“Publish early and publish often” as some might say. This is an in-progress article that will be completed soon!
1. Track moments of Impostor Syndrome as they come up; capture specific thoughts and emotions that accompany your experience of impostor syndrome
Become the UX researcher on the topic of your own impostor syndrome and gather insight:
- Use a mood tracker or other type of journal-tracker to annotate when feelings of impostorism bubble up to the surface.
- Document the context, describing:
Where you are + time of day
Where you were just prior
Where you’re going next
the specific unfiltered thoughts & scenarios that are occurring to you surrounding your career, vocation or academia
List The named-emotions that you feel, and scale them from 0%-100%
A description of the somatic experience, or, how our bodies feel at the moment that we are experiencing the phenomenon
- Look for patterns or “hotspots” in your routine where the phenomenon tends to appear most often; look for common factors at play such as hunger, specificity of locale, and common professional situations happening just prior or just after.
2. Practice deconstructing and replacing the impostor’s logic via a structured process of therapeutic journaling and practical validation
It’s easy for the mind to fabricate a worst case scenario, but it takes intention and purpose to intercept that automatic thinking with a revised and more balanced scenario. This step is largely inspired by the technique found in Cognitive Processing Therapy known as the Impact Statement,
- The journal of your unfiltered negative self-perceptions or doubts about your job or career is the source of prime data that we need in order to deconstruct our automatic thoughts using process-driven validation and logic;
- Journal an impact statement about your impostor syndrome in your next moment of downtime:
Write down what your impostor syndrome means to you. Why do you think it occurs? How does it impact your thoughts, perceptions and beliefs about yourself, others and the world in general?
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This phrasing is a variation on the journaling process we activate in Cognitive Processing Therapy known as the impact statement — a document detailing:
What we think caused a specific traumatic event to occur, as well as
What we believe the consequences of that traumatic event were/are.
- Systematically review your journaling, highlighting any cognitive distortions that emerge. Notice if you find yourself casting excessive internal self-judgements simply for having a distorted thought in the first place. This article from Mind My Peelings offers structured insight into what cognitive distortions are, and how to approach countering them. If you really want to go in-depth on individual thoughts that feel distorted, you can try out the Alternative Thoughts Worksheet offered in CPT;
- Rewrite the impact statement as a more balanced scenario; one that is more realistic and makes use of the grey area. At the end of this revised statement, include a list of vocational achievements as well as positive experiences you’ve had in the context of vocation;
- Throughout this process, remind yourself about your basic humanity, which already exist prior to any discussion about socioeconomic or vocational output and worth;
According to Dr. Marsha Linehan, all of the emotional experiences that we can name have associated somatic experiences attached to them. Anxiety and shame can feel very uncomfortable in our bodies. One strategy for dealing with uncomfortable physical sensations as a result of strong emotion is to use techniques for sensory downregulation when we experience them, in tandem with the active adoption of new mental models offered by therapy. For example: when we’re sobbing, we may physically rock back and forth as a mechanism for self-soothing.