Let's talk about the gremlins

On imposter syndrome.

When people said starting a business would be hard, I thought I knew what they meant. I thought they meant: you will have to work hard. I thought they meant: there will be financial uncertainty, and this will be worrying. You’ll have to keep on keeping on, even at the beginning, when it’s just you doing all the work and all the motivating and all the worrying, all on your own.

None of that put me off, really. My work for years has involved juggling client work and showing up for my team and finding time to go to networking events and approaching huge challenges in totally new areas every few months with vim, vigour and the belief that solutions can and will be found. Design thinking is a process, always, of wading determinedly into messy uncertainty. It’s widely acknowledged that there is a terrible bit in the middle that just has to be got through before the good stuff happens. Keeping on keeping on was, therefore, not daunting.

And, so far, those things have turned out to be challenging, and I have got through them. I have an Airtable board with nine different ‘to do’ columns, all of which I try to address at once whenever I’m not doing something else. I am doing some quite concerned income-and-expenditure maths. I am hoping that organisations would actually like help designing better cultures so their teams can show up and make the world better, unimpeded; and that the people who are trying to make the world better would actually like inspiration, ideas and community.

For a while, though, every tiny step towards this has been only 5% easier than impossible. Something about the process - about the need for the foundational idea that I might, perhaps, be worth something without the job title and the organisation and all the professional frameworks - has opened a cupboard in my subconscious that I didn’t know was there, and let out a whole bunch of gremlins. 

I’ve had a lot of counselling; I thought I knew what was in all the cupboards. The gremlins, therefore, were a surprise. I wasn’t expecting making progress to feel like fighting multiple invisible assailants with a straitjacket on, or to feel so sad and hopeless every time I tried. I didn’t know what was happening until I asked my partner to help me figure it out and he asked me about six questions and said, matter-of-factly, “you’ve got imposter syndrome. Everyone gets it”.

I’m used to hearing about imposter syndrome in the context of working within organisations, where there’s no alternative but to show up and do the work because you’re contractually required to do exactly that. I’d never thought that it might show up for founders or activists or people who have brilliant ideas about what they might be able to achieve. I’d never thought it might happen before you were actually doing the job, in the part where the job was only just beginning to form.

If I didn’t have the support networks I have - if I wasn’t paying for some of those, on the basis that they help me get through this process - I would have given up fifteen times by now. I did give up fifteen times by now; I just didn’t realise that that was what was happening. When I had the first kernel of an idea and some part of me said, “no, that’ll never work” or “you don’t have the audience for that” or “they wouldn’t want you to do that, though” and the idea disappeared, the end result was the same: nothing happened.

Having a word for this, naming the gremlins and giving them a seat at the table, has allowed me to sit there with them. I can thank them for their contribution, listen to them, find ways to reassure them, and then I can say yes, and we’re still going to do this, even if it scares you, but it’ll be OK. Because of that, in a few years’ time, there might be a whole lot more people who are able to make the world a better place, inspired and unimpeded. 

I’m thinking, though, of all the ideas that do get squashed; all the would-be founders and activists and people with brilliant ideas. Maybe this essay helps someone put a name to the swampy no-you-can’t feeling, and work their own way through it, too.

–

Here are my gremlins:

• The one who thinks people will demand Who are you to think you belong here?
• The really primal one who just wants me to continue to afford to buy food, please.
• The one who collects other people’s biographies and points out all the degrees and qualifications and accolades I don’t have.
• The one who tells me I’ll never be able to make a good impression, looking like I do, because only people with perfect skin and nice hair can ever succeed on their own terms.

And here are my anti-gremlins:

• My wonderful coach Jess, who said off-hand recently that “the work is to keep believing that you have a business when you’ve literally just made this shit up,” which is something I think about at least once a day.
• START, officially a fully-funded training programme ‘designed to take you from tech-based business idea to running your own start up company’ but also a room full of other people figuring their own way through this messy business. The next cohort starts on the 13th May in South Gloucestershire, and there are spaces available; register your interest here.
• My supremely talented counsellor Sally, who helps me listen to the parts of myself that need listening to, and lets me sit on the floor with felt pens and draw things when that’s what I want to do instead of talking.
• My lovely partner Ben, who asks me hard questions when they need asking and who I won’t link to because he is not available for other partnerships thank you very much.
• My team, my friends, my family: everyone who’s said “that sounds exciting!” when I stammer my way through the latest version of what I’m trying to do here. Saying things out loud and having people not laugh at you, it turns out, is the fastest and most effective way to prove the gremlins wrong.