Discussion on:

How consultants can deal with the Impostor syndrome

Perhaps one of the contributing factors to feeling like a fake is actually being one. Trying to project an image (we call that marketing) can easily create a false impression. Perhaps another tip here is to get real -- be the real you, warts and all. Might be harder to sell, but you'll be happier with the result.

there's a discourse that demands wiz-kids.
We don't want a by-drudgery-to-the-stars consultant, we want a by-broomstick-to-the-stars consultant, because they don't prescribe for us to do so much hard work with our flaws

Also, this happens to muscicians and other artists enormously. Coke is for making them feel that they are as they always feel they should be, but aren't.

The artist (and sometimes the consultant) is supposed to be great in one or a few areas. What they don't understand is that greatness in one area often depletes another -- thus performers of every ilk include some of the worst-adjusted people in the world.

Then there's the other problem of not even being able to sustain greatness in one area all the time. Depressing.

Clients aren't worried about your mental health, though -- they just want what you can give them.

"Come in here, Dear boy, have a cigar.
You're gonna go far"

(As, otherwise we'd have to be something less than geniuses for having this problem you solved in the first place)
It's definitely nice to glorify someone if it also diminishes the threat to one's own face, however misconstrued.

Praise can be the perfect poison. It tempts the one praised to forget that they're just people like any other. And if one builds one's self-worth upon the praise of others then that's almost as bad as being a perfectionist. Cold turkey and crash'n'burn ahead, sure enough.

Perfectionism is another way of not assessing one's own worth in a useful way.
It's like Bergenfx said, knowing one's self is key... only problem is that the guy in the mirror is always putting on a show, never keeping it real.

No substitute for building something to quite your doubts

Imposter syndrome is a real and difficult thing. I had forgotten about it, but I tend to suffer from it all the time!

I disagree that one should 'get real'. After all one IS real, even when faking it. That's part of the person. As for showing your warts, well, heck man if that were a good thing I wouldn't pluck the hairs that insist on growing out of my chin ever since I hit 60 and it hit back.
Everyone is real and Everyone is faking it til they make it. Get used to it. It's not like when I started programming in 1960 at the age of 12 (high school grad / legally emancipated / working for big blue). Things didn't change as fast as they do now and were not as buggy (we only had 'real bugs' to worry about and that damned 'ctrl-z'.

I have my leads and managers practice facilitating meetings, and I have the newer folks send emails to me so I can review them before sending them to the stakeholders. If I teach these jr ppl mgrs how to display their (and their teams) best side, you'd call that lying or being a fake, huh.

I call it keeping the energy and positive spirit 'up'.

If you go around NOT blowing your own horn, you lose out on the better world there is out there. If you have to play a cd of trumpet songs until you can really play your own, so be it. Frankly I've know this all my life: the world is mediocre during its best times. It doesn't take much to be successful in this world. So FAKE IT TILL YA MAKE IT.
BELIEVE in yourself. Don't lie to anyone. If they ask you 'can you do this' you say 'yes', and I'll get back to you when I'm ready to prove that.... give a deadline you can meet (you know yourself after all) and then MEET IT.

Between "believe in yourself" and "fake it 'til you make it." In the former, you're not afraid to take on projects about which you know little, because you have faith that you can learn what you need to know. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't misrepresent yourself. When I hear "fake it", I hear misrepresentation.

I totally agree with "fake it till you make it". And a potential client will never hear me say that I'm faking it. And a potential client will never hear "I believe in my ability to competently do things I've never done before".
So you portray yourself as an expert, or you have a much bigger chance of not landing the job. And generally us consultant types honestly have an ability to quickly pick up the skills needed without being "found out". So we fake it to get the job, and complete the job in a way that exceeds client expectations, thus "making it"

"Do you know everything there is to know about this?"
Or do they just ask "Can you do this for us"?

Faking it implies saying yes to the latter question, despite positive knowledge or at least circumstantial evidence to the opposite effect.
Saying yes despite lack of positive knowledge to that effect isn't faking it. It's completely normal and very common - and not realizing this can be one of the reasons why people begin to suffer from the impostor syndrome at all. Like we talked about in the dreyfus model thread; I don't think that the value of a consultant is in the specific bag of tricks (or stuff) that he holds, that's just being a book. I believe that the value of a great consultant is in their ability to quickly adopt new stuff, and twist it intuitively into the a form that functions in the given situation: Innovation and information hunting rather than passive knowledge.
To return to our topic, imagine this exchange of words:
A:"Can you paint the house?"
B:"Don't know, never tried"
That's not being truthful, it's just being rude.

... "can you do this for us?"

If I don't have experience with it, I tell them. Usually it goes something like this:

"I haven't done that specific thing before, but it's a known domain that others have tackled so I'm sure I can do it."

I never take those jobs on fixed price, though.

They get: "If I can't, we're both in trouble."

Your analogical question is interesting because it highlights the main point perfectly. You are, of course, right. Anyone can paint a house. But do you know which paint to use on the surface covering the house. Should a dermatalogical paint be used, weather-proof etc;? Should the house be painted at all? Is the house subject to authoratative permissions prior to painting? Are there areas that cannot be covered?

The answer "Don't know, never tried" implies that this person might actually be aware of the potential complications and implications of painting the house in an inappropriate way.

To that end, the answer is technically competent and not rude.

Just go look at the specs for the house, what was used before. Reapply.
Designing a new paint job for an unpainted house is a different matter, and may be a more appropriate parallel to consultancy. However, can a consultant be expected to be able to find out how to do something new? And, isn't every business environment somehow unique? At least, depending on the degree of interacting with employees, there's going to be individual differences.
So, ok, you know better, but I think customers might not be able to appreciate the difference between "technically honest" and "lacking in what we need". They may, in fact, not know how to ask the question they want answered.
If I'm asked "can you do this", and I don't know, I'll likely say "Let me have a look, I'll let you know in an hour". I research the process involved and guesstimate if I'm up to the task or not.

The degree to which "I don't know, but I'll find out" needs to be said depends on how little of the domain you know and how critical it is that you be absolutely correct.

"Can you make an application that does X?"

"Sure, no problem."

"It has to support 100,000 simultaneous users."

That changes things.

puts it into perspective.

Likewise, to me, if someone wants a translation of a surgical procedure manual, it makes a similar difference whether the audience of the translation is a patient group or a surgeon group.

Honestly, I don't think I am making it too difficult.

Ask a network engineer: Can you converge this network to include data, voice and video?

Answer: Don't know. Haven't tried.

I think thats reasonable simply due to the fact that so many factors are involved and up until this point, it hasn't been something that has been considered. It may even be outside of his chosen field of expertise.

It might also be the way people from his(her) neck of the woods speak. I'm from the South of England and the way we phrase a question is different from the way people from the North might phrase the same question. It doesn't make it rude. It just makes it different.

That at least is what I mean by rude... not saying "I'll go check what that would entail, then I'll let you know if it's something I can do".
A bit like just answering "yes" and doing nothing if someone asks "can you reach the salt?" (Depending, as you very correctly pointed out, on dialectal preferences).

....how many clients could you lose before making it? Enough to remove any trust or client faith in you?

... that bothers me.

Maybe you don't volunteer your ignorance, but I really don't like the idea of intentionally hiding it. Dishonesty takes a lot of energy away from a project.

Transparency as a consultant is a must. If a job can't be done because I don't have the knowledge to do it at that time, then I tell my client/customer that.

I did it once, made monumental mistakes that normally I wouldn't have done, and lost a customer that never came back.

Never again.

A couple of months ago I tried that. I thought I would be safe, I was referred by another contractor on the project, he wanted to work with me and only me. The project involved a "revolutionary paradigm shift in how we use the internet".
I told the client that I knew all the technology required to implement the concept, but I hadn't actually worked on a similar job. That was it - "stop right there, I don't think you are qualified". I was dumbfounded, and honestly felt that it was obvious that I was an ideal match. I still do - the project ended up failing.
Anyway, if I had spent a day researching I'm sure I could have comfortably talked like an expert and landed the job.
There is a great difference between our actual abilities and the potential client's perception. Lesson learned: if you want the job, be the expert.

You said the project subsequently failed. Maybe that had something to do with the attitude of this self-proclaimed paradigm-shifter. Seems to me he believed in miracles and was looking for a god to provide them.

Chip,
Your readers can take an online test for the impostor syndrome at www.impostorquiz.com

Don't go there. And don't post the link either

Any of that happens on TR, do you?

Well at least not with me anyway.

edited to add;
depending on how you mean that...
After re-reading the article, hum, I recognize myself in many of the points given, but I do not consider myself an "Impostor" with-in a 'syndrome'. Perhaps though, I am overly critical of myself, but I think for me personally, it more a question of finding a 'fit', rather than as an impostor, false or otherwise.

Listen up! You might learn something. Any time someone posts something that sounds suspiciously like a bad dialogue from a cliched private detective lifted from a worse 70s exploitation movie, I can't help but get a mental image of a guy afraid to leave his mother's basement sitting before a computer (front left) and a mirror (front right) into which he offers his best Bogart impersonations.

As for me, I just try to do the best I can to conceal my Nobel Laureate status. Gotta run -- dinner with "O" and then hop across the pond in my private jet to give Steve a chance to redeem himself on that chess game we had last week.

Edited to add ... I hope at least one person gets that the sardonics are pointed elsewhere.

For all anybody knows, I'm that guy in the basement. None of you have ever met me, including the folks at CBSi. It's all an elaborate hoax!

"A lot of brooklyn heads still live with their moms..."

That's from a hilarious rap song I heard a long long time ago on dirtyradio... I think it's by Thirstin Howl the 3rd, but researching it was a pain.

I've got to look these guys up. If they came up with a name like that, they've got to have some interesting song lyrics...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirstin_Howl_III
with a name from Gilligan's Island, no less
Real name, Victor DeJesus... not so bad that one either

Oops. I should have read the text of your message before I posted this.

enough.
At least judging from some of the photos I found. I only made the connection from the lyrics fragment to the creator through an archived BBS convo... in french. I'm thinking a lot of important memes are slipping through the net; future historians will be scratching their heads... after ripping out their hair of course.

If I ever grow pathologically obese I'll take up either rap or death metal or acid-bop (whichever is more dreaded/least mainstream in that day and age) and call myself "the Gibberin Jowlz Maak Vee-ay!"

the question in context. The response was worth it.

Me, I have a dream of Neo-beat, Punk Romanticist movement ... kind of a Byron, Ginsberg, Sid Vicious mash. Really could make room for a measure of rap, though.

Now you can take the two adjacent titles out of context.

That sounds an awful lot like how they constructed Goth...

I'm starting to think that the next teen craze will be a mix of barbie girl, bitches brew and baroque... ouchie!

How about a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, only set in 1950's New York, and rather than families, they could be street gangs ... the gang of native New Yorkers and a Hungarian gang ?- no make that Puerto Rican. Oh, and get this, it could be retold by the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Nah, that's crazy. How about setting it in Southern California and an Australian opera director could be retelling ... forget it. It's a stupid idea.

I was going to retire with the refrain from below, but then thought why not with the imagined cast of: Itshak Perlman, The Clash and Miles Davis -- already been used, make that Ornette Coleman doing a three way of this  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tqxzWdKKu8

Anyone who has seen your source code knows that it's not all a hoax.

I'm not a perfectionist I'm lazy.

So if I do it right the first time I don't have to come back and do it again.

Isn't it strange how many people pin the wrong label on you for the wrong reasons.

Col

I said to myself, "I'll go with Chip's afterthought -- Be Thyself. Can't go wrong with that." But then that kind of circled back into the main post -- How can one "Be Thyself" if one does not "Know Thyself?"

All kinds of fine edges here that are easy to fall off, one side or the other. It is good to project confidence, but too far to one side, and you project arrogance, which may be perceived as compensating for ineptness or for just plain arrogance. Too far to the other side and you project under-confidence, which projects a lack of ability to accomplish the job.

Another edge -- self-effacing humor. Too far in one direction it shows false modesty which is arrogance with a cherry on top. Too far in the other and it looks like, not just lack of confidence, but self loathing.

Tough balancing act, but we can't avoid it can we. All this in saying another fine product from your kitchen ... Be Thyself, but understand thine's true measure (value, attributes, weaknesses) first.

Wonderful article, Chip.

I have felt that many times, since as IT consultant I must be well versed in many fields (for commercial reasons), but I can't better than my clients in all them!

God-Sent Saviours!

I love this article. It is nice to know that I am not alone.

New company in town markets to my long-term customer and does the razzle-dazzle marketing, while criticizing every teeny thing that isn't perfect in the client's systems (whether I had anything to do about it or not). Customer hires new company. It takes months and sometimes years before the customer realizes that things are worse and deteriorating.
They call me back, tell me the story, and hire me to come in and clean up the mess. Meanwhile, I've been questioning myself, thinking about day-labor and drinking.
This arc seems to repeat over and over.
Oh Sage, I need an article about that.