This Is What Impostor Syndrome Looks Like

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1:37Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you love this podcast, send me a text message 512-580-9305. I send out sporadic text messages throughout the week on mindset tips and tricks to help you learn and grow throughout the week. So if that's something you're interested in, text me right now 512-580-9305. Today, I want to talk to you about something that almost nobody escapes. And I want you to know that the more competent that you are, the more likely you are to experience it.

2:11And that is the imposter syndrome. I'm talking about that deep, quiet, psychological version of the imposter syndrome, the one that shows up when you're actually doing well, or you're trying to push yourself to step into something new, or you're getting new opportunities, or people are actually starting to respect you, or maybe you got a promotion, and there's still that voice in the back of your head that says, yeah, but they don't really know who I am yet, or wait till they find out that I'm not good enough to actually be here. So let's talk about what the imposter syndrome actually is in this situation.

2:49I want to define it properly for you. The imposter syndrome is not a lack of confidence. That's what most people think that it is. They think it's a lack of confidence within themselves. It's not. It's something much more specific than that. It is a mismatch between your internal identity, which is who you think you are, and the identity that you will need to create to create the life that you want. There is a dissonance between who you are and who you're stepping into. So externally, you're stepping into a new version of you. You're taking new actions. You are trying to become somebody new. You're getting better.

3:29Maybe you're getting a promotion. But internally, you still feel like the old version of you. and you have to understand, I've said this many times recently, the identity that you have, there's always a lag in your identity. So your external world for your identity, the behaviors, the actions, the results will change. Your internal identity takes time to catch up to that, to actually go, okay, I guess this is who we are now. And so your actions will change first, but your identity will take months to even years to catch up to your new results and new actions. And so this is because your brain, it starts to go, well, this doesn't really necessarily match what I know about myself.

4:14Something's off. So they think, we must be faking it. We must be a fraud. Do you see that? And so the psychology behind it, there's a concept in neuroscience that's called predictive processing, which is your brain is constantly trying to predict reality based off of all of your past experiences. So if in the past you've been a loser or had failures or screwed up or any of that type of stuff like we all have, if your past identity from that came up with, um, I'm not, I'm not good enough, or I'm behind, or I'm not the smart one, or I'm unlovable or whatever it might be, your brain basically like builds a model of you around that.

4:58And then so you think that you're not enough, but then suddenly you get promoted or you start a new business that starts doing pretty well, or you start leading people. Your brain doesn't go, wow, growth. I'm so awesome. Your brain goes, error. This doesn't match the internal model that I have of myself. So instead of like just updating itself, your identity doesn't go, oh, we have new results. Well, let me just go ahead and update. What it does is it questions your reality. That's what imposter syndrome really is. It is the feeling like maybe you don't belong where you are based off of who you believe yourself to be.

5:38And that is always based off of past, not future, and not present version of yourself. So let's go deeper and talk about why it exists because your imposter syndrome is not a mistake. It's not like a bug inside of a computer. It's just, you know, running the wrong code. Imposter syndrome isn't a mistake. It's adaptive. It is your brain trying to protect yourself by predicting who you are and what you're supposed to do in this moment. And most of this, obviously this conditioning starts early in childhood. There's research from Dr. Pauline Kydance who found that common patterns that people have in their childhood that ends up having them think that they're not good enough or not smart enough or have the imposter system in some sort of way.

6:27It would be something like if you had praise that was inconsistent from your parents, like maybe you can't, like I hear it all the time, like you came back with a B and your parents were like, why wasn't it an A? Or you came back with an A and like, why wasn't it an A plus? So it could have been like praise was inconsistent or you only got love whenever you won a baseball game or achievement was expected, but not celebrated. And maybe your identity was tied to performance. And because of all of that, you learned what I do is never quite enough. There's so many times I hear this from people where they can succeed and succeed and succeed.

7:02And it doesn't really register from them because their childhood, they could never quite feel like they got to a point of all that success and love from their parents. And that just doesn't disappear when you do succeed. It scales with you. You still have that feeling from childhood of what I do is never quite enough. So even though you may be doing well, you might be killing, you might be crushing life, you might be doing better than you ever have. There's still a part of you that feels like you don't even deserve what you've accomplished. You, if you look at your external reality, it doesn't match your internal identity.

7:41You're actually starting to outgrow an old version of yourself. So instead of being like, wow, I'm doing great. I deserve this. I'm so proud of myself, right? Very rarely do I hear people say that about themselves. They usually think I'm a fraud. I hope they don't find out. And so there's something in psychology. It's really interesting. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect. And what this means is that people who are incompetent overestimate themselves. So incompetent people overestimate themselves. Imposter syndrome is basically the exact opposite of that, which is competent people underestimate themselves.

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11:42So it's like the more that you know something, the more you know how much you don't know about it. Do you get that? And so you might be like really advanced in your knowledge around some specific industry. But because you're so advanced, you see all of the knowledge that's there. I don't know as much as I could. And because of that, you actually underestimate yourself. And so your brain says, I see all of these gaps in my own personal knowledge, then I must not be that good. Meanwhile, the buffoon that's less aware, those people feel more confident. It's this weird paradox that happens with it.

12:22And so it does show up like, I'm not good enough or I'm a fraud in some sort of way, but it doesn't always show up that way. It also shows up as like over-preparing for everything or not sharing your ideas until they're perfect and trying to become a perfectionist. or maybe you have some success and you downplay your success, or you call your wins lucky, or you get praise from people and you feel anxious after that praise for some reason, or you're constantly waiting to feel ready, but you never actually do feel ready. And so you achieve something and your brain says, I don't know. Like, I don't know if I was worthy of that.

13:02Maybe I did it one time too. Can I do it again? like that's actually the insecurity behind the imposter syndrome and like when you look at the imposter syndrome it's not just um it's not just a feeling problem it becomes a behavioral problem as well and what happens is when you start listening to the imposter syndrome and you actually start letting that thought of not being good enough and that feeling of not being good enough dictate what you do you'll start playing smaller you will delay your actions you will uh over plan or stay in like preparation mode. You will avoid putting yourself out there, being more visible to people.

13:42And if you do that over time, you will become what you fear, not because it's true, but because you acted like it was true. And over a long enough time, you will always become who you act like you are. And so that's what the imposter syndrome is. So if that's what it is, how do we actually try to get past it? How do we work to get past it? I'm going to give you a step-by-step process, okay? The first thing that you need to do is you need to stop trying to feel ready. When you're trying to feel ready, like you'll never feel ready for something the first time you're doing it. Does that make sense?

14:18Like you'll never feel ready the first time you do it. You'll feel ready the more that you do it. But you're basically like waiting for confidence. Confidence doesn't come to you like a bolt of lightning. Confidence is not the starting point of something. Confidence is the output that you get after doing something. So it's like you have to take action. From that action, you will get evidence of how well you did. From that evidence over a long period of time, you will start to build an identity around the evidence of how you did around something. And then from there, if you do it enough over and over and over again, you succeed and succeed and succeed, or you improve, improve, improve, then from that, you will start to get confidence.

14:58It's not the other way around. It's action, evidence, identity, confidence. And so when you look at it, like one of the things that I love, I had Mel Robbins tell me this when she was on my podcast a couple of years ago, we were talking about the imposter syndrome and she said, stop calling yourself an imposter and start calling yourself a beginner. And I love that because imposter feels like I'm a fraud, like I'm not supposed to be here. But when you say I'm a beginner, even if you're a beginner in your new promotion, right? You're a beginner. you start to go well if I'm a beginner beginners inherently really shouldn't be great at something but they can always improve and that's a good thing so that's number one number two is to try to start updating your internal model like your brain won't just update automatically sometimes you just have to kind of force it so I want you to write down what it is that you do well when you have a win I want you to start tracking your wins and be very specific with your wins not vague.

15:55I want you to look back over time and start to see your wins over the past five years or 10 years, whatever they might be. I want you to build evidence over time of how competent you actually are because most of the time we're not looking at it. Your brain will always look for the negative. It will always look for what's wrong. It will always look for the faults. It will always look for the places where you are not good enough. And if that's the case and that's the default, but we want our life to be different, then you need to intentionally find and search out what you are good at or what you're good enough at or where you're good enough or where you're qualified or whether you're smart enough or where you're ready for a promotion.

16:38This is self-efficacy. Like confidence is remembered competence because most of the time we're just defaulting to, I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I can't do this. If the default is negative, that in order for me to build confidence within myself, it needs to be remembered competence where I know I can do this stuff and I can see the data points and the evidence that show me that I am actually qualified to be able to do this. You need to find it and you need to remember it. Okay, so that's number two. Number three is you need to start separating your identity from performance. Because right now, most people's brains say, if I fail, I'm a failure.

17:18No, you need to really try to break that. And you try to replace it with, hey, that attempt failed, or that strategy didn't work, or I found out what not to do next time. So don't let your behaviors become your identity. I'll give you a different example just so it could kind of click. A lot of people will like screw up as a parent and they will accidentally yell at their children because they've had a hard day. And then they think I'm a terrible mother. No, no, no. That was a behavior. Your behavior does not become your identity. Did you screw up? Sure. Does that mean you're a terrible mother?

17:55No, that's an identity thing. So you need to separate your behaviors from your identity. It was something that you did. It's not something that you are. Okay, so that's number three. Number four is I want you to normalize imposter syndrome. Over 70 % of people, according to psychological studies, experience imposter syndrome at some point. So if you feel like an imposter or not good enough or not smart enough or not qualified, you're not an outlier. You're actually like most people. Join the club. We all have imposter syndrome. But here's the part that most people really don't realize. It is actually more common in high performers.

18:36Huh, you would think the exact opposite, right? No. Why is it more common in high performers? Because the more that you grow, the more that you're stepping into environments that you haven't mastered yet. And you're realizing, oh my God, I've still got a whole lot to learn. And you're constantly around people who are smarter or who are better or who are more experienced than you in that specific arena. And so your brain compares your internal uncertainty to their external competence. And so it assumes like they belong here. I don't. But if you think about like, that's a really, really distorted comparison.

19:17You're comparing your behind the scenes and what goes on in your head to somebody else's accomplishments and highlight reel. So when you feel imposter syndrome, it doesn't automatically mean that you're not good enough. It often means that you're in a room that's stretching you, that you're trying to grow yourself. That's actually where your growth happens. So if you're a high performer and trying to be a high performer, you are more likely to experience imposter syndrome just because of the fact that you're gonna be pushing yourself to be better, which shows you when you're better, it shows you that there's a lot of stuff that you lack, and you're gonna be around other people that are better than you in some specific arena, which also shows where you're not quote unquote good enough.

20:01It makes you feel like an imposter. Okay, that's number four. Number five is I want you to reframe that feeling. So instead of saying, I feel like a fraud, something's wrong. Go, you know what? I feel like a fraud, which means I am expanding myself. It's the same feeling, but it's completely different meanings. And meaning is everything in your life. I mean, I tell us people all the time that they say, oh, I feel like I'm an imposter when I'm starting this and I don't feel like I'm good enough. I always say like, think about this for a second. How crazy would it be if you were just 100 % confident that you could do something?

20:37that you've never done before. Like, isn't, isn't that a little bit psychotic to be like, well, I should be a hundred percent confident. And I've never done this before. No, if you saw somebody that was like, don't worry, I can land the plane. And you're like, have you ever landed before? Like you're a flown a plane. They're like, no, but I watch videos online. You'd be like, what the fuck? That's crazy. This person is so confident. It's a little bit, it's a little bit cuckoo, isn't it? So you should feel like you're not good enough in some sort of way, because at this point you might not be good enough and you can always get better.

21:09And so I want you to understand like you don't feel like an imposter because you're unqualified. You feel like an imposter because you're evolving faster than your identity can keep up. Your brain hasn't caught up yet and it usually won't, especially if you keep pushing yourself to get better. And so if you feel the imposter syndrome, don't shrink. Don't pull back. Like that discomfort that you feel, that edge that you feel like you're on. That's where your next identity is being built. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories.

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