Escaping the Trap of Imposter Syndrome. Learn How to Empower Your Thinking.
As a psychotherapist and life-long student of human behavior, I’ve been fascinated in the way we think and how much power that has over the the reality of our lives.
Week after week I hear my clients who are experts in their field grapple with this inner demon of imposter syndrome.
It’s that inner voice that says things like “you’ll never be that good” or “who are you to ____”?
In this article I am going to break down the process and give tools to transform it from toxic thinking to empowering thinking.
When we perceive success in others’ we are only seeing what we want to see.
The first part of envy or jealousy is a fantasy. It’s easy to look at someone else’s moment of achievement and think it’s all roses. When I first started working with high achievers and billion dollar business owners, I learned that they handled more crisis, sabotage, challenge and breakdown in one day then most do in a lifetime. It’s no joke that the more you succeed the more people want a piece of it. Many prefer to get results off of your success, not their own hard work. You can’t have achievement without challenge.
Are you willing to do the work?
It’s easier to sit on the couch feeling jealousy and envy than it is to actually do the work required to achieve.
Achievement, fame, stardom or winning a great job involves sleepless nights, rejection, failure, failed relationships, financial crisis, health challenges and more. Hours and hours and hours of work as well as self-doubt, depression, anxiety and hustle.
It’s not a one-sided life.
To the degree that one succeeds there is equal failure and challenge. Success is not an arrival but moments of confirmation that counterbalance the hustle, struggle, boredom and grit of hard work.
Faulty thinking through unfair comparison
When we look at what we admire in others, we compare that with what we despise in ourselves.
It’s a trap. If you compare what you perceive to be the worst in you with best in other, you’ll never win. It’s comparing apples to oranges.
Take charge of your thinking.
If you are going to spend time admiring someone-get specific on what exactly they are doing or achieving. Then look at your own life and find in what specific form you have achieved that same thing. It may be at a different time in your life or in a completely different area of life.
For example you may admire someone’s confidence in public speaking, and you see that you have confidence in how you network and caretake others. The forms may not be identical, but the trait is confidence is. You can then see it’s not that you don’t have confidence, it’s that you don’t perceive yourself as a confident speaker.
Learn from those who have already achieved it.
Once you have neutralized your thinking and can perceive that you have the same trait you admire in someone else, then you can begin research the action steps and processes that are required to grow that skill in the form you’d like to master it.
For example, once you are conscious of your confidence in the form it is in, and you know what it feels like and how you embody it, then the work becomes transforming that into the area you want: public speaking.
It all comes down to vision.
Most people struggle to know what they want and why. But without that clarity it’s nearly impossible to conquer the path towards achievement because the minute it gets hard or heartbreaking, giving up is easier than persevering. Having a WHY that makes it all worth it is essential. No one can tell you what that is, it is your WHY to clarify and speak.
Strategy and timing.
Once you know with certainty your WHY and can clearly articulate a clear goal, then that gets broken down to small action steps strategically planned. Timing is key. You can have an inspired vision with clear goals but if it’s in too short of a time span you’ll be overwhelmed by futility, distress and overwhelm. Make sure you’re realistic in how much time things actually take to get done.
Imposter syndrome is feedback.
Imposter syndrome is emotional feedback from yourself to yourself. It is letting you know your perceptions have gone awry, your vision is unclear, and you haven’t strategically planned in congruent time spans goals that are authentically inspiring to you.
There is no mistake to your emotional world. Your emotions are not something to numb or get rid of-they are feedback about your inner world with important information to be decoded as your pursue self-mastery.