Imposter Syndrome ft. Shy Young Adult in Leadership Roles
Hello everyone! This is my first Medium article, and I can admit that I have a bit of imposter syndrome right now, being that I have never written any kind of article or blog post before. This is my disclaimer that I don’t exactly know what I’m doing — and that’s okay! You never actually know until you try.
Figuring Things Out
I was always shy growing up. That is, until I became comfortable with my friends. Then, I preferred to be in charge and wasn’t afraid to voice my opinion about what we were going to do, etc. Sometimes my outgoing side accidentally carried over to situations where I was with people I knew less well. This is where I would get comments mostly about being bossy, or a perfectionist, or critical. Due to also being sensitive at the time, I took these comments personally, and eventually avoided taking any kind of leadership role in school. This was quite hard due to teachers having a particular liking to me for the first 7 years of my education.
When I was almost inevitably selected for a leadership role while trying to appease everyone (who most often didn’t want to work), I knew that I would be carrying most of the workload. Not wanting to be “bossy” or “critical”, I would simply accept it, tell everyone else not to worry about it, and do my thing. Only later did I realize how sad that is and how it, in no way, benefited me in the long run.
For the latter half of my public education, I adjusted my role and was able to have a healthy mindset in regards to working in groups and not carrying everyone else’s responsibilities. However, I still stayed away from leadership roles, and preferred to blend in with the crowd.
After I graduated high school, I won the US Grow with Google Udacity scholarship. I entered the Android Basics track and was in a Slack community full of my classmates that were studying Android development or web development. (I’ll talk about my experience in another article.)
From Nobody to Somebody
Our Slack workspace for scholarship recipients has about 4,500 members. At first, I was shy about posting in a space where a lot of people with more expertise were talking. Eventually, I mentally kicked myself in the butt and told myself that I need to take this chance to get involved in the community. ‘If programming and software development is going to be my career, I need to start making some connections!’, I told myself. Which is very helpful and beneficial, in case you didn’t know.
Maybe a month in, an announcement came up about signing up to be a Student Leader. This role was for people who wanted to be more involved, help other students, and contribute to the Slack community as a whole. I was interested, but unsure about whether to sign up or not. My go-to was to not say much, but stay on top of reading what others were talking about. However, I really wanted to reach out and get involved with my fellow students, even if it was small talk about the program. I wanted put myself out there, and step out of my comfort zone a bit. And I knew that it would be good for me. So I signed up.
Later, I realized that how much you do as a Student Leader is optional, but I wanted to be a good one. So anytime I saw people asking questions I knew the answers to, or was able to point them in the right direction, I dropped a reply. Of course, there was always going to be people who knew more than me, and sometimes it would occur to me that I wasn’t smart enough to be as helpful as some other Student Leaders. But I kept reminding myself — it’s okay to not know everything! I knew this deep down, and many people reading this may relate and think, “Yeah, I know”. Yet we still can be hard on ourselves, despite knowing this. We are all at different places in our learning path, and there’s always more to learn, especially in the tech field where new technologies and versions of things are always coming out.
Being the Leader of a Team
Our scholarship program introduced a cohort setup, where we were put into groups based on where we lived and what track (field of study) we were in. They announced that active cohorts/teams could participate in the upcoming Cohort Challenges, after coming up with a team name and selecting a team leader. I was excited, but a lot of people in my assigned group were mostly quiet. I stepped out of my comfort zone, and started posting in our channel. I wanted to get the conversation going. About 3/10 of us responded.
I seemed the most active on Slack out of the 4 of us saying anything, so I volunteered to be the team leader, if no one else wanted to. This also made me a bit nervous, because I didn’t want to seem as though I was declaring myself in charge. But I was worried for nothing, because everyone who cared said either that they were either for me being leader, or just indifferent. Maybe I just got lucky that there wasn’t any conflict, and if so, I still made the effort to volunteer and take the role, which counts for something.
Fast forward some, some of the inactive members were booted, and I was able to recruit some new, more active ones by reaching out to students on the main channel. Soon, our cohort was at the member limit (15). We still had about 2 people left who were not participating, who I reached out to for a final time via a tagged post. One person was particularly upset, because I worded it pretty much like this:
“(so-and-so), (this-other-person), please respond to this post, or you will be removed for inactivity 🙈”
Now maybe this wasn’t the most… professional way to go about it. But I wanted to be firm, yet nonchalant, so I added the emoji at the end. Obviously, I’m not experienced with this.
I promptly received responses. (so-and-so) said that they were here now, and that they didn’t know about the cohort until I just tagged them. I believe (this-other-person) said the same, but with a personal touch. About how it was never a requirement to participate in cohorts, and I’m a bad reflection on the program, and I’m putting people down for not having enough time, etc.
Well, ouch.
My self-doubt started catching up around now, and I was contemplating whether I had made too many steps outside my comfort zone. It seemed as though I had never healthily dealt with a situation like this, since my way of dealing with criticism as a leader had been to… well, stop being a leader.
I stepped away for awhile, to give myself some time to think about how to respond. When I came back, the summary of what I said was “I’m so sorry if you were offended! Of course I understand that many life things take precedent over this team. I wouldn’t want to hurt your view on this program, and I again apologize if that came off harsh. However, team leaders were indeed told to have inactive members removed, and I wanted to reach out to you guys before that happened.” I was nervous about posting this, but felt that I worded it right.
I kept him on the team, and he did come online a few times. He never posted again though. I messaged him two weeks later, saying that he had been inactive and with cohort challenges starting, that we would need member participation. If he was too busy to participate, that’s completely okay, but he would likely be removed. No response, and he was removed.
The world did not end, and I did not spontaneously combust.
What I learned from this particular experience is that if you are going to take a leadership role, you have to do what you feel is necessary for the sake of the team. We aren’t all able to participate all the time, nor complete every single challenge, but we are present, participating, and supporting each other. Had that one member came back and participated every now and then, I would have kept him. But meanwhile, it was a ghost position in our member list, where other students wanted to join but couldn’t. I imagine making leadership decisions are more difficult and anger-inducting to those affected when you are in a managerial role. Luckily, I’m not at that point… or not yet. (Who knows!)
In Regards to Age…
Our student body was ages 18 and up, because that was the requirement to enter the scholarship contest to begin with. I turned 19 a few months in, so I still found myself being a “baby” in the group. This also led to some insecurities about taking leadership roles within the program, because I didn’t want older people to think things like:
- “I know so much more than this girl.”
- “Why is this kid telling us what to do?”
- “She has no idea what she’s talking about.”
Maybe some of these are over the top. But I will admit that these sort of things are what I was worried about.
For the record, this is an online community, so maybe that made it easier for people to keep their opinions in their heads, because anyone being overly critical would likely be called out. On that note, I hope that I would be able to ignore my insecurities in a person-to-person scenario as well.
But in my track/field of study (Android Basics), almost all of us were new to studying Android app development anyways! We have all ages in our track, and we’re all starting with the same foundations that are being taught. So, we are all equals. I think, yet again, I was more worried than I needed to be. I don’t act cocky for anything I understand, because I know there’s plenty that I don’t. And I think that anyone who is in a similar situation should keep this in mind, because being humble usually keeps the peace.
In Conclusion
If you do indeed have the skills and time to take a leadership role — then what’s stopping you besides yourself?
If you are looking to expand your skillset, self-worth, confidence, or all of the above — I would highly encourage you to take a shot at a leadership role if it comes your way. It will certainly be scary, and even if it turns out you weren’t cut out for it, you can at least say that you gave it good effort.
Girls/women/anybody really: Keep the following in mind!
I want every little girl who’s told she’s bossy to be told instead that she has leadership skills.
— Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO
I didn’t even see this quote around until a few weeks ago, when I starting thinking about writing this article!
I wrote most of this content in a few days’ span in August. It is now the end of October, and in relation to my scholarship group, I have since became a very involved Facebook group moderator, ran a T-shirt design competition, and opened my own Slack workspace for studying with some peers after we finish the program. I hope to keep up my community involvement, and stop letting shyness control the ideas I voice, and opportunities I would otherwise pass up!
Thank you for everyone who read the whole thing, and thank you even if you skimmed through it! I will be publishing another Medium article very soon on my experience with the Udacity scholarship program, for anyone interested.
Mini-shoutout to my cohort named Androidians — you guys helped me with some of this confidence through your supportiveness and involvement!
