How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome - Especially When Inexperienced

And how the immigrant experience can be an enlightening shift in mindset, helping to overcome imposter syndrome and leading to a new perspective on the concept of the "outsider".

When I saw a clip of Martha Stewart responding to how she deals with imposter syndrome by stating, "I don't get that. How else would I have ever made it in business?", it clicked for me. In order to succeed in life, you cannot afford to feel misplaced when you somehow manage to get a seat at the table. But how do we learn to feel worthy of the opportunities in life in the face of inexperience?

The first time I heard about imposter syndrome, I was part of a 12-person cohort during my first internship after graduation. During this placement, we had the privilege of attending masterclasses held by industry professionals, and afterwards, we would discuss what we had learned. The subject of imposter syndrome came up very quickly when someone asked, "How can I hope to find work when there are people with this much experience under their belt?" Painfully legitimate question. Our team coordinator quickly approached the subject with empathy and sensitivity.

“Imposter syndrome” is often used to describe a situation whereby you feel like you do not deserve to be there, as if you aren’t worthy or good enough. You feel like everyone else is much more experienced and skilled than you. By sheer dumb luck, the Gods have selected you to be humiliated in a circumstance you are completely unfit for. An outsider, an imposter. The conversations during my internship touched on the normalcy of it, how everyone struggles with this, only for me to negate the fact.

At the time, when I first heard about the concept of imposter syndrome, I felt like I had never struggled with this. Unlike Martha Stewart, I do not possess nearly the same business acumen as hers to back up my audacity. So, where do I get my belief that I am exactly in place and not out of it?

To answer this, I want to draw a direct parallel between imposter syndrome and the immigrant experience. As the child of immigrants, who lived as an exchange student in Argentina for an entire year, and then emigrated to the UK for study and work, I have never truly belonged fully anywhere. In Austria, I get the question "you don't look Austrian, where are you really from?", but I cannot claim Romania as home because I speak the language like a second grader. Growing up, I was neither nor.

The turning point happened in Argentina, when I went there as part of a youth exchange programme to learn the culture and language. I stayed with three different host families and attended a local school. Each month, I would meet exchange students from all over the world who had come with the same organisation. Never before have I felt such a sense of belonging, and ironically, it was because I wasn't supposed to belong. We were there as temporary exchange students, representing our home countries, forming friendships with other nationalities, and that was all that shaped our identity. Full assimilation and integration were not expected, for we would, otherwise, forfeit our identity as "people from elsewhere".

I specifically chose not to use the word "outsiders" because of the negative connotation attached to it. Let me be clear that our exchange experience was one without struggle. In fact, I felt like a superstar. The first day in my host High School, all the grades came to introduce themselves to me. Mind you, I did not speak a word of Spanish, but it did not deter my popularity, and as a 9th grader, I had never felt so cool. From that point onwards, I attached the idea of "outsider" to the positive concept of being someone from elsewhere who brings new ideas to the table by virtue of being a newcomer rather than an innovator.

In other words, my power lay in being new and inexperienced, and that was worth all the excitement without even trying to prove myself. Of course, professional situations vastly differ from my one year in superstardom, but the mindset shift helped me immensely later in life, too.

Similarly, when I moved to the UK for university and work, I did not even try to prove my right to be there (metaphorically speaking, because bureaucratically, I had to prove my right to live there on numerous occasions). I enjoyed the company of my British friends when we compared our cultures, even if they constantly had to explain their jokes to me (humour is such a national concept!). Never once did I feel like an outsider, as if I didn't belong, because I didn't get the reference to a British commercial from 2005.

This comparison to my personal experience is not to dismiss the feelings of people struggling with imposter syndrome. I can wholeheartedly understand and empathise with why imposter syndrome has become such a common state of mind, sometimes provoked by the people you are meant to fit in with, it is just as often self-inflicted. Most of the time, no one thinks about you as much and as intensely as you do. In most cases, people probably think to themselves, “Why am I here? This could have been an email”, way more than, “Why is this person here, ew?”. The body language and resting bitch face emitted from both thoughts translates as the same bad vibes, so we jump to the conclusion that it must be about us.

Even if the reception is warm, welcoming, and inviting, there is still a tendency to fall prey to self-criticism. When we perceive other people to be ahead of us in any shape or form, we often tend to put them on a pedestal and, by default, put ourselves on the floor beneath them. All of a sudden, compliments feel like they are meant to taunt us, because why would a better person think highly of us in a genuine way? Hence, we get even more in our heads about why we really should not be here.

While perfectly human and explicable, this process is not necessary. Just imagine that when we are born and look at our mothers for the first time, surrounded by the rest of our family, we go, “They have years on me, never mind!” Have you ever witnessed a baby be shy of volume in the most ear-piercing wail ever erupted? Nope. After a while, they learn to express themselves through words, and after an even longer while, they stop wailing altogether (although, for some people, this phenomenon continues well into their 50s…). The same goes for when they have to initially crawl to get from point A to B until they awkwardly stumble forward in a motion similar to walking. And one day, they are suddenly running!

All of this to say, we all have to start somewhere, and no beginning is elegant. “Monster” wasn’t Nicki Minaj’s first verse; 1989 was Taylor’s 5th album, and Deathly Hallows is way better than Philosopher's Stone. To me, it would have been devastating had any of these people thought they were imposters early on in their careers and let it keep them from the gift that time and persistence bring: improvement. Just as it is devastating that anyone else should think of themselves as the outsider and throw stones in their way.

Personally, the best approach to overcoming imposter syndrome, which I learned through my immigrant experience, has been embracing my “otherness” by referring to it as a novelty that can offer insights no one has thought of, rather than an impairing sense of inexperience.

For example, I have applied to jobs I had absolutely no business doing because I thought, what if my lack of experience brings a fresh perspective and out-of-the-box thinking, since I am blissfully unaware of what the box is? And what if the super-experienced, hard-working, and intimidating CEO is so stuck in their ways that have worked well for so long that they can’t see a way that might be more innovative? Spotify Wrapped was pitched by an intern. While the higher-ups were busy with their Excel spreadsheets, they couldn’t have conceived that the public might find statistics exciting. The no-experience intern did. Of course, there will be times when the CEO still knows best and the intern won’t, but it doesn’t hurt to think of the possibility that the opposite holds true as well.

I want to highlight that I mostly didn’t hear back from these job applications, rarely did I ever get to the interview stage, and once or twice did I end up getting the job. That is once or twice more than if I had thought of myself as unfitting, unworthy, and unskilled- an impostor. Every time I felt out of place in the past, and sometimes I truly was out of my depth, I carved my place fine enough. Most importantly, I learned to destigmatise inexperience and being a newbie, stripped it from its attachment to shame, and reframed it as one of my biggest advantages.

Returning to my immigrant experience, especially in light of what is going on in the world discourse about them, I am proud to be the daughter of Romanian immigrants. As a child, I was acutely aware of the privilege granted by growing up in a liberal democracy rather than a communist regime, like my parents had. It allowed me to feel appreciation and gratitude that my peers have always taken for granted. In addition, growing up bilingual facilitated acquiring new languages, so that learning Spanish came very naturally to me. After only two months in Argentina, I was already fluent. Upon returning to Austria, I felt like my horizons had widened at a much faster rate than those of my peers, whose world had stayed the same.

When I moved to the UK, I got an unconditional offer at university based on my grades and my intercultural experiences. As I entered the workforce, I found myself quite lucky in getting my foot in the door. In hindsight, I realised that young British people had felt so discouraged by the job market, they sometimes forgot to go down certain avenues that, in my naivety, I never thought to dismiss. Throughout my entire life, being new, an outsider, inexperienced, or simply different has always been my biggest strength.

And so, the con artist became the artist par excellence.