Posts Tagged ‘Self Esteem’

Are you an imposter?

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
  • 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”.

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It’s none of your business!

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

“What people think about you is none of your business”

I first heard Jamie Smart use the above phrase, and he also told a story about the Buddha which went something like this…

Buddha was travelling in the company of several other people. One of the travellers begins to test Buddha by responding to anything he has to say with disparaging, insulting, hurtful remarks. Every day for the next three days, this traveller keeps verbally abusing Buddha, calling him a fool, arrogantly ridiculing him in any way he can.

Finally, after three days of this, the rude traveller can stand it no longer! He asks Buddha, “How can you continue to be so kind and loving when all I’ve done for the last three days is dishonour, offend and try to find ways to hurt you? Each time I try to hurt you, you respond in a kind manner? How can this be?!”

The Buddha responded with a question for his fellow traveller, “If someone offers you a gift, and you do not accept that gift, to whom does the gift belong?”

The common thread though my recent articles is about learning to take responsibility for your stress and improving your ability to respond to things happening in your life in a calmer way. To access the previous articles you can go to http://www.nickmeredith.co.uk/blog . In continuing this theme, I would like to cover a common issue that I deal with a lot in private client sessions.

A number of the clients coming to see me with stress or even self-esteem issues regularly torture themselves by imagining and believing what they think or perceive other people are thinking or saying about them. This is often called “mind reading” and can be a key contributor to creating unnecessary stress and misery (which is often a contributing source of insomnia, anxiety or panic attacks)

Examples of what mind readers might think or say are …

“When my back is turned, they start to talk about me” or

“Although she said X, I know she really meant Y and it was directed at me” or

“I could see by the way he looked at me that he thought I was stupid” or

“It wasn’t what she said, it was the way she said it…”.

Left unchallenged by you, these often quickly spiral into a cycle of feeling bad followed by more mind reading and then feeling even worse.

If you are one of these people,  stop it! Or at least ask yourself these questions before you choose to do it.

v How sure am I that I can truly know anything about what other people are thinking?

If you are very sure, then it might be worth considering how you can profit from your psychic skills

 

v How can I possibly know that the person meant it in that way?

Irrespective of whether the person intentionally meant a comment in a negative, positive or indifferent way towards you, it’s down to you to choose to interpret it in a negative, positive or indifferent way. Think about why, in a group of people, you will observe a full range of positive to negative responses o the same news story. In most cases, people are too busy in their own thoughts, getting on with their own lives, to be using their time to think or say negative things about you! This point is particularly important

 

v How sure am I that when another person makes a certain gesture or looks at me in a certain way, that he/she was intentionally being hurtful towards me?

Contrary to what you think, people don’t always all mean the same thing by using familiar looks or gestures, there is a lot more going on inside them that you don’t know about.

You might initially think you are very sure about your answers to these questions, but how can you really be? The only person who can be close to sure is the person who said the comment or made the look or gesture; and even that is debatable sometimes.

Take a few moments to re-read this article and think about it ! You might start to realise that all of the put downs and insults eventually come from within you rather than from outside you. Owen Fitzpatrick once said to me that “being put down presupposes you must have been up on the first place which seems to me a useful way of looking at things!

If any of this kind of thinking is something that you recognise in yourself then why not liberate yourself from it by politely refusing to accept the “gifts” offered to you – and repeat to yourself: “What other people think about me is none of my business!”

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