Overcoming Imposter Syndrome and Social Conditioning: Learning to Sell Yourself in an Interview as a Woman

By Julia Dolinish

One thing I feel deep in my soul is how much I hate interviews. It has always felt like mental gymnastics or like trying to unlock some secret code to make those asking the questions choose you. I have so much trouble selling myself. This struggle has been defining to my career experience.

I started my career out of college as a middle school teacher. The buildup of stress during interview season had me jumping on the first job offer I received. Honestly, what made the decision for me was that accepting the offer would mean not having to interview at more schools. Little did I realise that after leaving that job a year and a half later that my success would require me to learn how to truly sell myself.

During the pandemic, I learned how to be a virtual assistant and started my own company providing social media and administrative help for businesses. As much as I loved what I was creating, it struck me that if I ever wanted to be successful, I needed to get over my issues around interviews and talking about what I could bring to the table as soon as possible. My business cannot thrive if I can’t convince people that I am a good fit. This was not an overnight switch: only with practice and persistence have I gotten so much more comfortable getting on calls and selling myself to potential employers. 

There have been a lot of mental blocks to overcome. One of the biggest was imposter syndrome. It can be difficult to be confident in selling yourself to others when you don’t believe you know what you are doing — even if you know you could figure it out when given a chance. This can be especially hard towards the beginning of jobs or when you go through a career transition like I was. Another aspect of imposter syndrome was constantly wondering if I was providing any value to the people I had worked with. Was my work good? Was it worth what I was charging? If you don’t believe in yourself, it can be damn near impossible to sell others on what you do.

It took time to get to the root of the mental blocks and reframe them. Take, for example, when I didn’t fully believe I knew what I was doing for every task I was interviewing for. Instead of seeing this as a fault in myself during interviews, I was able to reframe that insecurity to a confidence in my ability to ask questions and figure out complex problems. You can’t help if you haven’t had the exact experience yet, but you can help with how you approach it.

Another factor that helped me overcome these mental blocks is having a group of people in my industry to help hype one another up. If some are a few years ahead of you, they can act like the older sibling, giving you advice and helping you break down the feelings that are holding you back.

Now, this problem of not being able to sell oneself seems to affect women more than men. Why is that? Even if not blatantly spelt out for us anymore, boys and girls are still taught very different things about how they should behave and what is proper conduct for them. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche put it best when she said: ‘We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, “you can have ambition but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man”’. There is an active suppression of female success in our society. Men are taught to talk about their wins and celebrate their abilities; women are taught that we need to stay humble. This can hold women back from career achievements but learning to sell yourself takes your power back.

So, how does one go about selling themselves in the next interview, promotion meeting or in their day-to-day life? The first step is to get comfortable with talking about your achievements and what you are good at doing. At first, it will feel wrong, but the more you let yourself explore this area, the more comfortable you will get with it. The second step is to ask for what you want. You need to learn to advocate for yourself in the workplace. Finally, it can help to adopt a persona during times you need to sell yourself. If Beyonce can pull out Sasha Fierce, you can have a character to give you the strength you need to sell yourself like a CEO. You know your worth – time to let everyone else know, too.