Episode 4 – Imposter Syndrome

The Imposter Syndrome, we’ve all suffered from it whether that’s in our personal lives or in business. Many of us have been in situations where we did not feel worthy of our successes. We felt that luck played a major part in what we achieved.

One of my most favourite quotes is “founders go through experiences… leaders learn from experiences”. And the way I like to interpret that is – leaders are able to realise their shortcomings and they’re happy and non-egotistical to go out and ask for advice, to go out and continually learn, and it’s the same with the imposter syndrome. We’re all going to go through it. It’s our decision on how we react to it. Do we learn through the situation? Do we grow? Or do we just go through the experience and just accept it for what it is?

Last year, whilst on a family holiday, I happened to meet the CFO of a very large tech-based company. What was surprising is that he recognised who I was – one of the co-founders of WeAgile, and he was very interested to talk about the remote-first based model.

He was very interested to find more about how we made the remote working model successful. He was asking me questions about how he could implement this into his business whether that’s flexibility or even taking some departments fully remote and, halfway through this, I realised he started to see me as a thought leader in remote working. It was at this point where the imposter syndrome started creeping in.

I know how the remote model is successful within WeAgile, but I did not feel worthy to be able to educate or impart knowledge on how to best implement it across other people’s business. But, at the same time, I felt that having this conversation I could probably learn a thing or two about how to improve the operations within WeAgile.

There’s nothing wrong with having imposter syndrome. In fact, we all should embrace it but there’s a difference between imposter syndrome and outright lying.