Joe Svendsen

An unanswerable hypothetical: which art is better? An art print by an unnamed that hangs in your dining room that you view at every meal or the George Seurat original hanging in the nationally-acclaimed museum gallery?

I've also seen triptychs and all manner of beautiful religious and palace art.

What makes the train station in Porto cool to me is that it is walked by, freely and without need of admission, by thousands of people every day. And it's technically impressive in its own way.

I've been to the Prado and the Tate Britain, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Korea, the Rijksmuseum, and the Vatican Museum, among others. I have, indeed, seen an impressive assembly of inspiring, provocative, and impactful arts in these places. Some of the finest.

Some of the most meaningful visual art I've experienced in my life is the entrance to the Porto Train Station.

OR do they continue to build as quickly as possible a building that appears beautiful from the outside, but which might lack essential infrastructure to keep the building upright in the long run? This is an aspect of the profession that I find confusing, sometimes even frustrating.

And this leads to a fork in the road for many: do they get down to business of making the best art they can with what's in front of them, doing the hard work of building, cultivating, maintaining, and creating excellence that might some day actually, on a daily basis, live at a high level?

So there are professionals who set out to build a singing environment for the specific purpose of receiving this form of affirmation. Alternatively, they use their current position as a way to prove that they should be placed in charge of an environment that is already closer to this goal.

Meanwhile, the profession has set up a culture that advocates that this form of affirmation is the highest form of recognition anyone can receive, that to achieve it is an honor. This is, it some extent, self-serving on the part of the organization. But it trains young professionals to seek it.

It felt like it would be enough affirmation to get selected for a national ACDA conference, but after that wore off there was this understanding that nothing compared to that feeling, so successive years became about returning back to it. And, if done wrong, a lack of return can be devastating.

If exterior affirmation is the only form of medicine that can treat your Imposter Phenomenon, you will end up addicted to increasing dosages, not unlike a drug addict.

It's why, in my profession, there are so many conductors who just can't stop submitting their choirs for conference performances.

These types of experiences aren't uncommon in academia, so it makes sense that they create IP in many people: peers get a job and you don't, etc.

The University of Idaho responded to my application for their Music Education position by accidentally pasting part of the spreadsheet they were using to rank candidates, so the salutation read, "Dear Joseph Svendsen | not considered | not interviewed,

Thank you for your interest....

Lol

For every one time I've had an interest session or paper accepted for a conference I've been rejected two times.

My last year of doctoral school I applied to 46 positions, both choral conducting and choral music education positions. I got three on-campus interviews. That's a 6.5% success rate. I found my way to where I was supposed to be, but boy did it feel like failure as my friends landed jobs.

The happy medium would be to limit social media interaction while practicing positive mental reinforcement both privately and publicly, expressing gratitude for success, and actively searching for positive work of others to amplify.

Alternatively, those who suffer from IP (like me) could take a less drastic but similarly static approach by intentionally creating an all-positive online persona, a sort of "fake it until it becomes true" tactic for those who struggle to be positive in a comparative environment.

So it would seem that perhaps the most drastic yet effective way to prevent social media influenced IP is to avoid it altogether. Since social media has also become a tool for professional promotion and networking, this solution is only available to those who wish to pursue such goals in other ways.

Constantly reinforcing gratitude for one's situation and condition was another way to avoid the type of comparison that stimulates IP. As is approaching all social media interactions with the understanding that their is the high probability that posts are filtered and curated beyond reality.

People can fight this in a number of ways: only being interactive on social media instead of passive cna help. Being affirming of and celebrating others, not humble bragging, sharing failures and setbacks more frequently and visibly so as to eliminate the feeling of upward comparison in others.

Social media usage was the most detrimental contributor to people feeling IP. People who spend time comparing themselves to other they feel are better than they are feel the worst, followed by comparison to peers, followed by those less fortunate. In other words, "comparison is the thief of joy."

I just got done reading this study about Imposter Phenomenon in choral musicians, and it turns out that there is a high Prevelance of IP in the field that doesn't discriminate by age, experience level, grade level, or any other particular demographic.

The study did hint at some ways to beat it.

The times I am successful are far rarer than the times when I am unsuccessful. I am unsuccessful a lot, actually. I have to experience failure as something that passes through me and not into me.