psychology

“Competitive” isn’t a dirty word, and nice girls can be competitive, too.

/ Ann Morey

side by side

For most of my adult life, I identified myself as “not a competitive person.” I was a nice, thoughtful, collaborative, easy going person. Competitive people, I thought, were aggressive, confrontational people who would throw you under the bus and do anything to get ahead. That definitely wasn’t me. I wore the “not a competitive person” label with pride.

And yet, somehow I fell in love with wheel to wheel racing, a sport that involves battling door to door with other cars for the same scrap of asphalt. Racing is arguably one of the most competitive things a person could do. How did that happen? It turns out I was a competitive person all along, but being competitive didn’t mean quite what I thought it did.

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Impostor syndrome and women in motorsports – How I overcame feeling like a fraud on the race track

/ Ann Morey

pink helmet

This is a difficult topic to write about, which is probably why I couldn’t find anyone else who’d written about it when I went looking for information. And that’s why I’m writing about it, because I know I’m not the first woman to have gotten behind the wheel of a race car and felt like a total fraud. Or the first person, because some of the things that made me feel like an impostor have nothing to do with my gender.

Spoiler alert: this story has a happy ending! After I figured out I was experiencing impostor syndrome, I did my homework on it and got to the root of my fear that “I don’t have what it takes to be a ‘real deal’ race car driver.” As it turned out, I was holding a few inaccurate beliefs about talent and abilities that were getting in my way.
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