9 min read

Imposter-maxxing

Imposter-maxxing

Nobody tell them how many times I googled "The Channel"...

PSA: This topic has been beat to death. But honestly, there are few things I enjoy more in life than beating a dead horse. Let's turn that horse into glue, baby!

“The only way to stop feeling like an impostor is to stop thinking like an impostor.”
- Dr. Valerie Young, Imposter Syndrome Institute

🪩RISE & RAGE, MAXXERS!🪩

We are SO back.

New year, new job, new goals, new... well, nothing else but you get the point. I started my new role with Devtech back in January and I have been off to the races. Miss me? I knew it. I want to share with you guys some of the experiences I've been having and growth I've been going through.. but before that, you know what we have to do:

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  • Just weeks ago, Jack Dorsey laid off damn near half of his company, Blocks.. in his own words...
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Before I get into it, I want to share the inspiration behind this post. I sat in a Webinar on Imposter Syndrome and its presence among women at work and stereotypes in leadership. For a lot of women, imposter syndrome isn't appearing solely just in our careers, but in every single area. I realized that over time, my relationship with imposter syndrome AND judging the shit out of myself has evolved.

One of my colleagues brought up a good point.. Imposter Syndrome can seem like an infinite loop. The more you learn, the more realize you don't know. This forces us to keep moving the goalpost for ourselves and we instill these negative self-fulfilling prophecies and ultimately become a slave to this cycle.

There are five different classifications of imposter syndrome, according the Dr. Valerie Young of the Imposter Syndrome Institute:
💅🏼 The Perfectionist
👩🏼‍💻 The Expert
🎤 The Soloist
👩🏼‍🔬 The Natural Genius
🦸🏼‍♀️ The Superhuman

You will probably resonate with most of these at some point but you probably identify with one in particular. Let's open the conversation about this.

Now, have a seat and try to guess which one of those I resonate most with 😆

Why am I even talking about this? I'll tell you.

I took a new job in tech. Not just any tech... the IT channel. Managed services. Cloud infrastructure. Engineering. A world where every third word is an acronym and everyone in the room has apparently been speaking this language since birth.

I, on the other hand, had to Google what an MSP was.

Now, to be fair, I knew what MSP stood for. Managed Service Provider. Great, love that for me. Except in my staffing life, MSP meant something completely different (sort-of). So every time someone said it, my brain was doing mental gymnastics while my face said "yes, absolutely, tell me more." I also had to Google OKR approximately one thousand times before it stuck. I have spent years living and dying by KPIs. OKR walked in like an uninvited "friend of" to the housewives party.

But here's the thing. I took this job knowing exactly what I was walking into.

My internal hype speech went something like this: I will be successful in this role if it's the last thing I do. And it won't be the last thing I do, because I KNOW tech. I didn't know telecom engineering either and I built a multi million-dollar program around it. So what can I do with what I know?

Bold. Confident. Correct, probably.

And then I flew to Belgrade, Serbia to meet my team for the first time and the airline lost my luggage somewhere between Paris and my new life. Let's laugh together!

I landed in a new country, starting a new chapter, with nothing but my backpack, my laptop, and an absolutely feral energy. First order of business before meeting my colleagues, before absorbing any of the industry knowledge I'd been frantically studying, before any of it.. was finding a mall in Belgrade and buying an entirely new wardrobe from scratch. Nothing like a little international luggage crisis to set the tone for "this is going to require improvisation."

And honestly? That's kind of been the whole vibe.

Imposter syndrome showed up right around the same time as my Sales Kickoff Meeting with an incredible group of people who seemingly knew everything about this industry while my head was quietly spinning. It didn't announce itself and rarely does it. It just settled in like and started making itself comfortable.

The difference this time? I wasn't going to wait for it to leave on its own.

Here's the thing about imposter syndrome that nobody tells you. It's not one voice, it can be two, or many. And they take shifts! Now here is what my imposter syndrome tells me:

Voice One shows up first. It's the classic: You are a complete fraud and one day everyone is going to find out. It's dramatic and loud (sound familiar?). It's the villain in every LinkedIn post about "overcoming self-doubt." You know this one and have probably read seventeen articles about it.

Voice Two is sneakier. Voice Two says: Everyone already knows. They're just pretending along with you because they feel bad for you.

Voice Two is the one that will really get you. It's the one that comes up when you start to think you have overcome imposter syndrome itself (moving the goalpost, infinite loop, remember?). What a beast!

Because Voice One at least leaves you with some dignity, right? The idea that you're successfully pulling off a con, that you're so convincing that nobody has caught on yet. Voice Two skips straight to the part where everybody's in on it and you're the last to know. It's imposter syndrome with a savior complex. A whole group project of people collectively deciding to protect your feelings while you blissfully perform competence into the void. Totally logical, right?

Cool. Cool cool cool.

And the advice? Oh, the advice is great.

My personal favorite which is always delivered with complete sincerity by someone who means well was some variation of: "You just need the confidence."

I want you to really sit with that one.

You just need the confidence. As if confidence is a thing you pick up at Target on your way to work. As if the solution to feeling like a fraud is simply to stop feeling like a fraud and start feeling like a non-fraud. Revolutionary. Groundbreaking, even. Completely unhelpful.

Here's what actually snapped me out of it, and no it wasn't a pep-talk.

It was looking up and realizing exactly how fast the tech landscape was moving and understanding, with sudden and uncomfortable clarity, that I had two options: propel forward or get left behind. That's it. Those are the choices. There is no third option where you sit with your imposter syndrome, process it at a healthy pace, and emerge confident and ready on your own timeline. The industry is not waiting for you to feel ready. AI is not waiting. The channel is not waiting. The conversation is happening with or without you and you can either be in it or be watching it from the outside wondering how you missed it.

So I stopped waiting for the fraud feeling to leave and I started doing the "thing" instead. I embraced the "fraud". I let it fuel me.

I had to find ways to update thinking that had quietly become dated without me noticing. I had to be bold in a different way than I'd ever had to be bold before. And most uncomfortably, I had to accept that if I didn't understand this industry, the only answer was to learn it. Not fake it until I made it but actually learn it.

Leg work. Unglamorous, necessary, absolutely worth it leg work.

And that's where the imposter starts losing the plot.

Let me be very clear about what "doing the thing" looked like because it was not cute.

It was not a montage or dramatic music. There was no moment where I gazed thoughtfully out of a rain streaked window and suddenly understood cloud infrastructure. It was me, at various hours of the day and night, in various states of caffeination, doing the unglamorous work of learning an industry from the inside out.

Step one was having conversations with people who actually knew things. I use the word "conversations" loosely here because what I was really doing was approaching industry veterans saying some version of "I know nothing, please tell me everything." It was less of a dialogue and more of a very enthusiastic information extraction. They were gracious and I was grateful and relentless. Typical!

Step two was studying... Conference sponsor lists, client websites, prospect LinkedIn pages, etc. I needed to understand what these companies actually did. Not the surface level "oh they're in tech" version, but the real version. What problem do they solve? Who do they solve it for? Where do they feel the friction? Because if I couldn't answer those questions, I couldn't actually be of service to anyone. I was just a person a lot of enthusiasm. Which I guess is fine, but that isn't my definition of success.

Step three is my personal favorite and I will not be taking questions about it.

I asked our internal AI copilot to take our case studies and explain them in great detail.. and then explain it again.

And you know what? It worked beautifully. Just "here is the problem, here is what we did, here is why it mattered" in plain language I could actually absorb and build on. There is truly no shame in my game when it comes to learning. If explaining it to me like I'm in kindergarten is what it takes, then hand me the juice box and let's get into it.

Slowly but surely, the shift began.

It was, to use the technical term, pretty sick.

Here's the other thing that genuinely surprised me about this industry.. the size of it. The channel is enormous and somehow still being defined in real time. There are hundreds of companies still climbing their way to the top, still writing the rules, still figuring out what the next five years look like. This isn't a mature industry with a fixed pecking order and a clear playbook. It's alive, it's moving and the people who are winning right now are the ones who are comfortable operating in that ambiguity who can build the plane while flying it and somehow land it smoothly.

Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what I've been doing for the last two months.

Here's where I'm supposed to tell you I figured it all out.. that I defeated imposter syndrome once and for all! I did not. Does anyone ever?

Me and Claude have become rather close lately! I still have days where Voice Two shows up with her little conspiracy theory about everyone knowing I'm a fraud and collectively deciding to be polite about it. I just have to stop waiting for her to leave and open another tab.

... and YOU already know that nobody has it completely figured out. Not the people in that room who looked like they knew everything nor the twenty-year channel veterans. And absolutely not me, fresh off a mall run in Belgrade with no luggage and entirely too much to prove.

So if you're mid-spiral, let me hold your hand while you close the anxiety tab, open a learning one. 🧃

XX - Jordyn

Jordyn

Jordyn

Who is she? Leo, empath, aspiring software developer, lover of dogs and mildly chaotic content creator. Join me in my journey of self-reflection, discovery and growth! I am SO happy you're here.