The Truth About Imposter Syndrome
Transcript of the episode recording:
Hey, big fucking dreamers. So pumped to be here with you today. Today we are talking all about imposter syndrome. Now, this is a topic that I get asked about a lot. am actually doing, I've done multiple speaking engagements on imposter syndrome. I have a few speaking engagements coming up with tech companies about it, which is really exciting because it is something that a lot of people suffer from. And we're going to go into some of the myths today about imposter syndrome, and that it's not just women. And so I don't wanna sit there and isolate men from this conversation and think that it's only women that suffer from imposter syndrome because that's just not true. I have coached a lot of men who also suffer from this. And so I'm actually just going to get right into it because I'm super excited about this topic and I think it's a really juicy one.
Okay, so with imposter syndrome, here are some patterns that I see. And so this is what I call the triggered high performer. So the triggered high performer is someone who has a lot of experience in their career. They perform at a very high level, yet they don't necessarily think that they're good enough. Typically there's some sort of event that does come along with imposter syndrome, whether that being like a rough year, let's say a rough year in sales.
Or potentially someone has a new job or they've faced a redundancy. I see a lot of redundancy trauma, frankly, of people that have gone through redundancies and then all of a sudden start to question their worth, question if they're good enough, even then when they're already in new roles, they think they then have this imposter syndrome that's come on. People that have gone through divorce.
Even going into entrepreneurship. So I know that imposter syndrome was something that I really experienced early on when I was in when I started out my business and it was like it was fucking horrific. Like I I had to work with a therapist on it. I worked with a coach on it. Like I thought every time I posted on LinkedIn that I was just a loser and everyone knew and like I had had this big sales career. But who was I now that I was a coach? I didn't necessarily have any clout doing it.
And so I think that know, imposter syndrome is something that has plagued a lot of people. And I know for me, it's really been almost crippling to me. And I don't want to understate, like I think imposter syndrome can sometimes be like, okay, imposter syndrome isn't real. Like it's just this thing that women have put on to, you know, pretend like to cripple themselves. But imposter syndrome is definitely real. And I'm going to go into how I work with clients, how I dismantle it, how I've also overcome it and the understanding behind it because it is actually quite deep what's going on underneath it.
And it can be, you know, it can have a really negative impact on your career. It can impact your pay. It could impact your performance. It could impact you going for promotions, which then ultimately really hinders the type of life that you want. It could hinder your career potential. It could hinder your relationships. know, these constant feelings of self -doubt, feeling vulnerable, feeling like, you the fear of exposure, feeling really high perfectionism, it all lowers self -esteem.
So understanding that if you're experiencing imposter syndrome, there is a way out of it, but diagnosing, are you actually experiencing imposter syndrome or not? So that actually brings me to my first point, and I'm going to go into that in a second.
So I want to differentiate first between imposter syndrome and between a skills gap because they are two separate things and a lot of people actually confuse imposter syndrome with the skills gap. So I'm going to give you examples of two separate clients that I've worked with. So one of my clients is a public facing figure. They work in media and they've had a very lucrative career in media. They have been extremely well praised and they recently got a new job.
It was very, it was public. And when we started coaching together, they said to me, you know, I feel like a fraud. I feel like people are going to find out about me, find out that I'm not good enough. And this is after, you know, a 25 year career in this specific industry doing what they had always done. So they made a lateral move from one publication to the next. And they then said, okay, I feel like a total fraud.
That is imposter syndrome. So someone who has the actual career clout, someone who actually knows what they're doing, the proof of what they have, proof of what they're doing, but they still feel for some reason really vulnerable fear of exposure. I've seen a lot of this happen in sales the past couple of years, even let's say with club performers. So people that have made Presidents Club have been in the top 10 % of their organization. Maybe they've made Presidents Club quite a few times.
They've had a bad sales career for the first time in their lives, then they start to think, my God, do I even know how to sell? Is this, like, am I even a good salesperson? Like, I don't know anything. They go into client meetings. They start really fumbling. And this actually happened to me where, you know, I'd always had a really strong sales career, been very strong in my numbers. And then one year I hit 99 .7 % of my number.
I had a fucking meltdown. I'm so sorry to my boss who had to experience that. And I remember going into a client meeting and I just like totally fumbled. And it was, I was with my customer success manager at the time and him and I had an extremely good working relationship. And he looked at me and he was like, what was that? And I just broke down crying and I was like, I feel like I failed. I feel like I don't know how to sell anymore. And he was like, look, you have to get help with this because
Hannah Kissel (06:17.738)
that performance that you just did in there, like that wasn't good. And it was after an extremely long tenure, like a very proven sales record. So just saying that it's also a myth that imposter syndrome, you know, be even the more senior that you get in your career, the more tenure that you won't experience imposter syndrome. That's definitely not true. Tenure doesn't really have anything to do with it. Experience doesn't have anything to do with it or make you less immune. So those are examples of actual imposter syndrome.
When you have experience in something, when you feel like, when you have experience with something, when you know what you're doing, but then because of something that has happened, whether that be a job change, whether that be not hitting your number, whether that be poor performance one quarter, you feel like, my God, I'm going to be exposed. It could be redundancy, et cetera. So you then feel like, holy shit, people are gonna find out that I'm not good. And it's all of a sudden like crippling self -fear and self -doubt.
Then there's another thing. So then I've worked with clients. I'm thinking of one specific client in my one -to -one coaching practice who was a new manager. And she said to me, know, she became a new manager and she all of a sudden didn't know how to do things. She didn't necessarily know how to forecast. She didn't know how to hire. She had to performance manage someone out. She had never done that before because she was a new manager. And she then said, no, I have imposter syndrome. And I said, this is not imposter syndrome. This is a skills gap.
So if you don't know how to do something and you think you have imposter syndrome, that's not actually imposter syndrome. You then need to get the skills required to do that job, learn the skills. So this is where mentorship really comes in. This is where also a strategy called situational leadership comes in, where the manager has to lean in at times and be an extremely hands -on manager when you realize in situational leadership, this is called when you're consciously incompetent.
So you actually know you don't have the skills and you don't know how to do things. That's when a manager should actually lean in on their team. And I would say that I wrote an article about this that I've just thought of this, but I wrote an article about this, LinkedIn article. I will link it in the show notes about situational leadership and about the times that you actually should be teaching your employees. So if you feel like, whether this be a new parent, whether this be a new job, whether it be something that you've never done before, just know that's actually a skills gap and learn understanding, okay, what are the skills that I need to know here? So for a new manager, for example, forecasting, I don't know how to forecast that at a team level. Great, how do I get that skill as quickly as possible? Who can teach me that skill? So if you have a skills gap, the question who is extremely important, who can shortcut this from A to B? Don't sit there and try to be like, I should know this. No, why should you fucking know it? You've never done it before.
So understanding who is going to teach you the quickest way possible. So that is the main difference between imposter syndrome and a skills gap. And I will say that when someone does have imposter syndrome, I would definitely recommend, if you feel like you are in a career or you are doing something, but all of a sudden you have this self doubt or all of sudden you don't think that you're good enough or whatever bullshit it is and you can't necessarily move forward with it.
It's extremely important to see a therapist or to see a coach and to help you move through it. And the number one tool I use for this is internal family systems therapy. Now I've used this both on myself with a therapist as well as I use this with my clients because basically what is going on with imposter syndrome is that there is a part of you and it's not all of you. It's just one part that all of a sudden feels like you're not good enough.
And the voices with that part tend to get really loud and it feels like you're in self doubt or you're vulnerable. You're going to be exposed or something bad is going to happen to you. And what has happened, and this is always 100 % of the time, is somehow that part thinks it's protecting you. And so the job of that part is to tell you, okay, you're not, you know, you're not good enough. People are going to find out because likely it's trying to keep you safe from something. So it's understanding
Okay, what is this trying to keep me safe from? For me, when I started my business, I had to start posting on social media all the time. And that's really just part of having a coaching business. That's part of having a B2C business. I mean, I'm going a bit more B2B, but initially I was just B2C. And so I felt so exposed, extremely exposed. I felt so vulnerable. I felt like people were gonna find out. I just felt like a loser, like posting on LinkedIn, especially having worked at LinkedIn for so many years it was, You know, it was really, it was really quite daunting all of sudden being a career coach when before I had been in tech sales.
And so I had these extremely strong voices in my head and I worked with them through therapy. And basically in high school, I got really, I got bullied and you know, it's so funny. It's actually not funny, but a lot of this comes back to what I've seen with clients as well as typically this part gets developed at some point in your life, whether it's high school, whether it's younger than that, maybe it could even be developed through a previous redundancy or something like that. But this part of me came from high school and I see this with a lot of clients. A lot of clients have almost like high school trauma around bullying where then that's then impacted and they're taking that into their present day. But what happened to me is in high school, I had to switch high schools. You know, after my sophomore year, I had to switch to a different high school.
All of this shit went down. It's in my novel. If you want to read it soon, you know, that'll probably come out in a few years. But all this stuff went down. And basically that part, that protective part that I had that had that was experiencing imposter syndrome that was telling me like, my God, you're not good enough. my God. Like people are going to find out like, my God, you're a loser. Like really, really harsh things. I was speaking to myself like that. And basically what I understood is that part was trying to keep me safe.
And it was actually like, no, you got bullied in high school. I don't want you to get bullied again. Don't put yourself out there like that. Like you're exposing us. You're opening yourself up for more criticism. You're opening yourself up. And oftentimes playing big or like sitting there, like part of my ideal life, and this is why I fucking bang on about this so much. I'm really sitting here living it too. I'm not sitting here on a high coaching horse being like, my God, I'm perfect.
I feel like I'm down in the trenches with you guys as well, also doing my work. But part of living my ideal life is to be big. It's to be a speaker. It's to be a coach. It's to take global stages. Like that's what I've always wanted for myself. And that really, I feel like is part of my true identity. But this part of me, you know, this imposter syndrome part wanted to keep me small and that's okay because it was protecting me. So in internal family systems therapy,
what you actually need to do, it's kind of like reparenting, but it's actually saying to the part, you know, I am, I have to say the part, I am 34 years old. I'm not in high school anymore because oftentimes these parts, they will get stuck. So we will think that you're the age that happened when the incident occurred. So let's say you had a really bad boss and you had a bad boss in your twenties. It was, I was actually talking to another client. I went on one client like this the other day, you know, her first boss then caused all of these insecurities in her later life where she couldn't trust bosses. And so, but that part of her thought that she was still in her early twenties. So a lot of these parts in this method, they get stuck in time. So I actually had to tell the part, you know, I'm not in high school anymore. I have my own business. I'm a mature adult. I have therapy. I have support.
I'm not going to put us at risk. Like you are safe. And what then started to happen is that voice really started to ease, and that voice and typically with parts work, you can actually transform a part. And that's why this method, this is why I fucking love internal family systems therapy, because that part actually has turned into a more strategic part that helps me plan podcast episodes, that helps me put myself out there. And I don't feel any of that anymore. I don't feel anything. If someone doesn't like what I post, I'm like, fuck it, who cares? And so now it's like, but I really did it first. It felt so real to me.
And so, in the life and work transformation, what I do with clients, especially if they're experiencing imposter syndrome, especially if they feel like they're stuck, but it's them that's holding themselves back. So any sort of self -sabotage, I always go back to parts work because understanding why is that part here, understanding what is this part doing, understanding why does it think that it's protecting you, and then soothing that part.
Because a lot of people, what they try to do and what actually doesn't work is just ignoring the voice. Like, just ignore that. Like, just ignore that part of me. And it's like, I'm just going to ignore that. I'm not going to listen to that. That actually doesn't work. And it actually makes things louder. So the more you try to suppress and repress these parts of you, the more that they're going to react and the stronger that they get. So it's extremely important to be working with someone that can help you overcome this part, that can help you understand, why is it that it's doing this? Because it's doing it for a reason. It's not just doing it to get shits and giggles and like sabotage your life.
The imposter syndrome is there. It's a data point and it's trying to tell you something. So that is a really big part and understanding that this is what keeps you from being confident, but it can change. It can transform. And I've seen this from anywhere from C -level executives, the senior individual contributors, it doesn't matter the title. It doesn't matter how senior you are.
And I remember one of my clients, like she went through very similar journey actually to the one that I did. It was definitely later. I'd process all this stuff and that's why I was taking her through that. But she also experienced high school bullying and that really kept her small and it kept her feeling like her voice wasn't valued. And this was a person who also had an extremely senior job. You she was often interacting with the board.
She was often interacting with the CEO, like had to do a lot of reporting. And when we started to work on this, when we started to work on this part and heal those parts of her and let it know that it was safe, then she started to be able to speak up in the boardroom. Then she started to be able to get on global calls and really own her voice and really own her power.
And so you can work through this, but just know that with imposter syndrome, it is a part of you. It is not all of you, but it is a part. It is likely very strong. It can be transformed. so typically, I mean, this is also, it's also rampant in our culture. There was a study, Harvard Business Review spoke about it, has referenced it, but there was a research study that said up to 70 % of people experience imposter syndrome at some parts of their lives.
So this is extremely relevant. So most of us will have experienced it, but you can transcend it and it's not just something that you're stuck with, but it does actually require proper care. So if you feel like this is something that you are struggling with, and if you feel like this is something that you wanna work through, the life and work transformation is open.
We go through this. If you feel like you have imposter syndrome, if you feel like you're not necessarily confident, this is something that we all cover to get clarity in your career, to be living the life and career that you've always wanted. So the link is going to be in the show notes. You can book a call for that. I'm so excited. I'm so, so excited. It's one of the favorite things about my job. I love running this group program.
The link will be in the show notes and let me know if this helps you send me a DM. If you want to be big fucking dreamer of the week, I'd love to feature you. I hope that you go achieve your big fucking dreams and I will speak to you soon.