Practical Tips for Dealing with Imposter Syndrome During Career Transition
Career transitions can be scary. Especially when you don’t feel like you have any direction on where you are going next. My own career transition is happening not because of the previous COVID furloughs but something else: A simple desire to do something I love.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still freaking out. I’m still losing sleep over it in this interim between old job and new job and I still loved my previous career in healthcare. But there are a lot of new variables that keep me from continuing in that space. Variables which I have no doubt I can talk about someday afterward. This article is more about how to keep it together when you are in a career transition. Especially when that transition is from one industry to a totally different industry that you may feel completely unqualified for.
Imposter Syndrome
Imposter Syndrome shows up for me during a career change more than any other time. It happened big time when I graduated college. I didn’t know what it was called I just knew that I felt unqualified despite having spent 4 years studying graphic design. I felt so unqualified that I didn’t even try to apply for any graphic design jobs. I ended up working in healthcare because it was interesting and had a lot of room to grow if I wanted to pursue another higher degree.
This time I am pursuing not only graphic design but UX design which is a role that didn’t even exist when I graduated college. So now that I know about Imposter Syndrome what am I doing to avoid giving up this time?
How to Deal with Imposter Syndrome
Something I have been practicing for a while is catching my thoughts. Catching your thoughts before they start to carry you away with them is easier said than done in many instances. I’ll admit that the majority of making this a practice in my Mental Health toolbox has been remembering to do it. One way I did this was to write little paragraphs in my journal at the end of the day about an event, how I responded and how it differed from what I would have done in the past. I still do this not just after in-person interactions but also texts that would have become disruptive in the past. Because it’s in my journal I don’t have to be embarrassed about saying if I’m proud of my reaction or not.
Catching my thoughts in relation to imposter syndrome and my career looks like noticing when I’m telling myself that I’ll never find a new job or that I have to be more qualified or totally redo my portfolio before I can apply for anything even if I have reached the level of the finished portfolio I set out to achieve.
Changing those thoughts looks as simple as telling myself that I can continue to learn while I’m applying to jobs or making different versions of my resume for different jobs. Also reminding myself by making a list of things that I have learned in past jobs that terrified me in the beginning. Chances are you have these things too. Anything can go on this list whether it is simple things like speaking to customers or complex things like becoming an expert in your industry’s most widely used software, we all have things that we couldn’t imagine being comfortable with in the beginning.
With these simple tools I can forge ahead and achieve my goals to transition into a whole new career doing what I love: Designing products that put the user first. I hope they will help you too.
