Feeling like a fraud, or thinking you're not good enough, is not your fault. And there are ways to change these thoughts so they become more helpful to you.
When you overcome limiting beliefs about not being good enough, you become free to focus on the impact you want to have, become more creative and productive. You will have more joy in doing your work.
Many of your limiting beliefs come from what society and your upbringing have instilled in you. They are not facts. They don't come from you and your abilities. This realisation can help you start taking back control from old unhelpful thinking.
There's more on this in the first part of this blog: “What is Impostor Syndrome and why it can be good”.
It is common to have been told many times, in many different ways, that your thoughts and feelings aren’t valid. This can lead to that consciously you don't even know what your thoughts are. Subconsciously though, you know and feel that something is not right. And that you want some change.
Some situations make life very difficult, and sometimes you should get out if you just possibly can. Even in difficult circumstances though, it’s your perception of them that decides how you feel. This does not in any way condone or excuse what may have happened to you.
You can feel strong from recognising that you are coping in hard conditions.
And as you have done hard things before, you can do hard things again.
When limiting beliefs turn up, remember that you can decide to think more useful thoughts instead. Here are some ways to do this.
1. Neuroplasticity - How to rewire your brain
Neuroplasticity means that your brain either rewires or strengthens its neuronal pathways with every thought you have.
These neuronal connections in your brain are not fixed. Your brain is not hardwired; it’s live-wired.
Every time you think, your neurons will fire in patterns to enable this.
If you think something by habit, it will strengthen that old pathway. When you think something new, your neurons will connect in new patterns. This means that the answers you get are different every time, depending on the question you asked.
It's like walking in the woods.
A well-worn path is easy to walk.
If you walk in a new direction, the path is created as you walk and barely visible at first. The more you use it though, the easier it gets.
If you don't use a path for a while, it starts to grow over.
This is why new thoughts can feel strange and take more effort, but will soon become comfortable if you persist.
There are more possible ways for your neurons to connect than there are atoms in the universe!
Ask useful questions
Your brain works like Google; it will try to find answers to any question you ask it. You will get answers no matter what you ask, because your brain tries to help you. Therefore, you need to be careful with what you ask.
So if you ask eg why you can’t do something, you will get those answers, because of course there will be times when you haven’t been able to do whatever it is. This will strengthen the “I can’t do X” pathway in your brain.
If instead, you ask about times when you have done something well, your brain will find answers to that. Therefore, your brain will strengthen or create those pathways.
Ask questions such as:
What have I done that I’m pleased about? (Also in small ways.)
How did I do that?
How can I improve?
These types of questions will rewire your brain in helpful ways for you. If you continue to ask supportive questions, your unhelpful thinking pathways will get weaker and in time disappear.
If you want to feel more competent and confident, choose questions that support you.
2. Don’t use your doubts to measure how accomplished you are
Feelings of accomplishment come from looking at what you have done; not what you haven’t done.
If you broke your leg, you wouldn’t measure your ability as a walker on how fast you could walk into A&E…
Write down examples of when you have done something that relates to how you want to feel and act. It doesn’t have to be the same thing and it doesn’t have to be big.
For example, if you want to feel competent, think of times when:
you learnt something well
when you felt knowledgeable enough
when you felt listened to
or something else that feels right for you.
3. Changing anxious, unhelpful thinking styles
When you’re anxious, you change the way you think. This is normal and how our brains evolved to keep us alive. It is not a fault in your brain, but it hinders us at times.
Some anxious thinking styles:
Your thinking becomes more negative, more black & white.
You notice your perceived shortcomings as bigger than they are. Thoughts such as “I have failed if I’m not perfect”.
You will also see them as more pervasive; ignoring the times things go well.
Assume that your feelings are the truth eg “I feel like a fraud so I can’t be competent enough”.
Another is to catastrophise and blow things out of proportion, “If I don’t do this perfectly, people will never respect me. I don’t fit in here and people will know, and I will not get another job”.
Be aware that these are thinking styles that happen naturally when we are anxious. They are not the truth, they are not how we think when we are calm, they are just there to protect us.
Many people get more anxious from thinking that their anxiety is a sign of their brains malfunctioning. You become anxious about being anxious.
Knowing that your brain is working as it was meant to, can therefore be calming.
If you are interested, there’s a lot more on how anxious brains think in my blog “Make sense of anxiety and stress”.
The main way to reduce anxious thinking styles, is to let the survival part of the brain know it is safe.
That means that like a guard dog, it doesn’t have to warn you any longer, and can let you go back to thinking in supportive ways.
Acknowledge the feeling but if it’s not urgent or dangerous, just note down if something needs to be done. Otherwise just tell yourself: “I know it felt dangerous but things are safe”. Think of the guard dog - just because it’s barking, doesn’t mean there’s a burglar. You would go out and check, do what’s necessary and then move on. And you don’t believe the guard dog is always right!
Writing down what works and what we have done well, forces the anxious brain to notice the grey-scale again. Therefore your anxiety calms down so you can think more clearly and logically.
There are a lot of strategies for both immediate help (if you feel anxious now) and more long-term strategies in my blog “How to choose strategies to manage stress and anxiety”.
4. What is your why?
When you focus on your perceived lack of abilities, you are making it about yourself rather than adding value to your clients. This is the opposite of who you truly are, because if you’re susceptible to feel impostor syndrome, it means you care deeply about others and your outcome.
Spend some time thinking about why you’re doing what you do. Why you help your clients.
If you’re a manager, therapist, coach, it may be about helping others live up to their potential.
If you’re an accountant, PA, lawyer, it may be about helping your clients have better, easier lives.
A doctor, nutritionist, trainer may do it to help people be healthier and live longer lives.
You will all have many reasons for doing what you do. Focus on the outcome/your positive contribution.
When you allow your fear and insecurities to take precedence over helping others, you are depriving them of your knowledge and help.
All change is uncomfortable. Or worse! This makes absolute sense if we think of how our old, survival part of the brain works.
Thinking is extremely calorie consuming. Calories used to be difficult to find in stone age times so therefore, the survival part of the brain doesn’t want to use energy on new things. New territory could also be dangerous, so why go there if not absolutely necessary?
Our stone-age ancestors had to choose between being safe but hungry in camp or venture out among wolves and bears to find food. Having food was a powerful reason to risk going foraging and hunting.
To overcome our brains’ tendencies to say no to new and possibly dangerous things, we need a clear and authentic reason to say yes. Focus on the positive impact you’ve had, and can have in the future if you allow yourself.
Some questions to help you:
Do you think it’s worth your discomfort to help somebody else?
When have you done so already?
What strengths did you draw on to manage to do so?
Simon Sinek has lots of videos on finding your why, mainly in a work context. Work is part of life though, so they are valuable whether you think of yourself in your private or working life. Eg: “How great leaders inspire actions”. Simon is a great speaker and I love listening to him so I hope you will too 😊 .
5. What does success look like to you?
Often our idea of success doesn’t come from ourselves. They’re shaped by what our culture has told us is important. If this success idea does not correspond with your values, working towards and getting that success will not fulfill you. You will feel “off” and not authentic. Being authentic and clear is vital to not having impostor syndrome.
An example:
Many people equate success with making a lot of money. Money by itself though is only abstract numbers in accounts; money is only the means to something else. Eg security, respect, freedom, having fun, being able to help others, buying things. All of them wonderful things.
If you only concentrate on success as having more money, you will feel unfulfilled and unhappy very soon.
What do you really want the money for? What difference in your life would making a lot of money make for you? Focus on that instead and you will feel much more aligned.
So over to you: Is your idea of success closely linked to your whys?
If your why is helping your clients’ lives be easier and success to you is to have many happy clients, then they are closely aligned.
This is an important exercise, so you know what you actually want. We’re normally experts on our problems, so much so that we haven’t really considered what not having those problems would be like.
You can’t succeed without failing as well!
If we feel that we can’t allow ourselves to fail, we end up playing too safe.
It’s not possible to learn new things, try new ideas, stretching yourself beyond what you know at this moment, without also some of this not working out as expected. Success and failure are not opposites. Failing is part of the process to succeed.
If you’re doing something new, you can’t have confidence in doing it as you haven’t done it before… You can however have confidence in your capacity to learn how to do it, and in knowing that you can handle setbacks and bounce back.
It’s about who you become in the process of trying something different. Even if that doesn’t work out. It shows resilience, curiosity, creativity to learn from the unexpected offshoots and keep on going. That means it will always be worth it, no matter what the outcome is.
I hope this blog has been helpful. If you would like help to change your thinking, get in touch for a chat or book in.
Lena 💛
PS Don’t forget to change society a little (or lots) too!
We can show our girls that they are smart and can do things that are typically male-dominated. We can encourage them to speak up among boys.
We can teach the men and boys in our lives to respect and treat us as equals. Most men don’t want to remain constrained into male stereotypes so are open to understanding women, once they realise the negative impact of gender inequalities on both men and women.
I heard an excellent talk by Jennifer Blackburn on the book “The Authority Gap: Why women are still taken less seriously than men, and what we can do about it” by Mary Ann Sieghart. Jennifer is a Skills & Leadership trainer.
PPS No, I don’t get any commission from Amazon – the link is just to make it easy for you to check the book out if you wish 😊 .