I'm Not A Fraud, I Promise! Navigating Imposter Syndrome As An Industry Newcomer - Chrissi Robertson

uh so i'm just gonna open with this image which is basically my favorite image at the moment because it really really sums up my mental state and i'm not just talking about me preparing this talk until about five minutes ago um credit to ragsac because she told me like put put memes in the talk put memes in the talk put memes in the talk and i was like do i want to and that was the only appropriate one i think um so to start off with i just want to say something i'm not a fraud i promise i'm just navigating imposter syndrome as an industry newcomer but that's all well and good until you know who i am

so i'm most often known as fruit or fruit ware my actual name is chrissy robertson i'm a software engineer at a portuguese software house called critical software and if you follow me on twitter you've probably seen me declare my love for them far too often um i'm also a moderator for the mini hats club and um it's been just over a year now and that's still really weird because it feels like i joined it last week and when i finally wander into security i'm hoping to be involved with malware analysis and incident response i also really like hippos and the colour pink and i'm pretty sure if i had a choice i would be a hippo

because as the meme says the female hippopotamus will do almost anything when motivated by food um oh yeah i'm also really dumb um so this slide is showing many of the times that i've called myself done in the 18 months before i started talk making this talk and i've called myself done a million more times since the reason i'm saying this is obviously because imposter syndrome um but before i really get into the meat of the talk i just want to give a quick disclaimer i'm not a mental health professional i've never had any qualifications with mental health treatment diagnosis or practice though i do have experience with mental health issues as i'm sure many others do

um i studied psychology for a bit but that doesn't really count probably and um like any suggestion with mental health what works for me might not work for you what works for you might not work for the person sitting next to you and what works for the person sitting next to you might not work for me um and as i said i'm not a mental health professional and this isn't really a technical talk i'm really sorry it's basically psychology i'm not that sorry so um hands up if any of you guys have ever felt like any of these statements on the screen me too um so these are a lot of statements that have been linked with the idea

of imposter syndrome um and it's something that i wanted to kind of gauge and be a bit interactive especially once i realized i was after lunch um and i also wanted to share this tweet that i saw a couple of weeks ago on facebook that says meta imposter syndrome when you know a lot of people have imposter syndrome but you've witnessed how competent they are they're not like you the real imposter and the reason i wanted to share that is because especially last year there was a lot of people talking about imposter syndrome on twitter and the two very significant examples that stuck out to me were stuart peck who is one of the owners of

the many hats club and hakka fantastic who runs my hacker house and [Music] these two people are very prominent they're very established they're very well deserving of the positions that they're in um and while it's very important that people in those positions are talking about how they have imposter syndrome it kind of makes people in my position where i've not even started my security career yet to kind of think what chance do i have um [Music] but i think the important question is what is imposter syndrome uh so it's known by a lot of things imposter syndrome seems to be the more common one these days uh but it's also known as the impostor phenomenon imposterism

fraud syndrome and the imposter experience its easiest definition is feeling like a fraud feeling like you're going to be found out any second now um but the official definition is that it's a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts the accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud essentially imposter syndrome is being convinced that you're a fraud and that you don't deserve what you've achieved and that anything you have achieved is either the result of luck or deception or sometimes both um the concept was originally coined in 1978 by dr pauline r clance and dr suzanne a eins and early research focused on a prevalence in high achieving women but originally

sorry not originally but more recently it's been found that there's no real gender bias but that there is essentially a reaction to stimuli and events it's not considered a mental disorder but an experience because it's not listed within the dsm and the icd which are two diagnostic manuals used for psychological disorders and it may be accompanied by anxiety and depression it has a comorbidity basically they're best friends and they run down the streets skipping hands um it's estimated that about 70 of individuals will experience imposter syndrome at least once in their lives and it can often be a result of a new setting such as an academic setting a professional setting something like this and it's really not uncommon for

students and the feelings of guilt involved with imposter syndrome feed a fear of success [Music] there are there's a few common ideas and statements in individuals experiencing imposter syndrome um so some people with imposter syndrome may write off their success as a result of the good education they were able to receive and many believe that it's not right or fair to them to be in a better position than a friend or someone that they love and some have also stated that in their childhood they were referred to as the smart one the talented one the responsible one the sensitive one the good one or even our favorite and in 1985 clance defi went further into

the research and defined a scale to measure characteristics of imposter syndrome so she talked about things like the imposter cycle the need to feel special or be the best uh kind of competitive nature if you will characteristics of superman or superwoman but i didn't really find anything that really defined that much further so i'm not entirely sure what they mean and um a fear of failure a denial of ability hi i'm dumb and discounting praise so like refusing compliments not accepting them not believing them and also feeling fear and guilt about success [Music] she determined uh she said that it determines if characteristics of fear are present and to what extent so there were three characteristics of

fear that she really looked at so a fear of evaluation a fear of not contin being able to continue the success and if fear is of not being as capable as others so comparing yourself clance also noted that the characteristics may vary between individuals and that she felt only two of the six things in the imposter scale had to be present to suggest that an individual suffers from imposter syndrome um so i wanted to talk about the impostor cycle especially because this really really feeds into imposter syndrome constantly and i'm going to be honest i did this exact thing when doing this talk um so clients proposed that when an achievement based task is given

to someone suffering from imposter syndrome they'll go in one of two ways they'll either over prepare in which case when they succeed they'll write it off as a result of hard work and as such they'll have no it'll have no effect on the individual's personal success perception of success and they'll discount positive feedback or they'll procrastinate and then towards the deadline they'll make a frantic effort to complete the job and they'll have a brief period of accomplishment and feeling of relief before they start writing it off as luck and then again there's no effect on the individual's perception of personal success and any positive feedback is discounted and then as another task comes in the cycle

continues and this cycle feeds imposter syndrome every cycle basically causes an accumulation of perceived fraudulence oh this was lucky especially if the individual tends to go more towards the procrastination side than the overpreparation side increased self-doubt depression and anxiety i'm sorry and the any increased success um would lead to an intensification of feeling like a fraud and the experience would cause an individual to be haunted by their perceived lack of ability essentially they continue to believe they will be exposed and that belief keeps the cycle moving but fruit what do what do if i have imposter syndrome what do if i'm following this cycle what do well the short answer is therapy the long answer

uh group therapy with the side order of cognitive behavioral therapy in the 1978 paper produced by clanson eims they proposed that a therapeutic approach was the best approach to manage imposter syndrome and they proposed a group setting was best as that was what they used was their study participants and they saw that it came to a realization in the participants that they were not alone in their feelings of being afraid of not belonging academically professionally with their achievements whatever happened the study participants were given homework assignments between sessions such as recounting all of the people that they felt they had deceived and what they felt they had done to deceive those people and writing down any positive feedback

they received between sessions to then discuss why the positive feedback had been given and what about it made them perceive it negatively these sessions also included cognitive behavioral therapy which if you're not familiar is challenging negative thoughts and reframing them to be positive it's also used with depression and other self-doubt and self-destructive disorders and so for example i might fail this exam is challenged to become i will do well on this exam it's quite difficult to do especially on your own because it involves being very mindful and aware of your thought processes and being able to catch the negative thoughts and stop them and change them before they complete themselves [Music] clanton nimes found that extracting

self-doubt helped eliminate imposterism so essentially believing in yourself more made you feel like you weren't a fraud which uh i'm sorry for the language but no in 2013 a researcher called queen hong i have no idea if i'm saying that right and looked at intrinsic motivation behind imposter syndrome and she proposed an alternate treatment of affirmations to improve self-worth so again looking at the same idea make yourself like yourself you won't think you're a fraud so she proposed a specific examples in her paper and i'm thinking these are probably examples that she was using herself and so for example i want to receive that degree i won't give up and have i have too much

pride to walk away if i can do this i will be able to help others in the future and work with people as motivated as i am i know i can do this [Music] she also suggested learning how to be your own person because obviously positive imposterism involves a constant comparison to other people in your industry in your class wherever you are in that stage of life so in learning to become your own person and just challenging yourself to be the better you you kind of break that element of the cycle and she also believed that if you were learned how to believe and accept compliments it would kind of stop the process of discounting

positive feedback allowing it to come into the brain and accepting it and i think it's all well and good talking about the clinical research but i think it's time for my story um so i was a high achieving student in high school my gcses i got 13 a star to c which is very good for example my teacher for french was predicted me for an a my dad told me i wouldn't get an a results day i call him french a star um but at that same time i discovered i had extreme exam anxiety and a part of that came from the expectations my parents had on me i wasn't allowed to fail um i went on to college

and i tried to kind of split between a levels and btec which allowed me to kind of do some coursework do some exams but not all exams and completely destroy myself the college pressured me into doing just exams and just a levels with the phrasing but your grades are so good you should be on a levels yeah but i'm trying not to die um as a result at the end of my first year of a levels they didn't go as well as i wanted them to they i passed everything some of them by the skin of my teeth and it was not great and i wasn't going to be able to get the grades i wanted to go to university

or the universities i wanted so i moved to a b-tech and nearly failed um part of that was because i was had a major depressive episode in second year and i was struggling to do much of anything let's learn coursework and part of that was because the i.t department at my college unfortunately was not particularly great and as a result of the treatment i got in college i swore off i.t completely and anything computer related for that matter i went off and trained to be a chef for a while and i had a trial at a missionary restaurant in chester and very quickly the same thing that caused me problems with exams caused me problems there too

except it evolved into performance anxiety basically i got one thing wrong barely wrong and immediately had a panic attack which you know not great in a kitchen not particularly safe so i realized this isn't going to be safe and i sat myself down and i said what do i find interesting ransomware quite literally that was the only thing i thought ransomware and so i wanted to i.t support to kind of get a basis back into it again and in that time i was studying security i made friends with people in security i went to conferences i joined the many hats club i became a moderator at the mini hats club and and now i'm a software engineer somehow

i don't know how i can't code but okay um but that's impostor syndrome still telling me i can't code somehow i'm a software engineer and it's hard but one thing that i found helped me with impastor syndrome is when someone gives me a compliment towards my work or towards a talk or towards something anything as i smile i say thank you and i nod and the nodding is probably the most important part because nodding subconsciously makes your brain agree with whatever you're nodding to so by nodding over time your brain starts to think yes yes this is true so that's the hope anyway we have yet to see if that's going to work so these are some of the sources i used

um so the two paper two of the papers i looked at the 1978 one by clanson imes and the 2013 one by huang and and also i used wikipedia fairly extensively because despite what my school told me wikipedia is a really good resource um and i wanted to just kind of close it up a bit on this quote i found from maisie williams when she gave a talk at tedx manchester that says trust that you are good enough if there's one thing that i've learned it's that there truly is a place for everyone thank you [Applause]