4.01 How to use your existing expertise when you feel like an imposter

Feeling like you know absolutely nothing is perhaps the worst part of doing a PhD. You know you need to become an expert but often you feel like a complete imposter. One great strategy is to identify areas of your life where you DO feel more competent or confident and consider how to transfer that learning to your PhD. This could be a past or current career or even hobbies and life experiences that you often overlook. In this episode, I’ll talk about why this is so helpful and how to use your expertise to make your PhD progress more easily. 

If you found this episode useful, you might like this one on how to overcome imposter syndrome. 

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to season four of the PhD Life Coach Podcast . I am so excited that we have even reached season four. There are now 138 episodes and at time of recording over 112,000 downloads. So thank you so much to all of you who have been a part of that. If you still know people that aren't listening to the podcast, why not? Make sure you send them an episode.

It is super exciting to be returning for another year of the podcast and I am really, really looking forward to all the things that we have lined up for you. Today we're gonna be thinking about something that comes up in so many of my sessions.

So at the moment I have 83 people in my membership. They're all PhD students who are looking to overcome procrastination, get the stuff done, and relearn how to enjoy their PhDs. And one of the things they talk about most often is feeling like a bit of an imposter. Feeling as though [00:01:00] they don't deserve to be there, that their supervisor is somehow gonna, you know, find out that they're not good enough to be there, that they don't have the capacity to learn to do all this stuff.

Maybe you felt like that too. Maybe there are times when you are just thinking, wow. Everybody else knows what they're doing, or at least they know what they need to learn to be doing. And I just, I don't belong here. I'm not part of this. This is not something I'm capable of. And if you felt like that, I want you to know that you are in really, really good company. Most people feel like that at some point in their academic career. And one thing I know more than anything is that it's not an accurate reflection of your capacity to be an academic, okay? The fact that you feel like that doesn't actually relate to your actual abilities, your actual skills, the actual place you're at the moment, or your capacity to become more in the future. [00:02:00] It seems to be completely independent and more driven by the circumstances you find yourself in, the experiences you've had in the past and the way you interpret all of that.

The problem is when we tell ourselves we're an imposter and we tell ourselves that the reason we're finding something difficult or the reason we don't know something is because we don't deserve to be here because we're not good enough to be here.

What it does is it shuts down all of our creativity, okay? Suddenly it turns from something that is solvable, is figureoutable, into something that is just a kind of inherent trait weakness on your part, and then we can't do anything about it. It's like you've might seen these challenges where they give some people puzzles that are solvable and they give some puzzles that are insolvable, and if they tell you it's an insolvable puzzle, most people will just stop. Most people won't even bother to keep trying [00:03:00] something that they've been told is impossible. And if you are the one telling yourself you're not good enough to do something, then it's really hard to believe that you are gonna make decisions, that you are gonna prioritize, that you are gonna learn, that you're gonna figure it out.

The other reason that imposter syndrome can be so sort of paralyzing is that it sees you as a really unidimensional person. It really focuses on this particular context, so the academic context and your current state of being, and take those two things and make it mean that you don't deserve to be here.

And we've already talked about how it doesn't allow for the fact that you are gonna change over time, that you are gonna learn and develop, but it also doesn't account for the skills and expertise you've got in other sectors of your life. Now, you may say, I don't have other sectors. I don't have skills and expertise, but it's [00:04:00] simply not true.

All of you have experiences in other places or in other types of bits of life that you have expertise in. It might be previous or current jobs that you have alongside or before your PhD. It might be hobbies, it might be your personal circumstances. It might be the way you look after, you know, say you've got a chronic illness, your skills and expertise are in managing that condition, perhaps looking after other people, parenting, looking after elderly parents. All of us have got expertise and experiences in other parts of our lives that imposter syndrome doesn't really take into account.

And that's a problem as well. And the reason that's a problem, again, is twofold. One is that, it doesn't sort of recognize that actually we are a sort of rounded human person and that if we [00:05:00] can be an expert in that area, maybe we can be an expert in this area too, but it also prevents us transferring expertise from one setting to another. This is something that actually, many moons ago I used to do some research about, about how skills you learn in one setting can be applied to others. And the main take home of that research was they can be, but you have to do it intentionally and in a kind of reflective way 'cause it doesn't just happen automatically.

And when we are telling ourselves we're imposters, we don't deserve to be here, that perhaps there's this other place where, yeah, I, I fit over there. I don't fit here. Then we often don't take the time to think about what do I know from that other bit of my life, whether it's a career, whether it's hobbies, whether it's personal circumstances that I can apply to what I'm here doing today.

And so that's what I'm gonna speak about in this first episode of season four, is how you can [00:06:00] use expertise that you have from other parts of your life to improve your own experience of your PhD or indeed broader academia if you're not a PhD student anymore. 

Now, I think the best way to illustrate this is to give you a couple of examples, right? So those of you who have been around for a while will know that I have a bit of a kind of circus hobby. Okay? So I used to do aerial silks quite a lot, and now I'm more doing sort of poi and generally trying to throw things around poi mostly, little bits of juggling and Diablo and stuff.

And you might think that there are no parallels between circus and doing a PhD or surviving in academia. But actually those of you who listen regularly will have heard me draw parallels quite regularly. So as an example, one of the parallels I draw is between tight rope walking and procrastination or staying focused, because [00:07:00] often we think that we need to stay focused all the time, and that focused people don't lose focus.

Same as we often think if we don't know anything about circus, that tightrope walkers don't wobble. But it's not true. Tightrope walkers do wobble. People who are highly focused do lose focus. The difference between experts, whether that's in the tight roping world, or whether that's in the staying focused world, the difference between experts and beginners is when and how quickly they notice that they're wobbling, either physically or in focus and how expertly they can correct that. So a beginner tight roper doesn't notice they're wobbling until they've really, really wobbled and then often is either too late to correct, doesn't know how to correct or massively overcorrects and falls off the other side. Whereas an expert type roper notices the little wobble, but [00:08:00] knows exactly what to do just to bring themselves back to in balance again without it being a big drama. So to the non-expert eye, you don't see them wobble when they have. And it's the same with focus. People who are very good at staying focused, they do sort of go, Ooh, squirrel, and then they bring their eyes back to what they were doing, they don't make a big deal of the fact that they just saw a squirrel. They just bring it back to where they were. So that's an example of an analogy from my circus world.

Now. I find it really, really useful to draw analogies from my circus world because it's a world that I understand. Now, I don't wanna overstate this guys. I am not an expert in any of this by any stretch, but I know quite a few people who are. It's a world that I enjoy. It's a world that I enjoy learning about, and so when I think of parallels from that world, they seem very visual. They seem within my kind of comfort zone and they [00:09:00] give me a fresh way of looking at things.

You know, I talk about plate spinning in one of my courses about what to do when you've got too much to do, for example. And that's another circus trick. We think about juggling quite often and that kind of skill acquisition associated with building up the ability to do that. And how often in PhDs we think we can just jump straight to the hard bit without the sort of buildup and so on. When we can translate it to something we're familiar with, and that feels lower stakes often than our PhD academic life, then suddenly it can bring clarity in a place that you hadn't had clarity before.

Now I've used this, this kind of finding analogies, finding expertise from other areas and applying them to your academic life with clients as well. So as an example, I had a client who was very into hiking. They were into hiking. They loved that [00:10:00] kind of route finding, and in fact, they taught others how to do it. They taught others how to navigate. They led climbs and led walks and so on. So this was a world that they loved, that they felt highly competent at and they had a lot of experience at. And we then sort of translated that to the academic world. The idea of way finding through a project. That actually there's not necessarily one correct route that the route you choose.

Depends on who's on the hike with you and what conditions there are, and how everyone's doing and all of those things, and how sometimes the route that you planned needs to change. And that doesn't make it a failed hike. It means that you are changing your priorities about where you're trying to get to and why understanding what the, the people, the people in your group are trying to get out of a hike would help you to design what type of hike to take them [00:11:00] on. So all of these things about tailoring it, about responding to setbacks, about considering morale as well as physical ability about prioritizing, whether, you know, are they there for the waterfalls or are they there for the physical challenge, or do they want particularly Instagram worthy photos, or are they trying to build their fitness, or why are they doing this?

All of those things we can apply to PhDs, and if you are not in that world, then that won't feel intuitive to you. But if you are somebody who loves the outdoors and loves hiking, then suddenly it kind of makes sense. It's like, oh, I'm plotting a route through this landscape. I'm where I am now and my, you know, submission or viva is somewhere over there, the other side of this landscape, and I can plot my route through this landscape.

I'm capable of doing that, and suddenly, if you are someone who's capable of navigating that and making those decisions in [00:12:00] a kind of geophysical landscape, then you can start going, okay, well how would I do that? And how can I translate that to what I'm trying to do here where it's more of a metaphorical landscape.

So that's another example. So we've got kind of circus as an analogy. We've got hiking as an analogy. There's also then more professional analogies, right? So lots of you will have either had jobs before, or will have jobs alongside doing your PhD, maybe within academia or outside of and actually taking translations from those can really help too.

In fact, some of the biggest imposter syndromes that I get are people who are really big wigs in their like professional area, either previously or still now, but who are relative beginners in academia. And I think it comes across because it's such a contrast that if in your professional life you [00:13:00] are used to people thinking you are great and knowing what you're talking about and coming to you for advice, then suddenly being the one who doesn't know anything can be a real challenge, right? Because you're like, whoa, it has been a long time since I felt this much of a beginner.

Now, just as a little aside, any of you're thinking? I don't really have any, I don't have another job outside and I don't really have any hobbies. This is a really good reason to take up some hobbies. I'm a big fan of hobbies for work-life balance, and I've got some podcasts lined up about that stuff soon. But being a beginner again in something is a brilliant thing to do and learning how you navigate beginner ness in something like circus, for example, um, can translate hugely into navigating beginners in academia too. But yeah, so these people who have, they have their amazing careers where they're really well respected and suddenly they're beginners again, in academia that can be really, really hard to manage. One of the things that can really help is really [00:14:00] reminding them that all that skills and expertise they have in their professional setting, they can use this in the academic setting too. Now they might have to translate it. Settings work very differently, right? You know, if you are from corporate America, or you are from a small charity in rural Lincolnshire, it might translate very, very differently. But thinking about how do I handle things like that there and how would I handle it here?

Or even if you are senior enough that you advise other people, so you have junior people in your either current or past job. Thinking about how you would help them navigate the uncertainties of that setting, again, can create really good parallels for you to bring into academia. I'm gonna give you two examples.

So one example I haven't worked with directly, but I love the analogy 'cause I think it really helps lots of people and that is about being a high class chef. So working anywhere where you've got a very kind of [00:15:00] regimented kitchen. So there are so many lessons that we can take from chefing and those of you maybe cooking's your hobby, right? It doesn't even have to be a job. Maybe cooking's your hobby and you are really good at this too. But, in sort of high class French cooking, they have this concept called Mise En Place, with apologies to everybody who has a good French accent, which basically means everything in its place. And one of the things that happens at the end of a chef's shift is that they reset everything back to where it was at the start of the shift. So that's cleaning down, that's restocking fridges, um, recreating basic sources if you have sources that are always in the fridge that you can use and things like that. Getting everything back so that it's exactly where it was and exactly where you need it to be when you return to work tomorrow. That is one of those examples of something that people do in that profession. Or if you are an organized home cook, you may do there as [00:16:00] well. Actually translating through into your PhD, how can you make sure that stuff is back in the metaphorical fridge, that things are processed and put away, that things are back where you need them to be when you start back up again.

A second example of a professional setting. I have had several clients and still do, had several clients who have medical careers either before or alongside their PhDs. So they're doctors, their nurses, their physios, their healthcare practitioners of a whole variety of things. And often they're doing their PhDs alongside their clinical duties and often the things that we struggle with in an academic or PhD setting are things that they're handling all day every day. So I recently had a conversation with a client who was struggling with prioritization. They had lots and lots of things that they "needed" to do. They had to do, um, in their mind, or at least that they had choices about doing. [00:17:00] And they were really, really struggling to pick because all of them felt important, and I encouraged them to really reflect this back to how they would handle it in a medical setting. And they said, you know, in a medical setting, I would accept that I can't do all the things and I would prioritize based on urgency, based on need, based on where I can make the biggest impact and so on and so forth.

And that I would have some acceptance for the fact that there are some bits that I can't do to the best of my ability 'cause I've got to prioritize these other people. And so therefore I do what needs to be done and nothing more. And they're not saying that that's easy, but that they get it. And they accept it and they know how to process it.

And we talked a little bit about how they would support more junior members of staff. Because when you start out in healthcare, you have the same thing, right? You wanna help everyone, you wanna do all the things. And you, it's hard to realize that you can't. And as they were thinking through how easy that was for them in their professional setting [00:18:00] and what they would say to their junior healthcare practitioners who were struggling, they were increasingly able to see how they could apply that into their PhD and academic world.

Now that one doesn't work for me. Right? The idea of being in a hospital and having 20 patients, all of whom need me to varying degrees for very different things, I find deeply terrifying. I have no idea how I would, you know, I'm a first aider, so I can do like basic sort of emergency, okay. Those ones are quiet and dying. Let's go that way, sort of assessments. But in terms of in a ward, the idea terrifies me. So that's not an analogy that works for me, but for my clients for whom that's their setting, that's where they feel like a kind of, um, you know, a functioning professional. That's where they feel at their best, whatever the opposite of an imposter is.

[00:19:00] Then being able to see that in this setting and being able to say, okay, there are parallels, there's things I can take from here and apply there is hugely empowering. So I want you to think, I want you to think through professional experiences. I want you to think through hobbies and side hustles and all that good stuff, or your actual personal life. So I think. Parenthood is a great example of this. Some of you might be in amateur theater or high level sports. So I come from a sports science background and some of our best students were the students that were also high class athletes. We called them dual professionals where they were a student and they were essentially a professional athlete and some of them got distracted by it.

But the ones that could translate through from one to the other, that they could see how the training they did in their physical lives could translate across to the training that they [00:20:00] needed to do in their academic lives. They were some of the best students that we had. So what is it for you? Where's a context that you feel like, you know what? I mostly know what I'm doing, or at least I feel comfortable 'cause I want to take you back. I am not good at circus. I cannot tell you how not good at circus I am okay. If the average person saw me, they might be like, eh, okay. If anyone who does circus, I am not an expert circus, but it's still my little world that I love and understand.

What's your little world where you feel like you kind of get it? You kind of can see it, and I'll set you the challenge of drawing some analogies, drawing some stories, lessons that you can take from that world and apply into your PhD or academic world.

Now if you're listening and you're not on my newsletter, you need to jump on my newsletter 'cause I will set these sorts of challenges every week in my newsletter. So you get one email a [00:21:00] week, you get a little summary of what I say in this podcast. You get two reflective questions that you can work through and ponder about, either in writing or just thinking about 'em when you go for a walk. And I'll give you a specific action and that is something that will help you to actually apply this stuff that we're talking about in these podcasts say that you don't just listen to them and go, oh, that was interesting, and then never look again.

So if you're not on it, go to my website, PhD life coach.com, and there's a big orange button right in the front where you can join the newsletter and you'll get prompts like that. What is your little world that you could take and apply and how could you use that to help you develop a sense of expertise in your academic world too?

It's worked so well for me, worked so well for so many of my clients, and I'm excited to hear what you guys all come up with. So do. if you are on my newsletter, just drop me a message back. Let me know what analogies you came up with, what applies out into your world. [00:22:00] Anyway, that is the first episode of series four, and I can't wait to be with you for the rest of the academic year. Thank you all for listening and see you next week.

Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.