Imposter Syndrome
I'm not sure if I'm asking a question or thinking out loud here, but does anyone else suffer from "Imposter Syndrome"?
Imposter syndrome is where you fear that "One day people will realise that I don't know as much as they think I know", or saying to yourself "What are you doing? You're going to be found out."
I see it in my day job in business management, both in myself and in others so I recognised it straight away when I started thinking about my first niche. I have no shortage of ideas but when I started thinking about creating meaningful, useful content on a topic then that fear of being found out started to appear.
As an example, I am a keen home cook and I love sous-vide cooking. But my efforts are amateur at best, certainly not good enough to make my Instagram feed! So how can I write meaningful content?
Here is what I have decided to do:
Focus on the value I can bring, not on attaining perfection. There are plenty of people who would get value from hearing about the learnings of an amateur and the mistakes he has made so they don't make the same ones.
Stop comparing. I'm not going to compare myself to a professional chef who has 20 years' experience. If I were to take up painting, I wouldn't compare my first effort to the Mona Lisa would I?
Stick to my ambition and risk being found out! So what if I make a mistake in a blog post and the experts flame me? Let's face it the real experts probably aren't googling my niche anyway are they?
How do those in the community who are further ahead than me, deal with this?
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I've had it Stephen, and it's normal. You just don't give yourself enough credit, if you can do something as good or better than the general public, you are an authority!
I meet a lot of fakes who have "certification" but don't know crap, so it works both ways lol.
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Been there, go back to visit periodically.
I absolutely love seeing other people here achieve success, but there are times that it serves to discourage me. "Oh, they did it faster... They did it better.... My site isn't as nice...."
It can be pretty hard to overcome those feelings, but I am working on it.
I agree. It's human nature I think. I like the supportive community - that's making a difference for me.