(#35) You Are (Not) a Fraud
It's been an unusually quiet time on the newsletter...because it's audiobook recording time!
You Are (Not) a Fraud: A Scientist's Guide to the Imposter Phenomenon will be released on electronic, paper, hardback and audio from late summer 2022 (date TBC).
To celebrate the book's imminent release, and your support of the newsletter, here's a short excerpt from the book's Preface:
Preface
…Towards the later stages of what could safely be classed as a successful career in science so far, I noticed that I was becoming increasingly tired. Shattered, even. My thoughts started telling me a new story, telling me that I was not at all successful. In that decade-plus career progression leading to my first academic job, my mind was slowly but surely turning against me.
As I learned more and more about life in academia, a new monster emerged from the career questions swirling around in my head:
“Am I good enough?”
Was I ready for this path? Did I really qualify? Did I know enough? Should I even bother? Could I ever be as good as all the other people walking the same path?
I was doubting my abilities and habitually making damned comparisons between myself and my peers. The excitement for creatively carving out my own academic career after a life-long love of science was in danger. My career was being overshadowed by one of the many monsters behind mental health issues in higher education:
The so-called Imposter Syndrome: the feeling that you are a fraud, that you are not good enough for your job, and that you are always in danger of being ‘found out’.
As you progress through this book, you will learn about the journaling exercise I used to help me record my own thoughts about feeling like an imposter. Together, we will look at what imposter experiences mean to the 800+ participants from the survey research that grew out of my journaling and now underpins this book. We look closer at the unfounded thoughts and feelings of inferiority that many students and staff in higher education face. Feeling like an imposter almost drowned me. I share the discoveries that stopped me from digging a mental hole from which I might never have recovered.
Journaling and studying the problem has helped me to no end. It still helps me. By treating my neurotic thoughts like any other scientific problem, I felt an incredible ease come over me when I began to understand this so-called Imposter Syndrome in more detail. I have learned from other people who have waded through self-doubt and emerged enlightened out the other side...
In the process, I discovered masterful works of literature that were almost lost in a fireplace. I’ve come to appreciate the power of persistence for writers, actors, researchers, and politicians in enduring what we might call the Imposter Syndrome. Through my story and the stories of others, I wanted to dissect and anatomise the experience of feeling like a fraud in order to make it easier to manage. Here's one important point upfront (one we will explore in detail):
Feeling like an imposter is not a syndrome...
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To hear about the book's most advanced release, visit: https://leanpub.com/notafraud.
Some recent outings on The reid_indeed Podcast that capture some of the latest book publishing challenges can be found below. Click on each image to find the episode webpage and all ways to listen:
