1 Year Later - My Early Imposter Syndrome

1 Year Later - My Early Imposter Syndrome

Today is October 23rd 2024. On October 23rd 2023 I coach the my first solo CrossFit class having done my CF-L1 and a bunch of shadowing with some of the fantastic coaches that I now get to call me peers.

I would say it's only really been the last month or so that I have really relaxed into it, let more of my personality come out and stopped second guessing myself as much. That's not to say I stopped caring, quite the opposite, in fact I would say it's just that I'm a better coach when I'm simply being me. I have really enjoyed coaching but at the same time I suffered for quite a while with a huge sense of imposter syndrome. I'm glad that it didn't stop me though. After I had been coaching for only a few weeks I started writing the below, which I have adapted for the now as a bit of a reflection, but it's a bit of a story of how that imposter syndrome impacted me. In general things were going ok but I had not long come off of the most challenging class I had coached and was slightly injured myself.

I had woken up the morning of writing, having thought about cancelling the night before,  in a good amount of pain, clearly the workout that was scheduled would do more harm than good on that morning but it meant cancelling 40 minutes before the class was meant to start (5:20am).

Honestly, if I wasn't a coach I wouldn't have thought twice about it, but that morning, I felt like a bit of a fraud and incredibly anxious about then going and coaching the 6am class the next morning. My logical brain was saying that it was ridiculous to feel this way. The 6am crew are all fantastic people who have been nothing but supportive of me on my coaching journey so far and the coach of the class has been a fantastic mentor to me and I was sure they would understand. On top of that I had been showing up consistently at 6am all year and don't skip the intensity when in workouts. Still the anxiety was real (you feel how you feel right). The feeling was that an ok start to my coaching career here would be thrown away. The feeling that when I ask people to push the tempo that next morning that they will feel like I don't understand how it feels to be in that situation because I wasn't there yesterday. And then I spiralled thinking things like that because I scaled a workout because there was a high skill movement I'm still working on that people would think I don't know what I'm talking about. 

Ultimately I knew this was something that over time would get better. I knew I would settle into my coaching and my legitimacy would continue to build as I got more experience. Right in that moment it was  a pretty terrible feeling, one that took a few days, a few good classes and sitting down to give myself a good talking to in order to get over.

A year in, I have had plenty of ups and downs. Some classes that have been fantastic, some that haven't been great and everything in-between. I still worry before some classes and worry about trying some new things or how I am going to cater for everyone in the class. I say worry, I guess what I mean is I want to give everyone in the class a decent experience and I always want to be up to that mark. The difference now is that I accept that not everything is going to work, that some classes will be better than others and that in the process of getting more experience, and getting better, that journey is not always linear but a series of ups and downs, both of which should be learned from but not dwelled on for too long.  I'm lucky that the community and the team at Functional Fitness Dundee are so fantastic and I get the opportunity to keep honing my craft.

Andy