My pal is facing redundancy, and he’s around the same age as me, in his fifties, and he will be, depending on his financial situation, looking for a new opportunity (employment). It’s a difficult stage of life when it comes to job seeking if you do what we do. If we were hairdressers or bricklayers it wouldn’t matter, because those roles change slowly over time. The fundamentals of IT remain the same, but the technology rapidly changes and changes greatly in a short period. For My pal and I we are facing a twilight of our abilities simply because we have both concentrated on the job in hand and not pushed forward in educating ourselves on what has emerged.
Imposter syndrome is the term for when you first change jobs and in your ignorance come to surmise quickly that everyone in your new employment place knows what they are doing and is exhibiting expertise. You feel both daunted and detached, developing early thoughts that you’ll never master the work and get up to speed with these individuals you may have now put above you in your intellectual thinking.
The problem is that this is nearly always a falsehood, a mistake of cognition. Think back to places you worked for a while, examine your estimation of the persons you worked with at that time. Did you think, once you had gotten to know these folks and worked with them, that they knew what they were doing and were experts? I think the answer is “no”, it’s more likely that they have faced all the slings and arrows of mistakes and bad fortune that you remember in your career, and nobody is actually going to expect that your history of accumulated skills will be a perfect fit for your new role. You’re just going to have to learn and they are going to have to give you time.
We are all imposters, the first time you walk into the pool hall or start the course, it doesn’t matter because one has to start somewhere. I’m minded of the book Feel the fear and do it anyway written by Susan Jeffers, where she asks people to acknowledge that they have fears but encourages them to be participants anyway, to not allow anxiousness to debilitate their life and create barriers to experience. One of the stages of Rogerian therapy is to become open to new experiences, to get past fixed perspectives. I have personally suffered from anxieties around sporting performances and work place expectations, and I feel like an imposter a lot of the time regardless of achieving much and being well thought of in my previous roles for the most part. So I can know the best path, that I should try to participate, but sometimes not be able to walk it.
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