The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Haven't written anything significant in one of these Wellness threads for a while, suppose now's a good time.
I'm currently in my fourth week of my first job at an accounting firm after a year or so of actively looking for a job (after recovering from years of chronic illness that derailed a lot of my plans). A lot has been thrown at me so far and it's been fairly exhausting. Despite how draining it can be, this is a development I'm fairly pleased with, and I'm even more pleased with it given that I have a reasonable level of certainty that I got in because of merit and not identity. During the job application process, I had a practice of entering "prefer not to answer" to any identity-based questions that could work in my favour, especially if the organisation indicated they would like to diversity hire (an all too common sight in Australia).
There is one thing that has been causing dissonance though, and it's the gulf between how I perceive myself vs. how other people seem to perceive me. So far people have told me that I have been doing well, and according to my superiors everyone who has worked with me has offered up very positive feedback. I am frankly very perplexed by this - I consider the rate at which I've been picking things up to be normal and expected, if not slower than I would personally like. I do attempt to be as fastidious as possible in my work, but I get the sense that I sometimes ask questions in excess and miss things that should be obvious. Note, I'm not complaining about the positive feedback in any way and I'm glad they consider me to have been performing well, but it's genuinely surreal to see how different their evaluation of my performance is from my own.
Perhaps I'm just used to unreasonably high expectations and perhaps my idea of "basic competence" is biased upwards, but I feel like short of actual mental retardation it's very hard to mess up what I'm currently doing. And it sometimes makes me think that the other shoe is going to drop, and other people are eventually going to see me in the way that I see myself.
At US accounting firms in entry-level roles the challenging part isn't the technical competence. Many people could reasonably succeed at the entry-level jobs with just the knowledge from the Intro to Intermediate Accounting courses (or the self-study equivalent).
The real challenges (in the US) are:
When someone says you are doing good at an accounting firm it usually means something more like: You are reliable and pleasant to work with. The main things that will get you negative feedback in accounting are: not putting in long hours like your peers, missing deadlines, or blatantly not following procedures.
Furthermore, accountants frequently burn out from the accounting firm lifestyle and end up in private industry or government. The busy season gets to be a bit much as you get older and have different priorities like family. Your coworkers want you to stick around because it makes their life easier when things get busy.
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Congratulations, this is what being competent feels like. If you have had great feedback from multiple sources, odds are you are doing great. There is a gap between the expectations for yourself and the expectations from others but that doesn't mean you're misleading them.
This position might not be a long term fit if, as you suggest, you are more competent than the role requires. But for now I would just enjoy being healthy and enjoy have a job for a while.
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You may or may not be prone to judging yourself harshly, I don't know. What I've found is that--and I do not mean to sound arrogant or conceited here--many people, perhaps even most in certain fields, are idiots. Some, of course, are idiots on every level, but I've noticed most all of us have at least some part of our lives where we are weak. The microbiologist has no social skills. The talented surgeon is inarticulate. Maybe it's true that whatever you're doing is easy for you, but for some it's downright challenging.
Personally the colleague closest to my own job seems to have great difficulty, stress even, with tasks that I find relatively simple, even though they take time and involve problem-solving. What I'm suggesting is that maybe you're right: It's easy for you. That doesn't mean it's easy for everybody else
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If a monkey can do your job then why are you worried? Just put in the work, it doesn't sound like an impossible ask.
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Imposter syndrome is real, get used to it. If you aren't being commended, then it's time to double-check.
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