Hi, I am Sara Vaca, independent consultant and frequent Saturday contributor.
Lesson Learned: I couldn’t anticipate when I volunteered to write some Saturdays for AEA365 what an amazing experience it would turn out to be for me because:
- It allows me to be myself and share my thoughts in a light tone about anything related to my evaluation practice – which saves me money in therapy LOL.
- It makes me think about what can help (?) or resonate with my Evaluation community – though you never know the real impact of it.
- I am often surprised by how many people react to many of my posts, and makes me feel connected – though doing so from the small village in France I am based in.
Lesson Learned: However, I had never received as many direct messages after a post as last month, when I shared how I want to be over feeling inadequate (not good enough) in certain occasions in my evaluation practice. I called it the impostor syndrome (doubting of your accomplishments and feel a constant fear of being exposed as a “fraud”) and apparently, a high percentage of us are (too) familiar with that feeling, or have felt like that at least at some point.
And it definitely does not seem to be exclusive to women, as many men also reached out. I even asked a (male) evaluator friend: “Have you ever felt it?”… “Everyday”, he said, half-joking but meaning it…
Lesson Learned: So since I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of people who felt like reaching out to me after bringing this topic up, and at the same time, I had been encouraged to embed a new online survey in another AEA365 post (as I did to find out about our reading speed; results here), I thought this was a good opportunity to find out more.
So I invite you to click in this link and fill in a 4 minutes survey sharing your experience with feeling like an impostor, when you shouldn’t.
Hot Tip: In a couple of weeks I will come back with the results. Hoping we make progresss overcoming it, allowing us to enjoy our work more 🙂 Thanks!
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.