Feel impostor syndrome? It doesn't mean what you think

Podcast Transcript:

Welcome to the Pattern Breaking podcast. I wanna talk about imposter syndrome. So many of my students share with me that they experience imposter syndrome. What imposter syndrome means when they say it, if this is the first time you’re hearing those words, which I think is unlikely, what it means to me, what I believe it means to them is that...

they don’t feel like they’re actually an expert in what they’re doing and that that invalidates what they’re doing and that others are going to see them for what they are, which is a fraud. And ⁓ my gosh, every time I hear this from a student, my heart just sinks.

because I just feel like you see yourself so low when what imposter syndrome actually indicates is such a beautiful quality that you inherently have. And that is considerateness. If you are feeling imposter syndrome, if you are concerned that putting your work out there into the world is gonna result in you being seen as a fraud,

That means that you care about what other people think, that you are considerate, that you are conscientious about how your actions affect other people. And so what that actually means, if that’s an inherent quality that you have, if that’s something that’s surfacing, as soon as you start to think about putting creative or technical work out into the world, what that means is that the work that you create is more likely

to actually help people and improve their lives simply because you have that conscientiousness and that awareness as you’re creating something. So right off the bat, I wanna completely debunk the fact that whatever you create is going to harm or offend.

And in the case of technical pattern making, it’s extremely unlikely that what you create is going to create real harm for the people who purchase your patterns, experience what you put out into the world.

And even if it did, wouldn’t that just be exactly what art does?

Some of the most important art in history is controversial.

We experience

controversy used for marketing all of the time. What if

that you think that you’re about to drop is exactly what catapults you into your future.

What if everybody talking about the thing that you create is exactly what is supposed to happen? What if it’s the thing that gets eyes on what you do and gives you a platform to create from?

Nothing that you do is likely to create irrevocable damage. If you are already so conscientious that you feel imposter syndrome as you start to put something out into the world. Nothing’s going to create irrevocable damage. There’s nothing that an apology or a revised release of your pattern, for example, can’t fix.

The thing is, that caring about the quality of your work is one of the best qualities that you can have.

But letting that care paralyze you is not. What we don’t want is for you to so fully live in imposter syndrome that it stops you from doing what you want to do and from what the world needs you to do.

Imposter syndrome is a form of fear, and fear will come up at every part, like it will come up in every stage of your life, in every part of your journey. But fear is always something worth exploring, getting to the root of, understanding. But it’s not something that you have to obey or even shy away from. It’s something to move through.

So I have said in private conversations, I’m gonna be completely honest about this. I’ve said in private conversations with friends, I’ve said, I don’t experience imposter syndrome.

And while that has felt really true at the time.

At this moment when I reflect on it, what I realize is that I experience something very similar to what other people are calling imposter syndrome.

I experienced the same feelings of shame, of...

uncertainty that what I’m doing is good enough. I hesitate to speak things because I’m worried about what people will think.

but I don’t call it imposter syndrome. Because what imposter syndrome does for me is it makes

pathologizes it. It makes it a blanket statement about who I am. I am not, I choose to not call myself someone who experiences imposter syndrome.

just not part of who I am. But I experience,

things that other people might call imposter syndrome. So like, let me give you an example. I think of, when I think of times in my life where I’ve experienced imposter syndrome, one of the things that I, one of the stories that I think of is when I was farming, when I’d first started farming, I was living in this place called Camas Prairie in the middle of Montana, middle of nowhere Montana, huge wide open space, right? Where,

It felt like the middle of nowhere and there were neighbors, but they were literally miles away. But because the land was so flat, you could see their houses. And because these people are my neighbors, were ranchers, they had cattle, they were always observing their property. Observing their property for other wildlife, observing their cattle to make sure that they were where they were supposed to be, that they were healthy.

Right? And just because of the vastness you could see really far. And they literally had binoculars that they would watch over across far long distances. So that even though your neighbors were two miles away, they were most likely seeing your place and your property and maybe even in your window with a pair of binoculars.

And so, he was middle of nowhere, but I felt observed. I knew that I was being observed.

And I was there learning how to farm for the first time. Like, I remember one day there was a random dog that showed up on the property. And again, like neighbors are two miles away, at least, more than that. And I didn’t recognize the dog, so I knew it couldn’t be from any of my immediate neighbors. had to be from pretty far away. So I called around the different neighbors and I asked them.

you know, who’s described the dog and they were like, I think that’s so-and-so’s dog. So I called that neighbor and he, he’s on the phone with me. He looks out the window with his binoculars because he’s miles away and he says, yep, that’s him. This is the kind of life that I was living. But I was like a newbie farmer managing a piece of property for the first time that I

that frankly was a mess when I arrived.

And so every time I was outside and every time somebody drove by on the road next to the house, I would feel this like

flash of shame come over me. Like, please do not look at this patch of thistle that I’m trying to turn into a garden. Like it just,

I felt like just I hadn’t like I was I felt like such a city slicker, even though I grew up

You know, with my family DIYing things, we were a super working class. I didn’t grow up on a farm. And here I was trying to carve out a life for the first time doing this, like with all my neighbors who’s for generations had been living off of the land. So of course they saw me and probably looked at me and thought, dang, they are in over their head over there. But I didn’t pathologize that feeling.

I didn’t make it mean that there was something wrong with me. I just knew that it made sense. I just knew that the dynamic was honest and human. That they probably thought it was a bit a little bit funny watching us figure things out.

And that that’s what we were doing. We were just trying our best.

And that in the process, it’s slightly embarrassing.

But I also knew something else. Like, I also realized something really important there.

by me going out and doing the work, that those neighbors that drove by and saw my, you know, sad patch of thistle, that they respected that I was out there doing the work. That we had a mutual respect for each other’s hard work.

that they could, even though they might have even said things like, those kids don’t know what they’re doing, I don’t know, they might have,

that they still had some respect for the fact that I was out there trying to do it at all.

And so that’s it, that the people who do the work, the people who, the builders, the people who go out there and actually create things,

those are the people that will give you a little nod and be like, I see you, you’re doing the hard work. It’s a little cute as you start out and you don’t quite know what you’re doing, but props to you.

Criticism is so easy to throw around. But building and doing the work and putting yourself out there is not. The people who throw the most criticism are rarely the ones that are out there doing the work.

It’s just so easy to criticize people who put their work out into the world. What’s hard is being the person who vulnerably shares what they’re creating.

And I think back to school, back to when I went to college, and how it kind of felt like I was being trained just to analyze and critique.

It’s like, this thing, this is cultural. That, okay, so I remember being in college and I was in a film studies class. It was one of the first classes I’d taken. I didn’t really know what film studies was gonna be and after I took that class, I didn’t wanna touch it ever with a 10-point-point pole ever again. And I’m realizing now why. Because the whole exercise was watching the film and picking it apart. It was like the more...

that you criticized something. The more granular you got, the more intelligent you were.

College taught me how to critique, how to analyze things, but what it didn’t teach me how to do was actually create something new. Even the essays in those, in my college classes were not asking me to truly create something new. They were asking me to regurgitate ideas, explain them in my own words, and do it to a certain word count.

It was not about creating truly new ideas.

It’s no wonder that when people finally step out into the world with something that they’ve created, they feel like there’s gonna be nothing but critics waiting for them. Because our culture literally trains us to be critics.

So let’s say you actually put something out into the world. Let’s say that you’re building something creative and you’re getting ready to share it with the world. And let’s say you put it out there and it turns out it’s not perfect, that people point out things that are wrong with it.

It is not irrevocable. What actually happens when you put something out there and discover after the fact that it’s imperfect? You get to decide how to pivot from there. You get to decide if you re-release it, if there’s a second edition, if you own the imperfection and publicly talk about it vulnerably.

And honestly, remember that if people start talking about your thing, even if it seems like what they’re doing is drawing attention to something that’s wrong with it, I want you to really remember that no publicity is bad publicity. That literally marketers, viral content creators, are doing this, are creating things that are

likely to be controversial.

simply because they know that it will take off, that the critics will eat it up, that the discussion around it will explode and it will get more eyes on it than if it was neutral and acceptable and everybody was just like, yeah, of course, and moved on and didn’t spend any time thinking about it or discussing it.

What if your first creative work in the world is your publicity stunt?

I say that just for the thought exercise because

I know that you care about the quality of your work and I know that you want to do the best to make everything that you create the highest quality

and that it can be and the best that it can be for everybody who receives it and enjoys it.

but you’re never going to even make that possible. You’re never going to be able to serve other people with the beautiful creative things that you do.

If you hold back

with this idea, with this internalized feeling that whatever you’re creating makes you some kind of fraud, that it’s not good enough, that it’s not worth sharing. That is the thing that I wanna

excavate from your identity that I want you to release and let go of and and and see for what it is.

that it is something that you are allowed to feel, something that is normal to feel, something that is a sign that you care, but not something to let stop you.

what you need to do is take action in spite of your feelings of imposter syndrome.

the alternative, the thing that actually feels worse is knowing that you wanted to do something and not doing it. I personally feel far more shame about feeling like I should be doing something or feeling like I’m not realizing my purpose in this world. That feels more shameful to me than...

going out and doing something amateurishly.

your imperfections, your mistakes make you real, right? I made a post on Instagram yesterday and after I posted it, I realized there were two typos in it. And I thought, you know what, leave those in there. It shows that Chat2pt didn’t write it. It shows that these are my words.

Another time I experienced a sort of imposter syndrome was when I first started teaching pattern making online. Of course the idea ran through my mind like

Who am I to claim that I can teach pattern making? I have not made everything that there is to make. I have so much more to learn. But I knew that the practice of teaching was going to make my craft better. was that by teaching, I was dedicating myself to going deeper with this thing that I loved. I also had a...

deep

could figure anything out. That if I didn’t know how to make something, I would be honest with my student and I would pour myself into figuring out a solution. I would pull together all of the resources at my disposal and I would figure it out with them. I knew that there was no way to know how to do

everything that there was to do in the realm of pattern drafting. But I also knew that the only way to get better and the only way to figure things out was to try.

One other thing that was indispensable at that moment, when I was making that decision to offer a course where I taught pattern making for the first time, was knowing that I could lean

fellow pattern makers, friends that I’d made,

who were

more experienced than me, who

many years of experience in patterns and different.

drafting different patterns in size inclusive and plus size pattern making, that if I had any question, I could always call them. They were encouraging me to go for it, to teach, and they were there if I needed them.

So don’t forget that. You’re not doing what you want to do in a vacuum. Surround yourself with community. Find people who are there for you to answer your questions, to help you think through things, because sometimes it’s not about having the answer. The fact is, is that there’s never one right way of doing things. There are always many possible paths towards the thing that you want to be doing.

If anybody tells you there’s only one right way, that is their narrow point of view, that is their experience, their lived experience, but what I can tell you...

is that there are so many different ways to make a perfect, beautiful fitting pattern.

And you could argue about which seam allowance is a better way of doing things and where a dart should start and stop relative to the bust point. And you can argue about those finer details of things. But what it really comes down to is does it work? Does it fit beautifully? Can people successfully sew it, right? Like if you are conscientiously approaching something, it...

doesn’t matter if you’ve done it exactly like some other expert has done it. What matters is that it has integrity. And if the sheer fact that you reflect on that before releasing it to the world shows me that it probably does.

The world doesn’t need more people sitting on the sidelines wondering if they deserve to participate.

If you’re feeling called to share something, to create something, to build something, that I truly believe is for a reason.

There’s no one right way. There’s no one path.

The feelings that people call imposter syndrome are normal.

They mean that they are doing something new. But the moment that you turn those feelings into part of your identity, that you pathologize it and say, there’s something wrong with me, I feel this imposter syndrome, I feel like a fraud, you give them the power to stop you. I want you to feel what you’re feeling and do the work anyways.