Have You Thanked Your Imposter Lately?

As I sit down to write this; there is an annoying voice at the back of my head which is telling me not to. It tells me that no-one will read it and those that do, will probably only do so to laugh at me.

The term Imposter Phenomenon was coined in 1978 in a study which looked at performance anxiety in successful women. The study had some flaws but the sense that most of us, at some time feel like an imposter; caught the public imagination and the term rapidly morphed into Imposter Syndrome.

It is now one of the most common challenges people take to coaches.

The imposter generally chips in with any combination of these narratives;

“You can’t do this and quite soon everyone will realise that."

"Don’t do that because you’ll just fail"

“You do realise that everyone is laughing at you / will laugh at you?”

“You didn’t really earn that success”

“You’re not good enough.”

These voices vary in volume and intensity and are unsettling and unpleasant. In many cases they also hold us back from doing many of the things we would like to do both professionally and personally. In extreme cases (not the remit of this short piece) it can lead to crippling and clinical anxiety.

We all have it to a greater or lesser degree; women seem to present it as more troubling than do men; although this may represent an honesty gap between the sexes. Additionally, Imposter Syndrome in women may well point to structural challenges in the workplace and society. Men also present with the “Not Good Enough” narrative more so than women.

There are a lot of techniques and strategies which coaches deploy to help their clients deal with their imposters; from collecting strengths data to looking at previous experiences or giving your imposter silly names etc.

But is it time to be a little more sympathetic to our imposters; and could this actually be a useful strategy?

Let’s take a quick look at the imposters' evolutionary function.

Essentially it is trying to protect us from what it perceives to be harm. The problem is that whilst the brain is brilliant at lightning fast responses to immediate physical threats, its risk assessment abilities when it comes to other threats are fairly poor.

In many cases the mind has logged occasions from childhood when we have indeed been hurt, ridiculed or failed and it is desperate to protect us from repeating that anguish and will ring the alert if it feels that we are heading into that territory.

In addition, it has much, much older imprints from which it tries to keep us safe. These go way back to our hunter gatherer days when taking risks or being unpopular with the pack would generally result in us being in grave danger of attack, cold, starvation and death. (The risk of attack was actually quite acute in London where hippos and scimitar toothed tigers were a real problem only 120,000 years ago!)

But how come these ancient experiences are still activated in 2022?

Well, as Homo Sapiens, we have been around for some 400,000 years.

The earliest evidence of organised urbanised living is only about 4,000 years old (Jericho) so that’s about 1% of man’s existence.

If we say that industrialised life is maximum 400 years old; that’s about 0.1% of our man’s existence.

This crazy tech driven life we are now living is max 40 years old so that’s 0.01% of our existence.

And the reality is that whilst we pride ourselves on this material progress; our minds really haven’t had the faintest chance to catch up in an evolutionary sense and so it will matrix any risks we take against these old threats. In addition it will also add in the feelings we might have had as children and so it does what it needs to do to “keep us safe”…and ultimately, it will use any tools at its’ disposal; even if that means becoming a harsh critic.

And so basically, it’s all a bit of a mess. But at heart, our imposter is really just trying its (imperfect) best to keep us safe.

And this is where thanking your imposter comes in; because fighting it doesn’t work and there’s not a huge amount of evidence to suggest that long term therapy has much impact either. But thanking your mind has actually been shown to work in numerous studies. (See Russ Harris ACT)

So when you are thinking about applying for a promotion and your imposter says that you’ll never get it, try saying “thank you mind; I know you’re just trying to help, but I’ve got this…its OK”

When your mind tells you not to speak in a meeting because you might look foolish, try saying; “Thank you mind, but we’re going to be OK"

Or when you’re writing an article for Linkedin and your imposter tells you that people won’t read it / will read it but only to laugh at you, just thank your imposter and assure it that you’ll both be ok; that you’re both safe.

With practice, you will be amazed how that voice within you will begin to soften and quieten; and over time, your self limiting beliefs will begin to fall away.

OK…..feel free to laugh now. (Thank you mind)

Playing Big

You Can Have it All