Sure, I can tell you what worked for me. I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I think I'm going to anyway.
We had these kids in my high school that were notoriously smart. They both got perfect SAT scores, and were straight A students. Our student newspaper released a parody paper on graduation, with the cover story being that these kids had been guessing on their exams the whole time. Maybe.
Firstly, one of the things thats kind of quirky about the Imposter Syndrome is that its a trait shared by high performers. So, while it may be kind of weird for me to say that if you think you're an imposter, you most likely aren't, thats actually a true statement I can make based on the research I looked at. (Something like 50% of wealthy people think they are frauds, and as many as 70% of all people feel like they are frauds at some point in their life.) Its actually the incompetents of the world that don't realize they have a lack of skill.
Lookup the Dunning-Kruger effect. All their research was born from the case of this guy named Wheeler, who read somewhere that Lemon Juice was usable as invisible ink like in so many spy movies. So of course he did the rational thing: he smothered his face in lemon juice and promptly robbed two banks, thinking the lemon juice would make him invisible to security cameras.
One of the takeaways of the study:
If you're incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.
If you can't tell, thats the corollary of the thing I put in bold up there. If you think you're incompetent, you can't be because you have the skills, knowhow and savvy to know what incompetence looks like in the first place.
It took me a while to wrestle with this, because it seemed very circular logic to me at first. So, I shrunk the findings down into a mantra that I use whenever I hear the little voice in the back of my head telling me I'm dumb.
"Everyone on this planet is dumb. The only difference between the smart people and the really dumb people is that the smart people know how little they know." Confucius and Socrates have similar words of wisdom -- if you still have self doubt, I'd recommend you pick up some of their work. I know I'm dumb, but those dudes are F'n smart.
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