The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (83)

Imposter syndrome teaching

If you read this when it's published on Friday at 6 p.m. I will be out for dinner with my eldest daughter, Grace and her boyfriend in Birmingham, having spoken at the DFT Careers Day at Aston University.

I've spoken to DFT/VT groups in dentistry (first-year graduates) since 1997/8, hundreds and hundreds of times.

I must have spoken to thousands of dental graduates through that process, but this is slightly different, as it often happens when people try to re-invent something.

Today, I will have spoken on dental implants and oral surgery for 30 minutes trying to give people a flavour of my career and what happened and what it looks like.

But the other thing I've been asked to speak on for another 30 minutes is entrepreneurship.

This is an interesting one (a little bit like leadership), which is quite an ethereal subject that people find difficult to grasp because nobody really knows the best way to teach it.

If you Google entrepreneurship courses, you can get multiple courses related to business, risk-taking, management, and all that stuff, and there are absolute lines of inquiry into 'how to become an entrepreneur'.

The problem with becoming an entrepreneur is, first of all, knowing what an entrepreneur is and, secondly, deciding why you want to become an entrepreneur once you've discovered what it is.

In trying to prepare for this course (and I'm not prepared at all), I'm unsure why I've been asked and what criteria I have to be able to talk about this apart from having nearly gone bankrupt, running a business and starting four or five different businesses, some of which I've sold.

To me, the voice in my head which speaks to me when I wake up in the morning, which says, "What opportunities are you going to create today?" is entirely normal, and that is a voice which speaks up in every person's head, but it turns out that when I speak to people, they don't necessarily have the same voice that I have.

I don't know when that voice arrived or what led to me having that, but I do know that when I was a teenager, I wanted to work in my dad's business because I felt that I could make a difference when I heard some of the stories that came back from his work.

I also know that when people ask me to put my hand up to help with things (like clandestine negotiations when high-level individuals are seeking a settlement from leaving their work in other sectors), I feel happy to be involved in that - that was something that happened this week.

So, I think I will have discussed with the DFTS what they believe an entrepreneur is and whether I can give them any advice as to how to get there, but I think that the most important piece of advice is that if you do know what an entrepreneur is, why do you want to become one?

I don't think that many entrepreneurs are really about making money. I think they just use money to keep the score around their opportunities, but I could be wrong about that because I don't live inside their heads.

But hopefully, it will be an interesting discussion, and as always, in these circumstances where you may have 10, 20, 30, or 50 people in front of you, you will probably only reach two or three properly.