 Hello and welcome to today's Business Skills webcast, when self-doubt gets in the way of performance. Today is all about uncovering and helping you eliminate the imposter syndrome for you and the people you may coach or mentor. My name is Sarah Gonzalez and I would love to welcome our presenters for today. We have performance catalyst Suzanne Mercier and Melissa Richardson from the Art of Mentoring. Welcome ladies, how are we today? Thank you very much, very well. Thank you. We're very excited to get into today's session. We've got a whole heap of people who have registered. And we were talking earlier, Suzanne, about the whole impact of this imposter syndrome and how many of us may have experienced it, but don't actually know what it's caused. So let's get straight into everything we're going to talk about and I'll hand over to you, Melissa. Thanks Sarah. So I just wanted to cover off the agenda so that we can give everyone that's watching today a bit of an idea of what we'll cover. It's primarily, we'll hear from Suzanne, she's the real expert in imposter syndrome, but I wanted to cover a little bit from a coaching and mentoring point of view. So that will, I'll bring my perspective on that. So we'll be touching on the importance of confidence and how self-confidence relates to the imposter syndrome. How important your mindset is in the background and really it's all sourced in mindset. How and why this very interesting syndrome operates. Suzanne will talk through, you know, there are some differences between men and women and how they relate with imposter syndrome. And then we'll move on to really how do you move beyond the grip of this thing so that you and your people can deliver on your potential. Because it really is something, if we move on to the next slide, sorry, one too many, that I think should be understood by all coaches and mentors. How it came to my attention, if you like, is because as coaches and mentors we all work with people that from time to time get in their own way. And you know, it's the role of the coach or the mentor to help them get out of their own way, if you like, because they're actually being a bit of an obstacle to themselves, so we need to help them sidestep themselves. We were looking at some of the data from mentees that participate across all our mentoring program, and we have probably thousands of people participating in programs now. And we found that the biggest single benefit that is derived from a mentoring relationship is in fact self-confidence. So we started looking at that and also in the feedback that we were getting from mentees when we were talking to them. Many of them talked about this idea of feeling like a fraud, feeling like any minute now they were going to be caught, how long will it be before somebody works out, I shouldn't be in this job. So I started exploring and looking at what's the psychological kind of underpinning of all of that. And that's how I discovered Suzanne, who really has become an expert in imposter syndrome. So I'm going to invite Suzanne to kick off now and really the first thing I think people would be interested to know is how did you get interested in imposter syndrome in the first place? Thanks, Melissa. Like a lot of things, my interest has actually started out very self-focused. About 20 years ago, I walked away from a pretty high-paying, high-powered role for all the wrong reasons. I had moved from fast-moving consumer goods marketing into advertising and I thought that the advertising side was the fun side. You know, we got to go to lunch, we got to do all those fabulous things and unfortunately I learned that wasn't quite the way that it was. So for the first 12 months I worked pretty hard trying to figure out how to actually make this job work for me. How could I make a significant contribution? And I attended an event at the end of the 12 months where one of the agency directors came up and said to me, Suzanne, how do you think you're going? And I said, oh, I'm not quite sure and he said, no, you're right. So that was not quite the answer I was hoping for. So back to the drawing board and at the end of a further 12 months, I got a telephone call from the managing director of George Patterson Advertising, which is where I was working at the time, and he called me up to his office and I can remember the feeling that I had when I got that telephone call because I thought that I was going to get fired. So instead of taking the lifts, I actually took the stairs and all the way up the stairs I was trying to compose my face because in advertising if you get fired it's not very pretty. They have two big burly security guards who walk with you to your desk and they give you a box and they watch you pack everything up and they frog march you off the property and everybody knows what's going on. So all I could think about was walking up the stairs was, Suzanne, you know, be gracious, don't cry. So I got into Alex Hamill's office and I was sitting there waiting for him to get off the telephone trying to compose my face and he turned around and the first words out of his mouth were congratulations and it was like, what? That's so not what I was expecting and he said congratulations and I said, but why? And he said, you're the first woman on the board of George Patterson Advertising. And I just looked at him, I was completely non-plussed and I said, really? Why? And he said, because of the contribution that you've made so far and the contribution you're going to make moving forward and from my perspective it was clear then they didn't have a clue that I did not know what was going on. So I sat on the board for a couple of years and for the entire time that I was there I felt sure somebody was going to come along and say, hey you you're not supposed to be here, pack your bags and go. I beat them to it and I left and I started my own business but the problem was I took the problem with me and with the benefit of hindsight which I acquired in this particular case about eight years ago and I started to look at the imposter syndrome I realized that was what was going on for me. So when I walked away from there apparently I was a role model for so many people and I had no clue. I didn't think I was doing a good job. I felt that there was no contribution that I was making and apparently I was wrong and learning about the imposter syndrome has helped me understand what was actually going on. So yes I'd like to talk to you about the importance of mindset because the imposter syndrome is a mindset, it's a limiting mindset and essentially when Henry Ford said whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right he actually captured the essence of a mindset and that's how we determine how we filter the world by the way that we perceive it and we might see it as a positive place or a hostile place we might see that we've got what it takes to be successful or we might not even recognize the capabilities and the successes that we achieve because of the way that we see ourselves. So the imposter syndrome is a limiting mindset. I call it a case of mistaken identity and the reason for that is that is actually about how I see myself and that's not accurate if we've experienced the imposter syndrome because it actually occurs to very successful people and I'll talk about that in a bit more in a moment but the feeling of not being good enough actually undermines our ability to perform to our potential so that's why this is such a critical issue and why I've actually worked so hard to understand this and help my clients work through it. So as I've said it's a limiting mindset but the thing that I think I really need to emphasize is it's actually the state of low self-esteem. People talk about confidence and absolutely confidence is the symptom if you like of what's going on but it's called the state of low self-esteem. It's not the trait of low self-esteem which is where I can't even get out of bed in the morning because I feel so bad about myself but this actually is something where we go we're feeling confident most of the time and then we go into this state of not feeling good enough and there's a lot of background as to why we might experience that so the first one is that it's influenced by nature and developed through nurture. So scientists have discovered that more than 50% of our personality is actually formed through our DNA and so you look at the big five personality factors of agreeableness, extraversion, openness and then conscientiousness and neuroticism and those last two are loosely associated with the impostor syndrome and conscientiousness is the ability to set goals the ability to delay gratification to be organized and ordered and then neuroticism is a degree of emotional reactivity that we might have and the degree of anxiety and stress that we might experience. Nurture is whether we've been raised by perfectionist parents or caregivers and we might have taken that on board whether we were raised with criticism often well intentioned and whether we were labeled as children because particularly in families where there's more than one child there is a sense of this one's the good girl this one's the creative fellow this one's the sporty one and those labels we take on board so it's latent until it's triggered by some external event that creates uncertainty so something outside of us and then we have an automatic unconscious response because we the last thing we want to feel is vulnerable the last thing we want to do is be seen as not good enough because that's our fear so we go into these self protective behaviors or we might go and take another course or read another book to try and improve our capabilities but it's the self protective behaviors that are the problem because they can often be more challenging than the actual experience itself so then the trigger goes away and the reaction subsides and so when the reaction subsides we may think that the imposter syndrome is gone but what I'd like to do and we will talk a little bit more about that is I'd just like to tell you where does this come from because it doesn't come out of the pages of Who Weekly it isn't something I made up it's actually a very rigorously researched phenomenon two psychologists named Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Eames who taught at the University or at the state of Georgia who actually identified it back in the late 1970s and they were working with high performing PhD and master's students and they found that the women who were and there were women at that stage of the research who were going for their final dissertations or exams were actually freaking out because they were thinking they were going to fail and they thought this was quite puzzling because there was no reason for them to think that they had been highly successful all the way through so they went back and investigated to see what was going on and what they found was that around 70% of the people that they identified their research were actually experiencing the imposter syndrome and around 30% of them experienced it at a pretty chronic level meaning it was almost like a pair of glasses that they wore around and looked at the world through so that was pretty interesting research and what they also later found was that it was thought to be initially a women's syndrome but they actually found that men experienced it as well they just experienced it differently and it's got a lot to do with the way that we're conditioned so we may see some changes in this over time but essentially women are still raised to be the ones who are responsible for the family they're still the ones that have the children until there's a scientific breakthrough I think that's going to continue and often they're the ones that actually raise the children and so the men are the ones who are conditioned to bring in the dollars because if they want to have a family they need to be able to afford that so men have a fear of failure and please this has got a gross generalization tag on it so men have a fear of failure and what they've learned is to fake it till they make it which ties into that whole piece of research that's been done around confidence because confidence is perceived as competence so a lot of times somebody will show up and be incredibly confident and it will be assumed he's going to be equally competent for women they have a fear of failure yes but they also have a fear of success because in many cases they're already doing a number of roles they're taking care of the children, the house often their parents and if they're successful something will have to give so many of them back away for that reason and so they fear success and failure but the symptoms of the imposter syndrome are that they feel like a fake and a fraud they focus on their weaknesses and their failures rather than their strengths and successes they dismiss their talents and if they do see them because sometimes you do see them you don't think it's actually that valuable if I can do it and I feel like I'm not good enough it can't exactly be rocket science so that's how we dismiss if we're in that space our talents if they're successful they attribute it to good luck or somebody else's mistaken mistakenly positive view of them they would speak in the right place at the right time so it comes down to a lack of ability to really recognize what we bring and the value that we bring and to have that foundation of self-esteem Fascinating We might launch the poll now sir Yeah so what we're going to do we've gone through the symptoms and now we want to hear from you our online audience so we're going to quickly open a poll and we want to find out if you can relate to these symptoms so just online and the polls are just select either the first response which is yes maybe somewhat or then maybe no and we'll actually have those live results come through and we'll be able to speak to them and then ask Suzanne some more questions and just as people are going through that poll and answering those questions I think the whole idea of the difference between men and women there's so much discussion around that celebrating your own success these days do you find it's more discussed now and more openly spoken about? In terms of owning your success Yeah as females especially Oh look as I said that was a gross generalization and there are a lot of women who are very comfortable with their value and the success that they bring and I think that's fantastic but I think that it's more acceptable for women to be successful the unconscious bias and the double bind still come through so where a fellow might sort of put himself forward quite assertively that's how he's seen as assertive but a woman can be seen as aggressive so we still got all of those sorts of things going on behind and those labels don't help women because they tend to show the symptoms of the imposter syndrome more because they're not faking it till they make it that doesn't feel comfortable for them so yeah I think that it's certainly being discussed more the imposter syndrome itself is being discussed more which I think is fabulous Well wasn't the CEO of Atlassian came out and said he was a sufferer? He did indeed Mike Cannon Brooks was speaking at TEDx in Sydney and he talked about all the stages of growth for Atlassian and how he came up against his own self doubt through all of those stages so yes it's definitely being talked about a lot more and entrepreneurial areas any time you're creative or any time the work that you're doing is put out in front of people it creates that sense of vulnerability and that's when we can experience the imposter syndrome Great we've also got a link to that in the resource library so if anyone wants to take a look at that and the results have come through I don't know what your expectations were here Susan about 70% yes 73.8% there you go 22% somewhat so I think after this this is great because it is something that you can apply and maybe after we start to think about whether or not this might be you and now you're going to go into some of the repercussions but yeah we've got 3.2% who said no as well thank you yes and maybe you're here to identify the imposter syndrome and help people that work around you and it may be the case for those who experience it themselves as well so thank you that's great and it's good to know the research stands firm so let's have a look then at the costs and consequences of self doubt so this is one of the reasons that Melissa and I have been talking about this for a while and because it has significant impact on performance and the whole thing about the imposter syndrome is that we actually do our best to stop anybody else recognizing that we feel like a fake and a fraud and so what it stops us from doing is putting ourselves out there with one exception but I'll talk about that so for employee engagement for example employee engagement is all about focusing on something bigger than ourselves it's all about being willing to make our unique contribution it's about you know sort of really advocating the company and doing more going over and above if we're busy in a space of feeling not good enough then we often will not engage we'll keep ourselves separate and the same thing applies to participating in team development you know teams go through that stage of forming, norming, storming and performing and storming requires people to be honest and to be open and vulnerable so they can find the rules of the team and that doesn't happen when you feel that you're not good enough procrastination is another one that is a big one and that's one of the ways that coaches can tell or can identify somebody might be experiencing the imposter syndrome because if we procrastinate then we're delaying putting our work out there so other people don't have quite the same opportunity to have a comment on it or to judge it in the same way. Poor productivity because perfection might be driving me and that's one of the indicators of the imposter syndrome so we're going over and over and things and not letting it go to we've done 120% of it ability to take feedback is all about feeling comfortable with who we are and not taking things personally and unfortunately when we're in that space of feeling like an imposter that's not what happens willingness to participate in innovation well if any of you have been part of the brainstorming sessions that we used to have many many years ago I know it's quite different now and they tell well you know put your ideas out there and we'll all share and there's nothing that's wrong and some poor bunny does that and gets banged on the head for you know we've done that before you don't need to worry about that and that sort of thing so people will never participate again in that because it's making them vulnerable making them feel stupid and open to judgment. Poor decision making second guessing my decisions with self doubt and then prevaricating or just you know sort of flipping and not moving forward in a firm way. Needing to control things and micro management can come in under that space so really wanting to make sure that everything is done precisely so there are no surprises and therefore there's no uncertainty judging myself and others for not living up to a high set of standards for example and the one exception of pulling back is risky behavior now if you talk about a Friday night that would be one thing but we're talking about in a workplace and this is actually somebody who says you know what I do feel like an imposter but I'm going to go for it anyway I'm just going to go to the top and you know what I do it out and I think that's probably the case in many situations so that's what some of the costs and consequences are feeling like an imposter and I think when we're working as coaches in the workplace we're really seeing this play out in lots of different scenarios absolutely yes absolutely so I want to talk now about how do you actually get beyond this syndrome and it really is all about mindset excuse me in our trainings with coaches and mentors we talk about some simple things but I guess you know we don't want people to go out running around saying oh everybody oh you've got an imposter so the first thing I'd suggest and we'll have some links at the end Suzanne does have a very good diagnostic that you can do or get your client to do that would help indicate whether they maybe are suffering from this but then if you are working with someone who does seem to be suffering from some of these some of the ideas that we had that coaches and mentors can use is firstly just help them examine their own mindset because it does come from the way you think so look at the underlying assumptions look at the underlying belief patterns and see how that might be affecting how the person is putting themselves out there in the world shine a light on their strengths and accomplishments because I think people with imposter syndrome focus very much on that and will diminish their own accomplishments and a great role for a coach or a mentor is to actually you know help somebody see some of the more positive things just tell them something simple tell them that you believe in them and that you're there for them because often people don't have that in their lives so you know having somebody that's a supporter that will help them through the difficult stages can be very important so we talk about maybe getting beyond your comfort zone but we don't want to push people too quickly so maybe little by little that you're there to support them and encourage them to try a few different things so if people who are watching today think they might have imposter syndrome or someone that they're working with can or maybe does what can they do to be sure and what can they do about it sure this sort of giving you a very very quick look down as you can imagine this is quite a complex issue but this will actually get you started so really the first thing is to actually increase your awareness around it notice when you feel that you're not good enough and see if you can understand what brought that feeling about so I use the term trigger so what triggered that feeling and because the external event is subjective so what might upset me might not upset somebody else so it will be relating to the community that you have so if you understand that you're experiencing it and that there was a trigger that set it off then you can have a look at what that trigger is and understand whether that's a limiting belief or what's sitting behind that and that's usually what it is then the second thing is that when we are in the space of feeling like imposters we can be quite judgmental of ourselves and others and I don't know whether this relates to many others but we can be quite hard on ourselves and that's not terribly useful so when we come across the imposter syndrome it's not about saying I've done it again it's actually about saying well that's interesting I'm curious as to what actually happened there and when you're in more complex situations with other people or other events you can actually start to see what was yours to own and what was somebody else's and be curious about how you responded and how you might respond more resourcefully the third one that I talk about is to build inner strength and you touched on that Melissa when you talked about focusing on strengths but it's also about recognizing a building resilience and recognizing that we go through stages in our life where things are fabulous and then things at other times might not be and what we need to do is really build that inner strength so it's about optimism and looking for the positive in situations that occur if there's something terrible that happens at work there's never anything that's completely terrible there's always something that comes out of that that can be seen as positive so look for the positives in those situations I encourage my clients to start keeping journals so they can keep track of what happens and there's a couple of things I get them to do I get them to write down what they're grateful for every day but the other thing I get them to do is actually focus at the end of the day on an external event so as you went through your day what went brilliantly that you can do more of what went quite well and how could you improve that and what didn't go very well at all and what could you do instead of that so all those kinds of things are actually building your feedback mechanisms and enabling you to really start to build that inner strength it's also about developing an internal frame of reference or having an internal reference check at least because when we're at the effect of what's going on outside us we can be bounced around like corks on the ocean stop comparing yourself to others I mean each of us has a different journey each of us has different set of circumstances different experiences different different ways of perceiving things and so it's not terribly useful to compare yourself to others the other part of that is that you're comparing the self that you see at three o'clock in the morning to the potentially the task that somebody else is putting forward you know their best foot forward they're faking it till they make it or whatever so the comparisons not useful recognize your own strengths and successes absolutely and the value that they bring and that's what Melissa was talking about earlier what do they enable you to do that is a benefit to your clients or to your organization and consciously and consistently step outside your comfort zone because that's where the magic happens so yeah great tips we're going to go to some questions now we have some coming through so I'm also going to advise people online to ask any question you like we're almost in a question now before we go into that what can people do just from the two of you I think it's really great that we talk about things that we can do on our own but what if we need that extra step and we want more help or you know like you said it's really hard to fix everything it's a five minute session where to next well I can really recommend reading Suzanne's book so we've got that on special on our website at the moment so I think that's worth doing there's also the free diagnostic which is available through Suzanne's website imposterhood.com so I think just learn more about it would be the first piece of advice absolutely I find that a lot of the articles that are around at the moment are great and awareness it's not that easy to find good solid information so my website certainly has that on there and it's come through my experience so I've had to work my way through this myself and as a coach and as a marketing person and all those various things that I've done in my career as we all have I've actually got I think a pretty interesting take on it because I look at the imposter syndrome as a mindset but I also work quite closely to identify how that's showing up at work because we spend so much of our time there excellent so we're going to get some questions now for those of you online who do have to leave I want to thank you for joining you will get a copy of the recording as well but please complete the feedback before you leave because it does help us improve and also take a look in the resource folder because there's some amazing information that Suzanne has passed the kind on sorry the other way around so first of all we have a question I want to answer both of you so this is from Dave so in a mentoring capacity once you recognise someone might have the imposter syndrome and they're in denial what do you do about that do you give them Suzanne's book how do you deal with those situations oh look in mentoring I love telling stories so keep it at arm's length perhaps as a suggestion by telling a story about someone else you know that may be a friend of a friend a friend of a friend and then let them step into the story for themselves to be able to say now if you've already done that and they're still in denial I don't think you want to push people drag people kicking and screaming so I'd say tread carefully absolutely I would agree it can be quite a confrontational subject unless somebody's really ready to look at it so I would tread very carefully when I was first talking about this because I speak on this and when I first was speaking on this I think if somebody had had some tomatoes they would have thrown them at me because I was obviously not as delicate as I might have been because I was so excited I figured out what I was doing and so yes very definitely tread carefully I also create quite a safe space by telling my story so that they feel it's okay for them to own up to okay I do that too so I find that quite useful and I think in any case some of the techniques I talked about before you could use anyway so trying to build their confidence and self esteem by focusing on strengths and telling them that you believe in them and you just don't put a label on it and just going back so if we go right back to the beginning when we spoke earlier it seemed to be there was a sense of sometimes this is inherent in people when we speak about the nature versus nurture as well so a question that's lended itself to that nicely is once you've figured out that you've got this syndrome maybe you've had it all along does it actually go away or is it something that's with us for life it's actually bad ask me in 10 years look I think what happens is that we become much more aware of what triggers us and then we address those issues and they don't trigger us anymore so what bothered me 5 years ago is water off a duck's back now but I think that what happens it's aligned with personal growth as human beings we evolve so when I was handled then leave space for something else to come up for me to handle so in my experience it is a sensitivity that remains with us but what triggers me is nowhere near as regular and as common if you like as it was back in the beginning and also just another and this sort of talks to what you were speaking about you know the repercussions you know when this does happen how does it impact our life and it's interesting how you speak about gratitude in the slide earlier we had a presenter who came on a few months ago and she was speaking about wellness and how important wellness is and the same advice write something down that you're great for for every single day so could this impact us holistically if we don't not just in our work life when it comes to representation how can it impact our mental health absolutely I mean the imposter syndrome is associated with neuroticism which not cause and effect but an association and that is the tendency to overreact emotionally to feel more anxious and stressed than others might so that's part of the setup but I think that I think definitely I think that I've totally lost track of the question so sorry our wellness yes look I think that what we're doing is rewiring our brain and looking for the positive and that also enables us to have a look at situations that might be perceived as negative and find something positive in there so yeah it's definitely looking at that absolutely excellent so we're almost at the end now but just from the two of you we've spoken a lot about how people online can take this and apply it to their everyday lives top tips from the two of you what's the one thing that you really want people to take away today and me do something about it if you're experiencing it because it comes and goes and the tendency when it's gone is to think it's gone but it hasn't it's just gone underground until the next time when you've got a big opportunity or something great comes up and it can derail you and as I said earlier it happens to people who are successful and that's relative but a success maybe that you didn't expect such as my situation immediately and then you might get an opportunity and you might not make the most of it so yeah that would be my advice great advice and mine for coaches and mentors would simply be just learn more about it so that you can actually be more effective in helping the clients that you work with excellent well thank you both it's been very enlightening to hear about this and like I said earlier I think it's something that many of us have experienced in other people or ourselves about it and we're much more educated after this 45 minute session so thank you everyone for joining thank you both to Melissa and Suzanne if you would like to find out information about the imposter syndrome and Suzanne's work or maybe Melissa and her coaching and mentoring organisation please feel free to go click on the links online and you'll be able to find it all there thank you once again everyone for joining we hope to see you at future business skills events and enjoy the rest of your day thank you