Imposter Syndrome Yay or Nay - Jude McCorry

when I was asked by Michelle to do this I said to the team um I've been invited to do bides uh and they said no way are you going to stand up in front of a technical audience and talk about cyber security so there is no way I'm talking about cyber security um I am based in Scotland we have got a very small team called the Cyber and fraud Center one of our ex ethical hackers is here um somewhere in the audience and and has got a job in belf so we work um with um ethical hackers but we've got 25 to 27 part-time ethical hackers to do loads of work for us and they're based at abte

University um but as I said I'm not going to talk about cyber security today I'm going to talk about something that really bugged me for the last few years when I heard when people stop themselves from doing things they're taking projects forward or going for the next job and they said I've got imposter syndrome I think I might have a bit of it after the last presentation so if I see you all leaving halfway through you know that I I'm not good enough um hands up for people in the audience who think actually who do say that they have imposter syndrome keep your hands

up interesting so most of the women am I right in the audience have imposter syndrome yeah and about half of the men or maybe even a qu quarter of the men put your hands up again actually yeah less than quarter of them not very many men at all so here we go I thought that impostor syndrome was something that had been invented over the last few years and then everyone jumped in the bandwagon but from looking into the history and psychology of it further it look like looks like it's something like skipping ropes hula hoops Hopscotch that come back into playgrounds Etc every few years so I maybe they haven't come back into playgrounds in a long time but

that's what it used to be when we were kids is somebody bring in a hula hoop and then it was everybody had to get a hula hoop um back in the 1970s two psychologists in the US Pauling Clans and suzan EES were also puzzled by this phenomenon and they came up with the idea of impostor syndrome to explain it Clans and published their classic paper that introduced the world to impostor syndrome in 1978 they interviewed 150 High achieving women I think of those dates and the stats so 1978 150 High achieving women think how hard it would be to get 150 High achieving women in 1978 or actually women who would say that they were high

achieving because even in this day not many women will say I'm a high achieving woman they interviewed the women um despite the tangible and independent evidence of their ability the women consistently played down and generally minimized their accomplishments and attributed their success to luck or to other people over estimating them the phrase impostor syndrome really took off the research was done in the mid 1970s and was a product of his time and just like Abba punk rock and Bay City Rollers the phrase impostor syndrome soon became part of a popular culture it took hold because it offers an interesting straightforward explanation for the feelings of anxiet self-doubt that we all experience when asked to do a

difficult task Clans described imposter syndrome as being a pattern of doubting one's accomplishments and fearing being exposed as a fraud now let's look at the psychology of imposter syndrome imposter syndrome is a specific psychological process it begins when you're given a task you don't feel quite ready for you start to experience feelings of anxiety self-doubt and worry you could respond to these feelings in a number of ways you could become obsessed with the task and over prepare or avoid the task and procrast procrastinate it's like me preparing for things like this when you get the T when you get the task done you experience relief and maybe even a brief feeling of accomplishment this is usually

short-lived because then you start to think about the task and come to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that the outcome had very little to do with the innate ability you might might have or you pick over every little detail of it like when I do an in TV interview it's like an absolute postmortem everybody else is sending me to heex going you did really well I'll watch it I'll look over I said that one word in a big long sentence the wrong that doesn't that means completely the wrong thing and then I'd start looking at my forehead and say I need Botox my 16-year-old daughter tells me Botox is preventative and I'm way past that stage so yeah I

feel rather good about myself after an interview um if I overprepared for the interview then a successful outcome was obviously a result of the overwork rather than my personal ability if I avoided and procrastinated and it all worked out fine the success was down to look and the fact that I had to wing it so whether you or I procrastinate or over prepare any positive feedback is of being a fraud becoming stronger and the corresponding fear of being found out feeding this negative feedback loop has anyone ever felt like that okay men and women so why is the idea of impostor syndrome flawed the actual phrase impostor syndrome is misleading an impostor is a person who pretends to be

someone else to deceive others usually to defraud them the experience of the person with impostor syndrome is the reverse of this in impostor syndrome it's usually other people reassuring the person with impostor syndrome that they are good at their job with the person finding it difficult to believe this and trying to hide their lack of confidence the word syndrome means a set of medical signs and symptoms that occur together and are associated with a particular disease or condition imposter syndrome isn't by any stretch of any imagination a disease psychological or otherwise so those of you who raised your hands to say that you did have imposter syndrome do you still raise your hands to say you've got imposter

syndrome two and the women have got their hands down okay we' still got some work to do on two of you what can you do about the feeling of being an impostor If you experience a loss in confidence in certain situations or with certain people here are a few ideas about what you can do to regain your temporary loss of confidence one edit your story if you're prone to imposter syndrome edit your story to say that most people find difficult situations tough it's normal it's a way of life it's normal to feel like an impostor some of the time however with practice and persistence most people get over it tell yourself that you know from

your own personal experience that when you start something new it's often very difficult but becomes easier with time and practice who here has started a new job in the last say year did you find it easy or difficult but you all found it difficult and you all sat there going somebody's going to catch me out I don't know what I'm doing you're not supposed to know you're not supposed to get a job and know exactly what you're supposed to do secondly we see the world from the inside out people are very surprised when they find out that I'm nervous before events like this TV interviews or even meeting new people always remember that you observe the world and other

people from the inside out when you do anything challenging you'll be aware of what is going on around you however you will also be painfully aware of all your faults your shortcomings and your self-doubt on the other hand you only see other people from the outside you see the face they choose to present present to the world it's easy to see other people as being all confident and yourself as being full of Doubt but that isn't true the next time you're in a situation when you feel like an impostor or feel that you're not good enough remember that you are only aware of your own feelings and not the feelings in the psychological state of

others around you maybe they feel as scared as you third feelings do not equal facts towards the end of his life Albert Einstein said to a friend the exaggerated esteem in which my life work is held makes me very ill at ease I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler so if you sometimes feel like an imposter you're in very good company objectively Albert Einstein was a genius and yet he thought of himself as an involuntary involuntary swindler just because you feel like an impostor it doesn't necess neily follow that you are an impostor when you feel like this take a deep breath and think of some objective evidence that proves that you

are not an impostor look at your CV look at the qualifications you've gained remember that an interview panel appointed you not anybody else you to do the job and chose you over other people people have mentored you people have brought you along people have given you time and advice to help you in your career assess then whether you are really an impostor on this tangible evidence not emotion apply for the job that you only know how to do 70% of because learning is not impostor syndrome you will learn the other 30% I get CVS all the time and I can guarantee you going back to the show of hands in this room the amount of CVS

that I get from Men Who maybe even know how you have like 30% of the skills some people for cyber security jobs there's people who've got telecoms experience and they think they can be an ethical hacker or pentester or Crest accreditation they just ignore that bit and they go and they apply for the job any CVS and also the lack of CVS that we get for women and cyber security because they'll look at the job and they'll go I don't know 100% of this job you know I might get away but 95% I don't want people with 95% of the job that they're going to do I want them to come in I want them to learn and I want them to

learn for the next few years and I know I probably only have people for about five years learning and learning new things and doing different things I don't want people that are going to come in and just do the same thing as they've done in their last job number four aim to be good enough rather than perfect and perfectionists look at me at times and go what do you mean you don't need it to be perfect you we don't we don't need perfectionism in every single thing that we do there will be things that need to be perfect but not everything needs to be perfect the biggest tip on avoiding imposter syndrome is to strive to be good enough

rather than be perfect when I had my first child 19 years ago I thought everything had to be perfect and this was even before social media which I'm lucky now when I look at Instagram you have all these moms who think that you know they have to have the children in the best clothes and you know uh shiny faces and shiny holidays and glass of champagne on a Friday night and stuff I didn't have any of that but I still had something that I had to aim for perfectionism to be a mother probably because I looked at other people I know my own mother wasn't a perfect mother but it wasn't or even like had a perfect

house and I didn't know where it came from what I wanted at the time was I wanted a perfect house how the everything had to be perfect the baby in a perfect routine home-cooked dinners and a few weeks into motherhood my dad said to me there's nothing wrong was staying in your PJs all day and ordering a chippy for tea it was his way of saying loosen the hell up dude and forget about being perfect it took me a while to take this advice but yet again my dad was right Donald winot was a psychoanalyst and a pediatrician who worked in London in the 1950s he found that many mothers who became depressed would say that they

wanted to be the perfect mother mother who didn't experience depression just did their best to look after their children and be good enough wiot concluded the perfectionism leads to depression ultimately Perfection is impossible and being unable to settle for anything less than Perfection will always lead to disappointment you can set yourself an impossible task wincott said we should all just do the best we can with the gifts we have and aim to be good enough rather than them perfect which is good advice for everything in life not just around motherhood so can I ask now for a show of hands from the two guys do you still think you've got imposter syndrome oh my God I'm down to one am I

down to one one and a two oh God I'm usually nil at this time so to wrap things up and we'll forget about these two guys that they still we'll ask again at the end I don't normally do this um my name is Jude Jude Jude for saint for hopeless cases so I've got two of them today to work on so to wrap things up I want to leave you with these thoughts impostor syndrome is a myth because people who suffer with it are not imposters and it's not a medical syndrome or condition impostor syndrome happens when vulnerability inside us becomes triggered by certain context we experience a temporary loss of self-confidence in certain situations or

with certain people that we've put ourselves on a pedestal against impostor syndrome affects women more than men and we know that from today as well for all you men in the audience recognize all of this in your organizations and be supportive impostor Syndrome has its roots in childhood think of all the times that people offered their opinions to us as children on our schoolwork Sports Hobbies or even our manners and behaviors how many times were we told when you said you wanted to be something and they go no you should be something else where I'm from in Bill turbert and Calvin people used to us say I say I want to go to university and people like

you're never going to go to university why would you want to go to university you know you just stay around and work locally but I did remember that we can change the story we tell about ourselves every day every morning when you get up in the morning you think oh my God I can't do this or I can't do that yes you can you done it before and you will do it again and that day you will have something else to think about about when you did it again we experience the world from the inside out we are aware of our own vulnerability but not the vulnerability of others and again for the men in the

audience when you do see women that you work with and they might be in a vulnerable state or they might think they've got impostor syndrome Please be aware that this is what they think feelings do not equal fact just because we feel like an impostor it doesn't make us an impostor we should be learning all the time if we're not learning then we are not living apply for the job you don't know the 30% of just because we are learning doesn't mean we are imposters or not good enough so when you do get the job and you've still got 30% or 40% of that job you're not an impostor you're learning everybody was learning at some

stage AG good is better than perfect you all deserve to hit whatever your own glass ceiling is and everyone's glass ceiling is different just because somebody wants to be something or go somewhere and do something not everybody wants or shares the same things as what they want to achieve and appreciate that and acknowledge it let's all strive for good and also goodness instead of perfection and do it all together thank you very much