251: Listener Q&A on (Furry) Imposter Monsters

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What's Next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello my friends. Good morning. Might not be morning when you're listening, but once again it is for me. Because as per episode 246, what is your job today? This is my second day of attempting to record a new podcast, and yesterday when I saved it for not the first thing in the day, it just didn't happen. My energy got completely zapped doing other things and then off it fell. I did not get to my two jobs, podcast and peloton. So here we are. It is a Tuesday when I'm recording this and we have an awesome listener. Q and A. You can always submit one yourself@pivotmethod.com Ask Today we have a question from Maggie on imposter syndrome. Maggie, you are not alone. I get this question all the time, so I'm going to turn it over to Maggie and then I'll be back and to riff with my response.

My name is Maggie and I live in Colorado. I have been struggling with the imposter syndrome for so many years. I keep feeling as though the only way I'm going to get over the imposter syndrome is by getting some type of certification. I have my bachelor's degree and somehow that's just not enough for me.

I feel as though I need to have something that will say to other people or what other people might recognize that will legitimize my expertise. So how can I overcome? How can I deal with feeling as though I have to have some type of certification or just degree to legitimize my expertise?

Thanks again Maggie for the great question and Again, you are not alone. I talk about this in pivot, that the Dunning Kruger effect says that people who actually rank higher in intelligence would rate themselves as lower. They're aware of how much they don't know. And then those who are less intelligent typically rate themselves as higher. They are confident, more more confident in their intellectual abilities. So this is the paradox of pivoting and going for big ideas and big dreams. A 2008 Harvard Business Review article defines imposter syndrome as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success. Imposters suffer from chronic self doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence that overrides any feelings of success or external proof of their competence. They seem unable to internalize their accomplishments, however successful they are in their field. Now that sounds a little bit clinical to me. It kind of reminds me of the self help advice that I've often ranted about, that you have to love yourself fully before you can love anyone else. I just think that's complete and utter bs. I'll speak for myself when I say that yes, of course I was on a journey of self confidence, self trust, self efficacy, all the self focused activities. And yes, there is some degree of self acceptance that needs to happen. But I will tell you, I learned how to love by being in partnership. It's very hard to do that. I was single for a long, long, long, long time, despite my best efforts at times not to be and at other times really accepting it. And it's one of these things where you can only love yourself so much in your head before you're in a relationship, you're challenged by the other person. And also, what's been beautiful to me about the relationship that I'm in. I've been married almost two years now. Anniversary is coming right up. That my husband Michael has shown me all these things that he loves about me, large and small, that I would have never acknowledged in myself. Some of them feel like flaws to me. Some of them feel like really odd quirks. Some of them were just completely invisible to me. So this is the type of if then thinking that tends to happen around imposter syndrome. And I think it would just be completely unhelpful to assume that if you have imposter syndrome, you're somehow alone in that or it's some kind of syndrome. If we just even look at the phrase, the whole notion of a syndrome is like something is wrong. I take feelings of, let's say imposter feelings as usually a good sign because it means that you're stretching yourself in pivot. I talk about the difference between your comfort zone, your stretch zone and your panic zone. And there's also a stagnation zone. So if you're not stagnant and you're in your comfort zone for a little too long, I don't know if anybody is in 2020. Honestly, I think we all got booted out of our comfort zone right when the pandemic hit. But let's say you are considering some next move that's in your stretch zone. Well, in your case, if you try to think too, if you try to think or stretch or pivot too far from where you are now, that may send you into your panic zone.

When I break down feelings of being an imposter, there's two types and they serve different functions. I'll come back to those in a minute. But let me also say I have interviewed senior level executives at large companies who have said that when they accepted their role, they felt imposter syndrome. For two years, their first two years on the job, they kept looking over their shoulder wondering, am I supposed to be here? Do I even know what I'm doing? I also have friends who work in very well funded startups in Silicon Valley, companies that have landed millions and millions of dollars of funding. And they'll say to me, no one really knows what they're doing. The big secret, nobody knows what the hell they're doing. Just because they have raised millions of dollars does not mean that they have some secret genius, intelligence and aptitude that you or I don't possess. If anything, I admire the Hutzpah, you know, to go raise all that money and figure it out as, as one goes along. So yes, I do think that is a skill that's in some ways the skill of risk taking. It's being willing and it's betting on yourself and saying, yes, I am willing to learn on the job. And I think there's a certain amount, I mean, some of those people is just straight up hubris. But for others, they do have a confidence that I am resourceful, I can figure this out, I can learn from other people. And I, I'm not going to let these feelings of being an imposter hold me back because again, it's so important. And the more you talk to other people, I would encourage you, Maggie, to even ask others in your community and your network, when do they feel like an imposter? Because you realize that it's just not that unique of a feeling on some level. And the imposter monster will rear its head when you're doing big things, as I've already said.

So the two considerations, because I do think that being a self aware adult means that you of course want to be have critical thinking when you look and say, do I possess the skills, aptitude and experience I need to pursue my next move? If you want to become an accountant, you probably need some kind of accounting certification, some kind of training to do that. It just depends where you're trying to go. It depends what your natural skills are in Pivot. I talk about a lot of people thinking that they need some kind of certification or advanced degree in order to pursue their next move and that that can be a stalling tactic. It can be a way of asking for permission. So part one is to ask yourself, would this next degree really give me a robust new set of tools that I don't currently possess that will dramatically help me in whatever it is I'm trying to do next? Or am I just looking for somebody to give me permission? And the way you can tell is if you ask yourself, when I complete this degree, when I complete this certification, then what? What am I hoping that this will achieve? Or what doors am I hoping that this will open? Or what results would I be seeing in my life, my business or my career? And then work backward. So once you have the vision, because really what is an advanced degree or certification? It's a means to an end. The certification itself is never really the goal. It's once I have this attached to my great resume in the sky, what can I do with it? And if you can look at that vision of what's possible once you have this, and what would it give you the confidence to do, Then you can ask, can I legitimately pursue that even without this advanced degree at several points in my life now I'm 37 at the time of this recording. I have bought GMAT books to try to study for the GMAT and then apply to business school. And every single time I order those books, I don't even touch them. I'm allergic to them. They arrive. I never look at them. This has happened to me twice now. And the first time I was considering business school, I was working at Google. It was pretty clear that everyone who was a manager had gone to B school. It seemed like the thing to do. And I love learning, I love school. It also seemed fun to me to go be on that adventure. And. And yet it also seemed really expensive. When I asked myself, what is my goal of going to business school, it said, I want to Start my own business someday. And I did always know I wanted to be an author and a speaker. So one year, this was in 2005, I was brainstorming how could I get into business school? And I thought I should start something. I should show that I have initiative and I can start something. So I started my first website, Life After College, both to help me get into business school and to be of service to other recent college grads like me that felt lost, lonely and alone trying to figure out this whole adulting thing. Lo and behold, that decision to bolster my resume for business school ended up creating the entire pathway of me starting a side hustle, turning it into a blog in 2007, a book that came out in 2011, and that completely launched my foray into self employment. And here I am now, almost 10 years later. So I circumvented the need to go to business school by just acting as if by starting to take the steps and doing the activities that would increase my credibility and increase my confidence. Because anytime you're blogging or podcasting, I have said this many times on this podcast that I feel awkward about every single episode and every single interview. I can always hang up or stop the recording and look at all the ways in which I was awkward. But I hit publish anyway.

So if the education or certification is just for your own confidence, confidence, if it's just for a certain permission that you want others to give you, then ask yourself, that's one option. That's one path. How else could I start taking steps toward this vision? Part two of these imposter feelings. You can see I have now just edited out the word syndrome because stories and language is important and how we talk to ourselves matters. So I didn't have that idea going into this recording, but it just occurred to me as I was answering your question, Maggie, that when I hear myself say the word syndrome, I already feel faulty somehow. Like, oh my God. And then reading that hbr, I hadn't read that prior to recording. I just wanted to pull up some, look at me like some legitimate source of defining imposter syndrome. Also, partly because I'm always curious. I think of how I might define it, but I like to see how others do too. But it sounds so serious, and it sounds like, oh wow, a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success. What a problem. We must all be so flawed. No, if you can notice imposter feelings and keep going, that's it. That's everything. So don't expect this goes back to, oh, you have to love yourself 100% before anyone else can love you. If, if we all had to feel 100% confidence before we did anything or took any risks or built into the future, nothing would be happening. Yes, there's some small margin of people I went to college with someone like this that was so confident, I don't even know how I, I have often had self doubt and anxiety throughout my life and hold myself to a really high standard and kind of these remnants of perfectionism and this friend just didn't have that. She legitimately thought she was like the world's greatest princess.

Queen, queen of the world. And what a, what a beautiful way, right? What, what an interesting way to walk through the world. I, I never really had that. And because I didn't have that, it has me get down into the weeds of oh, how do I build skills? How do I build confidence? What do I struggle with? And that allows me to solve problems at a more granular level that I can then bring into this podcast. Because for the people who are just kind of flying high and super confidence, super confident and unwavering, they're not observing at the level of granular detail that you or I might be. So you can find the silver lining, you can find the strengths of feeling imposter ish and you just gotta keep moving. So my secret to anything, if, if you can see any level of quote success, I don't even like that word at all is just that when I feel awkward, when I feel imperfect, when I feel like I'm an imposter, I either take it as valid information that I legitimately like. I have a really high integrity bar. So I will not bullshit or fake things or say that I'm someone I'm not or say that I achieve results that I'm not. But when the imposter feelings get so sometimes it motivates me to actually improve and learn and grow. And then the rest of the time I just need to say, oh, there's that feeling again and keep going.

We probably all have some kind of different flavor of imposter. Like I like to think of these, the imposter monster, as some really cute furry. What's that movie Monsters Inc. I've talked about the Furry Rest Monster. So when I say monster, I actually mean it as a term of endearment, not some scary like a cute dragon or a cute monster. So what's your flavor of imposter monster? Mine tends to come up most prominently when two things my aptitude of running my business and original ideas. So sometimes I'll get an idea and then my imposter monster says, this isn't original. Or this has already been done a million times. Or look at that podcast episode that just came in. See, your idea is not original. And sometimes that's a good thing because it pushes me to say, okay, this is not original yet. And the imposter monster is not trying to hold me back. It's actually improving and refining my ideas. And then there are certain times where the imposter monster, let's say, my aptitude as a business owner will rear its head when it's in compare and despair. So it will compare myself to another person who has maybe a similar type of business and say, see, look what they're doing. Look at their results. What have you been up to? How can. How come you don't have that to show for your near decade in business? And that's when I have to remind myself that everybody operates on a different framework of evaluation. Some people's primary mode of evaluating their business or their success is money. For me, it has more to do with time and quality of life and spaciousness and deep work. And I will often turn certain gigs or opportunities for money down in order to keep a really high bar. In terms of how I spend my time or more importantly, my energy, I am really committed now and moving forward to doing things that really energize me. My friend Laura Garnett just came out with her second book, find your Zone of Genius, and she's been so helpful in helping me think through, you know, what is my genius? My friend Sarah has helped reflect to me that I like to show up and have fun. I don't like things that have too much rigmarole or bureaucracy behind the scenes. I like to be able to show up and have fun, just like I'm doing here, recording this podcast and answering your fantastic question. Maggie.

So going back to certifications, is the certification a form of permission? Are you looking for someone to say yes? Maggie, I hereby grant you permission to go for this type of job or opportunity or, or project creative, project your own business that you've been wanting to do. And if it is.

Permission seeking, then I hereby grant you permission that you do not need your certification or advanced degree in order to go for what you want. You have my permission to start now, to start small, and to just get that ball moving. And by the way, then when you have momentum of starting small and getting the ball rolling, then you can always go to school later. But you're not waiting and you're not holding that version of you pursuing that thing out into the future.

If the part of you that wants an advanced degree knows that for the type of thing you're trying to go for, it is actually vital. It is actually the thing that opens the door and exposes you to a new network of people, then that could be a really good thing. And if that's the case, I like to ask the question, what would you need to get out of that degree program in order to make it priceless for you, in order to make it worth the money and the time and the energy you spend? And then some. I share in Pivot, the story of my friend Adam, who, as he went to it, was kind of an art design business program at Parsons. As he went through the two year program, he applied every single project, every single homework to his own budding business. So every single school assignment, he was applying to his real world creative projects so that he wasn't spinning his wheels doing kind of like fake school assignments. He was always applying them to something that would serve him and his business and his clients. If you're a longtime listener of this podcast, you know that I spent a semester and a half at Union Theological Seminary. And the way that I made the choice to go there and actually apply, I also, believe me, a master's degree has a sexy quality to it. Both of my parents have advanced degrees, Masters, and it kind of. And my husband Michael. So there is a part of me that I feel like, oh, you know, yeah, there is this. I don't know if you want to call it ego or the social self that would say, oh, yeah, that would be a cool stamp to have. But I was very interested in the intersection of faith and work and what drives people, especially what helps people navigate change. That's much deeper than what's on your LinkedIn profile. And the reason that I wanted to attend seminary was as I recorded a podcast episode at that time to put myself in the path of Pivot. I wanted to be totally immersed in these topics and meeting people who are studying different things and learning how to build bridges and exploring the meaning of God, you know, like these big questions that were really appealing to me. So going to school, although it was a financial investment, it also felt that it was going to provide really rich in the moment, day to day learning and exposure to new and big ideas. And I love new and big ideas. And I loved the reading assignments and I loved even doing a lot of the homework. And the professors were fantastic. And I met really Interesting students. The only reason that I paused in the second semester was my business started really picking up and it was achieving the most momentum it had ever had. So I wanted to accept those invitations from big clients and ride that momentum while I could. And I have to say I'm glad that I did, because when I took a leave of absence, I spent all of 2019 building and rebuilding my systems behind the scenes that set me up well for the forthcoming pandemic that of course, none of us saw coming. So in that case, maybe that helps you decide that, you know, just the process. I really believe in the process of something being as important as whatever outcome you're seeking. So if the process itself delights you, excites and delights you, then by all means go. And as you can see, in the case of my grad school experience, I pivoted out. So I was there. I didn't finish my degree. I recorded an episode that I talked about how challenging that was because I never really saw myself as a quitter. And should I leave? Is this, is this acceptable? So you can listen to that episode where I kind of talk about my decision to pause school. That's 123 peeking out from the plateau. And the other one when I talked about putting yourself in the path of Pivot. And if you want to hear me talk through my decision to go to school in the first place, that's episode 109. It's called Personal Pivot. My big news and the decision making process behind it. I hope that was helpful. Maggie. I can't wait to hear what your takeaways are and where you decide to go from here. So if you want to give me and listeners an update, you can always record a follow up. And that goes for anyone else who's out there listening. If you have a question that you would love for me to address on the show, leave a voice note@pivotmethod.com ask. Thank you so much for listening everybody and celebrate those imposter monsters because it means that you're doing big things. The most important thing is that you keep going. Take one small step and then the one small next step after that.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow.

Hasn't it always.