Imposter Syndrome, or Imposter Experience as I prefer to call it is a field I’ve worked in for many years now, leading to the tag Imposter Expert. I’m still blown away by the number of successful, high performing people who admit to sharing these feelings of self doubt that they rarely share with others. Worried it’s a sign of weakness that further evidences this feeling of not being good enough. In fact many people on my workshops will confess when they share with colleagues they’re doing this training they get the response “really, you get that? I never would have thought, you’re so confident and good at what you do”. It’s a familiar issue and here’s why.
Imposter Experience is the domain of high achievers so the reality (and what others see) is we perform well at what we do. However, privately on the inside we doubt this. We doubt our abilities, we worry we’re going to get found out and feel like we’re faking it till we make it. It’s why we worry one day we’ll get found out and often assume that people have got it wrong. We tell ourselves our success is not real, it’s actually down to my amazing team, luck or some kind of mistake. Or we justify it by saying, I just work harder than everyone else and here in lies the problem. This last bit is probably true! If we’re desperate not to get ‘found out’ of course we’ll work twice as hard as we need to, to try and prove ourselves and prove the imposter wrong.
It’s these feelings of self-doubt that push us to work twice as hard to not get ‘found out’. This combined with the fact we’re high achievers normally means we’ll be invited to more meetings, asked to sit on more projects and be given more work because of our capability. Yet the inner imposter will tell us, you must prove you can do this and get it perfect, you must also not ask for help – people will think you can’t cope or you’re not as good as they thought!
Can you see how these beliefs shape our path towards burnout? I often talk about our imposter experience being a lens that we look through, a lens that is clouded by self-doubt and obscures reality. It’s also what drives us to overwork, try twice as hard, aim for perfection, not say no or be reluctant to delegate or ask for support. Sadly this is a perfect recipe for burnout and one I believe is driven by our beliefs that stem from our Imposter Experience and this fear of not being good enough that keeps us pushing.
It’s the reason why burnout is so prevalent in high achievers and given 70% of us suffer from imposter experience (according to the international journal of behavioural science) that’s a lot of us. The irony of course is that we don’t need to prove ourselves to anyone other than our own inner critic. Often the only person doubting us is ourselves!
It’s why I’m so passionate about teaching people the tools required to remove this lens of self-doubt, the over come imposter syndrome and recognise our achievements and capability. When we silence this imposter experience and our inner critic we also find we’re less likely to burnout, less stressed and anxious and can perform at our peak. If this resonates with you and you’d like to learn tools to overcome your imposter experience and prevent burnout, come along to one of our forthcoming workshops or events.