Imposter Syndrome

So you think you’re not good enough? Your work doesn’t compare to other peoples? Do you feel like your images don’t look like whatever the latest editing trend is and so you’ll never be good enough? Your work never gets picked by hubs to be reshared? I could go on; the list is long and exhausting and like you I’ve felt every one of these emotions. It’s called “Imposter Syndrome”.

Imposter Syndrome is a very real thing. It takes us and grabs us and makes us believe that we are not good enough. It makes us feel that we need to compare ourselves to others. And that they are so much better than we are. We feel that we will never improve and never get there. And do you know what I think? Sometimes the more we improve, the worse it gets. Imposter Syndrome even has a definition in the Oxford Dictionary. That’s how real it is! It says that ‘imposter syndrome is the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skill.’

Remember before you owned your big camera, when you snapped with your phone and never thought twice about what you were posting? What changed? Because I’m sure we all did it. We took a snapshot of our lives and we thought that image was fabulous. We wanted to share what we were doing with the world… well with our followers and friends anyway. Think back, can you remember that? I can.

The thing is, the more knowledgeable we get, the more we start to see the things that we couldn’t before. Can you now see a wonky horizon or the fact that you actually missed focus just a little bit? Before you started your learning journey into photography you wouldn’t have noticed either of those things. But now they sort of jump out at you, don’t they? Something happens that drives this desire to compare ourselves. For some reason we never look back at how far we have come. We never compare ourselves to ourselves. Only to other people. And when we compare ourselves to other people, all we see is how good they are and how bad we think we are. What we don’t see is the journey that all these individuals have had themselves.

When I did my first proper photography course, there were people in my class with different levels of abilities. Some of them had many years of photography experience, just in a different genre to the course we were currently doing. Every week we had to submit work that was critiqued in order for us to improve. We were also able to post in a group for everyone to see our images. I remember being really proud of the images I had taken until I went into the group to see other people’s images and then suddenly, I felt completely inadequate.

It wasn’t because I wasn’t making any progress though.  I just couldn’t see and didn’t understand the knowledge that my classmates already had that I didn’t have. It took me a long time to understand that we are all on our own individual journeys and that we all see things very differently. That’s the beauty of photography. It’s an art form and as a creative we all have a different vision of the same thing.

You can see that in the following images. These images are all taken on the same beach at the same time but by 4 different photographers; how different are our visions and our editing? All equally beautiful but taken differently.

You just have to look through the Hello Storyteller community to see how much we see things differently. How different our voices are. Take these images for example. All equally beautiful but so very different in their voices, and the stories they are trying to tell.

I guess what I’m saying is that we all suffer from it. Imposter syndrome is very, very real. BUT what we all need to remember is that we are good enough and that we all need to take a moment to look back on our own personal journeys. The only person we should be comparing ourselves to is ourselves.

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