- Do you ever feel like you are an imposter in your own job; waiting to be found out for the fraud that you are?
- Do you often think that you are fooling your peers that you are more competent than you are?
- Do you often think that your success is mostly down to luck and not your ability?
- Do you normally brush off any personal successes as not a big deal and can’t accept praise for your success?
The label for this kind of thinking is “Imposter Syndrome” and it was recently featured on a Radio 4 documentary. Now you might be wondering what this has got to do with stress, and my opinion is “quite a lot!”. See my article from last month on “mind reading” to found out why (go to http://www.nickmeredith.co.uk/blog)
The good news is that “imposter thinking” is a lot more prevalent than you think and surprisingly, it seems to occur more often in high achieving and successful people (people across all professions who are normally regarded as very successful by their peers). In fact, the radio 4 programme revealed many well known and successful people who admit to regularly having such thoughts. I too recognise this as a common theme with some clients I have coached with self esteem, confidence and anxiety issues.
Research claims that many factors seem to contribute to this kind of thinking, including family situation and dynamics, early upbringing, harbouring a fear and negative beliefs about success and experiencing pressure not to fail. People will often exhibit behaviours which perpetuate this thinking, often leading to stress, including:
- Being overly diligent because you perceive that you need to work harder and harder to avoid being “discovered” as an imposter [a sure way to increase chances of becoming stressed]
- Brushing off compliments as a way of deflecting being “found out”
- Avoiding showing any confidence in your abilities in ways such as not accepting promotions or opportunities to stand out in front of your peers [leading to frustration and stress because you are holding yourself back]
5 Tips to help you to respond better to this kind of thinking
v Remind yourself that if or when you are doing it, research says that several of your respected peers will be doing it at the same time.
v Find somebody that you can talk to about it. Get a reality check and realise that you are not alone!
v Identify how you think in this way i.e. what do you say or imagine to yourself when doing this? Gaining conscious awareness of what and how you do it is an important first step to stop it happening automatically. How would you teach somebody else to think in the same way? – it will help you bring all of the steps into your conscious awareness.
v Challenge your belief that just because it feels right to you that it is. Find contradictions from your past that challenge your belief. E.g. “I feel I don’t deserve to be here” can be challenged by “Just because I feel this, doesn’t mean it is true”.
v Apply the approaches from my previous article “What other people think about you is none of your business”.