On humility and self-confidence
This may or may not be an epiphany, but the two are wholly compatible
A lot of us in this business have an awkward relationship with praise and success.
The perennial conversation about imposter syndrome happens because career advancement in this line of work involves a ton of rejection as well as key milestones that require you to get past gatekeepers.
Whatever your career stage is: You could be an undergraduate starting out in a research lab or you could be a full professor who by every metric is thriving. It’s still quite possible for us to doubt that we deserve whatever status and praise we get. Might it even be the norm?
It’s even easier to doubt your value in the community once you accumulate enough experiences to recognize that the concept of meritocracy is a sham1. Once you accept the reality that professional advancement can happen for people because of many things unrelated to talent or accomplishment, it’s very easy to imagine that any positive regard that others might hold for you is just as unmerited.
And then I’ve seen a lot of people with my identity who have a knack of being promoted to the point where they are wholly incompetent. It’s easy to wonder, “is that me?”
Perhaps if you are like me in some of these respects, then you’ve struggled with acknowledging that you fully belong in the place and professional position that you occupy. Moreover, you recognize the value and importance of humility, and pulling this off without being imposter-y is a thing that we don’t talk about so much.
There’s a conversation I had when I was junior faculty that replays in my head once in a while. I had a long-time friend and colleague come visit my university to do the campus-seminar-and-visit thing. As I was showing them around, they remarked on the cool stuff that I was up to and how it mattered. I said something vaguely minimizing or self-effacing in response, and they said back to me, “Terry, just learn to take a compliment.” That was a diagnosis, of sorts, though I think it took me a long time to take it to heart.
Last week I was chatting with a friend about how we’re managing (well? poorly?) to forge through our careers in light of trauma that we’ve experienced. I asked them, “How many of us are making choices in our career that are primarily responses to trauma?” We didn’t settle on a number, but it was clear to us that a nontrivial percentage of us have wound up on the raw end of some bad actors or toxic environments that have left us reeling. And plenty more of us have spent time in places where the ethos was about elevating some people by tearing down other people, which made us wonder where we might fit in, which is a trauma of its own sort.
My friend asked me (in so many words) how we can get over imposter syndrome without being stuck-up on ourselves.
Another way of putting this is: How do we develop a healthy amount of self-confidence while maintaining appropriate humility?
I suspect a lot of us struggle with this issue because we internalize the erroneous idea that confidence is on one end of of a continuum, with humility at the polar opposite, and we need to somehow hover between the two. However, I think they are separate axes. Just as a person can be confident and lack humility, it’s possible for a person to lack self-confidence and be overly prideful.
It’s true that we observe others demonstrating extreme levels of confidence, this is often coupled with a regrettable lack of humility. However, the expression of self-confidence and humility is very different than the state of being confident and humble. Confidence and humility are things that we think and feel, which often are reflected in our words and actions. You’re not humble based on what you say. There’s a lot of fake confidence and fake humility, and I think to get this right for ourselves, we need to disconnect what people say from how people feel. Because if we’re looking at our peers as models for how we should connect our thoughts, feelings, and actions, this way lies frustration and maybe anger.
What does it mean to be humble as an academic and a scholar? It means that we don’t overestimate the importance of our work in the grand scheme of the world. Humility means you don’t expect praise, and it means you don’t fuss about what other people think about your accomplishments. Being humble means being genuinely pleased when other people experience success. Being humble means that you are always open to the possibility that you might be wrong, and make a point of listening to others — and seeking out their opinions — to figure out whether or not that might be the case. Being humble means that when you get reviews back on manuscripts and proposals, you don’t instinctively perceive that the faults like in the reviewers rather than your own work. A humble person may apply for an opportunity but not expect any particular outcome. Being humble means that you’re probably more interested in hearing what other people have to say than feeling a need to tell them what you want to say. Being humble means recognizing that you belong and also making space for others to belong.
All that stuff about humility is wholly compatible with healthy levels of self-confidence. When you’re confident in yourself, then you’re not afraid to try new things because you might fail, and you’re not shied away from a task because it’s difficult. When you’re confident, you can separate your ego from your reasoning so that you can distinguish valid critique from shabby reasoning, and this will make your work better. When you’re confident, you’ll stretch yourself beyond your current boundaries. A confident person can receive rejection without instinctively perceiving that this is an indicator of one’s quality or value. Moreover, when you’re confident, you can contextualize the interplay of luck, circumstance, and achievement to process when rejection happens, and use this as an opportunity to grow without being dejected about your own shortcomings. If you’re confident, you can understand that you belong. Confidence means that you can recognize when you’re being excluded for the wrong reasons and understand that this is not a verdict on yourself, but instead
Looking back at those explainers of humility and confidence (which I just made up on the spot, by the way), those look like really hard things to do?! Which I suppose is why I’ve been navigating this planet for about fifty years before I have arrived at a place where I’m feeling adequate levels of both of those in myself? I sure hope all y’all are managing this a bit better.
Did you know that the term “meritocracy” was invented as a pejorative piece of satire, and it took a decade or two for for the ruling class to co-opt the term into something that unserious people take seriously?