Authentic Success

It’s an interesting thing to watch the reactions when I talk about Imposter Syndrome.  There is normally this light of recognition that comes in to someone’s eyes as they easily agree that this is something they deal with in their life.  Then you can watch them mentally putting it on a shelf marked “work on this someday” and move on.  It makes me sad in that I don’t feel they fully understand the true costs of relegating this “issue” to the “someday” shelves of self-care and love.

When you suffer from Imposter Syndrome (and I don’t say “suffer” lightly), you are experiencing it in EVERY area of your life.  It shows up in all personalities, all walks of life and all roles that we take on.  It takes up a supply of your energetic self by using it to protect you from beliefs and emotional pain that you have carried likely your whole life.  It depletes you, and dims you, and keeps you playing small.  These are not little consequences… these are massively impactful to your health, wealth, happiness and success.

In simple terms, Imposter sufferers wear masks of protection.  These masks are made up of all of the coping mechanisms we have designed to protect us from anyone discovering the emotional spots of pain underneath.  I see the masks as heavy, solid and yet brittle enough to be at risk of shattering, whereas the emotional spots under the mask are soft, sore and tender to the possibility of being exposed.  The sore spots are all of the negative things we believe about ourselves… you know… I’m not good enough.  I’m not smart enough.  I am alone.  I’m not lovable.  Once we have created this belief (and yes, we create them ourselves as kids), we then spend the rest of our lives protecting ourselves from anyone discovering that we feel this way.  Enter the masks of protection that consist of our thoughts, behaviours, patterns and actions that we live every day.  By using our energy in these protective ways, we are taking that energy away from self-care, self-love, expansion, gratitude and every other positive emotion available to us.  To put it bluntly, it is a waste of your energetic resources… especially given that there are amazing ways to heal those sore spots and take off your mask.

Here is a really basic list of some categories of people and how their suffering commonly shows up:

Entrepreneurs

You are your business and if your business is not growing, it’s because you aren’t.  Especially for those of you that are service oriented – you are selling yourself and essentially your energy.  If you are using lots of your energy protecting your sore spots, clients feel the “lack” available to help them.  So grow, heal and up-level personally and the professional will follow.

Moms

You are the superheroes of giving.  Seriously – it is a HUGE emotional output in your life. The most important cost to you is that you miss the magic of what you have created.  You miss the magic moments, the magic feelings and the magically quirky growth of your little humans.  You miss it because you are so busy making sure you look like you have it all together.  Or managing EVERY TINY aspect of your entire family’s lives.  Or you miss it because you are too busy castigating yourself for not knowing how to do the 10,000 things demanded of you in a day in the properly perfect manner.  You frigging miss so much when you use your energy to protect yourself from all of the inferiority feelings instead of using your energy to soak up every bit of magic on your Mom journey.  This one is heart-breaking for me.

Professionals

How much are you running on fear?  Fear of screwing up the pitch or presentation, fear of not getting that client, fear of being by-passed by someone smarter than you?  It is absolutely exhausting having to pretend that “business is business” and feelings are for your personal life.  That is crap – you are having the feelings at work… you just take the energy to stuff them in to a box, then more energy to pretend they aren’t there, then more to unpack them at the end of the day (if, in fact, you do this at all).  More than likely your relationships at home suffer too because you have used so much of your energy stuffing and pretending, that you have run out at the end of the day.  This road leads to physical sickness, mental health issues and, in lots of cases, pure burn-out.

Care Givers

Nurses, teachers, doctors, paramedics, social workers etc.  I am talking to you here.  Like Moms, you give of yourselves ALL damn day.  Like professionals – you have to stuff your personal feelings.  When you are also hiding the fact that sometimes you are scared, sad, unsure, rejected and overwhelmed – you will just plain run out.  You will run out of compassion, out of empathy, out of emotions because out of necessity, you go in to lock-down mode.  You especially, need to care for yourselves more diligently than you care for your patients, students or clients.  You HAVE to make the conscious choice to clear your energy so that you can continue to be a care-giver at all.  You HAVE to.

The cost of not addressing your Imposter Syndrome can be devastating.  I don’t want that for you.  I want you to know that there are ways to heal the sore spots so you don’t need a mask to protect them.  I want you to know that you can feel, think and behave in a way that makes you even better at your chosen role, while at the same time making yourself a priority.  I want you to be wildly happy and enormously successful in your life.

So if you are struggling, reach out and start to heal the sore spots.  The cost of not healing this is just way too high.

To your wild happiness and enormous success,

Deb

Whenever I talk to women about their talent, capabilities or success, they almost always downplay themselves. I’d say, about 90% of the time this happens. There are two main responses:  1) They genuinely don’t internalize their success (i.e. they have Imposter Syndrome), or 2) They actually understand that they just pulled off something great, but don’t want to sound like a “jerk”.  As much as Imposter Syndrome is my passion and specialty, I want to address the “feeling like a jerk” reaction.

I believe that feeling like a jerk comes from observing other women who celebrate themselves being treated like a jerk.  The empowering movement of having women be bold, take action and step forward consistently bumps up against the reality that they will be brought down with words, looks or actions if they do.  They are treated as arrogant, rude and, yes, like a jerk.  This is not just men reacting this way, I have watched women react chillingly to another’s success.  Contrast this sharply with a man celebrating a well-deserved success.  My observations have been that the people around him are happy to celebrate with him.  Like it is somehow more normal and acceptable for him to acknowledge his contribution to the world.  This standard of normal is very dis-empowering for women on their journey to authentic success.

Without getting in to a whole sociological debate on this, I simply want to encourage women to own their success and tell them that genuinely celebrating what you can, and have done, is never a jerk move.  It is powerful and necessary to build momentum, and move to your next level of success.  So please don’t allow your light to dim in the face of other’s potential reactions.  Celebrate the hell out of what you have done because you deserve it, and the rest of us need to see it!  Young professional women need to see you shining bright.  Our daughters need to see us stepping forward and owning our success with the same vigour as we own our responsibilities.  Our sons need to learn that this is the appropriate response to success for both men and women.

Let yourself be happy and proud for as long as you can hold that feeling.  It is preparing you to be able to hold that level of joy and excitement the next time.  This is a practice that will serve you on so many levels.  Power, joy, confidence, happiness, success – and all you have to do is celebrate!

A note for the men… this is not an attack on you.  It’s simple social conditioning that you can help change so that your wives, daughters, sisters and friends can own their very well deserved successes too.  If you find yourself not owning your success authentically, please know that I am speaking to you too.

If I were to ask whether you put undue pressure on yourself as a woman and mother over the holidays, would you reply with something like, “Does a bear….?” Check.

For most of my adult life, over the holidays I would routinely pull out “the big stick” if things weren’t just so, as my mother used to say. Of course, she was my role model (part of the challenge for most of us). As a child, each year I watched her frantically run herself into the ground. She would only declare “victory” when things went off without a hitch. To me it didn’t seem like a particularly good time, for her at least!  (As an aside, I used to wonder why my parents would start Christmas morning with Bloody Mary’s… hmmm.)

When I became a parent, I tried to model my mother’s herculean efforts. It damn near killed me. After a number of years, I began to ask myself how I had fallen into the same trap. Not surprisingly, it dawned on me that I was simply doing what I had seen my own mother do, without considering the huge divide between my circumstances and hers.

As a recovering imposter, wearing a mask of outward perfection was very important to me. After a lot of inner work and soul searching, I learned that I alone was judging myself, and that I could choose to be kind to myself, and banish “competence extremism” as we call it in our work.

This holiday season, I invite you to practice a little self-compassion, as I have slowly learned to do. Here are two suggestions for you to consider as we enter the “holiday chute”:

• Listen to your inner-dialogue. Self-criticism isn’t motivating! You were likely taught to have compassion for others. Make a pledge to yourself this year, that when you go looking for the “big stick,” you’ll try to treat yourself as a dear friend would.

• Forgive yourself for your need for perfection. It’s just not possible. In our group program last week, my amazing partner, Deb, led us through a tapping exercise based on the ancient Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness, called Ho’oponopono. It was moving for us all. It is both healing and powerful to forgive ourselves, and others. I’m going to share it with you here. Repeat it a few times each day. If you’re a tapper, tap on the points as you say each sentence.

I love you.

I’m so sorry.

Please forgive me.

Thank you.

Give yourself a gift this year, that will unquestionably trickle down to those you love. Show yourself some self-compassion. I’ll be doing the same, right along with you. May your holidays be filled with light and love; and leave the dazzling to Martha!

Ever wonder why you can be capable, confident and powerful at work and yet, in your personal growth and development you feel like you are constantly floundering?  Or why you can be open, funny, silly and engaging at home, but that kind of behaviour has no place at work? For me, my “work self” was confident, solid, smart and powerful, and my “home self” was quiet, insecure, emotionally drained and in desperate need of a hug. These were two wildly different personalities that I put on every day. When I got exhausted enough by this pattern, I dug in to figure out why. The answer was pretty simple really – I was faking it at work!

Yep – I had simply learned to put an almost impenetrable mask of confidence on at work.  It let me be what I thought was a strong leader, a compassionate (albeit a little arrogant now that I think about it) listener, a great problem-solver.  It kept the vulnerable parts of me safe.  Genius really.  Or was it?

Here’s the danger if you notice your work life persona is a mask.  It is EXHAUSTING. I mean, on an energetic, authentic level…this kind of fakery is emotionally and energetically exhausting.  It robs from other areas of your life to shore up your professional life.  This might work temporarily to advance your career, but from an “authentic success” perspective, it is a flawed plan. One area will always be giving energy to support another, and eventually that imbalanced neglect will start to show.  You might get sick and need a few days off to recuperate, which allows you to store some much needed energy.  Your home life may get rather dramatic because you are short-tempered, exhausted and running on empty by the time you get home.  Your work may start to suffer because it is the only thing that will make you take notice.

For me, it was a series of dramatic and emotionally draining work events that precipitated my wake-up call.  A tricky thing about that confident mask – it blinds you to what your authentic self would see quite easily.  It keeps you operating in a state of fear that you have to be perfect, have the answer, push harder…all the damn time.  Here is the irony, your authentic, successful, flawed, powerful self, is so much more motivating and inspirational to others than your mask. Taking off that mask will allow you to fail without taking it personally, and achieve incredible success that you own on a very personal level (because let’s face it, you are too busy attacking the next challenge to own the success of the accomplishment you just achieved).  The truth is that there is immense power in shining your true face to the world.

Bottom line…the harder you are holding on to that mask, the deeper is your fear of not being good enough or accepted for your true self.  That fear is a dangerous place to live, because it cuts off your true access to happiness and success.  I can promise that taking off your mask is worth all of the learning, vulnerability and practice that it takes to show, shine and rock your authentic face to the world.  I hope you find that bravery for yourself – it is absolutely worth it.

Our brains are pretty incredible. They keep us safe by guiding our behaviour based on experiences. Our behaviour becomes a pattern that we unconsciously play out our whole lives. This is really great for the safety factor – after all, our thinking has kept us alive until now. What it’s not so good for, is breaking a pattern because it doesn’t differentiate patterns that are good for us vs. patterns that aren’t. Many of the beliefs we formed about ourselves happened between the ages of 1 – 8 years old. This is before our brains are capable of logical thought. These are not the beliefs that we want guiding our lives.

My 5 year old self thought she was stupid because she was a day-dreamer, which translated into a small being that wasn’t paying attention to other humans. That was often interpreted as “not being very bright”. You’ve seen this happen right? A kid in a store gets that exasperated sigh and angry look from Mom or Dad because they aren’t paying attention? Don’t get me wrong, as a parent it is exasperating…but as a child, I interpreted that sign as “I am stupid”. No judgement or blame here, that is how I (and a lot of other kids too) interpreted that expression and sound.

Now, my 37 year old self has had a lot of proof that I am not, in fact, stupid (I also don’t like to use that word, but it’s what my 5 year old self used).  Know how I knew that “I am stupid” was one of my core beliefs from childhood?  Because almost nothing else pissed me off more than feeling stupid as an adult. Red flag right there. My feelings were such an over-reaction to the situation that I had to figure out why.  I didn’t want to be reduced to tears or rage when someone questioned my work, or judgement, or opinion.  But that is what would happen, because those questions triggered my belief that I was stupid.  So I worked on it through EFT (tapping), paying attention to my reactions and making conscious choices about my behaviour.  Awareness is the first step, so give this a try:

1)  Recognize that your reaction is a pattern that has kept you safe to date.  So don’t be upset with it, just observe your feelings and try not to judge.

2)  Keep asking yourself “why does this bother me?” until you end up with an answer that has “I am” in it.  That is where the power of a belief lies, because “I am” is about the core of you.

3)  Congratulate yourself on your amazing detective work in discovering one of your core beliefs from childhood.  Just notice your feelings and reactions for now.  This is empowering awareness.

Beliefs can be changed. Not without awareness, and not without work, but they can be. For me, my belief that “I am stupid” has been worked through, and in its place I now believe “I am valuable”. That shift impacts my happiness, my relationships, and my fundamental success, because I no longer operate from a 5 year old’s perspective. Our negative beliefs are one of the rare times that feeling like a kid is NOT necessarily in your best interest.