Feeling Like a Beginner: Understanding Imposter Syndrome

Emma Bryant: Hello and welcome back to The Purposeful Shift. I'm Emma Bryant and I am really glad that you have chosen to spend some time with me today. In this week's episode, I will be talking about imposter syndrome, which is another thing that can keep us stuck and keep us doubting ourselves and living lives which feel less fulfilling than we would like them to. If this sounds like something that you can relate to, please join me as we explore this idea further, the impact that it has on us and how we can move beyond it. So last week I talked about my own week and living with the idea of the fear of looking stupid. So closely connected to that. And something which comes up a lot for me is the idea of imposter syndrome. And it became one of those expressions I feel like I hear quite often. So I might hear people saying, ⁓ I've got imposter syndrome or she suffers from imposter syndrome or I feel like a fraud. And I think those two words, imposter syndrome have almost become part of our everyday language. And I feel like I experienced this often. And I wanted to give you an example of something that happened just in the last couple of weeks. So it was a very exciting thing that happened for me. I was featured in the women who podcast magazine as one of their up and coming podcasters. So I knew this was happening and I had been eagerly awaiting. the issue to be released. And when I first saw the magazine, I flicked through to the right pages and I saw my little podcast image in the magazine and my description and I was genuinely, absolutely delighted. It felt like lovely moment to celebrate because this podcast, as you probably know, is still relatively new. It's actually going to be five months old this week. five months since the very first episode was published. And it's something that I have poured a huge amount of time and energy and heart into this year. So it was a really amazing feeling to see the purposeful shift there in the Women Who Podcast magazine imprint in a real magazine, which features incredible women and their podcasts that they produced. So then naturally I started reading about the other women who were featured alongside me and what their podcasts were about and their experience. And some were doctors, some were therapists, some had decades of professional experience and others had incredible lived experience that had led them to and shaped the work that they do today. And then I noticed that my feelings had changed slightly and my excitement had started to lessen a little. And instead of that excitement and genuine pride, I then found myself asking a completely different question in my mind. And you know that moment where there's a fully fledged debate going on inside your mind that you are kind of sat back observing and both of the people debating are versions of you? Well, that's what was happening. And I'm asking myself, what am I doing here in this magazine alongside all of these incredible women who look and sound so together, so polished, so professional, so experienced. And the whole process of me kind of smiling from ear to ear with the excitement of being featured in the magazine to then kind of, ⁓ slumpy shoulders. That happened so quickly that I kind of barely even noticed it at first because one minute I was kind of celebrating and feel really proud of myself. And the next I was comparing myself to women I don't even know. And of course, the point of this story is that I suspect I'm not the only woman who is doing this regularly. Maybe you walk into a meeting at work and suddenly everybody else in the room seems like they know more about the topic that you're discussing today than you do. Or maybe you start a new job and you assume that everybody else knows exactly what they're doing and you're the only person who doesn't and you're playing catch up. You're still chasing the kind of the new person identity and you're holding onto that for longer than you should. Or maybe you launch a business and you wonder. If everybody else in the business world, every other entrepreneur has some secret cheat code that maybe you haven't discovered yet, or maybe you are invited into a room that you have always wanted to be in, a bit like me being featured in the Women Who Podcast magazine. And instead of feeling proud to be there, you spend the majority of your time instead wondering whether somebody else made a mistake by inviting you to be in that room in the first place. So as I reflected on this kind of 10 second rollercoaster of feelings, I realized that I didn't feel like an imposter because I'd lied about who I was because I am here. I am doing the podcast. That's true. And that's very real. And I hadn't pretended to be something I wasn't. I feel like I own the fact that I'm learning as I go and I'm enjoying the process of learning how to be a podcaster and what that means and the technical skills that are involved in creating a podcast. giving it out to the world as something that people can listen to. And nobody had made a mistake in printing my podcast as one of the up and coming in the magazine, But I felt like an imposter because I was comparing myself to people who were simply in a different place to me. So maybe to me, they looked more polished. in terms of their podcast image, their graphics, their logo or the description of their show. Maybe they were further along in their journey than I am. Maybe their experiences and their life choices today have taken them on different roads, but we were all ⁓ sharing a similar destination and wanting a similar And that is to make an impact on others, however big or small that might be through our podcasts. And when I thought about it a little bit more, I started to ask myself, if I was really experiencing imposter syndrome, or if I was simply experiencing what it feels like to step into a different or a bigger room and to suddenly be visible alongside women who quite honestly inspire me, who I look up to and who I admire. And I think every time I have grown, every time I have stretched myself, every time I've started something new, I found myself surrounded by people who have more experience, they have more knowledge or they have more confidence than me. And I remember feeling that in the past when I started new jobs. and I remember feeling it even when I've been interviewing guests whose work is areas that I don't know too much about. And I felt it when I've been running workshops or training in the past where you never quite know ⁓ what skills and experience the people in the room will have and if they're going to challenge you and if you're going to do them justice and give them what they come there to learn about. And now apparently I have even felt it when reading a magazine feature ⁓ that I was genuinely honored to be a part of. So I am now choosing to flip my initial negativity on its head and see this not as evidence that I don't belong, not that I am an imposter, but instead evidence that I am growing. And after I had sat with those feelings for a while, I found myself doing what I often do when something catches my attention and takes me off on this distraction tangent, I started reading. So I wanted to know where this idea of imposter syndrome had actually come from. And the first thing that I discovered really surprised me because did you know the phrase wasn't originally imposter syndrome at all? It was actually called the imposter phenomenon. So back in 1978, two clinical psychologists called Pauline Klantz and Suzanne Imes published some research after noticing something unusual in many of the successful women that they were working with. And these women were highly capable, they were intelligent and they were accomplished. Yet despite all of the evidence of their success, they genuinely believe that they had somehow fooled everybody around them. They worried that sooner or later somebody would discover that they were not as competent as people believe them to be. And what really struck me was that those women were not lacking ability. They had already achieved things that demonstrated that they were competent. The challenge wasn't that they weren't good enough. It was that they couldn't accept that they were. And they would try to explain away their success and You've probably seen this or maybe you've even done it yourself. You might have used phrases such as it was just luck or I happened to be in the right place at the right time Their success was always attributed to something external, never to their own ability or knowledge. as read more about this, I came across something else that I found really important. So despite the name that we use today, imposter syndrome, it isn't actually an official mental health diagnosis. It's not a syndrome. So researchers still refer to it as the imposter phenomenon, recognising it as a common psychological experience rather than a medical condition. And in fact, more recent reviews of the research highlight that there is still no single agreed definition or diagnostic standard for it. It's not a syndrome. So I think that's reassuring because language matters. And when we hear the word syndrome, it's very easy for us to put two and two together and come up with the idea that something is wrong with us, that we need fixing or that we need improving in some way. But actually what many of us are experiencing, of course, isn't a disorder at all. It's a very human response to finding ourselves somewhere new. So going back to the magazine feature, I realized, of course, that I hadn't suddenly become less capable because I was featured alongside women who I perceived as more experienced or more able than me. Nothing about my podcast had changed overnight. The conversations I'd recorded, they were still the same. The feedback from listeners hadn't disappeared. It was still positive. The invitation to be featured hadn't been sent to me by mistake. The only thing that had changed was who I was comparing myself with. And outside of this situation, I think that we unfairly compare ourselves all the time. We measure our beginning against somebody else's middle, we measure our first few years in business against somebody who's spent 20 years building their business. or we might compare our first public speaking engagement or presentation. ⁓ against somebody who's delivered hundreds of keynote presentations before, or perhaps our first book proposal against a published author. And if we do that, it's no wonder that we sometimes feel as though we don't belong in that space. And it's not because we're imposters, but because we've changed rooms, the space around us has changed. And if you're feeling this too, then maybe you have stepped into a place where you've never been before and your environment has changed and you're not an imposter. but you're in a different place. So as I went deeper with this, I realized that I was massively discounting my own journey whilst this internal debate in my head was occurring. I wasn't thinking about the months that I'd spent planning this podcast before I even recorded the first episode. I wasn't thinking about the hours that I spent researching guests, preparing questions, editing episodes, learning new skills. or even just building the confidence to press the publish button every week. I've received from listeners who've told me that a particular episode has made them think differently or... has helped them through a difficult time. Instead, I was looking at everybody else's experience and quietly telling myself that my experience somehow counted for less. And according to the research, that's exactly what many people do. So as I noted earlier, Pauline Clance found that people experiencing the imposter phenomenon often dismiss their achievements, explaining them away ⁓ as luck ⁓ or hard or good ⁓ rather than recognizing their own Or perhaps they'll give credit to somebody else instead of taking that credit for themselves. And I bet we have all been there at some point at some time. Maybe you have been complimented on something and you've immediately found yourself saying, ⁓ it was nothing, or I just got lucky, or anyone could have done it, or Joe did most of the work. We often find it easier to accept criticism than we do praise. And yet if somebody else achieved exactly what we have achieved, we would probably be the first people to go and congratulate them. So I wonder why is it so difficult to extend that same kindness to ourselves? Anyway, as I kept exploring this further, ⁓ I came across the work of the psychologist Albert Bandura, whose research on self-efficacy has shaped our understanding of confidence for decades. ⁓ And Bandura had found that of the strongest ways that people develop belief in their own ability is through what he calls mastery experiences. So in simple terms, confidence grows from doing something, not from waiting until we feel confident enough to do it in the first place. So every time we try something new or we solve a problem or we overcome a challenge or some days we just simply keep going, we are collecting evidence. We're building our evidence bank and that's evidence that we can cope, evidence that we can learn, evidence that we can grow. And when I read that, I smiled because it's something that I've talked about here before. Confidence doesn't usually come first. It's what comes afterwards. It's built through experience. It's built through that evidence bank, that reinforcing our beliefs that we can do something. You have to do a thing to feel confident that you can do the thing. So I wonder then whether imposter feelings appear because we're expecting ourselves to feel like experts whilst we're still actually learning. And if you are a highly ambitious or overachieving woman, then you probably recognize this, that need to feel like an expert from day one. And of course, if we think about that for a moment, we can see it's absolute nonsense. We wouldn't expect somebody to feel completely confident. on their first day in a new job. And we wouldn't expect someone to feel like an experienced parent on the day they bring their first child home. And we wouldn't expect someone delivering their first keynote speech to feel exactly the same as someone who's spoken on hundreds of stages around the world over many years. But we might expect that of ourselves. Perhaps we have confused being new with not being good enough. And obviously they're not the same thing. Being new simply means that you're at the beginning of learning something and it's good to have a beginner's mindset and to be open to learn more and to want to absorb what we can be taught. Being new says nothing about your potential. And standing as someone who is new to something alongside another person who is not new at that thing, that doesn't diminish you because I suspect that every expert was once the person stood there wondering if they belonged. And as I was preparing for this episode, I realized that I don't think feeling like an imposter is always something that we need to get rid of. I think it can be a helpful sign that our identity hasn't quite caught up with our reality. So maybe we are still seeing ourselves as the person who's just starting, as the beginner, as the one who is still learning. But maybe other people have already started to see us differently. Maybe they already see us as a podcaster who is worthy of being featured in an up and coming feature in an international magazine. Even if the podcaster themselves is someone who still feels like they're finding their feet as a podcaster. And this made me wonder how frequently we carry these old versions of ourselves into new opportunities. So we still see ourselves as someone who's new or a beginner or learning, still introduce ourselves with phrases like, ⁓ I'm just this, or I've only been doing this for a little while. Like we're apologizing for the fact that we're still learning. But isn't learning a lifelong adventure? Isn't it a sign that we're continuing to grow and evolve and become the best versions of ourselves? So now I'm starting to think about imposter syndrome or imposter phenomenon a little bit differently. Now for me, it's less about being a fraud and more about standing on unfamiliar ground or new ground. And that doesn't mean that we don't belong there on that ground. Maybe it's just a sign that we've not been stood there for very long just yet. So I would like to leave you with a couple of questions to reflect on this week. The first is, where in your life do you feel like you don't quite belong? And the second question is, if you stopped comparing yourself with people who've been there much longer than you have, what evidence would you see that you've already earned your place? Maybe you might remember the clients that you've already helped or the conversations that you've already had or the skills that you've already developed or the challenges that you've already come or the courage that it took to begin in the first place. Because I would like you to believe that the evidence is already there. You just have to allow yourself to see it. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the Purposeful Shift. If today's conversation resonated with you, you might enjoy my weekly newsletter, which takes these kinds of reflections and teams them with a little nudge for you to explore. You can sign up via my website and I will pop the link in the show notes. Until next time, please take care of yourself. Keep following your curiosity. ⁓ And please remember that if you are feeling like a beginner right now, that does not mean that you don't belong here. Maybe it means that you have had the courage to enter a room that is big enough to help you grow. See you soon.