A tucked away secret in the vault of the Haz Mat Guys. We get a chance to bring out this topic hoping that we can give you some insight as to the psychology of Hazmat
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Don’t just get on the job, get into the job!
So we’ve all been there. Standing at your first or even the hundredth drill or roll call and you get the cold sweats. Someone had made a mistake, I am not supposed to be here.You’re thinking, I am in a Haz Mat company or team, and everyone here is good at this, and I am supposed to be too. I’ve been to the classes, I’ve been in a company doing Hazmat for a while, but I am WAY out of my league.So you start questioning yourself, rationalizing that, “Well...This seemed like the next step, but…”Or maybe people said, “You should go to Hazmat, your smart”All the while, Deep down in our minds we were thinking, “Someone made a mistake”So you ask yourself, how did I end up with a such high performers? And the cycle continues.This thought, along with feelings, things like fraudulence or self-doubt came with it.This feeling sticks around for quite a while.So we begin our endeavor with the thought that if I outperform them, I’ll keep up! So we play the part.***If you can’t make it fake it***Maybe you begin to feel that you’ll never be able to compete with these guys on skills alone so maybe we began focusing on helping the bosses achieve their goals…more on that later.What we find out is that this is a standard way of dealing with our “perceived” phoniness.What I’m describing is something called imposter syndrome.We didn’t make this up, this is a legit psychological syndrome that is more common than you thinkIt was first brought to light in 1978 by psychologists Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imesimposter syndrome describes the experience of being unable to internalize accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud.”Those who experience these feelings of fraudulence tend to believe that they haven’t truly earned the success they’ve achieved — despite clear evidence of their intelligence and capability — and instead attribute their success to luck, or the ability to deceive people into believing they’re more competent than they actually are.When you're in the situation you have this fear of being “found out”. Surely, if they’ve managed to fool a boss, into believing they’re actually capable, then someone will discover the truth about them.Multiple studies have shown that impostorism affects both genders, and occurs in people from all professions, cultures and levels of successClance later conducted a survey that found that about 70% of all people have felt like impostors for at least some part of their careers, while other researchers, like Joan Harvey, concluded that anyone can feel like an imposter if they fail to internalize their success.Clance & Imes, who explain imposter syndrome in terms of three central behaviors that come from and even reinforce the imposter phenomenon.The first one is Diligence and hard work.The fear of being “found out” by someone important often causes the “imposter” to work even harder.Putting in longer hours, studying harder or obsessing over quality of work result in strong performance and approval from the bossThat accomplishment validates the person and delivers some temporary relief from the feelings.True fraudulence and inauthenticity.In an attempt to avoid feelings of fraudulence, some people will work to game the system around their accomplishments by finding other ways to satisfy their authority figures.For example, they may figure out the opinions the boss likes, then express those opinions to gain validation.
