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Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Ten Strategies to Stop Feeling Like a Fraud at Work is available from today!

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Ten Strategies to Stop Feeling Like a Fraud at Work is my new ebook aimed at anyone who has ever felt out of place at work.

Imposter Syndrome is really common. As a result of my research for this book I’ve spoken to many men and women who have talked about feeling as if they aren’t good enough at work.

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome explains what Imposter Syndrome is, the symptoms and shares 10 ways to overcome those fraudulent feelings. The book includes stories from men and women who have built their self-confidence, tackled Imposter Syndrome and found their own ways to feel more positive about their performance at work.

Most of the books about Imposter Syndrome explain the symptoms and the rationale behind why we feel like that. Learning about why we feel like that is important but I wanted to write something practical that would help people make changes to their attitudes and behaviour straightaway, so the book is full of practical tips from me and people I interviewed.

Helen, one of the people who got an early copy, said, “I am now 58 and retired. “I wish someone had given me a book like yours about 25 years ago. I have learnt all the lessons in it the hard way.”

Buy your copy before 15 December 2011 and be entered in to a draw to win a parcel of other books worth over £65:

• All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource by Curt Finch
• A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management by Penny Pullan and Ruth Murray-Webster
• Get Started Using Social Media on Your Projects (ebook) by me
• Social Media for Project Managers by me

Together these books are worth over £65!

Email your PayPal receipt number to ebooks@otobosgroup.com. A winner will be selected at random after the closing date.

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome is available in .pdf format online at http://www.overcomingimpostersyndrome.com.

Click here to buy your copy.

Related posts:

1. What is Imposter Syndrome? This is an extract from Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Ten Strategies to Stop Feeling Like a Fraud at Work. This new ebook launches next week and...
2. Free report: 5 Symptoms of Imposter Syndrome Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter will know that I have been working on an ebook about Imposter Syndrome over the summer. I’ll...
3. 5 Symptoms of Imposter Syndrome: free report This short report looks at the 5 symptoms of Imposter Syndrome. Download your free copy now! Name: This field is required. Email: This field is...

Today is International Project Management Day. Project management is a series of small (and sometimes big) decisions so today I wanted to talk about that.

At work recently I had cause to question one of my decisions. I had made a decision that affected other people (as most decisions do). I communicated the decision, replanned accordingly and updated my risk log. Then I got some more information.

It wasn’t information that fundamentally made my decision wrong. However, it did make it slightly less black and white. I started to question whether I had done the right thing.

An older (and wiser) colleague told me something that made me realise I had absolutely made the right choice. “There’s no such thing as a bad decision,” he said.

That sounded rather flippant to me, so we discussed it further.

If you make a good decision, all is well.

If you make a ‘bad’ decision, you learn from it.

Say that you decide to hold negotiations with one supplier. You plan to visit their offices and attend a presentation for their services but later you realise you don’t want to use them after all. It’s too late to back out of their presentation so you maintain the meeting and attend their pitch anyway. Is that a bad decision?

Your time would be better spent in the procurement process for another vendor. However, by attending the presentation you get to learn about that vendor that you don’t want to use, which could be interesting. You get to visit some other offices. It’s always nice to nose around where someone else works – every cloud has a silver lining and all that.

Even a ‘bad’ decision stops inertia and moves things forward. You can always revise your decision later.

So, all decisions are good. Or, if you can’t subscribe to the ‘all decisions are good’ philosophy, all decisions have elements of goodness in them.

What is bad is making no decision. This leaves the project team in limbo. They don’t know what is going on or what direction they should be going in. Inertia sets in. Nothing is clear and the project cannot move forward.

Putting world politics and economic policy aside, in project management terms I’m convinced that there is no such thing as a bad decision. Today, on International Project Management Day, what decision are you going to make?

No related posts.

Back in 2009 I wrote a post about career and personal goals, and what I wanted to achieve before I was 35. I made a list of 5 things. They were:

• See polar bears in the natural habitat
• Knit myself a jumper that I’ll actually wear
• Read Herodotus’ The Histories (which has sat unopened on the shelf since 1998)
• Organise my photos
• Write another book (which may or may not be about project management)

I turned 35 last week, so this is the moment to see whether or not I achieved those goals.

I have written another book, which was project management-related.

I have organised my photos.

I have not even taken Herodotus off the shelf and I certainly haven’t knitted anything. In fact, I have given up knitting and moved to crochet instead. I am a lot better at it now than I was when I made my first ever scarf, but I haven’t committed to a project as big as a jumper.

I’m not sorry that I’m not wearing handmade clothes or lugging around a 700-page doorstop of a book. I am a teeny bit sorry that I haven’t made it to see those polar bears but I have been to some other lovely places.

I haven’t updated my list, even though I have knocked some items off it. At the time I wrote:

It’s not a project plan, it’s not even a project.  It’s life, and that’s far more interesting than any fixed list of tasks.

I still believe that is true, and that’s why I don’t feel the need right now to add more items on. I feel that I’m meeting my personal goals, and I’m certainly meeting my professional goals. There is still more to life than checking off tasks on a list and as I’m now on the journey to 36 and beyond I’ll just see what else comes my way.

Related posts:

1. Five things I want to do before I’m 35 I’ve just come back from Jukkasjärvi in Sweden, a place I’ve wanted to visit for ever because it’s where they build the magnificent Ice Hotel...
2. Book review: Making Things Happen Normally I take lots of notes when I’m reading books for review.  I took loads when I was reading Scott Berkun’s Making Things Happen: Mastering...
3. Things I’ve learned this week Don’t sing in the photocopying room – you never know who will walk in. In fact, don’t sing in the office at all Johnson’s Holiday...

I try really hard not to let scope creep impose upon my projects, so why is it so difficult to stop it in the rest of my life?

Despite my efforts to keep my language skills up since moving back to the UK from Paris, my French is rusty to the point where if it was a sword it wouldn’t even cut through jelly.  The latest series of Un Dos Tres is still in it’s cellophane, and surfing the website of Le Monde just highlights how much of my language I have lost.

So, new plan.  I don’t have time to watch French TV (too much CSI, Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries to keep up with) so I will be making better use of my commuting time.

Last weekend I went to London’s quartier français to have a look in the Librarie Française for the next Alex Rider book.  No luck.  Arkange was out of stock – they had the previous one in the series and the next one, but not the one I needed to read next.  Not to be put off from my mission to read more in French, I spent ages looking at the other books by Anthony Horowitz before choosing Devine Qui Vient Tuer (the English title of which is South by Southeast, which bears no resemblance to the French at all).

Hurrah!  I had a book to read on the tube by an author I like.  At the till was a big pile of Stephenie Meyer books, including a translation of her latest, The Host.  I think it is going to be hard to read, given that it is all about the end of the world as we know it, but I picked it up and paid for it anyway.

I was still disappointed that they didn’t have Arkange, and then I noticed another French bookshop across the street (they don’t call it the quartier français for nothing).

They did have Arkange!  So I bought that too.

Forecasted budget:  £7.45
Forecasted deliverables:  One book.

Actual budget:  £23.20
Actual deliverables:  Three books.

Total overspent:  £15.75 or nearly 320%!

On the plus side, my tube journeys are not so boring any longer.  I’m 116 pages into Arkange and Alex has escaped two attempts on his life already, and I just know there will be a couple of others before he saves the world again…

Related posts:

1. Strikes and scope The office is going into emergency mode at the moment in preparation for crippling strikes tomorrow. We’ve received flyers from the unions, an email from...
2. Scope Management presentation at the BCS I will be speaking about Scope Management at the British Computer Society in London on 11 May. Scope is one of the many bugbears of...
3. A question of shopping There were plenty of questions about project management at last week’s womenintechnology event on how to be a successful woman in IT. Mainly people were...

Email sent! Please check your inbox for the download link.

Happy New Year!

You might have seen the little pop-up box which is appearing on this blog at the moment* which talks about a survey.

I’m writing a new book on the role of social media and enterprise collaboration tools in a project environment, and I am interested in gathering your experiences – positive or negative.  The survey is 9 questions and takes less than 5 minutes, so please do complete it if you can.  [Update 30/12/10: this link has now been deleted as the survey is closed and the link goes to the 2011 survey instead].  The results will appear on the blog and will probably get a mention in the book too.

I’m also interested in hearing from you if you have more experiences you would like to share that might make interesting case studies on the uses of social media for project teams.  Please get in touch.

As the book develops you’ll get all the latest news here, so stay tuned to hear how things are going.

*The box is powered by WP Greet Box, a WordPress plugin.  So far, it seems relatively easy to use (although I did have to do some work to get the related posts links to work properly with it), and you should be able to avoid seeing the pop-up again if you click to close it.

Related posts:

1. The Social Media & Project Management Survey returns This year I am once again running the Social Media in a Project Environment survey. This time last year lots of you completed the survey...
2. Social Media in a Project Environment: 2011 Survey This year I am once again running the Social Media in a Project Environment survey.  This time last year lots of you completed the survey...
3. Social Media in a Project Environment: 2011 Survey Results The 2011 Social Media in a Project Environment Survey results are now available. Key highlights: 20% more people are using blogs for business use than...