Rebeccah Silence, the Unsilent Woman, tells Big Papa that imposter syndrome is a trauma response she calls "playing the game" – hiding your truth to stay safe. She argues that being authentic, even when it's scary, makes you irreplaceable, and offers a free masterclass on nervous-system regulation to help people feel safe when they stop performing.
Chapters
We're live and local. It's Mix 102.5, Big Papa in the Morning, Mental Wellness Wednesday. With the world's leading love and emotional healing coach, the Unsilent Woman herself, Rebeccah Silence of unsilentwoman.com. The unsilentwoman.com. Rebeccah, good morning. How are you?
Oh, I am ready for a Mental Wellness Wednesday. Let's do it.
Let's talk about work, work, work, work, work, work. A lot of people feel like they need to play the game at work. Can we talk about playing the game or being better at playing the game at work?
Yeah. So here's what imposter syndrome actually is, is you playing the game, right? So if you ever feel like you suffer from imposter syndrome, it's not that you're out of your depth or you don't deserve what you have.
It's—
and I say this with so much love— you're being fake. And you know it, and your body is telling you, come on, let's be real, let's be authentic. And I will not go off on a tangent about AI right now beyond AI is not going anywhere. I just got back from a full weekend with the best of the best in the world getting ahead with AI and learning so much. My company has 13 agents created to help run the back end of my business in Claude right now. So there are two reasons that I want to give you to get ahead of this. One, you deserve better than feeling like crap because you're not being real and the best of you and going to work and it feels good because it's on your terms. And B, I want you to be so good you're, you're replaceable. And it is your authenticity that will make you so good that you are irreplaceable in 2024. 26 and beyond. So how do you get there? How do you get real? How do you trust it's safe to, instead of playing the game, be real and really you and more of you? You have to risk it. There is no guarantee, okay? So let me just make that very clear. I'm gonna say be honest, Be real, be true to you, and that's the best gift you can give to any organization.
When you say risk it, what do you mean?
When I say risk it, what I mean is you have no evidence that you can succeed right now without playing the game, if that's what you're doing. You have a ton of evidence that you can succeed by playing the game, which is why you're doing it, right? We always do what's most valuable to us. So When I talk about survival mode, it's really hard for a high-functioning, high-achiever, highly successful leader in business to even consider that they might be in survival mode. But fight, flight, freeze is survival mode, and I'm going to tell you right now, playing the game is survival mode, and it's a flight response. It's running away from your truth and being unwilling to risk saying the thing that you know. How many times have you been in a boardroom or in even a private meeting and you know better than what the leadership is saying needs to happen, but you're afraid to rock the boat? So survival mode can show up in business like this, and we don't even know that's what it is. What nobody else is going to tell you is we stick to survival mode, AKA playing the game, because we know we can survive it. Okay, what we don't know is we can survive alignment. I was working with a client recently who was going through a very sticky divorce, terrified, and I had to say to her, if you can survive survival, you can survive alignment. You just don't have any evidence yet to prove that to yourself. So that's what I mean by risk it. Go for it. Risk it. What's the worst thing that can happen? You spoke up about a solution. You were solution forward. You had the best interest of the company at heart, and you said the thing. There's no fallout that can happen there. There's only information that can happen there, and that information can look like this environment, this company is a fit, or maybe you've outgrown it. But you don't have to get too far ahead of yourself. Just be brave and connect to your truth and DM me on Instagram @rebeccahsilence emotional CPR, and I will send you a free masterclass to regulate your nervous system so that you feel safe not playing the game and letting go of imposter syndrome and being the real you at work. You deserve that. We spend so much time at work. Show up fully. Show up as you. Risk it.
It is a Mental Wellness Wednesday. She is the world's leading love and emotional health coach. She is Rebeccah Silence, online theunsilentwoman.com. Great stuff as always, Rebeccah. We'll talk to you next week.
