Do you ever feel as if you’re not who people think you are? That if people discovered who you really are, they would think you’re a fraud? This phenomenon has a name: impostor syndrome.
I’ve struggled with it more times than I can count.
In fact, I’m even struggling with it a bit right now.
To be honest, it feels funny writing a book that you, an actual human being, will hold and read. It feels funny because I don’t have years of qualifications or experience as an author. In fact, I never even dreamed of writing a book.
Interestingly, Nana wrote me a letter when I was eleven, and in it she said, “I predict one day you will write a book. You will get to share your experiences with the world.” I told you that woman dared me to dream. She knew it and believed in this all along, before I would have thought it possible. Me? Not so much. I mean, who would have thought that the girl who asked her parents to legally change her name to Sparkles would write a book? (Can we just take a moment to imagine Sparkles Lee Dooley on the cover? Thank you, Mom, for making me settle for a temporary nickname instead of a legal name change, as my six-year-old self often requested.)
Anyway, it pains me that Nana is no longer alive to read these words or hold this book in her hands, but I know that she’s been with me through the process, that her heart is woven through these pages, and I wholeheartedly believe she’s smiling from heaven.
Like I said, I didn’t set out to write a book. In fact, my current career, this book included, began with an unlikely combination of a fancy interview, some unexpected but awesome advice from Mom, a Sharpie marker, and a little help from my friends. Seriously.
During my junior year of college, while getting a degree I was not at all passionate about, I had an interview for a summer internship with an insurance company. I interviewed in a corporate office with a bunch of men in tidy business suits; the office was without a speck of dust and filled with a lemon Pledge kind of scent.
As I sat across from executives at a big desk and answered question after question, I never felt so stiff and awkward in my whole life. I realized right then that this was so not my style. Ironically, I thought it would be. I had always envisioned myself as a successful career woman in a corporate setting, leading a team within a company and wearing pants suits because the ones I’d see on mannequins at the mall looked sophisticated.
As the interview concluded, the men stood up to shake my hand and told me they were impressed and would be in touch. The interview went fabulously, without a hitch really, and I should have been thrilled. Yet I made my way to the elevator feeling so disheartened.
This is what you’ve been working toward, J. This is what you want, I tried to convince myself as the elevator doors closed and I made my way down to the lobby.
I couldn’t quell the unsettled feeling in my heart that day. On the drive home I began to wonder, Did I choose the wrong thing? What if I’m not supposed to be doing this with my life? It’s too late to change my major; I graduate next year! God, what is Your plan?
Later that week my mom happened to come visit me in Bloomington, my beloved little college town in Indiana. I told her the concerns I was having. “I don’t know if I want to do this corporate internship, Mom. I know I’ve been studying this subject and it’s important to my future, but I just can’t get myself excited about it!”
I expected Mom to remind me how much time and money had been invested in the pursuit of my degree, or how great an opportunity this was, or how I ought to at least give it a shot. Except she didn’t do that. She simply responded, “Okay, so don’t. Don’t do it.”
Wait…what? Don’t? Isn’t telling your kid not to take a job opportunity against some unwritten mom code?
“What do you mean, don’t?” I asked.
“Don’t feel the pressure to prove yourself or think you have to figure it all out this second. For now I encourage you to try some other stuff while you’re still in school.”
Don’t take the job? Try some stuff? What is this baloney?
Again I asked what she meant.
“You work hard and have done everything to be responsible with school, future opportunities, and more. Maybe you’ll get the internship; maybe you won’t. And I’m proud of you regardless,” she explained. “But I think you’ve put so much pressure on yourself to have the perfect plan that you haven’t taken any time to explore your personal interests and passions along the way.”
I did not see that coming.
However, in that moment I realized all the career-related expectations I thought my parents had of me were just perceived expectations.
Honestly, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was never one of those lucky ones who woke up when she was seven years old thinking, I’m positive I want to be a doctor! and then never lost that passion all the way through graduation from med school.
If that’s your story, more power to you, sis. But it’s not mine. I’m the definition of a girl who is learning as she goes, figuring out how to trust that God has a plan, all while having wacky unfigured-out dreams in my head.
So I began to explore some stuff that interested me.
Among many different things, hand-lettering became something I really enjoyed. It was therapeutic for a stressed-out college student. I would letter quotes that inspired me, Bible verses that influenced me, and pretty much anything else I wanted to remember. Writing something down carefully and beautifully made it more meaningful to me.
After some time, Matt, my boyfriend who would eventually become my husband, noticed I was creating all these little designs on napkins and in notebooks. One day he said, “You know, J, you’re pretty good at that, and it seems like a really great creative outlet for you during stressful weeks of school. You should start an Etsy store or something!”
I had only vaguely heard of Etsy, an emerging online marketplace to sell handcrafted items.
Curious, I decided to create an account and try it out. Unsure if this would even work, my first few pieces were pretty primitive. Seriously, I thought it would be a good idea to letter a quote with a Sharpie on a piece of computer paper (professional, right?) and then take it down to the dungeon-like art room in the sorority house and take photos of it to post online.
I doubted whether it’d sell, but then one day, while sitting at my desk, I got an email notifying me that a lady in Texas bought my item! I leaped out of my chair. “Oh my gosh! Are you serious? I made my first sale!”
There really is nothing like creating something and making your first-ever sale. Whoa. I made something with my hands. And somebody likes it…enough to pay money for it. Is this real?
Of course, then I had to figure out how to package and ship it properly so it wouldn’t get bent.
From that day on, my little lettering business grew. I made an account to share my designs on social media, and every week the orders increased. For a while I did everything on my own. I would buy blank items (canvases, mugs…not computer paper!), draw a design on them, photograph them, and upload them to Etsy. Once they sold, I would print labels, package the items, drive Nana’s old hand-me-down Nissan Altima to the post office to drop my packages off, and then manage to squeeze in a little studying before bed.
Truth be told, I felt like such an impostor as I’d answer customer service emails from the biology class I probably should have been paying attention to. To this day I can’t tell you the first thing about a cell nucleus, but I can rattle off a billion facts about return slips and postage rates.
Day after day I’d do this. Finally it dawned on me that I needed to do two things: first, learn how to have my designs printed on items so I wouldn’t have to do it all by hand; and second, ask for help.
As the volume of orders grew, I began to recruit my friends and roommates to help me package, promising to pay them in pizza. They agreed without needing much more convincing. Turns out when you bribe college students with free food, they’re much more likely to oblige.
Okay, I’m totally kidding. They offered to help simply because they supported and believed in my crazy ideas. For that I’ll be forever grateful. Little did any of us know that those small beginnings would lead to so much more.
We’d sit upstairs on the third-floor storage closet floor, shoving packing peanuts into boxes, and talk and laugh for hours on end. Many of the lessons and advice we’d trade in those conversations inspired me, so I would write about them in social media captions.
I quickly learned that those stories resonated with women around the world, not just the girls in AOII’s third-floor storage closet. Some of the articles I’d post alongside photos of my lettering designs picked up steam, some getting thousands of shares on Facebook.
Within a year or so, I had a growing online community (something I didn’t even know was possible at the time). And they were following me for my writing and content more than for my lettering business. Again I began to feel insecure.
It was crazy to think that women with ten times more life experience were following a twenty-one-year-old sorority girl who hadn’t yet finished college. At that time, I rarely shared photos of myself, so I don’t think they realized how young I was. I often tried to act older and more sophisticated because I was convinced that if people found out my age, they’d unfollow me and perhaps even ask to return anything they bought from my shop.
That may sound dramatic, but impostor syndrome can take over when our insecurities combine with the expectations we perceive others have of us, together creating a massive pressure to prove ourselves.
Looking back, I now realize that I will always feel like an impostor when I live under the pressure to prove myself instead of just living intentionally, before I prove anything.
Never in a billion years did I anticipate doing this with my life. I was just “trying stuff,” like Mom suggested. But just trying stuff turned into a small shop, which grew into writing a blog and eventually speaking. It also led to trying other creative endeavors like a photography business on the side, raising money for causes I believed in, creating online courses, hosting a podcast, and now writing a book.
Have there been a thousand times I’ve felt unqualified along the way? Yup. Were there things I really messed up? More than I can count. Did I accidentally almost put us into debt my first year of marriage? Guilty. Was I threatened to be sued for a mistake? Actually, yes, and that was traumatizing. (Shout out to my dad for walking me through that one.) Have I embarrassed myself? You bet. Did I rewrite this book three times before publishing it? Also yes.
Sister, so many things have gone wrong since the start of this journey, but I think that’s what has made it so right too. Every step has been worth it, and every step from here forward will be worth it.
I didn’t wake up one day with everything figured out. I didn’t just happen upon my purpose. I fumbled into projects I found interesting, and slowly over time—as I battled my struggle with impostor syndrome and the unnecessary pressure to figure out my dreams—I learned something powerful and humbling.
My purpose wasn’t in that first Etsy sale. It wasn’t tied up in how many packages I could sell or in how much I got paid or even in how many people read my captions. It wasn’t something I found when signing a book contract or stepping onto a stage. It has never had anything to do with my position—in an internship, in a sorority, or as a small-business owner. It’s not even in this book or as an author. Instead, it has had everything to do with the passion and purpose I bring to whatever space I occupy in my everyday life, labels aside.
Honestly, my own unfigured-out dreams and Mom’s encouragement to explore and experiment have probably made me look like a crazy person over the years with everything I’ve tried. I don’t fit in just one box, because I’ve refused to let labels continue to define me.
So, yes, I might look like a crazy person who doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life. And sometimes I have to chuckle and remember that’s not entirely untrue. (I mean, do any of us really know exactly what we’re doing with our lives? No.)
Maybe a meaningful life is not at all about figuring it out but rather just being willing to get outside our comfort zones.
Remember, none of this happened because I woke up one day and had a crystal-clear dream that I went after. None of this happened because I was an expert at anything. All this happened because Mom gave me permission to do something I’d never once considered doing: to explore and experiment before I had a perfect plan to execute. And it happened because I decided to just go for it even before I knew what “it” would become.
Now, I want to emphasize that Mom didn’t tell me to drop out of school and just do what I like. She encouraged me to learn alongside and grow beyond what I was currently doing, without dropping my responsibilities. That said, please do not read this and just quit your boring job tomorrow, saying you’re taking my mom’s advice. (If you do that, you’re probably going to end up eating ramen for a few weeks and resenting me.) There’s wisdom in planning if you’re going to make a big move like that.
Just as Mom encouraged me to explore—to open doors I didn’t even know existed—while I stewarded my academic responsibilities, I also encourage you to try some things that bring you life and joy, even if they don’t directly correlate with your career or obligations in this season.
I say this because I think so many of us put far too much pressure on ourselves to strike gold on the first step we take or the first thing we try, and when that doesn’t turn out to be so great, we are hesitant to try again. So few of us allow ourselves to try new things, because we convince ourselves we shouldn’t for one reason or another.
I want to look at some of the reasons I have struggled to dream outside the box or try new things, because I have a feeling you might have similar excuses—I mean, “reasons.”
Before I talked to Mom, I thought she expected me to do a certain thing with my life, something that was secure, stable, and successful from the perspective of society. However, I realized how wrong I was. If we hadn’t had that conversation, I might never have tried something outside the qualifications on my résumé. I’m aware that not everyone has that luxury, and perhaps your parents or spouse or someone else really does have unrealistic expectations of you. Even so, only you get to decide if those expectations will control you.
Even if others don’t impose expectations on us, I believe that when our own expectations of how our life should go don’t match our reality, we begin to make excuses. At least, I know I have. Our own unmet expectations can hold us back from stepping into new things as we attempt to avoid further disappointment. Have you ever let this happen? Are you letting it happen now? Knock that off, okay? It’s not helping anyone, especially you. You haven’t lost your purpose just because you missed an opportunity or failed on your first try.
So many of us don’t try anything outside our comfort zones and qualifications because we are concerned with how other people will perceive it. When we run into Great-Aunt Mildred at the family reunion and she asks, “So what do you do?” most of us want to be able to give a short and sweet answer that will satisfy the question and also make us appear successful. When our passions and roles don’t quite fit into a particular label or aren’t even entirely clear to us, insecurity sets in.
I think we cling to labels more than we realize because labels give us something to quickly impress others with. Replying with “I’m an accountant” will probably make Great-Aunt Mildred smile and nod in approval. However, responding with “I’m trying some different things, dreaming up a nonprofit, working on my master’s, and barista-ing on the side” might make her raise her eyebrows in concern. She might not understand, and her reaction has the potential to make us rethink our entire lives.
My mom once said, “Women tend to put themselves in boxes.” Think about how true that is. How often do you see a woman you know and immediately associate a couple of words with her name based on what she does, subconsciously labeling her accordingly? How often do you do this to yourself? We so often assign labels based on one component of someone’s life, even if unintentionally. She’s the photographer. She’s the dentist. She’s the stay-at-home mom. She’s the smart girl. She’s the fitness guru. The problem with doing this to others is that, yes, although she may be the smart girl, that’s not all she is, right? We’ve put her in a box based on one thing we perceive. As a result, we end up assuming we must fit into the box we perceive others have put us in.
This makes it really difficult to try something new, because we’ve basically believed we are what we do. How do we break out of this? We can try two things. First, we can take small steps and make incremental changes when we sense it’s time to pivot. Second, we have to get comfortable with surprising and even disappointing people at times.
A really small personal example is when people would come up to me and say, “Oh, you’re SoulScripts (the name of my shop)!” It began to make me cringe. I wanted to say, “No, I’m Jordan! I’m so much more than that. I don’t want to be pigeonholed to that!” Even though SoulScripts is a brand I started, it began to feel as though it were permanently branded on me too, marking my entire identity. So one day I decided to make a change that felt like a tiny step in the right direction to diminishing labels and expectations: I changed my social media from the shop to my name. It might seem trivial, but at the time it felt like a huge risk in the right direction. And isn’t that basically what an unknown step of faith is?
So what about you? Start envisioning your life as a path to walk on, not as a box to sit in. That simple mind-set shift will help you keep moving forward into unknown (but often exciting) places instead of remaining stuck, stagnant, and comfortable.
I believe we also hesitate to step into new opportunities, ideas, or interests because we don’t want people to see us starting small or to see us fail if things don’t work out. When we try new things, we have to start small most of the time. I didn’t start speaking at huge events. I started speaking at small events, usually in rooms without a stage, and every single time I felt like such a fraud.
When I finally did get to speak at a larger event, I was the girl who missed my cue and walked out on stage at the wrong time without even realizing it. Seriously, I just started talking, completely unaware that the band wasn’t done with their set and that I was not supposed to be on center stage. When I realized the sound guy had shut my mic off and no one could hear me, I looked around to see everyone staring at me with wide eyes. I could feel their embarrassment for me as my cheeks flushed red and I awkwardly curtseyed and hustled off the stage. With my confidence level registering a big fat zero, I wanted nothing more than to go hide in a cave somewhere for the rest of my life.
After the event, though, a young girl came up to me and said, “Thank you for being awkward. It reminds me that the people on stage are human like me.” What? Isn’t that something? My embarrassment actually encouraged a young girl. And I realized for the first time that maybe embarrassment can be an unexpected form of empowerment. My advice? Shift the way you see embarrassment. It’s no roadblock. It’s dynamite to blast you beyond the confines of the walls your pride puts up.
Before I wrap up this chapter, I want to share a few lessons I’ve learned about overcoming impostor syndrome. If you’ve ever felt like a fraud, seen yourself as unqualified, struggled to believe God has a plan for you, or said, “SOS! I have no idea what I’m doing,” listen up because this is important.
When you begin to feel unqualified or like an impostor, it’s so much better to admit that you’re not sure and ask for help instead of trying to mask it and act as if you know what you’re doing. This takes away the pressure to have it all figured out and gives you freedom to learn, grow, and figure it out as you go.
Whenever I’ve felt insecure about my age or my lack of experience or anything else, I’ve found that it helps to look inward to see where that insecurity is coming from. I focus on what I am equipped to do instead of looking at everyone else and becoming frustrated by what I’m unable to do. Trust me, this is far more effective.
There will always be someone who has a little bit more figured out than I do. There will always be someone a little older, a little smarter, a little cuter, or a little funnier. But if I can learn to look past that and appreciate where I am, I’ll be able to show up and make an impact. I’ll be able to embrace my place and run my race. My advice? Stop focusing on what you don’t know or don’t have and start focusing on what you do have right now—even if that’s only a Sharpie marker and a piece of computer paper.
Many people will tell you to expect failure, but they’ll stop right there. What good is it to expect something if you aren’t prepared to handle it? If the meteorologist tells me to expect a blizzard and I don’t prepare by turning the heat up in my house or changing my travel plans or salting my driveway before it hits, that blizzard is going to have a much worse effect on my life than it would’ve if I had prepared for it.
So don’t merely expect failure but actually prepare for how you will respond when it comes. Yes, have faith that it will work out if it’s the good Lord’s will. However, don’t be shocked if it doesn’t work out the way you think it might. Instead of reacting to an unwanted error or failure, consider how you’ll respond if what you’re trying doesn’t go according to plan.
To piggyback off point number three, we need to stop using the word failure so much. Unless you refuse to try or just quit being willing to grow, then no matter how bad it is, it’s not failure; it’s learning. You don’t overcome impostor syndrome by having some superpower-status immunity to mistakes or by being a know-it-all. You overcome impostor syndrome and unfigured-out dreams by learning. If you’re always looking at mess-ups as learning experiences, you will never fail. You will just learn. When we learn, we grow.
When I started lettering, I didn’t have a five-year business plan. In fact, it overwhelmed me to even think about that. If I had put the pressure on myself to have it all figured out in the infancy of the business, I probably wouldn’t have even given it a go. However, I could take a first step by learning about and starting an Etsy account. I could take a second step by going to Hobby Lobby and picking up some canvases and paint. I could take a third step by ordering packing peanuts online and then a fourth by asking my friends for help.
Take the pressure off, sis. Nothing you try, nothing you put your hand to—whether it’s med school, making your own small business, or mothering—will be an overnight production. There’s wisdom in planning. But if it comes down to either figuring it all out or just digging deep down inside yourself and taking a baby step toward beginning, I vote for the latter option. Because big steps are really just the result of incremental decisions implemented imperfectly, one at a time.
Sister, you will tackle your unfigured-out dreams only when you give yourself permission to dream outside the box. Just try some stuff and show up as your full self, not an older version or more figured-out version. Don’t try to be the person you perceive others expect you to be. Be you, with your wild ideas and funny quirks and unfigured-out dreams and lack of expertise. When you do that, when you root yourself in faith and step beyond the labels you may be wrapped up in, something divine happens. You may even fumble into a dream you didn’t know you had.
Friend, try stuff before it makes sense, because it doesn’t need to all make sense in order for God to use it. He’s got this. He’s got you. And that means you can do something as seemingly small as doodling on computer paper with no idea what it could turn into, even before the lady in Texas makes her purchase. And still be living your purpose.