SHORTS | Why Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Doesn’t Need to Be Hard with Jeff Webster

And you mentioned how a lot of it is mindset and about our inner narrative and mind talk. And that's something that you've done a lot of work on. Like can you share some of the specific things you've done that you've found useful to help help you manage that? Because imposter syndrome in all its different guises and the different places where it might show up, it's really common. Right. I don't think I've probably spoke to a single leader for this podcast, 160 plus episodes in, who's not referenced it either in the recording or in sort of our preparation call. So yeah. What is some of the stuff that you've personally done to help you manage and overcome that mindset?

Yeah, my nature is I'm a super reflective person and I'm inquisitive. So reading books, listening to podcasts, speaking to peers, enjoying moments of solitude. I think solitude is super important to get rid of inputs. So inputs are important to enable us to learn and to spark creative ideas, but then to have moments of quietness and stillness and solitude, be it a two hour bike ride, be a two hour run, be it a walk with the dogs, and just to allow things to settle down so you can actually have clarity of mind. That's super important for me and that works really well for me as an individual. I've not really done anything formal. It's all just been self journey, self journaling and. Yeah. And just listening to myself as in as an individual.

And how do you find the time to do all of that? Right. Being a entrepreneur, business owner, when you're really trying to scale and grow a business, especially one that you are deeply passionate about, it's flipping busy. Right. Like where there'll be lots of people listening going, oh yeah, that's great. Not nice one Jeff, but you should come and do my job. I'm super busy. I've not got time to. I'd love to read a book. Not a chance. And I've got two kids. It's never going to happen. Like how do you make the time for that? Because that's what it's about, right? If you, I guess if you value it, you make the time. But how do you go about doing that?

Yeah, let's, let's just rewind that. That is kind of a seven or eight year journey of, of discovery put into a 20 second sound bite. So I'm not doing all those things every day, every week, every month, every year. There will be points. I think balance is almost a fallacy. As well, where people say you can have it all in one week and you must seek balance. It's almost like a pendulum, a pendulum swing. Sometimes you really over index on exploring these things and you go really hard on it for a month and you just, you commit everything to it. And other times you don't listen to any content, you don't read any books, you don't do any solitude because you just haven't got the chance to. Yeah, but I think it's important to, to carve out those moments when you zoom out on a long enough time horizon rather than today, this hour, this morning, today. I think that's important to note because yeah, life gets in the way. It really does. And that's why it's important maybe to journal or to look back and take moments of reflection to see where you've come on that journey.

I love that, especially your comment around zooming out like that resonates in so many different ways for me. And your point around balance I think is bang on as well. I tend to run and live my life and business in three month blocks. I'm always creating 90 day plans and in some ways I'm maybe a bit of an extreme character, but I was chatting with a leadership group just this week actually and was doing a lot of work around personal values and how they can just be so valuable in terms of maintaining balance and making difficult decisions. And one of the things I shared with the group that some of them sort of chuckled at and raised an eyebrow. But I've got all of my sort of core values written down in the front of a journal with a couple of really specific and granular bullet points for each one. It really explaining what that means to me. And one of the things I do is I've got a recurring free monthly appointment with myself in my diary where I sit and review my values and I score myself out of five on, on each one. And what that does is it lets me adjust that balance over a longer term horizon. So if for a period like I've really been going kind of hard in the business to land a new project or something, then I see that through my values and go, okay, actually like family, I need to dial that up and put a little bit more focus there over the, over the next quarter. So I think balance day to day, week by week is a fallacy. I think you're absolutely right.

Yeah. And I love that we, we actually operate with like a 90 day world too. We, we try to stick to kind of not sure if you've heard it. The traction or the EOS model within the business?

No, I've not.

We kind of use rocks and a 90 day worldview, but personally, what you mentioned there, I must confess I've been trying to work towards that structure for the last three years and I've not made it stick because everything you say there resonates with me as an individual and that's what I could be doing. Don't like to use the word should, but that's what I could be doing. And that's what I mean towards. So yeah, it's great to hear you're using that and that might be the catalyst I need to actually implement that.

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