How marketers can fight the impostor syndrome – Interview with Tiffany daSilva
After having to deal with impostor syndrome as a marketer for many years, Tiffany daSilva – founder DaSilva Consulting – decided to turn her experience into a lesson for marketers who struggle with the same issue. During this interview at GPeC SUMMIT in November 2019, she sat down with us and shared many useful insights about fighting the impostor syndrome and finding the right mindset to deal with professional failures.
There is a lot of pressure on marketers to constantly optimize, improve and make their work better as fast as possible. In the beginning, this fast paced workflow is exciting and rewarding, people get promoted even though they had small failures occasionally, as part of their job. “And all of the sudden, failing seems like it’s not an option as we start getting further and further along in our career. And I think that’s the moment when you start going “Oh, my god, I shouldn’t be here, I thought that I should stop failing by now, people are going to realize I’m not as good as I think I am”. So people stop talking about these issues with their colleagues, peers or managers, which is the opposite of what would help their career grow and reassure themselves that their work is valuable.
What I found is, if we’re like that, if we’re closed up, if we’re not sharing how we’re feeling, it’s causing us to teach the people that we manage to be the same way and you’re creating this a little bit of a hostile environment. And with that hostile environment it means that you’re not being open enough to even invite new people into marketing.
What Tiffany means is that marketers should be more open to each other in terms of how their work affects them and allow more diversity in their professional circles. A diverse environment gives place to more ideas and perspectives than a closed one where every person is of a specific economic or academic background. “There’s so many people who maybe don’t have a formal education that we’re not allowing in the seat next to us, when I’ve learned more sometimes from those people than from people who have PhDs in what I do” is one insight of her experience shared in the interview.
We’ve asked Tiffany for recommendations on how can marketers deal with failure and how to ground themselves into what they actually need. The simple answer is that everyone needs to focus on what they need to improve or what they are insecure about and find a way to get better at, without beating ourselves up about it. “If it’s so important to you, that if you’re thinking of this negative thing every single day, is it worth it to not do anything about it? (…) you might not have a lot of money, but maybe it’s time to start taking courses and doing that. Or maybe it’s time to start reading a book about it, or telling yourself you’re going to do this, because it’s that important to you and you’re thinking negative thoughts about it.” She also recommends therapy or coaching and asking for help from people that are not generally biased about you (friends, family etc.), because you need them to be as objective as possible.
Tiffany has more great advice about dealing with impostor syndrome, creating habits that work and you can also find out the story behind the Shine Crew in the full video interview on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe to the GPeC YouTube Channel for more interviews, insights and live transmissions.
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