The 5 minute guide to impostor syndrome for leaders
Prefer to listen rather than read…. all my blogs are now recorded!
I talk to clients so often about impostor syndrome that I can’t believe it’s something I’ve never written about here. Impostor syndrome is something that every single one of my clients suffers with. Sometimes all the time, sometimes now and again.
Sadly, generally this phenomenon is more commonly associated with women in leadership which is why, I think, sometimes the male clients I work with probably struggle to label it quickly enough.
As it happens to everyone, it’s definitely something worth taking a deeper look into.
If you’re wondering what it actually is, or indeed whether you have it, let’s take a couple of minutes first to outline what it is and how it manifests itself.
Impostor syndrome is characterised by feelings of worry about:
getting found out
coming unstuck
dropping the ball
not knowing enough, or being good enough to x, y or z
being exposed as a fraud
feeling excessively vulnerable to failure or mistakes
You might read this list and think that those things just go with the territory, and to an extent they do, but when they start getting in the way of you doing, or achieving the things you want or need to do then it becomes something you need to address.
Left unchecked it can be self perpetuating for two reasons - one, you start to tell yourselves that even feeling these things is evidence that they must be true and two - you get paralysed by feeling like this and lose the ability to prove yourself wrong. You lose the ability to do the things you need to do to move forward.
A sense of not being good enough for your job ultimately leads to hesitancy about fulfilling some of the major components of your role. Prioritising and making decisions take confidence, and impostor syndrome is the enemy of confidence. You start to lose trust in your own abilities to do some of the things you used to find simple and your estimation of other people’s perception of you starts to diminish in parallel.
All sounds pretty grim doesn’t it! I find it amazing how for so many of you this is a daily reality. Think of the energy that’s taken up trying to behave as though you don’t feel all of these things.
So what is it caused by?
There’s a number of things that tend to cause it, and sometimes to trigger it if you’ve already done some work to control it.
Impostor syndrome tends to happen most acutely during periods of transition, change or when we’re faced with the unknown or something new. When you’re working outside of your comfort zone consistently, you kind of are exposed, you are vulnerable and you do have higher chance of getting things wrong. That’s natural. It becomes impostor syndrome when you’re unable to gain that sort of perspective on things and keep going.
It can also happen when we’re extremely busy. When you’re spinning an enormous amount of plates, again, it’s pretty likely that one’s going to drop. No wonder then that you feel you’re not capable of what you’re trying to do, if what you’re trying to do is impossible. I often get clients to metaphorically step back and look at all the plates they’re trying to spin - we usually find there’s no way they would ever expect themselves to keep that many plates spinning physically.
What can you do about it?
Reading this blog is hopefully going to help as identifying and calling it what it is is one of the best ways to overcome impostor syndrome. Taking away those all encompassing feelings of not being good enough and replacing them with a deeper understanding of what’s really going on. Accepting the things you’re feeling as a normal part of growth and development - replacing a label of ‘unfit for the job’ with one of ‘growing in certain areas due to the challenge or change’.
It also helps to step back and really think about how many plates you’re spinning. Chances are if you had that many actual plates and poles in front of you you’d never even attempt to spin them all. Growth and change take time, reflection and space. Accepting these things and prioritising what’s going to make the biggest impact to how you feel is key.
And finally, pay attention to your thoughts. It’s very easy to believe that all of our thoughts are true…and to think that all of our thoughts must exist to help us. Start to recognise the thoughts that are driven by that inner voice that tells you you’re going to get found out and start to question how true, or helpful, that thought really is. Find a way to counter that thinking with something more positive like ‘this will feel uncomfortable as it’s new’ or ‘this is a challenge I’ve not faced before but I’m learning and growing’.
If any, or all, of these thoughts resonate with you and you’d like some help to give your inner impostor the boot once and for all, do get in touch at hello@rebeccamorley.co.uk. If you’d like to think more deeply about how you can elevate your leadership and evolve successfully for the next phase of business growth then why not check out Elevate and Evolve - the next module of 3rd House - my innovative new leadership development programme for fast growth and scaling CEOs.
