Have you been playing Among Us? If you haven’t, your kids definitely have. I found out about it a few weeks ago because my children suddenly became Batman-level detectives and knew how to ask the kinds of interview questions that would make the FBI proud. In short, the game is all about finding the imposters in your midst based on their behavior and voting them out of the group to win. Sometimes you get it right. Other times you get it wrong and vote out someone who was doing legitimate tasks. It’s all a matter of perception.

Now, let’s look at another situation where we see this kind of behavior in a different light. You probably guessed where this is going already. We’re going to talk about Imposter Syndrome in our non-gaming lives and how it affects us. We may even make reference to pop culture along the way.

Where You Need To Be

I was thinking about this because something I said a few years ago at Security Field Day 1 popped back up in my feed. I was giving a speech at the beginning of the first day to the delegates and I wanted them to know that I understood that they may feel like they didn’t deserve to be there. I wanted to reassure them that they were where they needed to be. So I said something along the lines of the following:

You are here in this position because you earned it and deserve to be here. It would be an insult to those above and around you to think otherwise. If you have doubt in yourself, trust in those around you that they know who is best for your role.

Thanks to Kori Younger for recalling that specific part of the speech. Imposter Syndrome is hard to overcome because we really do feel like everyone else around us knows what they’re doing and we’re the odd ones out. We feel like we don’t know how to proceed or what to do. And that feeling can be crippling at times.

The idea that we don’t know what we’re doing is really called “learning”. It’s something that we do all the time. We apply lessons and intuition to find new solutions to problems, even ones we don’t feel qualified to do. We feel more comfortable doing this in areas where we have more knowledge or feel more confident, but rest assured we apply it all over the place, especially when confronted with situations we don’t completely understand or feel comfortable working on.

Earlier this year I took a Wilderness First Aid course for an upcoming Scout high adventure trip. Now, I must admit that I’m a terrible doctor or medical professional. I don’t like the sight of blood and I tend to focus on things without having a big picture. WFA is all about what happens when you find yourself in the back country far away from a hospital and what to do to handle situations. After a while, the solutions all kind of started sounding the same. You need to assess, stabilize, and almost always evacuate when critical. Now, that whole process sounds fairly simple when boiled down. But considering the crazy amount of things they want us to know about, like Acute Altitude Sickness, Hypoglycemia, and even things like concussions that cause cerebrospinal fluid leakage, you can see how easy it is to quickly be overwhelmed. However, the training up to that point helps you understand what to do: assess, stabilize, and evacuate if needed.

Applying A Process

Training and baselines help us overcome imposter syndrome in real life. We do similar things in IT or in other lines of work. When we encounter something we don’t understand or we feel overwhelmed by, we repeat the same process.

• Assess – What is going on? Does this look like something I’ve seen before? The more it looks like a previous experience the more knowledge I can apply. Trust what you know. Being wrong because you applied an incorrect lesson is better than being wrong because you did nothing. Your experience will always serve you well. Trust those instincts.
• Stabilize – This is where we spend a lot of our time. How can I fix this problem? Or stop it from getting worse? How can I get back to point where things work well enough to be able to reassess or make a different decision? Stabilization is the work that goes on in a process. A problem that is 100% stable is fixed. A problem that is 25% stable is better than it was with room for improvement. We need to apply lessons and things from our experience here too. Seen OSPF fall over before? Let’s try some things to get the routing table stabilized. Seen someone slice open their finger with a pocket knife before? We know how to fix this so it won’t reopen.
• Evacuate – This one is a little more tricky. Sometimes we can’t fix something. Or we don’t know what’s wrong. So what do we do? Sit there wringing our hands? Scream at the sky? No, we get help. In WFA, evacuation is all about getting better help, whether it’s a first responder at base camp or a doctor in a hospital. In a professional setting, evacuation is more about finding the right help to get past an issue. Asking a mentor or senior person about the issue. Calling the support line. Asking someone on Twitter if they’ve ever seen this before. These are all great examples of evacuation from a situation. There’s no harm in asking for help. But there is harm in not asking for help when you need it.

Remember that everyone else around you is doing the same things you’re doing above when you find yourself in a situation you don’t completely understand. Some look more expert because they have better knowledge to relate to the problem. It doesn’t mean they’re smarter than you or better than you. It means they’re more adept at this problem for this time. Some people are more suited for things than others.

To quote Einstein, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it’s stupid.” If we only judge people harshly by their ability to adapt to unknown situations with a minimum of information and then spend hours in post-mortem meetings laying out why they didn’t do everything right, we’re going to make them feel like imposters. Instead, let’s cut them some slack and remind ourselves that we probably couldn’t do as well as they did in the same situation. And if we could have done better than they did, this is a time to step up to the plate and mentor them to make them better. Apply your knowledge to theirs and they will succeed next time. Hoard your knowledge and you will forever believe that they are the imposter.

Tom’s Take

Among Us is all about finding imposters in our midst based on their behavior and what tasks they’re doing. Real life is all about proving we aren’t imposters by doing things and showing our worth. As much fun as the game might be trying to figure out who the imposter is, our reality should be spent more on encouraging people to feel better and mentor them through the process of believing in themselves and applying their knowledge to a problem to have a successful outcome. We should be focusing on making everyone better and more confident. There’s nothing suspect about that.