‘Imposter Syndrome’ Blown Away
Earlier this week, I was with a coaching client after her recent promotion to the board of a large packaged goods company. She was telling me all about her doubts about herself, her ability to do this new role, the credibility she thought she would lack in the boardroom, and so on — the perfect storm of what’s often called ‘imposter syndrome’. I asked her:
“Do you ever think about what to have for dinner when you get home?” She looked at me with a rather dismissive expression through the video call screen and said
“Yes, what’s that got to do with anything?”
“Do you then keep thinking about it and worry about what’s for dinner and think, ‘If I don’t know what’s for dinner, I’m a terrible person?’”
“No of course I don’t!”
“Why not?”
“That would be crazy!” We were both chuckling at this point although she was still a bit bemused at what on earth I was getting at.
“Well, what makes the thought of you in your new job more real or worthy of attention compared with the thought of tonight’s dinner?”
“They’re totally different” she said, “One is real, I need help with and the dinner thought is clearly just something that comes into my head and goes”
“What is it about them that makes them different?”
“The feeling and how real each of them is!”
“How do you KNOW one is more real than the other?”
“I just do — isn’t that obvious?”
“Well, let’s take a look. In their essence, they’re both thoughts, right?”
“Yes”
“How do we decide which one is more real and requires attention/fixing and worry?”
“I decide, I suppose. How…by thinking… wait! I decide, and that’s a thought too??” A long pause and a pensive, reflective look showed up on my screen.
“So, what you’re saying is, all this stuff is just things I’ve made up to seem important and worthy of worry”
“What do you think?”
“That’s blown my mind a bit… I got this promotion on merit, I know that. Everyone on the board were in the decision making committee to promote me; so what have I been so worried about?!?” And she just relaxed.
Regardless of how pervasive and persuasive the thoughts appear to be that we have about ourselves; they are not who we are, nor about what we are capable of.
When I saw this for myself, as the person I was talking with started to get a glimpse of, I realised more and more about my true nature — and the true nature of every single human being.
In my own life, I’d had those hundreds of thousands of thoughts about me over many decades and they were nothing but a thought that looked real. Yet, I’ve come to realise that I can think ANYTHING, and so many of those thoughts I’d had I did not take seriously, not seen them as true, did not think more and more about them until they looked like my identity. I’d made the whole thing up! I make things up all the time! That’s what every human does.
Now, I see more and more that when I feel low, it means the relationship I have with low-quality thinking is ‘off’ — I’m taking what I think as true, meaningful, permanent, and personal. They are, in fact, the opposite of those things: illusory, arbitrary, transient, and universal for all human beings.
Thought is an incredible energy of creation in human beings, and our ability to believe what we think is one characteristic that defines us as a species.
We imagine all the time, including imagining our doubts have merit or meaning.
(Edited version of Wyn Morgan’s own chapter within ‘From the Heart’, by Nicola Drew, 2020)
