Healthy Self-Doubt

I wonder how much of this ends up being from gender-based socialization. Maybe this individual got just the right balance of encouragement and luck in her upbringing to build a healthy balance of self-confidence in her abilities and self-doubt to encourage her to keep learning.

Meanwhile, a ton of men are insecure and scared, but they're treated as "the default choice," so in many cases they may not receive that formative boost of self-confidence. Thus, we get grown men convinced that they don't belong in their own careers.

> Imposter syndrome such a popular thing to belive in because actually most people really do suck at their jobs.

The question then is whether there's a correlation between professional confidence and job performance.

The individual may feel impostor syndrome or similar negative feelings. On one level emotions need to be managed (observed & accepted). Associating emotion with being "underrepresented" may just be one of many possible internal justifications. The environment, work-environment dynamics, unreasonable demands and lack of leadership, are probably more powerful influences than one single individual's exhaggerated feelings of responsibility. Psychological safe space must be consciously built and maintained, sometimes by dilligent effort on multiple levels pushing back against existing marginalizing forces.

The modern victim narratives I don't automatically subscribe to. Though, try to relentlessly direct attention to official and unofficial power structures: How they shape interactions, siloing and the inevitable unhealthy power dynamics (entropy). The dynamics is defined from top and down in typical hierachical structures, but is not rectified until cooperation starts at the top. Sometimes, technology and knowledge hoarding is used to same effects and ends. With good people all this may happen unwittingly, no matter the color, gender or "representation".

The cure to self-doubt is a healthy and supportive environment to provide necessary feedback during the course of creative and deep knowledge work. This happens to really be what agility is about too.

The Divide & Conquer-people would like us to fully believe in individualism, to justify shortcomings in leadership, for own small-minded benefits or managerial simplicity.

To me what the author is describing as 'healthy self-doubt' doesn't sound like self-doubt to me at, but rather admitting one doesn't know everything, one needs to surround oneself with competent people, etc. If you feel you're good-to-go except there are some things you just don't know, I'd say you're not suffering much self-doubt at all.

> I see a similar sentiment all the time where people say things along the lines of "Nobody really feels like an adult, we are all just muddling through" etc etc.

To me, when I used to feel like this a few years ago, it was not about the fact that I didn’t have my stuff sorted (which is also true that I hadn’t), but rather that it turned out that what I thought adult life was about when I was little turned out to not be true.

Since then I have been able to reconcile that, and to work out a direction that I am pursuing.

One footnote to that though, is that I am still not an adult in the traditional sense of having financial security and a spouse. But I am working towards that.