Contents
We are publishing an excerpt from the book Pro: Leadership Workshop. How to maintain the mood in the team and not burn out yourself. It is dedicated to the personal development of top managers, flexible skills and leadership qualities.
About the authors:
- Ivan Maurakh, leading business coach, coach at Business Relations;
- Vladimir Gerasichev, founder of the international company Business Relations;
- Arsen Ryabukha, leading business coach, coach at Business Relations.
We previously published a chapter from this book on how to minimize work stress and deal with burnout.
Criterion fuzziness
Often, the impostor syndrome is possible only in those areas of activity where the criteria for the accuracy of the definition are blurred, where it is difficult to understand the facts. It is easy to see this in reverse, when a person is engaged in an area that has clear signs of success and quality. A locksmith who makes keys always knows exactly the level of his skill, because if the key he made opens the door, then he did the job well, and vice versa. Or any athlete, overcoming distances and achieving results, also receives an objective, easily measurable criterion of success. There cannot be a large field for comparison, subjectivism, self-doubt. He cannot run undeservedly faster than the necessary time. This clarity of the criterion of success instantly removes the impostor syndrome in those professions where there is an objective measure of success.
In professions where there is no such measure, subjectivism in relation to oneself and the state of affairs flourishes. False “I’m not talented enough” attitudes appear, as people believe that abilities are either given or not. They compare themselves to those who are at the height of fame and have legendary results (Steve Jobs, Jack Walsh, Richard Branson and others), devaluing their own successes.
Talent is not a task, but something that needs to be developed. If we are talking about managerial talents or abilities, this is a huge set of criteria, abilities, soft and hard skills that a person can form. There are no ideal leaders, just as there are no ideal professionals in any business. People with this view of things earn less money, do not set themselves ambitious goals, and thereby maintain themselves in the belief that they do not have outstanding abilities like others. In other words, the lack of a clear criterion for the result and success pushes people to the impostor complex, based on ideas and subjective feelings.
What to do with it? Realize that the cause of self-doubt is subjective, based not on facts, but on inner feelings, and therefore false. Thus, you can recognize that the problem is in your views, beliefs, and therefore, completely in your power.
Low, negative self-esteem acquired in childhood
“I am ordinary, gray, like everyone else,” people say. The reasons for these thoughts may be the words that many of us heard in childhood: “Don’t show off. Don’t think too much about yourself, don’t turn up your nose. You are normal.” Without external factors and assessments of others, low self-esteem cannot form. A child somewhere up to three or four years does not evaluate himself in any way. He doesn’t even have a thought in his head: “What am I? Is it good or not? Children are born out of competition. If a kid plays with cubes, then he joyfully plunges into this activity and does not think: “Am I worthy of playing with cubes? Am I where I belong now? Do I have a talent for playing with blocks? Then, at the age of four or six, the child begins to be bullied by his grandmother and mother, nannies, brothers and sisters, father, children in the yard, a teacher in a kindergarten, a teacher in the first grade – everyone strives to teach him. In children, the number of ratings, comparisons with others and criticism overstates all reasonable limits. And now a six-year-old child, having accumulated other people’s, subjective opinions about himself, begins to think that he is not good enough. Someone else’s opinion becomes his idea of himself.
An idea that is absolutely not confirmed by facts is the basis of a person’s self-esteem. By the way, we can say that there are practically no inflated self-esteem, it is extremely rare.
If we talk about what a healthy belief in oneself is, this is a lack of self-esteem, when a person does not consider it necessary to devote part of his mental activity or life energy to thinking “what am I like in this life?” All his energy is spent on creation, results, his actions, goals, daily interaction with this surrounding reality, work, on what his life is filled with.
What to do with it? In short, right now, reading this book, you are correcting this – you are realizing the reason. You need to question the lies that you pull from childhood, all the subjective opinions of the society that shaped your beliefs. It is important to debunk myths about yourself. The easiest way in this work is to trust a coach, psychologist or trainer, that is, an external specialist who is devoid of your personal experiences, doubts and fears and sees the situation from a different angle. You can do this work yourself with the help of self-coaching and with a developed ability to think critically about yourself.
Acquired low self-esteem in adulthood
In a world where everything is changing so quickly and the idea of “successful success” is being sold at every corner, it begins to seem to a person that he needs to do everything, be great, have many admirers and likes. Here, a mechanism is launched that speaks about the state of mental health – in pursuit of achievements imposed by society, the human body gives signals that it is necessary to stop, rest, and not do meaningless work. If we allow ourselves such a break, sometimes we are lazy, then our psyche is healthy. If the race continues through force, it is not possible to switch, to be at rest for some time, then we fall into procrastination, put things off and avoid them for a thousand reasons. This can lead to neurosis. But a person at this moment draws a different conclusion: “If I am lazy, I don’t do something, it means that something is not right with me.” His self-esteem drops. “Everyone out there, how far they ran, but I slow down, I have no energy.” Belief in oneself disappears, in its place comes the wrong conclusion that everyone around is successful, but not him. Far from an ideal conclusion.
What to do with it? Stop comparing yourself to others! Take care of your life, your own interests, goals and focus not on others, but on your satisfaction, interest and tendency in the chosen directions.
The benefits of such an attitude
I want to offer you such a point of view – everything that we have in our life with you, for some reason, it is beneficial for us to have. This opinion at first causes resistance in people. They say, “No, I don’t benefit from having impostor syndrome. Well, I’m embarrassed, uncomfortable, why do I need it. I would like to get rid of it.” Let’s try to say this categorically and harshly: “I would like to get rid of it, I would have done it a long time ago.” It seems that for some reason it is beneficial to have a person even at the age of 30, 40 or 50 years old, when there are many sunrises and sunsets behind him, and there is still an opinion that he is gray, untalented, does not correspond to anything. If we are so stubbornly committed to such a belief about ourselves, then it is not very profitable to part with it, because we receive some secondary benefits.
What to do with it? I invite you to be very honest about 10 benefits of not getting rid of the impostor syndrome. Answer your questions:
- What benefits do I get from this view of myself?
- What does it give me?
- What am I entitled to at this moment?
- What do I allow myself and do not allow at this moment?
- What excuse do I have?
You can see very clearly for yourself, for example, such benefits:
- I allow myself not to change jobs, not to study, because talent is an innate thing. Why memorize this nonsense, because I will never become successful anyway.
- Why should I develop? I avoid high goals, do not set them, go with the flow.
- I’ve been doing the same thing for months or years. I don’t choose to decide today to set an ambitious goal.
- That’s when I become normal, talented, beautiful, I will begin to allow myself everything, and now who am I.
If we talk about the general directions of work with the impostor syndrome, then there are three of them:
Work with your core beliefs
You can do this work on your own: find the belief “what I think about myself”, and at that moment, right on paper, prove that these thoughts are nonsense. That is, break, criticize your own conviction. Prove that it is not based on facts. Or at least find a dozen other facts that reverse this belief. Ridicule is a great tool for devaluing beliefs. “That’s what I think of myself. Idiocy! Such nonsense. And that’s why it’s so funny…” Don’t make a drama about your outlook on life, don’t focus on “boss, it’s all gone, it’s all gone, there’s something wrong with me”. No. Learn from a small child up to four years old. He was not in an emotional state, no matter what happened, he did not have any tragedy, after the tears he did not believe that there was a terrible trend in relations with his parents. Tears dried up, and he rejoiced and played again. He has wonderful parents again. He did not string, as if on a thread, all the defeats. But grown-ups love to do this.
Avoid Perfectionism
Do not assume that any mistake is bound to be a tragedy. It is wrong to think that talented people who are in their place do not make mistakes. And how they do it! And so many times. And entrepreneurs who have earned a lot of money, before that, they ruined twenty businesses, only then did they start to succeed. It is impossible to learn to walk if one is not ready to fall. So less perfectionism. The fear of failure is very addictive and therefore increases the chances of making mistakes.
Do more for yourself, not for outside approval. If something doesn’t work out, shift the focus from “I didn’t do it perfectly” to questions like “How close to perfect am I already? What did I do better than yesterday? What am I proud of? Record progress.
Focus on your actions, don’t compare yourself to others
There are two points here. We discussed with you that self-esteem and beliefs are a habitual view of oneself. As soon as some kind of trigger works, we habitually begin to think that something is wrong with us. My recommendation: at the same time, start doing something. Choose some activity that requires a certain amount of concentration and engagement. For example, wash the dishes, sort out the mail, write a plan for the next day. In other words, push out negative thoughts, focus on your actions. It is quite a working tool. Psychologists say this phrase: “Motor skills beats thinking.” That is, the action of a person pulls thinking under what he is doing. Every habit of thinking is a repetitive procedure, so replace it with actions.
The second aspect is comparison with other people. One coach I know, a colleague, said: “The best way to ruin your life is to start comparing it with the lives of others.” Between us, in a private conversation, he did not say “spoil”, but a harsher word, which I like more because it shakes up great. As soon as you notice that you are comparing yourself with some good fellows, remember this phrase. The only one worth competing with in this life is yesterday’s self. I am glad that I did something today that I would not have done before. What will I do tomorrow? Displace negative thoughts with actions, focus on your actions and actions today compared to what will happen tomorrow, come up with plans to improve the next day.
So, we have disassembled that the impostor syndrome is largely a product of our own head, thinking, our own fears, past experiences, avoidance of responsibility, but to a lesser extent the actual state of things in the objective world. Start this work with yourself in order to feel lighter and freer, and, accordingly, release energy for a better life.