In Silicon Valley, there is a movement of genteel outrage and increasingly organized action growing around the issue of diversity in tech (or more accurately, the lack thereof).
Last year, Soledad O’Brien provoked much dialogue with a segment of her Black in America docu-series devoted to the dearth of African-American tech entrepreneurs. More recently, the New York Times chimed in with a smart and hopeful piece on the successes that are being
made in another tech-and-diversity issue: the decreasing numbers of women who code.
The primary subject of the piece, Dr. Maria Klawe, is a female mathematician/computer scientist who is using her role as the President of California’s Harvey Mudd College to transform the messaging, style and substance of entry-level programming coursework in a successful campaign to halt and reverse the decline in female students electing to major in computer science. Dr. Klawe’s innovations have been carefully watched by schools nationwide, and have now inspired similar rethinks of tech coursework at my own alma mater, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, among other schools.
The article was riddled with smart insights from Dr. Klawe, her husband (also a mathematician and professor), students and academics, focused on the issues around women, programming and academia. But the closing graph of the piece contained a takeaway from Klawe with far broader applications and implications for anyone who has ever wanted to try something new in their career, in their business or in their life:
In spite of unequivocal evidence to the contrary, Dr. Klawe still has moments when she is convinced she is an imposter.
“If you’re constantly pushing yourself, and putting yourself in new environments, you’ll feel it over and over again,”she said. “So the only really important thing is not to let it stop you.”
This struck me as a profound and powerful manifestation of the ‘Growing Pains’ phenomenon. If you choose to make moves to play your biggest game in this life, those very moves by definition signal the end of the world as you know it. And in your new career, your new life, your new adventures, you will not feel the comfort level of an expert at first.
In fact,
- the higher the standards you like to set for yourself,
- the more you are used to being an expert
- the more self critical and type-A you are naturally inclined to be,
the higher the chance that you will experience this ‘Imposter Syndrome’ Klawe so vividly describes.
And the bigger the leap you’re trying to make, the worse your Imposter Syndrome symptoms are likely to be. When I moved from being a big fish superstar student in the small pond of my hometown university, to a small fish in the massive, prestigious pond that was the UC Berkeley School of Law, I had a case of Imposter Syndrome so bad that I had myself convinced that I’d simply bamboozled my whole hometown, my entire life, into thinking I was super smart – until I got my first quarter’s marks, that is. (They were good.)
A friend of mine who has grown a tiny business into a very, successful and profitable one for her industry was recently asked to speak to fledgling business owners and actually laughed at the idea she could be an expert on any topic – until she delivered the talk and was nearly mobbed by the grateful, hungry-for-more audience afterwards.
Do you want to make a change? Is it time to move to the next level of possibility? Well, friend, Imposter Syndrome is par for that course. It’s just a growing pain.
So, what’s to be done about it?
Follow Klawe’s advice - and her example.
Know that it’s coming, anticipate it, feel it – even lean into it and sit with it for awhile, instead of fighting it - it will go away faster that way. But approach your new frontier with a clear plan of action, and then absolutely refuse to be moved, deterred, slowed down or stopped by any Imposter Syndrome symptoms that come.
In fact, do the opposite – build a note into your roadmap that reminds you that Imposter Syndrome symptoms are a signpost that you’re moving in the right direction: into a new, expansive realm of possibility.
