Impostor in your own skin

Do you sometimes lack belief in yourself?

Do you look at your career or your business and thing, how did I get here?

When you compare yourself to others to find yourself lacking or unworthy in your mind?

Well the good news is you are not alone. I mentioned’ impostor syndrome’ in a LinkedIn post recently and it quickly became clear that the article had hit a nail on the head of many people. Read on and I’ll share how I first realised and then rid myself of the lack of self-esteem and self-belief that was a characteristic of my own experience of being an impostor.

The term impostor syndrome was first used by Dr Pauline Clance and Dr Suzanne Imes to describe an experience of ‘self-perceived intellectual phoniness’ reported by high achieving women (subsequent research has confirmed it is equally present in the male population). Whilst it is a very common experience it is not recognised as a formal mental disorder, although it is often accompanied by anxiety, depression and stress in sufferers.

For me it became present from the moment was promoted into my first ‘management’ role. It stayed with me through my corporate career, getting noticeably worse the further I moved up the ladder, and continued into the first few years of my self-employed coaching career.

I had constant nagging doubts about my capabilities and my value. It didn’t feel like I could trust my judgement in many commercial situations, particularly ones that bought me into difficult conversations with my colleagues in other functions. As a result, I would tend to over analyse everything and then become combative in situations where I felt at risk of being exposed.

Whilst I was aware of the feelings of low confidence, I didn’t attribute them to feeling like an impostor. That’s because the experience I had of inferiority felt legitimate and real to me.

The most obvious cause of this experience was that my peers / subordinates and bosses were, in the main, university educated and chartered accountants (my formal education ended at sixteen, and whilst I passed all of the exams to become chartered in my profession, I never regarded myself as an equal). However as I subsequently learned the roots of such deeply held beliefs as these are often much deeper than the ‘obvious’ cause.

No one who worked with me, or who had met me, would have recognised that any of this was going on (several people that had worked with me in the past responded privately to me saying they were really surprised by my post). I hid it well, mainly by projecting self-confidence and being highly outspoken.

I still managed to progress from a 16-year old Clerical Assistant, via eight big household name companies, to Director of Financial Operations in a major Telecommunications company. So what is the big deal, you might ask?

Well there are actually two big deals here.

Firstly, and I have this in common with many of the people I coach, the success was present in financial terms, but it was the experience of doing the job that was difficult. When you feel in constant fear of being discovered as a fraud, there is a tendency to compensate by adopting behaviours and traits that are unnatural to you. For me I tried to pretend that I was someone I wasn’t. This made my working life feel difficult and stressful, where it should have been effortless and even enjoyable. In the end I hated the corporate world and forced my way out of it. Yet from my position now I can see all of that anxiety and stress purely as a function of my own perception.

Secondly there was the cost in terms of the opportunities I never took. Because I did not see the full reach of my capabilities and depth of my knowledge there were promotions I didn’t go for, conversations I never had and countless times I never spoke up when I should have. Even when I became a self-employed coach I lost countless opportunities to work with clients because I didn’t have the self-belief to show up fully in those crucial ‘sales’ conversations.

So what changed for me?

The death of the impostor

As I sit here now I can look back and smile at how I was. All that struggle and anxiety was simply me trying to protect myself from an imaginary enemy. It was an innocent mis-understanding about the efficacy of my view of the world and myself.

Then one day it all changed…

I had been studying a new branch of psychology to help with my coaching. The approach was focussed on how we create our experience of reality, exclusively through conscious and sub-conscious expressions of our thought. This approach gave me access to several key insights which began to tear a hole in the fabric of the story I had been holding about myself. It was a step in the right direction but I still fund myself defaulting back to my old identity of not knowing or being enough. I guess that when you’ve been living your life to the same story for decades it is not always easy to let go of it.

Then one day I was involved in an exercise that required me to tell my career story, in a very particular way. The result was not so much a lightbulb moment. It was more like a bomb had gone off in my head. My entire career reframed itself and I saw the power, breadth and depth, of my career for the first time.

Since that day just like everybody else I continue to be subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but everything is different. Whatever is going on I have a rock solid level of self-belief that I can deal with whatever happens and continue to move forward in the direction of travel I have chosen.

Ridding myself of the sense that I wasn’t enough, has more than anything else in my life, allowed me to access a level of self-confidence and resilience that has allowed me to whether some very tough times and ground my decisions and actions in a strong understanding of who I am and what I want.

You are more than you think you are.

Can you imagine what you might be capable of if you were crystal clear about what you wanted and able to see the full reach of your capabilities?

As soon as I experienced the transformation that I went through I realised that this was the single most important thing I could do for my clients. I immediately began integrating some what I had learned into my work with owners, managers and sales people.

One of the challenges with this type of work is that the trigger for people to have this type of transformational insight is unique for each individual. After testing and measuring different approaches through the programs I have been running I have narrowed it down to four key access points.

Any one of these areas of focus has the potential to give you the breakthroughs you need in order to rid yourself of impostor syndrome and access untapped levels of self-confidence, resilience and commitment.  

If you would like 2019 to be the year where you effortlessly achieve new levels of performance and wellbeing then you need to register for my one-off Christmas webinar on Tuesday 11th December 2018 at 10:00am

The four keys – How to overcome impostor syndrome and become confident, resilient and committed, without years of business coaching

In this online webinar you’ll discover four simple tools that you can use to liberate yourself of that negative internal chatter that holds you back from going for what it is you really want from your business and your career.

You’ll learn how

• a simple misunderstanding of how your psychology works is at the heart of all of your career challenges and how to overcome it
• you can reframe your experiences into a powerful internal narrative that will give you boundless confidence and resilience
• shifting your perspective of others helps you more confidently build deep relationships with them
• committing to the path of mastery and becoming the go to ‘expert’ sky rockets your self-belief and esteem

Don’t let 2019 become a facsimile of previous years. Register for the webinar and allow yourself to break the mould and move yourself quickly and confidently forward.