The one about confidence. Or the lack thereof.
It’s belt-exam week.
This means that this week I will spend 12 to 14 hours every day at school, trying to further cram into my brain the information I need to pass my C# belt exam on the first try. Which, if you’ve been following along, you know isn’t always an easy thing to do.
But this isn’t about how stressed I am, or how I’m still not sure how I feel about C#, or how I feel like I live on campus during belt-exam week.
This is about a realization I had this morning.
While working on this week’s set of algorithms (which happen to be Singly Linked Lists and also currently the bane of my existence) with two students, and one of our instructors, something was brought to my attention.
I was staring at what my cohort-mate, Nick, was writing on the board, and listening to him talking things out as he went. I understood what he was writing after he wrote it, but for the life of me I could not come up with it on my own. I felt as though the vocabulary and terminology for what we’re learning just hadn’t sunk in fully yet.
I mentioned this fact to our instructor, who challenged me on this.
“Is it that you truly don’t understand it, or just that you’re not confident that you understand it, so you don’t feel comfortable talking through the problem?”
Holy Shit.
She was exactly right. I realized this is actually a really big theme in my life at the moment. This program has challenged me in more ways than one. I’ve moved to a city where I knew barely anyone, faced some tough challenges, and every day feel like I will never understand the content I’m learning. It has greatly affected the confidence and self esteem I always felt like I had a decent amount of, and instead replaced it with a level of vulnerability I’ve never known.
However, by giving into this belief that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I become my own self-fulfilling prophecy and prevent myself from learning, confirming my knowledge, or correcting my mistakes. As a learned behavior, I continue to just stay quiet, and get even more lost as I don’t speak up and ask the questions I need to ask to clarify my understanding.
As soon as I change this frame of thought, however, and ask to T-Diagram the problem, or map it out so I that I can confirm I understand it as well, I realize how much I actually do know the material, and how much I have learned in the last 8 weeks.
I harbor a definite fear that if I do speak up on these subjects I’m not confident in, and I am in fact wrong, that my peers will think I am a full-blown idiot, who has clearly not learned anything. But the truth is, as my friend Jack admitted while we dove into this topic, that none of us feels like we know what we’re doing. We’re all covering the material at the same rate, with roughly the same amount of prior experience, and we all feel like idiots most of the time. Comforting.
After this conversation, I once again realized that the best way to learn, is by failing (see failing forward blog post for more confirmation on this). One of the biggest pieces of advice I’m finding for anyone suffering from a little bit of self-doubt, vulnerability, or imposter syndrome while learning something new is to “Fake it till you make it.” Find the way that you learn best, and try to channel what you’re learning into that medium. If you learn by reading, read about it. If you’re a doer, do it. Try the algorithms you’re white boarding on Repl.it with a real set of numbers; clone a website using code you’ve seen others work with; watch demos and repeat what the demonstrator is doing, comment out lines of code in your editor with what they are actually taking care of. The most important aspect is that you try. And if you fail, you’ll learn what you f*cked up even more thoroughly.
Don’t be scared to speak up, because you only delay your own progress.
And if you don’t believe me here’s a great little article on how to survive if you don’t think you’re a great developer.
In other news:
It’s the first day of spring, and here in Chicago we’ve got a toasty “Feels like 19” happening. Lovely.
I survived my first Chicago St. Patrick’s Day with the best friends around.
However, the casualty of St. Patty’s weekend was my bucket list being deleted from my phone. So please send over any recommendations you might have of places you think I should check out and things I must do!
