Leadership Journey: My Story of Doubt and Imposter Syndrome.

To understand where my doubts began, I have to go back to my parents’ stories—and the world they grew up in. My father was born the same year the stock market crashed. His family was poor even before the Depression, and he remembered living on rations. He was one of fifteen children, raised by a mother he admired and a father who was an alcoholic. It wasn’t long before they divorced and in the 1930s she found herself a single mother, before that was even a term that we knew, with fifteen children to feed. My father left school after junior high to work and help support the family.

My mother was also born into poverty, with all the challenges that come with it—abuse, poor health care, and no real sense of family. She lost her mother to cancer when she was just a teenager. Heartbroken and adrift by the loss of her mother, she dropped out of school during her sophomore year.

My parents met at a local bakery called The Scandia and they both dreamed of a better and more stable life. I was their first-born. While my parents knew what they wanted, they weren’t entirely sure how to achieve it. My childhood was more stable than theirs ever was, but it was still lacking in many ways. There wasn’t a sense worthiness instilled in me or my brother without it being attached to something we did, earned, or provided. Given their childhoods and their need to work and provide for their families caused them to equate basic human value with the production of something…a pay check, or support of some kind to the family.

Given their lack of education, there wasn’t an emphasis placed on education past achieving a high school diploma, something neither of them were able to achieve. They knew I was smart and I was never allowed to earn anything below a B, but my parents had no idea how to channel my intelligence or how to cultivate it. When it came time for college, they had no idea how to navigate those waters either. The lingo of higher education was as impenetrable to them as if they were asked to understand a foreign language. Consequently, I took a more practical approach and enrolled in the Cosmetology vocational program offered by my local high school and community college. I graduated at 18 and went directly to work.

I was successful in my career, working for a few years for a corporation and then I opened up my own salon, The Best Little Hair House in Galesburg. It was successful as well. I had several employees and it was nominated and voted the “best salon in the Burg” in a local contest several times. It was while working there that all of my old desires for a college education kept tugging at me. I wanted more. I wanted to understand business better and so at 30 years old, I made the decision to put my fears aside and go back to college. I had decided if there was ever a time to do it, the time was then. I still needed to work full-time, but I knew I could adjust my schedule here and there to accommodate my school schedule.

I went back to that same community college where I had earned my cosmetology certificate, enrolling full-time despite working full-time and soon earned enough credits to transfer to a baccalaureate college. Knox College, a four-year private liberal arts college was in my hometown and it was, and still is, highly respected. It was also highly competitive for entry. Almost 50% of all incoming freshmen came from the top 10 percent of their classes. I applied and when the acceptance letter arrived, I couldn’t believe I had been accepted. This wasn’t really rational as I had a pretty high GPA from the community college, but I remember thinking maybe a mistake had been made in accepting me. Or maybe they only accepted me because I was from the town and they wanted to help bridge the gap between town and gown. It couldn’t have been because I deserved to be accepted. This would be my first introduction to imposter syndrome.

At that time, I had no intention of changing careers. I simply wanted to earn my bachelor’s degree and learn more about business. There was a chance event that would completely change the trajectory of my life. An article was written about me, in the local newspaper, The Galesburg Register Mail, because as a local business woman I had attended both colleges in our local community to earn a degree in economics and history. They included a quote by me saying that “someday, I would like to teach” and help other nontraditional students achieve a college degree. I continued to say that higher education had changed my life and I wanted to help other nontraditional students realize that they, too, could go back to college and graduate. The article was read by Janet LaDage, the Department Chair at Carl Sandburg College. At the time she read it, it held no special significance to her except that it was a feel-good story about both her college, the local liberal arts college and me. Janet and I knew each other so the story maybe had more significance for her in that regard. While not directly friends, we shared many of the same contacts.  But, a few months later when her economics instructor suddenly fell ill right after the fall term began and she, literally, could find no one with an economics degree to teach, she remembered that article. She knew I had an economics degree. I did not have the required master’s degree in economics but in an emergency, someone with a bachelor’s degree could teach on a temporary basis. She called me. I was her last chance to keep the classes and the students enrolled in them.

It was early on a Tuesday morning when I answered the phone at the salon. It was a conversation that unknown to me at the time, would change my life. She asked me if I would consider taking on four courses in Economics for an undetermined amount of time. Maybe a week or two or maybe the rest of the semester. After much discussion, my husband and I decided it was worth a try for me to see what I thought. And as the cliché goes, the “rest is history.”

I ended up only teaching for two weeks before the professor came back but I knew in that short amount of time that the community college was where I belonged. A job came open a couple of months later for a Coordinator of Institutional Research at Carl Sandburg College and I applied. Good news, I received the offer…. bad news…it paid less than half of what I was making at my salon. I still took it. I understood that I was starting a new career and that I was not going to make what I was making in my current career.  I also knew that I did not want to look back at some point in my life and wonder what my life would have held if I had taken the job.

From the beginning, I loved my new job. I had done primary research at Knox College while working on my senior thesis so research was something that I really enjoyed. I would over the next six years go on to earn both master’s and doctorate’s degrees and slowly I was getting promoted to higher positions and given more responsibilities.  Did I feel like an imposter taking that new job? Absolutely. When I walked into work that first day to find my office just down from the President’s office I sat down at my desk, and I was overwhelmed. I was certain the college was going to find out that I really had no idea what I was doing. In fact, I really didn’t know what I was doing. This was a job that I hadn’t done before, but that didn’t mean it was a job that I couldn’t do. Imposter syndrome is a tricky thing. It seems to always be there in the background. So, the question really isn’t whether imposter syndrome is real—it is. The real question is what we can do about it?