 Hello, this is a one hour talk in five minutes, so let's go, go, go. I'm going to be talking to you about imposter syndrome and individual competency, but more importantly I'm going to be talking to you about brains. I love brains. I'm a former teacher and the thing you need to remember about brains is they're terrible. These are wet bags of meat inside a bone prison and they give you everything you care about. That thing you're afraid of? Stupid meat bag. That thing you love? Stupid meat bag. And your stupid meat bag loves to learn, but it needs specific things. The zone of proximal development is an educational concept saying, if stuff's too easy for you when you're working on it, you can do it. You can do it alone, but you won't learn anything. If stuff's too hard, you can dip up there with extra help, but you're not getting any learning done. You need to be in this absolute sweet spot, the zone of proximal development to really learn. And that's fantastic. Your brain just needs to be right here to learn. That would be perfect, except that your brain is terrible at self-assessment. You need to know how good you are. Your brain has no idea how good you are. Because I'm lazy, here's the Wikipedia definition of a cognitive bias. We're going to be talking about my second favorite cognitive bias, but my husband gave me a much better definition. It's when your brain takes garbage data, it builds a terrible conclusion and it falls in love with it because it made it just for you. Like a little kid with a macaroni picture, your brain loves this garbage it made you. Imposter syndrome is my second favorite cognitive bias, and I define it as this sick, sad, cold, wet feeling that you have no idea what you're doing. You're going to get caught and it's all going to be terrible. For me, I don't know what I'm doing. Oh God, my coworkers are going to find out. I'm going to get fired. I'll lose my flat. I'll have to live outside. Because I live in England, it rains. Your process may vary. What does imposter syndrome do? Ims and Clants back in 1978 studied high achieving women and coined the term, and they found that imposter syndrome gave people feelings of inadequacy, and that's kind of in the definition. We're fine with that. Also you would avoid displays of target skills. And they found that people who suffered from it would use social skills to get around that, and they would actually work harder in response to imposter syndrome. Who's impacted by imposter syndrome? Your options here are to raise your hands or yell in one, two. Everybody quickly look around at who does not have their hands up. This is great in two minutes. Of course all of you who did this are like, just, just, just fix it. How do I fix it? I want to be able to fix imposter syndrome for other people. You're nice people. You want to fix it for other people first, right? There's somebody right here who's like, no. The first thing I would warn you is never tell anyone they have imposter syndrome. This is so dangerous. They can be telling you, I have a serious problem, there's a work culture fit, people are ignoring me, a real skills gap. If you come up and say, oh, that's just imposter syndrome, I am not responsible for your murder. Do give positive and meaningful feedback whenever you can. Who here complains about something when it goes bad on an open source project? No documentation, y'all are lying or super nice. Who here says something really nice when stuff works perfectly? Oh, maybe y'all are just really nice. Give people positive, meaningful feedback. Give them the feedback their brain needs to know they're doing okay. And this one's not risk-free. When you get a chance, talk about your own fears. Talk about how it doesn't always work for you. Fix it for yourself. If your brain doesn't know how good you are, give it the data. Say, hey, who here has taken a very valuable industry certification? Who here has taken an industry certification? They're not always super valuable, but giving your brain some feedback to say, hey, we're 80% not crap is all right. You can also interrupt that, ah, feeling. For me, it's, I don't know what I'm doing, I'm gonna get caught. I told my designer what I actually do to de-stress. And she decided to draw that, and that was fine. Normal human beings should not eat cake in the bath, I'm told. I'm told people, play video games, read a book, go running. Do the thing that interrupts that horrible, ah, cycle of imposter syndrome. You can't debug your brain, but you can give yourself the space and the forgiveness to walk away and say, this is terrible, but it's just a buggy error message. I'm fine. Everything's okay. Thank you very much.