Trusting your Gifts & Talents
Trusting your gifts & talents
According to a 2020 study, anywhere from 9-82% of people in any given group suffer from imposter syndrome.
impostor syndrome
[im-pos-ter sin-drohm]
noun
anxiety or self-doubt that results from persistently undervaluing one’s competence and active role in achieving success while falsely attributing one's accomplishments to luck or other external forces.
inferiority complex
[in-feer-ee-awr-i-tee kom-pleks]
noun
intense feeling of inferiority, producing a personality characterized either by extreme reticence or, as a result of overcompensation, by extreme aggressiveness.
lack of self-esteem, feeling of inadequacy, lack of self-confidence.
Imposter syndrome or having an Inferiority complex can stunt your growth in so many ways.
“Do I need to ‘Stay in my lane’”
Things like this work on your psyche in ways that you don’t really understand. Why does a child who loves to sing all of a sudden claim they can’t sing; one friend claims to be the sporty one, one claims they are good at academics and the other the artsy one. You get praised for some things as a child and not other things you worked just at hard at; you automatically start thinking, I'm good at this and not that. I should leave this to so and so cause they are better at it than me at this, and then there are phrases that we say all too often to ourselves “I need to stay in my lane”/“Stay in your lane.”
As a child, I had been accused of copying others around me where we had the idea at the same time in reality. Another time when my teacher took the accusatory route when asking if I plagiarized on one of my papers when in reality, those were my own thoughts and my own conclusions of the work. She believed me in the end, but you can see it left a permanent mark in my memory. It got to the point where if I weren’t the first to do something, I wouldn’t bother, or I tried to blend in as much as possible so that I wouldn’t bring attention to myself.
i.e., losing the sense of self and a sense of creative trust in my own thoughts and my abilities
God has been challenging me to redefine originality
No one is an imposter if you trust in your own abilities and creative process.
Babies are only able to interact with the world by “copying” those around them, but we call that “learning” (and we are not talking about culture vultures here). No one tells the baby who is learning to speak they are copying their words. For crying out loud, in art school, they tell you nothing is made in a vacuum! The concept of art and creativity extends to the perspective stances individuals take when viewing or interacting with a subject. That means two individuals staring at a piece of work will not walk away with the same information. The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” stems from this same thought process. This way of thinking can extend to just about anything at all, from the way you like to take your coffee, your music and movie preferences to how you dress and express yourself.
Thoughts, concepts and ideas are not something isolated from one particular moment to one person. The outcome of those big vast ideas or sparks of creativity is how many of us see the world and interact with it creating our own space in its many shapes and forms. You have to come to terms that you, as a human, are a culmination of all the influences around you. Everyone you look up to and admire all started at the same place as a student, learning different techniques, making mistakes, and taking from the different influences around them to perfect their own way of creating.
All that to say, you are not an imposter. Don’t feel inferior cause people trust in your abilities and see the products of your labour. But you will always have something to prove until you yourself trust in your own abilities and thoughts, if not for the first time, then once again as you did as a child.
