Something I like and dislike at the same time is receiving compliments for something I did, no matter how proud I am of it. I like receiving compliments because I'm human, and I feel good when I'm appreciated for my efforts. However, I dislike it as well because I always feel like I don't deserve any kind of recognition, since my efforts weren't as big as they should have been and my ability to create great results is non existent.
In short, I'm dealing with the impostor syndrome. If you don't really know what that is, the shortest way to explain it is by saying it's a psychological pattern in which someone doubts their accomplishments and progress and is afraid of being exposed as a fraud (thank you Wikipedia).
This also makes you attribute all your success to luck or to simply being able to fool other people into thinking you're better or smarter than you actually are.
The impostor syndrome is not yet considered a disease, and to be honest, I wouldn't think of it that way either. I rarely think of this type of mental disorders as being diseases. For example, eating until you almost explode isn't, in my opinion, a disease, just people being lazy and unwilling to make an effort to stop.
But because this syndrome is a thing, and because a lot of people feel the same way, I thought about sharing with you a little trick that helps me not get rid of the problem, but at least get over it for a short period of time whenever I feel like what I do is not enough or unworthy of appreciation.
Acceptance.
This word can easily be interpreted the wrong way, but I'll try to explain what I mean when I use it in regards to the impostor syndrome.
First, I'll say this - I don't think you can completely get rid of the syndrome, at least not unless you get to a certain level of skill that makes you feel really proud of everything you do. But if you don't get to that level, you'll probably always feel like you're not good enough and like you don't deserve anything you get.
This will haunt you no matter what you do, no matter how successful you are and no matter how many people compliment you and tell you how great you are at what you do. It happened to me before, it still does, and I still didn't find a way to get rid of those feelings no matter how much I tried.
This is where acceptance comes in. Accepting the fact that you may be good enough, despite not truly believing it, and accepting the fact that people are complimenting you for a reason, and not out of pity, won't make the impostor syndrome disappear, but it will make it easier to do your thing.
You don't have to change anything, you don't have to truly believe that you're good enough, you just have to take it as a fact, believe in it as much as you can and focus on moving on with your work without thinking too much about what you did and how you did it.
Of course, you shouldn't take "being good enough" as a general and ultimate fact, and never try to improve because of it. If there's something the impostor syndrome is good at, is making you obsessed with improving and getting better. Don't get rid of that. Don't look at accepting compliments as a way for you to stop working and never trying to improve.
Accept that you may be good enough at certain things, that what you do right now can please other people, and use that to work and make progress. But never stop trying to improve. Acceptance will help you temporarily, but those bad feelings will always come back unless you constantly make progress.
To give you an example of how the impostor syndrome works, I'll tell you about something that happened to me a few days ago. Some of you know I like art, and I work in Photoshop quite a lot, creating design packages for Graphic River and Creative Market. Once the packages are uploaded/approved, I share my work on websites like Pinterest, DeviantArt, Behance, etc.
A few days ago someone sent me a private message on Behance, asking me for some help regarding an image. The first thing I thought was "I'm not good enough for this", but I still accepted after using the trick I talked about above, accepting that I may be wrong and that I may be good enough.
I talked with the person through e-mails, I helped him with editing an image, I tried to make sure he is satisfied with the final result, and yesterday I received my payment. It wasn't a complicated project, it was something quite simple to be honest, but I managed to do it.
Now, the problem is that, because of the impostor syndrome, once I was done with work and he said he was satisfied, I spent a lot of time thinking that he may be lying, that he may say that to not make me feel bad, that he paid me simply because he didn't want to seem like a bad guy and that whatever I did was horrible and I don't deserve the compliments or the money I received.
And this is the kind of thing a lot of people have to go through whenever they work on something. They spend minutes, hours or even days thinking that they didn't do a good job, thinking that someone appreciated their work out of pity or that they somehow managed to trick the client, and that can easily make you lose all your motivation.
That's why accepting compliments and trying to believe people when they tell you that you're good is a good way of trying to fight the impostor syndrome. It won't make it go away, and whenever you'll work on something you'll still feel like a fraud, but always remembering those compliments and trying to force yourself to believe that those people are right will help you with not thinking too much about deserving the rewards you got or not.
If you have the same problem and you have your own ways of getting over the impostor syndrome and just be happy with what you do, feel free to share them in the comments section. I'm sure that those who have a hard time working because they think they're not good enough will appreciate it.