You truly can overcome impostor syndrome! And i've listened to a couple of youtube
videos that talk about this and they say that you'll never really get over it,
but i think there's a big misunderstanding there which i'm going to share with you
and i truly think you can fully overcome imposter syndrome and i'm doing this video
and i want to encourage you to do this work because i want to see you achieve
your true potential, shine your light bright, and the world needs you. All right let's get into it
Today i'm going to share the three things i'd like you to understand about impostor syndrome and then
we're going to talk about some practical tools, very implementable, like steps you can take,
and then also a little bit about the deeper healing needed, so stay tuned. If you end up
liking this, please do give it a like and share it with somebody you think it may help. All right,
let's get into it. So there are three things that i think it's critically important to understand
about imposter syndrome because understanding this can then help you take the steps to feel
better and eventually fully overcome imposter syndrome. So the first thing to bring to mind is
that imposter syndrome has fear in it. It has an anxiety. It's not just that feeling that you can't
cut it or that your skills aren't good enough it's a feeling of being a fraud a concern about being
found out right so it goes beyond self-doubt self-confidence or self-esteem issues right
it ties into this is i'm gonna be found out i'm gonna be exposed and then oh no
whatever it is you fear will happen so that part of it is an anxiety and it's really important to
understand that because you can then begin to work with some general anxiety tools
to calm the anxiety down because we always want to tackle imposter syndrome by feeling better
and more confident and all that stuff and i do think we can do that but we can't ignore
that there's this fear piece that probably is really really old instinctual fear in us because
our survival is dependent on others it clearly is and many many many years ago in early human
evolution we were really dependent on a small group to support us now if you lose a job you
probably can find another job right but in a hunter-gatherer society if you were excluded from
the group your life would literally be in danger so i do think there's sort of a very innate
ingrained fear of being excluded from a group or exposed embarrassed right so that fear is
underneath imposter syndrome so that's one thing to recognize because recognizing it also can help
you go through the what-ifs and i know for some people this is very hard to do but other people
can do it so it's like okay so let's say they call me out as a fraud well then what
okay well then maybe i think a lot of people fear well then i'll lose my job okay so then what well
then maybe i'll never find another job okay well then what well then i'll be homeless on the street
right but once you identify that as anxiety you can identify those things as projections and
then come back to is there anything that really should be causing me so much fear at this moment
and if you can at least put a bit of a question mark in there and lower that fear feeling you'll
make major progress on this okay we'll come back to that the second thing to understand about
imposter syndrome is that it really is based on shame right it's based on a feeling of like
i'm not good enough it usually is not only i'm not good enough at this job because if it was only i'm
not good enough at this job then i can look at the evidence in a realistic way and maybe i could say
hmm you know what this job really doesn't fit my skills and i'd be better off elsewhere or it
could be nah my skills really fit this job i'm actually pretty good at it i can tell
because of my work history and then i'm over it but it's usually impostor syndrome is usually
based on some deep-seated feeling of not being enough not being competent enough smart enough
sort of a pervasive feeling so guilt is sort of i did something wrong right like so i made a mistake
at work that's doing something wrong but like i'm wrong that shame so that's the second thing
to understand because that's something that we'll need to heal to get over impostor syndrome and the
third thing to understand about imposter syndrome is that these feelings are deeply embedded in your
emotional brain the mammalian part of our brain the emotional brain we can call it a number of
different things but it holds on to concepts and feelings and patterns from very early in our lives
and then changing those patterns concepts feelings doesn't respond all that well to our frontal lobe
which says like hey you know you got this it's no problem look at your accomplishments so a
lot of the practical tools that are shared about getting over imposter syndrome and
i am going to share some of these practical tools but those are really frontal brain tools
and they can help shift the emotional brain but really this might require some deeper work and
i do have a free webinar if you haven't seen it about rewiring your brain for joy and confidence
which takes some time but it's very helpful to understand why we need this rewiring and
why things got embedded in that emotional brain so deeply and so strongly so long ago so feel free to
join me for that there's a link in the description to the video so i want to come back to when i said
that i believe you can fully recover from imposter syndrome and so many people say that you can't
it's kind of always sort of going to be with you you just manage it i want to explain why i feel
the way i do and part of that is based on my own personal experience as well as all the people i've
worked with over the last couple of decades but if we think of those components of imposter syndrome
right the anxiety fear piece of it the shame and then that old emotional brain stuff
we can rewire that stuff we truly can and that does not mean that you'll never feel
a moment of self-doubt right like but feeling self-doubt or being in a new job or once in a
while feeling overwhelmed and not sure you can cut it those are like momentary normal
feelings that happen and those feelings will happen to all of us because well there might be
some people to whom this never happened but generally i'd say most of us feel insecure at
times maybe inadequate or not quite up to a job at sometimes and if those are sort of momentary
feelings they happen in a particular situation and they're not tied to this kind of feeling of being
found out and exposed and humiliated well then it's not imposter syndrome it's more tied to
self-esteem which can be improved but also as i said like some amount of that kind of self-doubt
is always going to be with us that's okay but that doesn't mean that imposter syndrome is always
going to be with us it also doesn't mean that if you have pervasive low self-esteem you can improve
that i do think you can recover from having pervasive low self-esteem let me know give me
a comment below sometimes i make these connections and i'm not sure i'm explaining it just right so
i'd love to know if that makes sense to you that once in a while feeling low self-esteem or feeling
bad about yourself or unsure no big deal it's when it's a pervasive pattern in the brain and that's
what i believe you can recover from okay so i'm gonna share five practical tips for overcoming
imposter syndrome and then i'm going to talk about a little bit of the deeper healing that might be
needed so the number one tool i call this look at the evidence and there's a couple of supporting
practices for this but looking at the evidence is to really write down really think through
what's the evidence that you know what you're doing what's the evidence that you're good at
your job or you're good in this role working with a couple of people recently one person was a nurse
who had been working in an emergency room for more than 10 years and she still had this impostor
syndrome feeling of like i don't really know what i'm doing now being in an emergency room
environment i imagine there's a lot of time that the nurses and the doctors don't always know 100
what's going on right so they have to try this try that and like figure it out so a
little bit of that feeling i think probably goes with that environment stakes are high
and things are uncertain but in no way does that tie to being a fraud or not being capable
so when this person went through her evidence with me she was like well i've had three different jobs
i've gotten promoted at every one i've never had trouble finding a new job and i've never been
fired so that's a lot of evidence that you're very competent right another person i was speaking with
recently who is suffering from this she said when we went through the evidence thing she's like well
my clients tell me how much i'm helping them and i said well what evidence do they give you and she's
like well they'll give me specifics of how i help them and some of them write me really nice notes
and i have a lot of evidence that i'm actually helping them so i recommend it to her and this
is one of those other techniques to create a file like put into a particular it could be a physical
file it could be a file on your computer put in there the compliments that you get the gratitude
you get from the people you're helping put in there your achievements at work right so you
could call this a brag file some people call it a hype file i actually do keep a file of some of the
comments i'll get on youtube like if somebody tells me specifically how it helped them and
is very grateful it's a really nice reinforcing reminder when i'm doing this work it's very
motivating right so i do keep a little bit of a file like that so keep an evidence file so that's
the first tool second tool take compliments in if somebody gives you a compliment it could be
about anything don't push it off bring it in say thank you express gratitude and if you can
acknowledge it so i'll give you an example let's say you get complimented at work for leading a
major project right leading a team through a major project and you accomplish something
right so if you get a compliment on that don't just say oh it wasn't me it was my great team
you can say thank you i worked really really hard and i couldn't have done it without this
great team so it doesn't mean you have to brag or take all the credit yourself but yeah you put hard
work in so you can acknowledge that it can be an and not an or so take compliments in acknowledge
them allow yourself to feel them and over time that will be very helpful tip number three
practice saying i don't know if you don't know something don't practice if you do know it but
practice if you don't know something saying i don't know and you can make it active and positive
by saying i'm not sure about that but i will look into it and get back to you or let me double check
on something i really want to make sure i'm giving you the right answer and i will get back to you
tomorrow or a week from monday or whatever the time frame is that gives you enough time to find
the answer or if it's something you'll never have an answer for you can figure out how to say that
sometimes what people really need are for us to ask them questions particularly if you're in the
helping field people don't need an answer they usually need well they might want an
answer but even if you give them an answer they won't be happy with it people really benefit from
being asked the right questions and being led through a process so you don't have to know the
answers all the time so that's number three say i don't know if i don't if you don't know and
be okay with that and understand also like nobody knows everything it's okay not to know number four
acknowledge that you are comparing your insides how you feel inside to other people's outsides
so you are comparing the self-doubt that you feel to what other people are projecting and what other
people are projecting is not is frequently not a reflection of how they feel so you might work with
somebody who seems like they always are on top of things they know exactly what they're doing
and that person might collapse in tears at the end of the day because they feel so stressed
because they're pretending all day we don't know i do think that's sort of a benefit of the job that
i have is that i do learn about people's insides and i'll tell you we are all way more alike than
different and if you're having internal feelings those people probably are as well some of this is
sort of normal and is you know occasionally going to occur but at least acknowledge to yourself that
you are judging yourself internally based on what you feel and using an external comparison of how
somebody is presenting and then tool number five is to calm yourself down in the moment right if
we go back to the fact that imposter syndrome is actually a fear and an anxiety one of the
best things you can do when you're feeling it is to use some simple tools for anxiety like
diaphragmatic breathing really helps to set you really helps to reset you physiologically
diaphragmatic breathing grounding exercises taking a break if you need it doing something to deal
with the anxious feelings that go along with that you can do that in the moment so those are five in
the moment tips and now i want to talk about the deeper healing because we're talking about really
healing the root of imposter syndrome and if you can heal the root of imposter syndrome
you'll never have to feel it again really again you might have that self-doubt once in a while
but it won't be tied to the overwhelming feelings of shame and the overwhelming
negative thoughts about yourself that are deeply embedded in your subconscious or emotional brain
so how do you go about that this is the part you can't necessarily get from a youtube video
just being honest with you because everybody wants solutions but some of these things take
time and yeah sometimes it takes working with a therapist for sure working with somebody who can
help you validate your own emotions help you validate your own successes
and help you develop a really strong inner coaching voice so sometimes it is required to
work with somebody else particularly on the issue of shame because shame is so much about feeling
we are fundamentally flawed like really on a deep level and if we have that degree of shame it can
be very hard to get out of that by yourself but whether you work with this on a self-help way and
maybe have a couple of friends you can check in with on that level because that would be helpful
or whether you work with a professional either one know this is going to take time and it's
going to take healing so those negative beliefs we have about ourselves they form really really
early which is why a lot of the advice you get these days on topics like imposter syndrome talk
about oh change how you think or change this these two or three things or whatever that's all frontal
lobe stuff it's not really changing it on a deep level so i do have a pdf that you can download
that i believe is very helpful for identifying what your negative core belief is and it gives you
three ways to begin to practice to overturn that belief so that pdf is available through a link
in the description to this video if you haven't yet downloaded it i definitely recommend it and
when you've identified your negative core belief then beginning to work to reinforce
the positive core belief that counters it now this is a concept that's used in cbt therapy
it's used a lot in emdr therapy many of you know i have some videos on emdr which is a technique i
really support i find it super powerful but you can also work with these techniques on your own
so working to heal these negative core beliefs on a deep level right and replacing them with
reasonably stated positive core beliefs is the work that over time will heal that shame and i
want to combine this with a comment about both the big t and the little t traumas of childhood
right a lot of us have little tea ongoing traumas or negative events that impacted our sense of self
and we almost always can tie these core negative beliefs the ones that are really deeply embedded
in there to a handful of experiences when we were kids so that stuff needs to be healed as
well so good news bad news on imposter syndrome and overcoming it is that you can do it totally
completely you can do it it is going to take time it's going to take enacting some
of these tools that i talked about the kind of more surface ones things you can do now
and it will take the deeper healing work but you are worth it you can do it and you're worth it all
right i hope you've enjoyed this video if you have please do give me a like it helps a lot subscribe
to my channel if you're not subscribed and stay tuned and i look forward to seeing you next week