You may be suffering from impostor syndrome if you have a nagging feeling of
self doubt
or unworthiness,
or if you constantly feel like you're intellectually inferior.
This can happen even if you have many achievements.
It's not about your successes. It's not about the achievements that you've had.
In fact, many people who feel like an impostor have many achievements.
They may have a wall full of awards and accolades and yet they still feel like
an impostor. You may be worried that one day someone's going to discover you
and realize that you don't belong where you are.
You may be sensitive to criticism or skeptical of praise and I get it.
I get it. I've been there. I mean throughout my PhD, throughout my Master's degree,
I always felt that other people were smarter than me.
I always felt that other people had more resources than me,
and who am I to be here? Who am I for this university to accept me?
Who am I to have gone to Edinburgh,
gone to university there for my Master's degree
and all along as I was accomplishing, as I was collecting praises,
I was feeling that I don't deserve this.
I need to be better than this.
Look at so and so who has this that I don't have,
look at so and so who has this particular experience
that I couldn't imagine that I would ever have.
So all along I was fearful that someday one of my professors would walk in,
call me into their office and say, you know,
"I think we've looked at your achievements.
We looked at our policies and you don't quite fit the bill for what we're
looking for."
And it was always this nightmare I had of what if one day I'm going to hear
from someone that I admire,
a postdoc or a professor that I really admire,
and they're going to point out this key flaw,
this monumental mistake that I've made,
and then all of it will come crashing down.
And I was always fearful that what I did was not going to be good enough.
What I did was not going to measure up to what success is supposed to look like,
if I wanted the career that I really wanted.
We are in a generation of people who are addicted to comparison.
Look at social media, you go to someone's Facebook page,
you go to someone's Instagram page and there are snapshots of the people's lives.
People of course would post the positive things,
the things that they're happy about,
and we see that and we compare it to ourselves and we say, I want that life. Well,
why don't I have that? Or what if I could get that lifestyle,
how do I do that? And when we compare, the academic system,
the education system is designed
to give you transcripts that compare you to other students.
The GPA is a comparison of where you are in the class and how big that class
size is.
All of it is a comparison.
So you are conditioned at a very young age to compare yourself to other people.
Your parents are comparing you to your siblings,
your friends are comparing their lives to other people. You're comparing.
There's always that competition.
So we're in a generation that is addicted to comparisons.
So if you want to overcome that impostor syndrome,
you have to separate the facts from your feelings,
because the facts are what will set you free.
This means that you have to begin to live at a level of truth with yourself.
Look at the raw facts of your results. What have you done?
Exactly what have you achieved? Those are the facts,
not your feelings towards them.
If you look at your achievements and you say that wasn't good enough,
that's a feeling. Or if you say, I could have done better here,
or that really wasn't what I wanted to do.
Those are feelings, it's editorial.
So look at the facts of what you have done and separate your feelings right now.
When you look at the facts of your achievements,
that's when you begin to see the fruit.
And when you separate the feelings from that, once you own the facts,
you begin also to own the feelings that you have associated with those
achievements.
So I'm going to give you four questions that you can ask yourself to overcome
the impostor syndrome. The first question is, what are the facts today?
So be brutally honest with yourself and look at your fruits.
What did you accomplish? What did you achieve? Get some feedback on that.
Ask your colleagues what do they see that you have achieved? Because sometimes,
especially if you've been in this pattern for a long time
where you're looking for negative things to believe about yourself,
when you are constantly sensitive to criticism and skeptical of that praise,
you want to get feedback from other people on how they feel
and how they see and how they view your accomplishments.
So get those facts. And again, as you're getting that feedback,
as you're collecting the facts on what's true today,
separate your feelings from that. Just looking at what are the facts,
what is true about my achievements today.
The second question is what are my feelings on that today?
So this question is important because when you look at what your feelings about
that are today,
that's where you really take ownership from the things that you're feeling. If,
for example, it is self doubt, if it is unworthiness,
it is an opportunity for you to check in with yourself about why you're feeling
that way. So recognize, first of all,
acknowledge the emotions that you are feeling. Write them down, acknowledged them,
and check in because this is
your body's way of bringing it to your awareness that something is wrong.
So check in with yourself.
Why are you feeling self doubt?
Why are you feeling unworthy? And then you go back to the fact and say,
is it true?
Am I unworthy? Is that really true?
What else is true?
So you use your feelings as a guidepost when you check in with them
and you ask yourself why you're feeling that way, it's an opportunity for
you to investigate what's working and what's not working.
The third question to ask yourself is, what are the facts about my career?
And this question is key because it ties it back to your career.
And this is all about feeling an impostor syndrome while you're on your career
path, on your career journey.
So when you ask yourself what are the facts about my career,
it ties it back to what's important to you.
The question of all of this career path that I'm on,
the feelings that you are getting on the emotions that are coming to you.
What is true about my career?
Are the feelings that I'm feeling right now about that,
are they relevant to my career or is it something deeper than that?
Is it related to my career path or is there something in my past that I haven't
dealt with yet?
And the fourth question to ask yourself is what are the stories that I've been
believing?
This is also a key question because it really brings it back to being able to be
vulnerable to yourself.
Being able to be brutally honest with yourself regardless of whether or not that
is going to be
something negative or something positive because you need that honesty.
You need the honesty about your facts, your feelings,
the connection to your career and the stories that you've been believing.
We all tell ourselves stories. I tell myself story. You tell yourself a story.
And the thing is, are those stories really true or are they conditions?
Are they values that other people have injected into your life
and they aren't really reflections of what's really happening.
The problem is if you believe in those stories and you continue to hold that
story to be true,
even when the reality is not a reflection of what you've been believing,
then the trajectory will go that direction, because what you focus on,
that story that you believe on will come true and it will expand.
So what are those stories that you believe?
What are those stories that you've been believing all along? I'm not good enough?
I'm not smart enough? I don't have the resources to get there?
These are all stories. Have they been stories that you've been telling yourself?
And are they really true? What else could be true?
Bring yourself back to the facts and if you realize that you've been
believing in a lot of stories that you've been telling yourself,
a lot of stories, it is time for a belief overhaul. Comment below.
Have you been suffering from impostor syndrome?
And what are the stories that you've been believing?
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