A few weeks ago, one of our readers who works for a global business school and deals with senior managers and entrepreneurs all the time, asked me what I thought about the impostor syndrome – something that he seems to encounter way too often in the people in his community.

Have you ever felt guilty for or unworthy of the job title you have? Have you ever attributed a big chunk of your achievements to sheer luck? Felt you didn’t earn the praise you were receiving? Or felt anxious that someday people will find out you don’t deserve the role you have or the authority that comes with it? Bluntly said, have you ever been afraid to be called out for the fake you are?

If the answer to any of the above questions has been “Yes, occasionally”, then you’re familiar with the impostor syndrome. If it is “Yes, regularly”, then the impostor syndrome is actually one of the main characters in the story of your life… and not an inspiring one.

It’s a self-sabotaging story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and, precisely for that reason, it can be very hard to spot and admit to ourselves. We don’t see it as a self-deceiving story, we call it reality: “This is what I am: I’m a fake.”

The lack of self-esteem and self-confidence that comes with this story hinders our further growth, the fulfilment of our role in society and, ultimately, the full enjoyment of our whole life. We live in fear of being discovered and in guilt for what we’ve got. We have no refuge: the future is full of disastrous scenarios where we’re destitute and alone because we were discovered. The past is full of achievements we didn't deserve. The present is imbued with guilt, anxiety and shame.

We may still look fully functional from the outside, achieving a lot, having a great impact on work and the people around us, but our inner scenario doesn't look very pretty. It can be hell.

At Wise Humanity, we work a lot with CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, business owners, successful people and “regular” people who we coach or who take our programmes, whose lives are curtailed by the impostor syndrome. And I can’t even think of all the people who are nowhere near where they deserve to be, who haven’t had a chance to express their full potential and all their talents because of the self-doubt and insecurities that come with the impostor syndrome.

It's painful for friends, family and colleagues to see a loved one self-sabotaging themselves that way. And it has an immense cost on society in both their physical health and the unfulfilled opportunities they will never grab.

A Couple of Real Stories

After a few years as a very successful CFO, Carla was promoted to the CEO position of an American manufacturing company. She had everything she needed and everything the company needed for her to take it through the next phase of growth… but she was paralysed by self-doubt, insecurity and shame. She wouldn’t contribute to the board meetings, wouldn’t feel comfortable delegating, would postpone decisions and, on top of being ineffective, she was driving herself towards burnout. The investors intervened and asked us to work with Carla who now, six months later, runs a very functional, collaborative, empowered team and is able to focus creatively on the next steps her company needs to take. (And in our coaching sessions, we’ve moved on to talking about her private life now.)

Henry was an entrepreneur for many years, sold the company, moved on to being COO of a global AI organisation and is now crippled with anxiety and self-esteem issues. He’s a talented leader. He’s naturally empathetic and deeply connects with his people who, in turn, love to follow and work with him. His company needs a new CEO and he just can’t find the courage to step up. He can see it would be a great career opportunity but, at the same time, he’s convinced himself he doesn’t deserve the role and doesn’t have what it takes. He can’t see his natural leadership talent. He’s always had it and, therefore, he discounts it. Anxiety is driving him nuts and he’s angry at himself for not having the courage to grab this opportunity. He’s now come to us for some help.

These are senior corporate examples but, wherever you’re at in your career or your personal life, how much of it are you not living fully? How many opportunities are you not grabbing? How many have you renounced because you felt you didn’t deserve them or for fear that they could expose you’re an impostor? How much talent have you got that you’re leaving unfulfilled because you take it for granted and don’t recognise its value?

You owe it to yourself, your colleagues, your loved ones and society as a whole to seriously consider how the impostor syndrome may be affecting you. And then take a leap toward change.

The impostor syndrome is a mental map deeply ingrained inside us. It generally has very tenacious roots in the education we received and the environment where we grew up, often with a lot of focus on excellence. And for many years, it helped us. It helped us study harder because we needed to prove that we deserved our high grades. It helped us work harder because we needed to prove (to ourselves, in the first place!) that we deserved what we were achieving. But it’s an exhausting mental map, physically, mentally and emotionally: it makes us work overtime too often, fills our head with self-doubt and self-sabotaging stories, and cripples us with guilt, shame, anxiety and fear. There comes a time when the price we pay outweighs the gains. And a leap toward change is necessary.

So, where to start?

Like with many other self-deceiving mental maps, overcoming the impostor syndrome by ourselves is incredibly hard. It’s a road full of self-sabotaging obstacles and traps. But take that journey with an experienced sherpa and you can be out of it in a few months.

That said, there are things we can start doing by ourselves. The inner work is always the hardest, so let's leave it for last. Let’s see what initial, easier steps we can take from the outside first.

Asking Someone Else

If we're blind to our past achievements and past/present skills, or even if we're aware of them but we just take them for granted, something we can do is to ask the people around us.

People who suffer from the impostor syndrome are often people who've had some talent or skill for so long that they assume it's natural, obvious, it's never cost them much struggle... they discount it and don't acknowledge what they've achieved and what skills/experience they own.

Asking the people around us can help us get a different perspective. At work, for example, we can pick one of the achievements people attribute to us, write a short story about it and involve someone else to write our role in it. We can't write it ourselves because we would naturally minimise it or attribute it to (some mysterious) luck. Asking different people (it doesn't have to be too formal... a coffee machine conversation will do) is better than just one because we also need to fight our tendency to assume that people give us praise out of kindness even though we don't deserve them. Asking them to describe our role in a specific achievement/successful project is a more powerful question than just asking them what they think of us. When they describe our role, they'll be more specific and it'll be harder for us to label them as " just being kind".

We can do the above for several past achievements/successful projects.

And yes, it'll sound awkward (but only to us) to carry out such a personal survey. But if we want to let go of our impostor syndrome, we need to do something. We can't expect it'll disappear just by magic... or by reading a blog about it. We need to create the opportunity to have different experiences – in this case, rewriting the story of a past success with a clearer role in it for ourselves written by the other protagonists of the story.

Connecting Outward

Regarding the guilt aspect of the impostor syndrome – that is, feeling guilty for and undeserving of everything we’ve achieved in our life/career – something we can do is ask ourselves "How is this feeling helping me?" How does it serve me to feel guilty all the time? What does it protect me from? What does it help me achieve? The answer, unfortunately, is... nothing.

In the context of the impostor syndrome, guilt is an emotion with several disadvantages and only one positive spin, which happens to be unnecessary, though. The first and foremost disadvantage is that it's ruining our experience of the present. We can't embrace what we've achieved and built over the years or who we have become. We can't rejoice in it. It's like we don't own who we are and what we've done. As a consequence, another disadvantage is that we feel insecure all the time, we're scared of making decisions and taking steps forward. We withdraw from projects and opportunities or, at best, we don't embrace our role in them and we end up being less effective and impactful.

The only (unnecessary) positive spin is that guilt for what I have undeservingly achieved probably makes us work harder in terms of how much time I'll dedicate to a project (it'll never feel enough, so I'll put more hours into it), how much preparation I'll do, etc. But I don't need to feel guilty to do extra/better work. It is completely my choice whether I'll do that extra work pushed by guilt or pulled by the vision of the greater impact I'll have. When I'm pushed by guilt, I'm basically acting out of fear. On the contrary, when I'm pulled by a vision, I'm fully embracing my role in a project, in a company, in life!, and I'm inspired by it.

So, something I can do the next time I go to the office, start working on a task/project and feel petrified by the impostor syndrome, is I can pause for a second, notice that I'm very inward-focused ("I'm not good at this", "I don't deserve being here", "what if they call me out", etc.) and connect outward: what is this project trying to achieve? What impact will it have? Who are the people that will benefit from it? And I can (try to) switch to seeing myself as a servant of those people and that project. I can embrace their energy, be inspired by them, and get excited by the vision of that project. There's so much literature about servant leadership, by the way.

Ultimately, guilt is a coping mechanism to protect ourselves from the fear of failure. But, like all coping mechanisms, it doesn't really solve the issue we're facing – that is, the impostor syndrome – and it only distracts us from finding a long-lasting solution and moving forward fully embracing our talents.

Handling the Fear of Being Exposed

Which leads me to the last point I want to make: what is our relationship with failure? With making mistakes? What do they mean for us? How do we react to mistakes?

We live in fear of being exposed: "I'll do something wrong – because I'm not good enough – and they'll find out I'm a fraud"... which will trigger many disastrous outcomes and my life will be ruined forever. Now, a powerful tool to handle fear is to realise that we're either blowing the consequences of a mistake out of proportion, or we're telling ourselves a story where we won't have the resources to survive that mistake, or both. However, the problem here is that, when we're suffering from the impostor syndrome, it's very hard for us to realise that we're blowing the consequences of a possible mistake out of proportion or that we do indeed have the resources to survive that mistake. Perhaps we can understand it intellectually, but we won't really feel it inside. A life coach can help us here.

One thing we can do by ourselves, though, is to look at our past: what mistakes did we make? How did we handle them? What happened after? Actually, we can broaden our search and not only focus on mistakes but on all difficult situations we've been through and overcome in the past. How did we do it? What resources did we use? And yes, perhaps (most probably, actually, since no man is an island) someone else was involved too and their contribution helped us overcome the tough circumstances but, hey, other people – aka our network – are a resource too.

If we do this exercise, it's essential to write things down. If we just do this exercise mentally, in our head we'll keep discounting our role, skills, resources and talents, and perhaps also the hardship of the past difficult situations we're analysing. Writing it all down helps us achieve better clarity and objectivity (which we lack desperately when we're suffering from the impostor syndrome).

So, recognising that we had the resources and the capacity to handle difficult situations in the past can help us reduce or at least contain our fear of the future.

The above are just self-help steps. To be honest, if, after reading this blog, you feel like the impostor syndrome may play a big role in your life, I would recommend you work with a coach. A good coach can turn your life around in a few months. And if you know someone whose life is being crippled by the impostor syndrome, you know what to advise them now. We often get contacted by managers who want us to work with someone on their team or family/friends who ask us to work with a loved one.

There are deeper, more powerful tools available to tackle the impostor syndrome but, if you’re unfamiliar with them, you can only access them with the help of a coach – or else, your mind would just resist too fiercely.

For example, an area where it's very powerful to work with a coach is developing our self-esteem and self-confidence.

One More Powerful Tool

Another powerful tool that comes to mind is altogether letting go of measuring ourselves based on our outcomes, achievements and successes. We feel embarrassed or even guilty because we have achieved something that we feel we don't deserve. Well, we can let go of the question of whether we deserve it or not altogether.

There are so many advantages when we stop judging ourselves by our outcomes and only focus on who we're being and how we're contributing to our endeavours in the present moment.

But this is not an easy tool to develop without guided help.

So, get in touch with us, for yourself or someone you know, if you want some help or just an exploratory chat.

And if you’re interested in bringing these concepts and tools to your workplace, come join our LinkedIn live webinar Wise Humanity: Personal Growth Programs That Transform The Workplace on the 5th of May at 5pm BST (6pm CEST, 12 noon EST, 9am PST).

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The Impostor Syndrome

Designing Courage Into the Workplace

The Power of Gratitude

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