Suzanne Mercier - Sunday, March 21, 2010
At the end of last week, I was working with a women who has a very successful business. She is an expert in her area and has around 20 staff reporting to her. Collaboration is part of the way she likes to work and in that vein, she was seeking to work with another expert in the same area as her. When it came down to working together, though, they had quite different approaches and, it seemed, different values. My client told me that the other women was so certain and so assertive with it that her own response was to back down. She felt uncertain about her own knowledge and experience, even though she'd been a specialist in this particular area far longer than the other woman.
It really got me thinking about the role the imposter syndrome played in this particular scenario. My client has the tendency to feel she's not good enough, even though she has more than 20 years experience in this particular area. Part of the way we play out the imposter syndrome is that we judge something to be right and wrong, black and white. In other words, we think in a digital manner: off / on. Because each of us individually perceives the world through our own unique combination of filters - values, attitudes and beliefs all of which result from past experiences, decisions, needs and so on - we all see the world and interpret situations we experience quite differently. When we accept that fact, it becomes difficult for us to hold the view that one of us is right and one of us is wrong. We realise that there are so many versions of reality. What we can then do is to become curious about how someone else perceives a particular situation and maybe we can learn something; expand our own wisdom.
In my client's situation, she saw the other woman as right and judged herself to be wrong which threw her into feelings of imposterhood. The other woman's certainty triggered her own uncertainty. Not a very resourceful space to operate from.
What do you think? I'd love to hear.
All the very best
Suzanne
Comments
In the case of your friend, I think the perception of 'imposterhood' came more as a result of thinking that there were other aspects of the discipline that she didn't know, rather than from thinking the other person was 'right' and she was 'wrong'.
Then again, without more context of the situation, perhaps you are right, and I am wrong.
:-)