Imposter syndrome is the overwhelming feeling that you don’t deserve your success – or that you do not have what it takes. Whilst it impacts men and women; unfortunately women experience it more often. To celebrate International Women’s Day 2021, we hosted an online event on Tuesday 9 March to examine the issue and find out how we can begin to overcome it.
To help us learn more about imposter syndrome we invited two experts to speak – Aoife O’Brien and Lynda Barry.
Aoife is the founder of Happier at Work and an expert in the art of making employees happy. Her presentation examined the different ways imposter syndrome can show up in our lives – including procrastinating on a big project or assignment. She then took attendees through her three steps for overcoming imposter syndrome; acknowledge, believe and call to action.
Some great takeaways for attendees included taking the time to reflect on your success and write down your achievements, something that’s easy to forget in our fast-paced lives. For Aoife, the most important point to take away from her talk was to flip ‘fake it till you make it’ to ‘believe and you will achieve’.
Our second speaker, Lynda Barry, is an international career consultant and the founder of Lynda Barry Career Consulting. She specialises in career advice and helping her clients to bring the best version of themselves to the table. Lynda explored how we can offset imposter syndrome and mitigate the impact it might have on our CV, job applications and interviews.
She emphasised the importance of shifting our thinking when it comes to imposter syndrome. It’s important that we don’t feed the feelings. Instead look at the evidence; check the narrative we tell ourselves and differentiate between facts and feelings. Lynda discussed how these feelings can impact how we present ourselves as a candidate to prospective employers and guided attendees through how they can avoid these pitfalls. Her closing questions for attendees to ask themselves was – what am I giving my attention to? Are you giving time to the grey sky, or the blue one?
We closed our webinar with the announcement of our 2021 Early Stage Female Researcher Bursary. The Bursary is a €1000 career development award for early stage female researchers working in the area of sight loss research in Ireland. For the second year in a row, the Bursary was proudly sponsored by its4women.
This year we teamed up Laura Whelan, one of our funded researchers and a social media dynamo, to piggy-back on her fantastic #ShareYourResearchSeries. We set researchers the task of explaining their research in a 30 second video and we received some absolutely brilliant entries.
Kerry Beckett, Marketing Manager at its4women, joined the event to announce the winner – Laura Finnegan, Farrar Lab, Trinity College Dublin. Kerry’s team felt Laura’s video was exceptionally engaging and creative. Congratulations Laura!
We would like to extend a warm thank you to our panelists, attendees and its4women for their support. Happy International Women’s Day 2021 from all in Fighting Blindness!
Happier at Work Podcast: