Beating Impostor Syndrome and Burnout
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Course Outcomes:
- Learn how to reduce negative self-talk
- Use compassionate imagery to avoid feeling like an imposter
- Counteract burnout with boundary-setting and behavioral experiments
- Reshaping your job to avoid burnout
Do you feel like you tricked someone in order to reach your professional position? Do you dismiss compliments about your work? Maybe you’re afraid people will find out how little you actually know? All of these are signs of imposter syndrome, and they’re more prevalent than many people realize. Studies show that in high-pressure jobs, up to 76% of people may experience imposter syndrome. This intense fear of being exposed often means overwork and neglecting to set healthy professional boundaries. This creates a cycle of anxiety, overcompensation, and self-sacrifice that is a direct path to professional burnout.
Join expert Jonobie Ford to explore the common causes of imposter syndrome and burnout, and pick up a variety of techniques and tips that'll help manage and overcome these feelings. You’ll work through exercises in the course to change your negative self-talk, improve your self-compassion, practice boundary setting, and try job crafting—all strategies that have been shown to both combat imposter syndrome and prevent burnout.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Understand the connections between imposter syndrome and burnout
- Mitigate the effects of imposter syndrome and burnout and work with greater confidence
- Be a more effective leader by recognizing and addressing signs of imposter syndrome and burnout in colleagues
This live event is for you because...
- You sometimes feel like a fraud at work, despite all your professional accomplishments.
- You want practical tips to look more clearly at the evidence of your success and break the cycle of overcompensation that leads to burnout.
- You manage people and want to learn how to proactively reduce team burnout and its associated costs.
Prerequisites
Recommended follow-up:
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Introduction (25 minutes)
- Presentation: What is imposter syndrome and why does it happen? How does imposter syndrome lead to burnout, and what else is a factor? How common is burnout? Effects of imposter syndrome and burnout syndrome.
- Hands-on exercises: Visualizing a better experience; learn about others in the class through an anonymous poll
- Group discussion: How does imposter syndrome affect people’s lives?
- Q&A
Tools for the Toolkit: Cognitive Tools for Imposter Syndrome (35 minutes)
- Presentation: Fighting the negative internal chatter and building self-compassion to counteract imposter syndrome
- Hands-on exercises: Complete a self-talk worksheet to express your negative thoughts, assess their truth, and explore exceptions and examples that support a new thought; create a compassionate avatar that you can use in moments of self-doubt
- Q&A
Break (5 min)
Behavioral tools for Imposter Syndrome (35 minutes)
- Presentation: Imposter syndrome, boundaries, and burnout, daring to say no, and places you can set boundaries that you may not have thought of
- Hands-on exercises: Explore setting boundaries when you feel like an imposter; writing scripts to help you with difficult boundaries; complete a behavior experiment worksheet; humor and power poses for combating imposter syndrome
- Q&A
A Near-Universal tool: Mindfulness (20 min)
- Presentation: Why psychologists and therapists love mindfulness for so many problems, including imposterism and burnout. Ways it can work for you, even if you hate sitting still.
- Hands-on exercise: Mindfulness exercise, novel ways to introduce mindfulness into your routine
Break (5 min)
Crafting past Burnout (35 min)
- Presentation: What is job crafting, and how can it help with burnout? What the research says about job crafting in times of big change. The relationship between finding agency, job crafting, and burnout. How to determine what to do with your agency if you feel lost.
- Hands-on exercises: Determining what your organization really values, Values you want to keep, brainstorming areas of change, avoiding pitfalls, your career map and reflection
- Q&A
Solving imposter syndrome and burnout in community (20 minutes)
- Presentation: How organizations (and managers) can help; connection for both burnout and imposter syndrome; ways to work with peers to reduce imposterism and burnout
- Hands-on exercises: Answer a poll about your organization; engage in a visualization exercise
- Q&A
Your Instructor
Jonobie Ford
Jonobie Ford graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Masters in Computer Science, and then spent the next 20 years working at IBM and Microsoft. At those companies, she held a variety of roles -- technical program manager, manager of program managers, content developer, and manager of content developers. She's worked on multiple software products, primarily in the enterprise management and cloud space. She's also an accomplished speaker at industry conferences.
At work, she was a sought-after mentor and coach, particularly by minorities in the field. Love of this type of work as well as becoming a certified coach through SeattleCoach! eventually led to beginning a coaching career and starting work towards a Masters in Counseling degree.