure this out I'm nothing special and he felt like a fraud that was really interesting for me to hear because you know what else Albert Einstein couldn't internalize his success which was clearly all around him at that time and has been proved over the years to be even more accurate his predictions his theories his other things and ultimately Einstein's subjective perception of how he felt about himself was different from how everybody else felt about him and his

work this is what impostor syndrome is now let me take you back to when I first encountered impostor syndrome I didn't even know what it was at the time but I was I was at Derby Con 2012 many years ago and I was walking back after a full day of being at the conference I was walking back to my hotel and I was talking to my friends Trevor he was having a milkshake and and we were sitting there and we were walking back to the hotel and I was like you know what I just heard an entire days worth of uber people talk about amazing things that I have no idea about I started thinking

well what the hell am i doing in info sack what was I creating what it was like contributing back to the field I wasn't talking at conferences I wasn't I was just testing web apps that's all I was a pen tester and there are thousands of me out there not only that but I didn't have any zero day exploits to trade for things I I didn't know how to program anything yeah I could do some bash scripting but that's not really programming okay so it's kind of like programming but it's like using Perl it's not real programming sir sorry umm yeah so what I was finding is that a lot of the things that I was comparing

myself to a lot of the people I was comparing myself to we're doing amazing things that I wasn't just but honestly my wife my kids my co-workers when they talked to me when they looked at my life and what I was going what I was going through what I was having my life was awesome I was running a team of badass pen testers I had a very supportive management structure at work I had a family that was healthy and happy and engaged and things were great on the outside inside mica was really unhappy because I didn't really feel like I worked I belong to an InfoSec anymore so I started looking for a new job now I

didn't find a new job but I remember while I was listening while I was doing this job search one day I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about something just Gavin about stuff and they came across the term impostor syndrome and as I calm I know what impostor means I know what a syndrome is maybe this is something important I had listened and it started making sense to me I did belong in the industry I just needed to change my perceptions so let's talk a little bit about impostor feelings or impostor phenomenon it's actually not a syndrome if you look up in the DSM four or five I think we're up to five the Diagnostic

and Statistical Manual for psychology it doesn't list imposters feelings as an actual psychological syndrome it's a collection of feelings perceptions phenomenon about yourself and it was first described by two doctors that went to grad school together dr. Iams and dr. clans 1978 what the clans found out was that she was working in a psychological field with a whole bunch of other really smart driven people and she felt like a fraud she had her doctorate at that point she was working with these people and yet she she didn't feel like she was really measuring up to what her students were doing what her colleagues were doing and so she did a study with dr. Iams and the

result is their 1978 paper where they described how these high-functioning people on the outside don't feel very high-functioning on the inside and that's really at the heart of imposter feelings is that your subjective reality overpowers the objective reality that everybody else sees so in plain words you see yourself differently than other people see you and that's not necessarily a bad thing I mean we all have our perceptions about ourselves but when your perception of yourself is markedly different from what other people can see and feel about you there can be some conflict there now getting back to the psychology part of this absolutely there are some psychological symptoms and disorders that can go along with impostor feelings when somebody has

impostor failings they can have any one of these or multiple of these and they can be in a variety from mild to moderate is severe or even debilitating whether it's depression or low self-confidence or whatever with impostor feelings they are sometimes persistent in everything that you do but more frequently imposter feelings are about there there are things that come and go depending upon the situation depending upon where you are what you're doing and your comfort level with what you're doing it's kind of an interesting thing to think about and you know what's even more interesting there was a study back in 2007 that showed that 70% of the people in the survey and this was a big survey 70%

had at least one feeling of at least at one time in their life they felt like they had impostor feeling so they felt like a fraud even then they shouldn't do I look out across the audience I look at all of you and I see some heads shaking here I see that that 70% may be quite accurate today you know 10 years later and that's okay stick with me because imposter syndrome doesn't just affect one type of person it affects all races all genders all I'll just anybody it even impacts people of all career types not just InfoSec no I mean in these people that are in Hollywood dr. Maya Angelou an amazing amazing creative

writer she felt it she actually wrote that every time that she was writing a new book she said this is the time they're gonna find out I'm a fraud every single time or how about JLo JLo thought after her even after selling 70 million of her record albums I know record albums I'm from the past and saw him and songs album I don't know what you call them any now you kids um but even after selling 70 million of these exams she's like I don't know why anybody wants to listen to my music it you know it's just the music even Harry Potter Harry Potter Liz Lemon Don Cheadle all of them yes I know his name

is Daniel Radcliffe but all of them in Moore have these feelings of imposter syndrome posture syndrome or impostor feelings generally resonate with people they they generally come out when you're in a pressure to achieve something oh my god I'm not sure I'm gonna measure up oh my god I have to give a talk in front of hundreds of people what if they don't like it I better make it better I better make it better so I was up late last night working on these slides putting in these pictures of Harry Potter and stuff to make sure that it was perfect for you all and that's another thing that happens with imposter feelings is that you work

Oh hard you become a perfectionist don't get to that in a little bit imposter feelings sometimes happen when you have a when you're surrounded by people that are smarter than you those people that know different things than you or are working in different areas and you're like oh crap I don't know how to how to hack a car you should I know that yeah I should probably know that oh I'm so dumb when you might be an uber expert in reverse engineering malware but when you measure yourself against other people's achievements you start to feel bad about yourself we also find impostor feelings come into play when you start a new project when you starting a new work you're starting

something that that you're not sure if you know of where you're gonna go if you're gonna be successful that that self-doubt is natural but the recurring feelings associated with it and what it makes you do or not do that's the imposter feelings part of it and the reality is that studies have shown that the longer you are in a field the more of an expert you become the more likely you are to feel like an impostor that's kind of weird when you think about it because you feel that you it's kind of natural to think the longer I'm in a field the more comfortable I should feel right well let's talk about this the dung dunning-kruger effect two

researchers at Cornell came up with this idea based upon some perceptions they had that we'll take a look at this really nice graph here this is a nice graph here on the x-axis yes I mean you're reading it on me and some of you might be like have worked with people that are at Mount stupid now but we'll get to that um so in the x axis we have wisdom right on the right-hand side I'm sorry the left-hand side your your very new at some task some skills some position and then on the left-hand side you are I'm sorry the right-hand side you are a guru you've been doing this and you know how to do it left and right

up and down on the y-axis we have a subjective rating of how confident you are that you can perform that task well now we've all seen these people I see it as a person that's been in infrastructure a long time I will go ahead and hire a new penetration tester to my and we're really happy to have that junior person on the team the person comes on the team they're like oh yeah I broke into this webpage and oh I got a shell oh I got two shells I am awesome and they're at the top of Mount stupid right there because they're experienced they feel like they've mastered how to get a shell right that I I'm the master of shells

and you know this is great because I know everything there is about shells the problem is they don't understand that there's so much else out there so they have high confidence but low experience and with a high confidence low experience you're up at Mount stupid until some senior person goes and goes well yeah but you actually routed that through your local box here so your VPN ting and then you're coming back to your box then you're going out to Amazon what the hell and so you know there's that recognition of oh my god there's other ways to do this oh my god I didn't know about SSH or I didn't know I could do port forwarding or I didn't know I could

bounce it off of some web socket oh and what happens is they go down to that valley of despair because they now know there's so much more out there they don't know and many people spend a lot of time in that valley of despair thinking about the things that they don't know eventually what happens is you've become more comfortable with the things that you don't know maybe you start tackling them maybe you make yourself a list maybe you make yourself some strategy to overcome that you get learning you you do some CTS whatever it is to meet your goals and you get to the plateau of stead of sustainability with impostor feelings it looks a little

different we still have that mount stupid we still have that valley of despair but getting ourselves out of that valley of despair is really hard and takes a lot longer because every step every success we have every success we have we don't attribute to something that we did so it's like no I didn't do that now the team and the team was integral in that I I just found this little thing here and and they did all the hard work so you stay in that that valley of despair and so our rise out of it is much slower getting back to our perception of things perception is extremely important when you're talking about imposter feelings

on the left-hand side this is how a person with impostor feeling feels about themselves when compared to other people I know just this little bit but everybody else here in the room you all know more than me about all this stuff so so what do I have to contribute I see this a lot I work with a group Nova hackers any of the you in the house yeah thank you so it's a local group a local hacker group if you're local to DC area and you want to travel out to Virginia once a month Nova hackers is a great very welcoming group of InfoSec people and we go to these meetings and new people will come to the meetings that we

welcome them with open arms and we say hey once in the next couple meetings we're gonna need you to stand up and present something because we run as a community we want your input and every single time at all I don't have anything to contribute on I'm new to InfoSec I I mean you all know so much more oh my god is that moving so there and people do this over and over again and what we have to realize is that everybody has something to contribute you know more than me about putting a car together or hacking your car or reprogramming a Raspberry Pi to control your TV or about jQuery or whatever everybody knows

something that other people don't and so the diagram on the right is more like what reality is hey you might be new to InfoSec but if you're right right out of college I guarantee you no more Java than I do that's okay teach us about that because everything that we learn makes ourselves grow this wouldn't be a psychological type of talk if we didn't have some kind of a cycle and when Impa in impostor syndrome or impostor feelings we do have a cycle in fact we have two cycles the simple cycle will start by the yeah the gold star on the bottom the oh I have a new project to do and that creates a little

bit of stress but then you start talking to yourself like okay I got to do this talking in front of hundreds of people I can do this no it's gonna fail they're gonna throw stuff at me they're gonna it's gonna be terrible but you put in the work and you do the talk where you work on that project or you write the code or whatever and it's not a disaster and you realize hey this isn't this definitely doesn't suck and then you have to do it again you're like oh I have to do it again this is the simple version the more complicated version is someone like this and this I did give this talk a version of this talk earlier

in the year at b-sides Nova and this has some extra stuff in it so stick with me here but this when I talked at besides Nova really it hit home for a lot of people that that saw the talk and if we started the achievement related task in the upper left that's what most things happened so whether it's something at home where your spouse says hey I need you to repair this toaster or something like that you're like oh what if I you know what if I don't or at work or in with your kids or whatever it happens to be you have some type of task now that creates the anxiety self-doubt and worry and that negative self-talk that

we people that that have impostor syndrome we feel so often I can talk myself out of doing anything I really can't I'm I'm an expert at it or I'm a fraud at it and you can you choose um so what happens is is once we've tackled they're like oh crap I guess I got to do this then we either do one of two things and sometimes we do them both we either procrastinate we go well I still have like 12 hours to work on those slides for that talk tomorrow I I can do it it's only an hour I can do it and then you get to the point where you're like oh crap and you create that

stress and and you go ahead and you make the slides and you just pray that they're gonna work I actually didn't do that for this but you pray that they're gonna work and it does work the presentations of the CEO works well you get the contract you've got the job your task succeeded and what do you do you tribute it to the luck ah you know it's just lucky I had the right they the right images on Google I put in there that really connected with the audience it wasn't me it wasn't anything that I did and then that feeds into the red box over there now you feel like a fraud because you feel like it wasn't you that did the

work or the other thing that happened if you don't procrastinate you overwork it you over prepare and you will work on that project you're only giving a one-hour talk or whatever it happens to be but you will work on it for 40 and 50 and 60 hours because you want it to be perfect it does work and then you attribute these success at the talk or the whatever it is that you're doing to that over preparation so next time what do you do you over prepare more than the last time so now that one-hour talk instead of taking 40 hours your time it takes in a hundred hours of your time or something you're really tweaking

everything from the font shape and size and who do I use the tallix here or not no bold oh this Comic Sans okay anymore no I think it's passe you know you're making these these decisions and it all feeds into the perceived fraudulence now with impostor syndrome we have a fear to succeed because that means that people will ask us to do more things which creates more stress and makes us feel more like a straw fraud but if we fail that's even worse because now our strategies for coping with the stress didn't work oh my god now I've got to do it even harder next time I gotta learn to code even better or whatever it is we

have that negative self-talk peace that constant little voice inside our heads that says no you can't do this or really what made you think that you could write this in Python 3 versus Python 2 or whatever it is the thing that talks me out of it the thing that makes me go hey you know what I I know I need to be working on these slides but I could also put something together with a Raspberry Pi yeah that would be fun and go do something else to distract myself and set myself up for failure with people with impostor feelings we also see them fail to try and fail to apply - this is especially true there was a

study done with women why aren't women applying for these types of jobs and the reason is is that they were afraid of the scrutiny of people looking at their resumes and go no you're not good enough they didn't even want to apply they didn't want to try and with imposter feelings you don't want that stress of being rejected you don't want that stress of what if I what if that do get an interview that I have to go in there and what if during the interview process they asked me something I don't know and they might say I'm a fraud reinforcing in fact there's a failure to try when there's public scrutiny what is public

scrutiny well what do we do in our industry here right in our industry we're like hey you know what if you want to be a part of cybersecurity or information security take part in the conversation go on this public social media platform just tweet to the whole world it's okay org if you want go ahead and use another medium to talk about things out in public where other people can criticize your ideas now some slack groups and some Twitter people they are amazingly supportive and righteous speech people but there are people out there that will cut you down that'll call you a fraud even though you're not and reinforce that those bad feelings you know what we also do when

people write code instead of celebrating their code we say hey take your cup put it out on github let me comment on it or if you have a great idea about something like man that that'd be a great talk at a at a at a small conference why don't you come out to b-sides Las Vegas we only have 3,000 people that can look at your stuff at this point you might be asking yourself you know do I have impostor feelings well you might if you can answer yes to these two questions do you feel like a fraud sometimes you feel like somebody's gonna find out that you're not really as talented or as capable as you thought

and are you unable to internalize success when somebody says you know what you did a great job there that was amazing how you put those PowerPoint slides together and you really saved my ass no you know it's just something I do it's no problem are you unable to internalize those assassins now imposter feelings they come in all different shapes and sizes so whereas today you may not be you know stressed out and really feeling like a fraud tomorrow in a different situation you might be debilitated you might feel like you don't even want to send in that cfp response to take your good idea and talk about it at the next conference that's okay there's actually some psychological

tests that are out there some more tests that are that are more psychological basis this goop I'm not here to like deliver malware to your browsers or anything it's perfectly safe um it's Google of course it's safe right so this this URL here is for a link to dr. Clancy's wet or dr. Clancy's web site she has an online survey 20 questions and right then and there you'll see as you start answering them you'll see that you'll either be you know to one side of probably not imposter feelings to the other and she has a great scoring system at the end to help you understand yeah you know this is your you're probably feeling some

moderate feelings or intense or what-have-you the point of me standing up here is not to to get myself you know to throw myself out there but I want to make sure that you know if there's anybody out here that feels is if there's anybody online that's watching this you're not alone there's lots of us that have imposter feelings but the thing about it is is if I have imposter feelings but one thing I'm not going to do is stand up in front of a group of people and go hey I feel like a fraud please confirm that I'm a fraud it's kind of you know it's kind of self-defeating there so I suffer in silence I keep it inside myself and I

whisper it to myself right don't try I don't tell people but I'm here to tell you you can work to overcome impostor feelings and I say work to overcome because it's a constant struggle or it may be a constant struggle with you as long as you can look at what you do from an outside perspective where you have a trusted confidant that says hey you know what I see you're procrastinating there my spouse does this a lot to me and I appreciate your point but I appreciate her for it hey I see that you're working on that project should you be focusing on your slides might this be you know some feelings of anxiety that you're

having well yes and shut up nice but you need to start identifying your feelings you need to start recognizing yourself I'm doing this because I'm scared I'm doing this because I'm going to feel like a fraud and I need to move past it one way to move past it in case you have been wondering the whole talk is he actually gonna talk about how to move past this yeah you need to talk about it that's hard talk about it to yourself in front of the mirror talk about it in front of your webcam so you can record your journey as you move through it find a friend a spouse a pet pets are awesome right how many scat and how many

people's cats judge that okay not cats how many people's dogs judge that no dogs are awesome right you can talk to your dog all day about feeling stressed out about feeling these things find somebody that you can talk to about it and that you really trust I'm sorry one thing that I'll ask you to do stop looking up and look down when I was at Derby con I was looking at Chris Gates I looking at HD more I was looking at Rafi Mudge I was looking at these people who are Hoover people and they're great people and they have uber technical skills but just because they have uber skills doesn't mean that my skills my

talents are any less valuable so stop looking at where you want to go and look at the path that you've traveled because in that path you've traveled you'll be able to see based upon your achievements based upon their projects and the progress that you've made that you are somebody that's got cred you are somebody that has skills and talent but you gotta track your achievements because if you don't then your mind is left to figure out that and when you are having those impostor feelings if you have those impostor feelings or if your colleague has any posture feelings the last thing you're going to be able to do is go yeah I remember the time when I

had success and it wasn't no you're not going to do that so put those trophies on the wall put those those talk near the whatever it is that makes you remember what you did that made you feel good make sure you note that down don't don't just track your achievements you need to start owning your achievements and start saying yeah I did that I made that Python I made that raspberry pie do this I did awesome at that project at work that was me until you do that it's gonna be much harder but you know what if you do nothing else I want you to do me a favor and take these words out of

your vocabulary these are words that minimize your efforts and reinforce in your head that you know it's just a little thing that you did don't say well I just or I only did that they're going to minimize your effort stop saying them see what happens this one's really hard for me practice accepting compliments for the longest time I was like mr. Teflon I would stand up here with my shield out you know like Captain America people would come up to me and say hey you know you wrote that Python program on whatever on looking at untapped profiles that was really cool that helped me in this investigation or something like that thanks and I'm like

that wasn't me that was the community that did it and their compliments would just bounce off my shields and I wouldn't allow it to come in and hit me allow them to penetrate your defenses thank you I appreciate that I'm glad that it worked for you I'm learning how to do that this is a tough one you're perfectionist yeah remember how I talked in that cycle about perfectionism being kind of a corollary of this of impostor feelings yeah if you're a perfectionist you need to work until something is good enough I was up last night I think this talk is a 50 minute talk and I have 76 slides and I looked at my wife last

night I'm like 76 slides is that enough and she said that's way too much of like all right I should do more than right the fonts wrong that I was really figure out a point when it's good enough and stop you can always make it better later version 2 version 3 and if you are somebody that constantly works on something you are somebody that can't let it go set a timer set a deadline for yourself on a project or whatever hey I'm only gonna work on it until this date then I'm done and I have to stick to that because otherwise you'll start tinkering I used to work as a volunteer early in my life

I worked as a volunteer in an emergency room and I was just one of those people that got the warm blankets out for the victims when they came in and and kind of helped and go and get things for for the doctors that were doing the real work and one day a kid came in and he had been bitten by a dog in her cheek and so it was it was really bad and I'm sitting there and I got her blanket or whatever and and the plastic surgeon who's stitching up her face bore her he said you know Micah I'll let you in on this secret the enemy of good is better there's like oh yeah well thank you man

but it didn't hit me until later on in my life that you can actually get something to a great state and be fine with it without trying to tinker it and make it that last bit better figure out where you're good enough is or where your customer is good enough is or where your family's good enough is and strive for that instead of perfection realize that this is if you're somebody that has impostor feelings or has had them it'll take time it might be a lifelong journey um I know that you know I've since 2012 this is something that keeps coming up in my my life over and over again and it's hard in fact when I was doing some

research for this talk I did some googling as we normally do and I came up with this amazing talk by Nicolas means now here I'd been accepted so I think besides ANOVA to give a 25-minute talk on impostor feelings and I'm listening - Nicholas's means Nicolas means is 30-minute railsconf talk on impostor feelings my holy this is exactly the talk that I was going to give people are gonna think I'm a fraud they're gonna think that I stole from Nicolas what am I gonna do I've already committed but it was it was tough it's an excellent talk it really is Nicolas brings up one point that I'd like to leave you with in his talk he

mentions that this is something that that if you have impostor feelings you may need to work with them for a long time and you might not ever see yourself as not an impostor but what he said is at least you can be a high functioning impostor [Music] that's what I strive to be so if you have any questions or comments on this is a link to my website web reach or calm I have a post there about impostor feelings I have links to some of the other versions of this talk and I'll link to this talk once it's posted online if you would rather not shout out a question because you're feeling like you want some more private talk time

there's my twitter handle you can come up here and give me a card in email address whatever and we can carry on the conversation offline and I'm happy to talk to anybody about about this or just anything so thank you very much and come up and talk to me

does anybody have any questions they want to shout out yes sir how do you learn to accept compliments very slowly is what I'm finding what I like to do is when somebody does give me a compliment it depends on whether it's praise or really something that's a compliment and there's a difference if I said to you good job on that that's kind of praised because you don't know what specifically you did or wrote or or said that really made them feel good or or whatever so what I try to do is I'll ask well hey you know you you liked what that what I did what I said what I wrote what was it in particular give me a detail about

about what it was so that I can keep doing that I can do that for other people so I like having the getting details about what what actually was what I was complimented on other questions okay well you're free to go home thank you thank you everybody thank you