basically the title. Here’s the examples:
I’ve worked for roughly 3 years as a Direct Support Professional. It was my first job out of high school and I’m really great with my coworkers and see them as aunts. This place is family run, and founded by my mom, dad and uncle. I absolutely despise the idea of being “owners kid” or “the spy”. I put a lot of work into trying to be better and to make my coworkers comfortable. I’ll do all of their books at the end of the day, or I’ll volunteer ASAP for changes. And while it’s okay that theres a certain boundary, it makes me feel out of place. It’s hard to explain, i guess.
I’ve also made a few new friends but I am absolutely terrified to approach them for anything. I **know** I’m their friend, and we socialize enough, but after years of holding up friendships on my side alone from past friendships and relationships, it shivers my timbers and makes me over-analyze the connections and if we’re really friends.
How can i tell my brain that this is okay? I recognize it as being okay but I still find myself uncomfortable when opening up and it feels like I’m making a problem out of nothing.
2 comments
Have you considered telling your family to keep your relationship with them on the down-low while you get to know new employees and feel out whether you’d connect well as friends? If they ask, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with letting them know that you work with your family. If I were new to your workplace and you had only said something because I’d asked, I wouldn’t view you negatively for it at all. I also don’t think it is a deficit from the perspective of someone who may want to be your friend if I knew right off the bat.
It all depends on your personality and how you present yourself. A secret — if you care a lot about making sure you don’t come off as the ‘spy’, you won’t. And this is coming from someone who hates authority! I’d still happily be friends with the owner’s kid provided they were a kind and considerate person.
You should also give your current friends more credit. Anyone has the potential to take advantage of your friendship, but in focusing solely on preventing that, you’re also preventing the ability for you to be vulnerable and find truly good friends that care about you.
I work in software development and imposter syndrome comes up a lot especially with people being promoted into new roles or with junior developers both self taught and university grad
In my years of observation imposter syndrome comes from the following
1) unclear understanding or misunderstanding of what is expected of you.
Learning to ask for help is important. I advise people to chew on a problem for like 45 min to an hour sometimes less if you have absolutely no idea where to start. After that time you need to ask someone for help. If you are not in a company where you feel like you can ask for help then organization leaders should be made aware and everyone should do what they can to promote this culture. Be honest though, is the culture prohibitive of asking for help like will people actually shit talk about you for asking for help or do you _think_ people will.
Sometimes you may also be making an assumption of what is expected of you. Before you take on a new job, a responsibility, etc it’s important to ask what the level of expectation is. Can you see by what metrics your successes are being evaluated by. Often times especially with new developers, they think we want optimized, beautiful, and groundbreaking code. The truth is, we want something that works, can be reviewed, and then have a feedback session on. The problem with this assumption is instead of having 3 manageable things to keep up with, you hold yourself to an unsustainable level and now have 5 unmanageable things to keep up with for example.
2) Guilt that you are in a position that you did not earn whether you truly didn’t earn it or you assume you didn’t earn it.
Look, we all fluff up our experiences on our resumes to get that job. Especially in this economy. But you may have bit off more than you can chew. You’ll know this if you’re barely able to keep up with the expectations that you are being evaluated by. Not everyone is good at giving constructive feedback and some jobs might not be conducive to employers giving constructive feedback. In the situation where you do receive constructive feedback, even if it stings a little bit, you have to learn to graciously accept it for what it is as a learning opportunity instead of an “aw man I got in trouble” moment. Work with the person who gave you feedback to create actionable items you can do to help you get on track or develop the skills you need to get on track. Whether they like it or not, they chose you. We aren’t Logitech Bluetooth mice. We aren’t plug and play. If they can’t see that then their leadership skills may not be conducive to bringing out your best.
If you were appropriately selected because of your potential and your qualifications maybe it’s down to your confidence. In that case maybe you need some good wins under your belt to make you feel more confident in your ability. If you fail, be hungry for feedback for improvement and apply it the next round and if you fail again, was it because you made the same mistakes? Or was it because of new variables that you couldn’t have foreseen?
We can talk more if you reply