Surviving the imposter syndrome

I'm sincerely sorry for the lack of blog action just lately but this month has been a LOT. For anyone kind enough to be following these random posts, you may recall that my last one was all about a bad bout of imposter syndrome. In short, I was due to speak on a panel in Paris about freelance journalism, alongside some rather eminent people. So, to say I was feeling the fear was a bit of an understatement.

Put it this way, my fellow panellists included four-time Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist Tom Fenton, now director of the English-language service at France 24; senior field producer for CNN in Paris, Saskya Vandoorne; and former executive editor at TIME magazine, Susanna Schrobsdorff. And that's not to mention the distinguished people in the audience.

Well, despite all my misgivings, I am delighted to report that somehow I survived - even if i was shaking like a leaf - and managed to get through it all without fainting/freezing/corpsing (substitute with any other fun finale). In fact, more than that, the panel actually seemed to go down well, and people said they found it useful. Yay!

I am sure this was due mostly to the excellent insights of my venerable fellow panellists. However, as a co-director of the Society of Freelance Journalists - and just as importantly as a jobbing freelancer - I like to hope my perspective brought at least something to the proceedings.

In any event, full credit to the Anglo-American Press Association and the Paris branch of the National Union of Journalists for organising such a brilliant day. As well as our own panel, Finding Work as a Freelance Journalist, there were two others - Getting Paid & Paying for it All and Staying Ahead of the Bot - both of which were excellent. Shout-out here to my NUJ colleagues Alison Culliford and Sylvia Edwards Davis who both did such a fantastic job on those respectively.

Anyway, to bring things full circle, such was my pre-event nerves that I arrived with a near-mountain of notes (and I mean multiple sheets of A4, not even Reporter's Notebook size) so I now have a ton of material that OF COURSE I didn't use. In fact, I'd be surprised if I referenced even 5% of it (lesson learned...). 

So, to get to the point, I thought I might take the opportunity to share some of that here in the coming weeks, in the hope that it might be useful to others, too? As we all know, finding work as a freelance journalist is not easy in the current climate, so I reckon any shared learning can only be a good thing. And hopefully, that way, we can all help each other to kick that imposter syndrome into touch once and for all.