Don’t tell me I can’t

Whilst researching recently for a workshop I facilitated on “Overcoming your Internal Imposter”, the irony of me facilitating this workshop subject was not lost on me.  I have written and spoken many times about my own personal struggle with public speaking – which not only manifests itself when I am talking from a stage, all mic’d up, but also in smaller groups and meetings.  Basically, in any circumstances where I am called upon as some sort of expert or authority on a matter.  Nowadays it doesn’t hold me back from doing things (aforementioned workshop for example), but it used to.

Since the concept of Imposter Phenomenon was first developed by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, much has been written about it; a wide variety of video’s, podcasts, seminars, books, and articles, by any number of people, are available on the subject (recently I read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, watched Amy Cuddy’s TED talk, read a February article in the HBR which poses the question of imposter syndrome as the reason women may be inclined to distrust their success, and listened to Deliciously Ella’s podcast).

Self-doubt, fear of failure, feeling like a fraud, attributing accomplishments simply to luck…call it what you will, it’s an enormous subject.  Whether you resonate with the terminology of imposter syndrome, or whether that turns you off completely, there is no getting away from the fact that pretty much all of us have experienced the thoughts or feelings associated with it, to varying degrees, at some point in our lives (actual statistics vary depending on the study but they seem to hover around the 70% mark, and it doesn’t discriminate based on gender, race, work, relationships, age etc).

For me it’s not always words (that inner voice whispering; you can’t do this, there are lots of people better than you, what if they laugh at you) that come up.  It’s sometimes a sharp twist in my gut or an unpleasant kind of flutter.  Or I am aware that my shoulders have risen up to my ears and my face is tense and strained.

Now when I recognise those things happening, I breathe.  Deeply.  And wait for a moment for my body brain to let my mind brain catch up and I can work through the thoughts.

So, I said it doesn’t hold me back.  And that’s true, it doesn’t.  Not now.  But my internal imposter telling me I couldn’t do something or wasn’t good enough definitely has held me back in the past.

In one of my favourite corporate roles, I found myself in a position where my self-doubt and fear of failure completely overtook all rational thought and I ended up resigning because of it.  Rather than voicing my concerns - because to do that would surely make them lose all confidence in me and my career would be over (so the voice said) - instead of arranging a meeting to explain things and find out more, I actually resigned.  Yep.  I left a place where I had built a great reputation, and really enjoyed the role (for the most part) and took a role at another company, on a lower salary, where I had to prove myself all over again.  In my mind at the time this was safer, the alternative was to risk being ‘outed’ as an imposter.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire springs to mind.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a particularly good time in that next role, I really didn’t feel like I fit in and because of the way in which I had left my previous company, I was not in the right head space to cope, and to deliver my best.

All this I now see with the benefit of hindsight.  What would I do differently? I don’t have regrets so I don’t necessarily wish I had done things differently, however, I think I would have liked to have stayed longer at my old company and addressed my ‘limiting beliefs’ there.  It may or may not have culminated with me leaving the company anyway, but at least I would have been calmly walking and not running blindly into the next fire.  Could I have worked through that on my own?  Probably not.  I really think a coach would have been a great idea but at that time I didn’t have the awareness to consider it, and it wasn’t suggested by anyone.

My point is, imposter syndrome, or whatever you want to call it, manifests itself in many ways.

I’ve also been reflecting lately about how these thoughts seem to have changed with age and experience.  Early in my career, working for an investment bank in London, I was seconded to New York for a few months.  Seriously, if ever self-doubt should have risen its ugly head it would surely have been then! But no, as far as I can remember I boldly seized the opportunity and took myself off to NYC, on my own, with limited guidance and supervision.  I remember being nervous, but a fear of failure, no, I don’t remember that.  And yet, this was the same period in my life when I was bribing my colleague with offers of supper out for doing the employee inductions for me because I could not bear the thought of standing up in front of people and speaking (advice to ‘imagine them all naked or on the toilet’ just didn’t cut it for me).  Strange.

These negative and limiting thoughts or feelings become an issue when they stop us from taking opportunities or doing things we actually want to do.

I had a client recently who is an impressive individual, a high achiever by anyone’s standards with an extremely bright future ahead of them, and yet niggling feelings of self-doubt were stopping them from working out what they really wanted to do next and from being bold enough to ask, respectfully, for the appropriate level of pay for the work they were doing.

Another client, whilst hugely passionate about what they are doing, was struggling in relation to marketing their new business on social media: ‘Why would anyone want to read about what I do? What do I know about this?  What if no one likes my post, what if I fail?  I’m not as good as xyz person / business.’

You get the picture.

So what happened?  How did my clients move forward?

We did it by working through these statements in detail, twisting and turning them around, assessing their validity.  Through the process of this close inspection these beliefs began to fray at the edges and fall apart.  They could then be replaced or reframed with true, helpful statements and messages.  By acknowledging the amazing things my clients had done, and could do, by visioning where they wanted to be and how they could get there, the negative narratives lost their power and potency.

“Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.”
― William Shakespeare

Image credit: Photo from Biblioteca Valenciana on Unsplash