TL;DR One technique, which helps me manage my imposter syndrome, is writing down evidence! Find/decide what ‘good’ looks like and regularly put evidence against it. E.g. every week write bullet points against your competency/skills matrix at work and over time the black-and-white factual evidence speaks for itself. How can you argue against facts?!

Like many others I speak to in tech (and other fields) I have struggled with imposter syndrome massively at different points in my career (and life in general). I think this is all too common in software because there is no checklist/certificate/exam that proves that you are, in a binary fashion, ‘good enough’, … which is at odds with other professions (you either are or aren’t a qualified Doctor, or a chartered Accountant etc).

At times, with other inter-related things, imposter syndrome has compounded with other challenges of life and really hampered my mental health and happiness as a human. I was in a tough spot (‘a real pickle’ as my late Nan would have said) a while ago and, alongside some other reasons, I was really struggling with my mental health and sense of worth. Desperate to find a technique to get a handle on it, I read Dr Jessamy Hibbard’s book and the main takeaway for me was all about cold, hard, evidence leads proof!.

For life in general, I found the exercise of ‘write down literally everything you have ever achieved in life’ to be really cathartic. This means every exam passed, saving for holidays, having the courage to try a new sport, painting a room in your house … everything! As per the suggestions, I did this over several days and weeks as different thoughts kept coming to me. That was a really useful reflective exercise.

For work specifically, the technique I use (which is similar to the above) is to evidence against our organisation’s competency framework. We have a skills matrix for all different levels of engineering and the behaviours expected at each level (as do most companies, … as should all companies, I believe). At the end of each week I spend 15 minutes writing evidence against each of the areas of the framework. Just a few bullet points each week. This is a private process and tool for me to reflect on, I don’t share it (although I wouldn’t have any problem sharing it).

The effect: looking back over a few months I can see looooooads of evidence of me doing different parts of the job across multiple weeks. Right in front of my eyes.

Surely if I am doing and achieving all of this across all areas of the ‘senior engineer’ job spec, … that means I am doing what a senior engineer would be expected to do … therefore I am a senior engineer! This helps quieten the voices in my head.

The other bonus of this is that it makes it easier to identify where I have ‘evidence gaps’ that I can use to tailor individual quarterly goals, and it’s also super useful for me to reflect on at the end of each quarter.

Conclusion

I hope you found this useful. How do you manage imposter syndrome? Feel free to message me on LinkedIn :)