Imposter Syndrome, self confidence & fake it til you make it.

Do you ever look around you and just think… how did I get here? I don’t think I deserve this.

I do, all the time!

I remember a blogging friend telling me about Imposter Syndrome some time ago, but it never really resonated with me in the way it does now. Never really explained how I was feeling – apart from the fact that I was a gutsy young twenty year old, I really always had this surety about myself. It wasn’t so much arrogance, or maybe it was, but whatever it was I had an internal affirmation that I was going places, I deserved the things that came my way, the successes I had because I worked hard. I was going to be the top of whatever game I chose, I was going to make like Beyoncé and run this world (complete with backing dancers).

As I’ve got older, once the kids arrived, the mortgage became a reality and I had a few knock backs under my belt, I started with this ever creeping doubt that perhaps, just perhaps, I wasn’t destined for whatever great conquests my younger self was so determined to make. I wasn’t destined for great things, and even if I was… maybe I didn’t deserve them.

People have often said to me “gosh I admire your confidence!” But those that really know me will know that confidence is a bit of smoke and mirrors. I have to swat butterflies in my stomach and I’m permanently carrying around bug spray to get them to relinquish the hold that they seem to have set up. It’s not a matter of confidence, more a matter of learning how to control your nervous energy and how to turn it into something else. Something that mirrors, or perhaps nods to, confidence. Smoke and mirrors.

Before Xmas I signed with a management company to help me grow Toby&Roo, and I remember saying to my husband as I was setting off for the train, “I don’t get why they want me? I think they made a mistake. Or maybe they tried all the big people and I’m the bottom of the pile.” Adam just rolled his eyes and told me, supportive as ever, that it’s because I’m good at what I do and I work really hard. I’m still waiting most days for them to decide they made a mistake – or for a client to suddenly declare that they don’t really want to work with me anymore because someone bigger and better came along. You’d never know it to look at me, I am a firm believer in the principal of “fake it till you make it” when it comes to confidence. If you can’t be confident in yourself then will people be confident in you? Probably not… so confidence is something that I do my best to sprinkle like confetti and hope that one day I *actually* really feel confident in my abilities.

I’m not sure why it is that we do this, or more I do this – assuming that someone out there will be reading this going YES! This is meeeee. Imposter syndrome is a well documented thing, something that women especially suffer with. Something that plagues us both professionally and personally, but especially as we become more successful in careers. From women documenting boardroom moments where they have internally questioned if they can possibly do the job, to mothers at playgroups just not really feeling like they belong because they aren’t quite cool enough or maternal enough. It goes beyond finding one’s tribe and is inextricably linked with the way that we are force fed a diet of modesty and self critique from a young age.

On paper Toby&Roo has done so well, but when I’m in a room full of other social media bods, I am always questioning why I have been chosen. Why am I there with these other people? I often have people laugh and tell me that I’m just being humble when I say “Ohh no, I’m nothing special” when people approach me at conferences or out and about, but I genuinely feel that way, and I think I always will.