The Background
When I started in tech in 2017, I didn’t exactly come from what most people would call a “traditional” background for the work I was stepping into.
I was an Army veteran of five years with a major in International Relations and a minor in Terrorism Studies. Useful? Absolutely. Conventional for tech? Not even a little.
I started as an Individual Contributor on Meta’s Data Center Infrastructure Team, and from day one I felt like I had entered an entirely different universe. I had to quickly learn the language, systems, and operational realities of a world I had never formally trained in. That meant learning about service migrations, hardware decommissions, data center operations, infrastructure dependencies, and not just how to build resilient programs and processes, but how to scale and automate them in environments where mistakes had a very real downstream impact.
When I eventually moved into the privacy world, I had to relearn almost everything to do my job effectively. I was wading into on-boarding material learning what terms like “ePD,” “GDPR,” and a host of other regulatory frameworks actually meant and how to translate those concepts into practical risk mitigation for projects and product launches. I had to understand the intersection between legal, product, policy, engineering, and operations — and then help teams move through that ambiguity with clarity and confidence.
On top of that, I eventually had to build a team from scratch to support the work and help guide them through challenges that seemed to come out of nowhere almost every single week.
The "Imposter"
Through all this, there were many moments where I felt wildly out of my depth. There were meetings I was in where I knew I was not the "smartest" person there. There were conversations where I didn’t know half the acronyms being thrown around. There were projects where I questioned whether I had any business being involved at all.
Through it all, however, I put my head down and embraced the situation. Not because I magically became the most technically qualified person overnight, but because I learned something incredibly important:
You do not need to be the most credentialed, most polished, or most naturally fluent person in the room to create real value. I was never the smartest person in the room — and in a lot of cases, I wasn’t even remotely the most qualified on paper to be in some of those conversations.
But I made sure I was someone who brought energy, humility, consistency, and a willingness to learn. I made sure I was someone people could rely on to “give it the old college try.” And maybe most importantly, I made sure I brought as many people along on the journey with me as I could.
The Lessons
I took two major lessons from those experiences, and they’ve stayed with me ever since:
1. Meet people where they are.
One of the biggest shifts for me was realizing that I did not need to compete with the experts around me in order to belong.
That sounds simple, but when you’re dealing with imposter syndrome, your instinct is often to overcompensate. You feel pressure to prove yourself constantly. You want to know everything, say the right thing, and avoid looking inexperienced at all costs.
But that mindset will wear you out very quickly.
The truth is, you may not be the expert in the room and that’s okay! In fact, recognizing and embracing that is often half the battle. Let other people own their spaces. Respect expertise when you see it. Take the time to understand the ecosystem around you: who owns what, where people shine, how decisions get made, and where your own strengths naturally fit within that structure.
Because most of the time, you were not hired to be the “end-all, be-all” expert on everything. You were hired for a variety of reasons: your judgment, communication skills, leadership, your ability to create order in chaos, build trust across functions, or bring clarity to problems other people are too close to see clearly.
Those things matter.
Learn to hone your instincts around where you can create value instead of obsessing over every area where you lack depth.
Know when to ask questions, listen, step forward to lead, or step back and follow. And most importantly, stop trying to drink from everyone else’s firehose all at once.
There is so much knowledge around you in any high-performing environment, and that can either be energizing or completely paralyzing depending on how you frame it.
Make conscious decisions everyday to let it inspire you, not diminish you. Comparison is almost always the thief of joy and in the workplace, it can also be the thief of confidence, growth, and perspective.
2. Give yourself the grace to learn, grow, and improvise.
There is a huge difference between being unprepared and being in the middle of growth. Imposter syndrome is always quick to convince us that if we don’t know something immediately, we’ve somehow failed. But growth rarely looks polished in real time.
Sometimes growth looks like being put on the spot in a meeting and saying: “I don’t know enough to answer that well right now, but I can follow up.”
Sometimes growth looks like asking what feels like a “basic” question or making your best call with imperfect information.
None of this makes you weak, it makes you real, relatable, and approachable. Most importantly, it makes you trustworthy. There is a lot of power that is inherent in being honest about what you do and do not know and actively demonstrating a willingness to fill in those gaps. And its not about being performatively humble and overly self-deprecating. Just be honest and embrace the momentary discomfort you may have.
Acknowledge your gaps, own what you know, be clear about where you need more context, and then do the work to close those gaps over time. A lot of career growth is really just an extended exercise in saying “Yes, and…” to things that are thrown at you.
“Yes, I have a perspective… and I know there are smarter people than me in this domain.”
“Yes, I can lead here… and I’m still growing too.”
This becomes even more important when you’re leading people because when you’re a manager, the way you respond to uncertainty doesn’t just affect you, it sets the tone for everyone around you. When leaders model curiosity, humility, adaptability, and a willingness to keep learning, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. It creates stronger teams, a healthier culture, and sustainable growth.
In Summary
If you landed the job it was for a reason. Even if you can’t fully see that reason yet.
So take a pause, read the room, talk to the experts, and ask questions. Understand where your skills fit and how they complement others. Be confident in what you do know, honest about what you don’t, and be willing to keep building from there.
You are allowed to feel uncomfortable while you grow. The goal isn’t to eliminate the imposter feeling entirely, it's to stop letting it take over and influence every thought you have and discourage you from learning and being the best version of yourself you can be.
Original Link to Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ali-chouhdry_embrace-the-imposter-hoping-this-activity-7403829803646439424-CL1H?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAB8WSSoBphX5bgMnGoLVVNKZGgL02J2m3sY
