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Investigation
He recommends re-framing that question to “What do I need to do to be great?”. This can lead to a healthy balance of proactivity and confidence.
What can be done?
Hastings:
Agencies: Promote people for their people management skills and cultural fit; Be clear on what success looks like as you promote them; Make sure you provide structured learning and support to set them up for that success. Individuals: Reframe “am i good enough?” to “what do I have to do to be great?”; Know what success looks like; Break goals into bite sized chunks and celebrate little wins along the way; Seek out support and mentorship inside and outside the agency; Find new ways to utilise your strengths.
Rich Lloyd, managing director of Media.Monks Content AUNZ: “I hate winging it. In my personal life, I’m the guy that gets to the airport early. That prints out his boarding pass. Boooring.
“In my professional life I like to understand context, I like to prep for meetings, I like to look clients in the eye and talk with integrity.
“To avoid winging it with clients, I decided very early on that I’d work in different types of agencies to be able to view the same brand and commercial issues through different lenses: big ads, conversion funnels, performance media, first-party data, influencers.
“Naturally, this means you constantly land yourself in places of dis- comfort from which to learn. The by-product of this is impostor syn- drome; where I question if I’m the right guy to do this job.
“Luckily for me, this mindset is valued by my employers, as gener- alists can open doors to the right specialists vs being pre-programmed to only offer one solution.
“I still find myself occasionally locked in self doubt.” Clementine Ford, Nova Podcast Dear Clementine
“To me, it shows a hunger to learn. Ambition. That you’re open to solving things in a new way. In fact, I think we look to hire these people.
“And it’s also the sort of work we look to do. Creative that makes us uncomfortable. Metaverse cam- paigns are things that haven’t been tried before. A scale of asset pro- duction that makes my head spin.
“Ultimately if I worked with people who were sure they had it all worked out, I’d really worry. So here at Media.Monks, Imposter. Monks are always welcome.”
Clementine Ford, host of the Nova Podcast Dear Clementine and best selling author: “I’m an objectively ‘successful’ person. But even after fifteen years of establishing a solid reputation as a writer and content producer, I still find myself occasionally locked in self doubt. Am I good enough? Smart enough? Do they like me? Can I do this?
“I often feel like an outsider at meetings and industry events - I’m always waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I don’t belong. But I wonder how much of that is also the paradoxi- cal nature of creativity. Imposter syndrome certainly isn’t reserved for the creative industries, but a lot of people working in the creative fields spent their adolescence feel- ing like they didn’t belong.
“Our terrible insecurity exists alongside our unrelenting egos, and it can be a hard beast to man- age! And it becomes even harder when you’re in industries that are not only competitive, but also often operate like a closed shop.”
When she feels the weight of imposter syndrome, she tells herself: I have as much right to be here as anyone else; I’m here because I have a body of work that speaks for itself; There’s no such thing as “good enough”, only “always improving”.
“We have to start unpacking whether or not what we mean by ‘imposter’ is actually ‘outsider’. Do we really feel anxiety about our presence in certain places because we’re not qualified enough, or is it because those places have tradi- tionally excluded us? And so when I speak to other women about these things, I always ask them one question: ‘Why not you?’.”
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