6 time-tested ways to get rid of your Imposter Syndrome
Nearly all of us have felt inadequate or unqualified at some point in our life. For some, these moments are transient, while it feels more pervasive for others. Letting go of the Imposter Syndrome is HARD; here is my journey of catharsis and 6ways I got rid of #IS.
Life gets in the way, you start seeing things differently, fear and anxiety takes over before you start anything remotely important. It may even start to feel gross to hear your thoughts about yourself.
The syndrome (Imposter syndrome or IS) makes you judge yourselves harder than anyone else, doubt your abilities and aggrandise your mistakes. It is chronic self distrust and a sense of intellectual fraudulence, and the feeling persists despite past/present evident success in your career. It doesn’t mean you’re hopeless or irredeemable, it just seems that way for a while. It costs you happiness, may cost you the job you’re in, but mostly it costs you time — time that you would have spent feeling good about yourself but you waste it on diffidence.
However, the light does come to you at some point and usually it shines when you’re in the darkest.
We’re wired to see vulnerability as a weakness, and being strong appears like the only way out, but recognizing and accepting that ‘this truly is just a phase’ helps. We’re not taught to let our guard down, and acknowledging the fact that you may be failing is not appreciated generally. If you’re in a leadership role, the first place where it (apparently) hurts the most is at work. As your self-belief and interest wanes, you notice the constant mental re-assessment that you do. You re-evaluate your words, the way you email, your thoughts and even feelings as if they are not legitimate enough and are somehow less valid. It keeps you from doing stellar work in which you once took pride in. Non verbal in-confidence makes up for the remaining damage, and things start to become awkward in social settings at work and life. You can’t seem to enjoy company, your colleagues don’t interest you, going out and meeting people starts to feel like a huge moral burden that you need to keep carrying on your back to survive yet another day in the corporate world.
Silence is relieving and feels like a vile super-power, but you get to use it only for so long. ‘Soaking in, listening hard’ seem like a way to cope but the unwelcome internal reminders haze you into mistaking others’ contribution to be way more valuable than yours. You step behind an inch, but it feels like you’ve taken a giant leap backwards.
In this parallel universe, others’ opinions are candy while yours are garbage. It feels real. You’re lucky if a colleague walks up to say’, ‘You’re good, have some faith in yourself!”, but the good boss hates to admit that you maybe going through ‘something’. Dismissal begins and it feels shitty. Work doesn’t inspire you anymore.
Your erstwhile strengths start to feel like a liability and then it dooms on you- the burden of being worthy. The cognitive load of deserving those $$ at work and doing justice to your own legacy takes undue attention. Your actions begin to deflect towards correcting your external image and ‘stepping up’. Again, much harder if you’re in a leadership or a people-manager role.
You feel invalidated, pointless, lost and voiceless. You’ve got it all wrong.
Are you a fraud, is your past a fraud too? “Where did you study? Who are you?” Questions like these stay unanswered in your head.
Impulses feel like they don’t exist. You mind-map everything before doing it. You’re rehearsing what you’re going to have to say to survive yet another day. You’re dreading the talk before it even happens.
Well, I’m saying an awful lot about this topic because, I repeat, it’s a syndrome, not a condition. It can be a phase or it can last a long time, and it’s important to know that it does get the better of you. BUT, I’m writing this post to share my lived experience with you in the hope to validate/fulfill my need to talk about it and continue an upwards journey of coming out of it myself. Calling it by its name- a syndrome, helps. And I want this to liberate me.
Anything could be factor- a high stress situation or things at home, failing health of a loved one or a personal struggle, anything that impacts your life negatively. In my case, I think it was a combination of declining health of a loved one+ a failing work relationship. Over months, ‘failure’ had somehow become my anchor keyword and I was mostly feeling let down by myself.
I tried a few things and made some progress but I’d go down the rabbit hole every time. Over painfully slow weeks, I figured that what I needed was to recreate my self-perception entirely.
Strangely, self perception is more fickle than you can imagine. You’d think it looks consistent on the outside, after all- it took years for me to build it a certain way and it’s not going to change drastically, but let me tell you that it CAN.
So, here is a time-tested, sure-shot list of things that I tried (which worked) and you can too-
- Normalize Imposter feelings. Start an internal conversation with yourself, shrug your shoulders and take comfort in the fact that almost 70% of the people feel the same as you. Welcome to the club!
- Do a self audit. Don’t over-index on the misses, be objective and unbiased. Irrespective of the mistakes and flaws, you must have done something/s right. Stare at them till it starts to settle in and you have enough reason to believe that you in reality are NOT a fraud. You’re a sum total of the life experiences you have, the wonderful years you’ve been privileged to live, and there have been real moments of pride and success. Internalize and accept the successes you see.
- Try to find a mentor- a therapist or a performance coach, who can objectively see and dissuade you from falling into performance-induced-anxiety or from hyper-focussing on improvements. They must look you in the eye, tell you to stand up to these thought patterns and take credit of your achievements.
- Try and find feedback from your close friends. They see you at your natural best and worst and they have the power to give you an immediate lens to see if you’re acting out or beating yourself up more than you think you should. The good thing with friends is that they share some of your world-view already and your personal ‘bars’ on shoulds and woulds. This kind of informal feedback through friends helps to interrupt your biased mental-trail of forced perfectionism that leads to self-doubt and more.
- Journal and read others’ experiences. See what works for others, but control how that influences you. Your need-to-know all that’s out there, basically your need to overachieve is a partial culprit. It makes you want to break-even with the information just to adequately fit in, and, you may often assume that others are radically better informed while they may/not be.
6. Share your own imposter stor/ies. Nothing is more powerful than seeing it yourself. Belief steps in when you see people around you open up and share how they wrestled or are still wrestling the stereotype they had assigned themselves. Hear their stories, reflect on their context and perhaps if you’re feeling like paying it forward, then be kind to counter their imposter-worries with affirmation and encouragement.
And, if you know how #Imposter #syndrome feels like and want to come out of it, do try the above to feel better about yourselves. It’ll be lovely to know that you made some progress, but if you resonated with this post at all then let me know here in comments or tweet here.
