Lauren Bateman, a self-taught guitar teacher on YouTube, shares how she got over imposter syndrome. She talks about building confidence and recognizing the value of what you already know.
I have so many fans and YouTubers. Ask me, Lauren, how did you get over your imposter syndrome? And I'm going to tell you my story of dealing with imposter syndrome and the steps I use to get over it in this video.
I think a lot of people suffer from imposter syndrome anyway because they feel like maybe they're not good enough. Imposter syndrome really is just a lack of confidence and what you're doing and what you have to offer. And I know for me personally this was a big thing because I'm a guitar teacher and I didn't have a degree in music. I didn't go to school for music. I barely even took any guitar lessons. I was mostly self taught. So I'm just like, who am I to teach someone how to play guitar? And believe it or not, when I started my in person teaching business, I actually didn't even teach guitar at first. I started with voice because I had at least taken some voice lessons. So I felt a little bit more comfortable with that even though I really couldn't play the piano that well. That's a whole other story. But I started with voice because I didn't feel like I was qualified enough to teach people how to play guitar because. And obviously now that my YouTube channel has almost 200,000 subscribers, it's quite obvious that I was qualified enough to teach guitar. But how did I get over those feelings and those emotions of not feeling good enough? So one day I was in my home office and I had extra guitar and I brought it into the living room and my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, she was in there and I said, can you just do a really quick experiment with me? I said, I'm just going to teach you how to play a song, would you do that? So she said absolutely. So I gave her the guitar. I showed her how to hold it really quickly and it was a simple song that was ode to joy. Very light, like single notes, Very, very simple things to do for a beginner. And I think she played two notes and I ripped the guitar out of her hand. I said thank you very much. I ran next door. She was all confused because she didn't know what was going on. And I immediately added guitar lessons to my website. Why? It was in that moment that I realized I have so much to offer someone who had never touched a guitar before. I had forgotten how hard it was just to play a single note. Nevermind, learn a song or strum a pattern. You probably feel the same in your business. There's stuff that, you know, there's stuff that you have experienced and knowledge that you have that could help someone who's, you know, 10, 20, 30 steps behind where you are, you know, I had been playing the guitar for 10 years, and I didn't really feel like I was a great guitar player because I wasn't an Eric Clapton, I wasn't an Eddie Van Halen. I wasn't a Prince or anyone else that was, like, phenomenal on guitar. But I was better than the person who knew nothing about the instrument. So that's what I did. I started focusing on clients that I could help. I started focusing on helping absolute beginners. And that started building my confidence as a service provider. And I was like, okay, I'm helping people. These people are making progress. I might not have a degree in music, but I'm getting these people from point A to point B. They're reaching their goals. They this means something. I can actually do this. And as my confidence grew and my teaching skills grew, I started taking more intermediate clients. And then eventually I started taking more advanced clients. Students that on went on to record and write their own music. I sent students to Berkeley, even though I had never gone to Berkeley myself. So step number one is you just got to get over yourself in the confidence issues, all right? It's just a lack of confidence. You. You have knowledge that you can share with people. And number two, it's just recognizing that that knowledge has value to someone, and you can provide someone with a shortcut to reaching their goal. And that's the bottom line about being a service provider and being here on YouTube is helping someone else get a shortcut to their goal. And if you can do that, then you can make a lot of money here on YouTube and a lot of money with the services you offer. If you guys are interested in seeing my YouTube journey, how I went from only having, like, a hundred subscribers to having over a hundred thousand subscribers. Check out this video right over there.
