Coping with Imposter Syndrome

As I mentioned in my Sick Not Weak talk, I experience a lot of difficulty dealing with Imposter Syndrome. Ironically, the wonderful reception I received from co-workers, friends, family and even strangers was a trigger for a huge case of it! I couldn't help feeling that I didn't really deserve the praise being thrown my way.

That aside, this past week I ran face first into a veritable snake pit of imposter syndrome - the self-assessment part of our bi-annual reviews.

As part of it, I had to explain all the wonderful things I did since my last review and how that has positively affected the company. I essentially had to brag about myself, and if you've ever experienced imposter syndrome you'll know that's about as easy to do as chewing broken glass. So, I started and stopped the process several times. I felt like I should just say, "Why did you even hire me?!".

Finally, on deadline day (of course), while in the shower I was wondering what to write. After some thought and some arguing with myself, I actually said out loud in the shower, "I did X and it really helped with Y, damn it!" Then I did it again... "I did A and it really helped with B, damn it!". In a few seconds I came up with three or four things I could put in the "accomplishments" section.

I finished my shower, got dressed and went right to my computer to enter what I had thought of. I started to think of all the sentences I could finish with ", damn it!", while pounding an imaginary fist on the table. The result was a good number of accomplishments that I was confident made positive contributions to the company.

Those things spawned thoughts about what I needed to write in other parts of the assessment, and completing it took about 20-30 minutes. That was after feeling blocked for a number of weeks.

So, if you're having a tough time coming up with good things that you've done, try that little trick. Try thinking of all the sentences about what you did, ending them with ", damn it!!".  This could be for self-assessments like mine was, for your resume, when prepping for an interview, and probably many other areas way beyond just your job.

If you do use it, please let me know how well (or not) it worked for you.

Speed Wobble

We've all had them. That shopping cart with the wobbly wheel. An unbalanced wheel, perhaps some loose bearings or dirt in the mechanism, and you have the wheel that wobbles as soon as you reach walking pace. If you're not in a hurry, it's not that big a deal. The wobble only happens when you reach a certain speed, i.e. when you are in a hurry, creating noise and slowing you down because you simply can't make the cart go any faster.

As I mentioned in the video of my Sick, Not Weak talk, my older sister suffers from bipolar disorder. My mother thinks that it's possible that my father did as well, though to a lesser degree. His aunt was hospitalized a number of times while suffering from manic depression, as it was known then. So, when I finally came to terms with the fact that I was suffering from depression, I seriously wondered if I was bipolar as well.

When I discussed it with my doctor and therapist, they didn't believe so mainly because I didn't have the traditional manic episodes. I haven't had those times where I stayed up for days doing a bazillion things. I didn't have the messianic feelings, like I was the Chosen One and had a mission to complete. So, I thought that I was dealing with 'just' depression and generalized anxiety disorder.

A recent incident, though, has me wondering.

I absolutely do have cycles where I'm down and ones where I'm more up. Actually, I think all people do and the 'bipolar' aspect simply means that you experience extremes of those. In this case, I had been down but I could feel myself coming back up. My energy was building and my mood was improving.

What happened next was intriguing. I've been making a point to pay attention to how I'm feeling and as I started to come up I noticed that I had a flood of ideas. A bunch about work, a bunch about home, a bunch of writing ideas, etc. There were so many ideas, I had no idea where to start! I actually felt overwhelmed by this explosion of thoughts in my mind.

I had a mental version of speed wobble!

As I thought about the phenomenon, I realized that it was something that I had experienced many times before. I can look at my blogging patterns and see peaks and valleys. What readers of my blog don't see, though, are all sorts of posts that I started or jotted down notes, but never completed. At home there are partially completed projects, although I've long coped with that by only taking on smaller things.

So, this last left me to wonder if perhaps I actually do suffer from bipolar disorder, but the manifestation of the mania results in an overload in my brain that prevents me from moving a whole lot faster on things that I do even when I'm down. It's not that I'm trying to be diagnosed as bipolar, but more that I find it interesting that I have this state, and that it might help me create some better coping mechanisms.