Imposter Syndrome.
When I teach people, one of the biggest obstacles to success is the student’s own feeling that “they are a fraud, and can’t possibly become a developer”. Your sense that you’re going to be “found out” and have people point fingers at you and laugh at you as an interloper; that’s so strong, that it makes people decide to not pursue a path to learning which could give them the skills they want.
As someone who loves the results of seeing people achieve the goal of forging a career in software development, there is little more disappointing to me than to have someone decide that learning is not for them because “they can’t do it” (based on nothing other than their feelings of being a imposter).
The doubly-frustrating part of this is that I’ve never found a successful way of expressing to that person, that the feeling of being an imposter Never Goes Away. I empathise with them completely, and I understand their decision, because I, and every developer I’ve ever spoken to says they feel exactly the same.
Whenever I sit in meetings where everyone is discussing Serious Business™, I look at all the terribly self-assured people around me and cringe at the prospect of being found out that I’ve blustered my way into the room, and that I have no right to be there giving my input to the discussion. At the times I’m about to give my opinion on something, I look around as if to find a responsible person to whom I can defer the decision - because they can’t possibly think that I’m able to make those choices. After all, I’m a complete imposter…
However, I have learned over long experience that it’s most likely that the vast majority of the others in the room are having the exact same same doubts - and because those feelings are not unusual, I need to discover ways of turning them to my benefit. To this end, when the feelings of being an imposter start to creep over me, I reflect on the things I’m worrying about, and use them to make my preparations even more thorough: If I feel that I’m a fraud to be teaching a particular topic, I double-check my notes to ensure that there are no surprises in there for me; If I feel that a task is way beyond my capabilities, I review the similar things I’ve done before, and find the comparisons.
Over everything else, I listen to others’ views about my abilities and performance. Being conscious of the fact that people are far quicker to criticise than praise, when I get sincere praise for something I’ve done, I file that away for the next time I feel like I’m an imposter at that task - for if I am an imposter, and they’re the experts telling me I can do it, they must be right.