Ever walk into a room of your peers, a meeting with your team, a proposal for a new project, a pitch meeting with the board, heck with your family for a family vacation, Imposter syndrome can strike at any time and often is a low lying fog around our brains 24/7. In fact, everyone feels like an imposter sometimes and that’s ok. In fact, imposter syndrome has probably existed for all of humankind but was coined by Clance and Imes in the late 1970s. Naming it is the first step in identifying it, and the next step is identifying if you have it. And here’s the super power: identifying if others have it, or if they are in fact imposters.
When you have the skills to spot an imposter even in yourself you free yourself from the debilitating effect of dealing with imposters relentlessly. An imposter is defined as a person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain, and when you’re dealing with this, or feeling like you’re doing this when you’re not, it can cause erosion of your confidence and decision making ability.
Imposter Syndrome Causes:
You’re creating. That means you are making original and important work without any prescription, formula, equation, proven process, or guaranteed results.
You’re Standing up for your creation. You’re not keeping your head down and giving away your idea to anyone else on the team who will claim it. You’re not imitating everyone else before you, you’re not hiding behind any facts and figures as a way to minimize your risk of being wrong or of being not as right as you wanted to be when you came up with the idea.
When you have challenges and you stumble, you are actively seeking out experts, collaborators, experiments… you are actively seeking out new ways to test your innovation and putting yourself out there at risk of failure, at risk of being seen as an imposter by others. Innovation takes overcoming the imposter syndrome. Or at least it requires doing it despite the often gut-wrenching feeling of being an imposter.
You’re progressing without any guarantee you’ll win.
You’re leading.
So how do leaders progress forward with their innovation and without a shred of a guarantee of results? How do they go for it? How do they brush off the naysayers and just do it anyway?
Imposter Syndrome Side Effects:
You feel as though at any moment you are going to be found out as a fraud.
You think everyone else in the world has more talent, knowledge, ability than you do and you shouldn’t be in this meeting at all, you should be home doing something with far lower stakes, like reading yourself a bedtime story and forgetting about living your best life, and feeling good about yourself. That’s for other more qualified people.
Attributing your success to outside circumstances: “I got lucky,” “I don’t even know how I did all of that,” “I had a mentor who really guided me, without them I’d be nothing.” “I stumbled on this discovery” – This is my favorite. It’s like there are discoveries poorly hidden all around our daily walks, you know the laundry room, the gym, where we’re apt to fall down and stumble right over a million dollar discovery. Doesn’t that happen to you? It seems to happen to most successful people; they were just excellent stumblers. It wasn’t belief in themselves, trust in their abilities, forget all of that, just go around stumbling and your life is made. I make fun because when we listen to our inner critic, we can see how close we are to our transformation because the inner critic gets more and more ridiculous, like calling you an imposter after decades of dedicated work.
You work way too hard, too long, too repetitively all to please people you have deemed to be future fortune tellers of your success. Because they don’t know what your results will be either. You stayed 16 hours straight including all night working out the smallest details of a proposal that will take 1 hour to present. And let me share with you, being the CEO, the decision maker doesn’t exempt you from this side effect. Every leader must enroll their team into the goal, the challenge, the project, the innovation, the new creative direction. So every employee, every leader, every vendor, every student, everybody has experienced imposter syndrome at one time or another.
You are constantly looking for reassurance and coddling
Seeking out reassurance, coddling, validation, is a sure sign someone doesn’t believe in themselves. With each reassurance of a project that has no guaranteed outcome, no assurance, literally is a trap. It traps you into attachment to the results, attachment to pleasing people, attachment to the illusion of a guarantee, and perpetuates the illusion that if people like me, I’ll be successful. This is not an equation. Being liked by your team does not equal having a successful idea. In fact, it is a huge distraction that keeps our head buried in the “game playing” or “politics of countermoves” to success, which is a tempting distraction, but this is not the life of a creator, a leader, a thinker, and quite frankly with the race of technological advances the creative is the horse to ride. The creative can not be replaced by a robot, an app, or software of any kind. So entrepreneurs, changers of the world, now and future inspirations to millions, let’s embrace the imposter syndrome as a key indicator that a great idea could be in our midst.
WARNING: The average leader will misinterpret a case of imposter syndrome for lack of belief in the idea from the creator. We are better leaders than that, we are better teammates than that, we are better listeners than that, why? How do I know that about you? Because you are listening to me now, you are a true leader who wants to spot the person on their team who is willing to risk personal rejection for the gain of creating something helpful to all others. Because you are willing to trust your teammate’s ideas even when— well, especially when they are ‘stumbling’ to define the potential of this new discovery.
Spot The Imposter In The Room:
The person with the most creative idea.
The person who is deferring to others as much as possible after they introduce their idea for innovation.
The most committed person in the room to the project.
The person who has thought this through deeply and needs help fleshing it out.
The person who brainstorms out loud for everyone’s benefit also brainstorms even if their ideas are unpolished and even whimsical.
The person who has a process, step by step plan, thought-out for how this innovation can benefit the team.
Antidotes for the Imposter Syndrome:
If you are afflicted with imposter syndrome: Develop trust in your creativity by doing it more. 40% of the workforce do work that is built on human collaboration, innovation, collective decision making, and the vulnerability of sharing your ideas before there is any possibility of proof that it will work. You Are Not Alone. Everyone Feels Like An Imposter so dive right into the winner’s circle. It’s full of people who feel like imposters but they are innovating, creating, starting, finishing, starting again anyway and the gratification of completion is so great it fuels you on, and the gratification of success is so great it fuels you on. So Shine On!
Thank you so much for joining me! If you enjoyed this blog post, I release new videos every Tuesday and Thursday on FB and IG, so follow me, or subscribe to my YouTube channel, and keep treating these episodes as a masterclass for becoming an Inspiration to Millions with Branding. And as always the way to becoming an Inspiration to Millions starts with our motto: Love What You Do and Love How You Do It.