Tackling imposter syndrome in the workplace | with Aimee Bateman

You're very welcome to episode 112 of the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm the CEO and co founder of Social Talent and your host for today's podcast. Today's podcast is going to be a special in case you missed an edition of the shortlist. This week in Social Talent, we announced the launch of our new internal mobility content. So today, there's no better way to celebrate than to feature the author behind so much of this amazing content, Amy Bateman, CEO and co founder of Career Kick, which Social Talent recently acquired. We wanted to showcase this episode from May 2022 that Amy delivered on the show live about imposter syndrome, which impacts many, many people at work. Imposter syndrome is especially interesting in the context of internal mobility or career progression. Those nagging feelings of self doubt can stop us from applying for promotion or asking for a stretch project, even if we're qualified and have the right experience. We're going to discuss how doubt can hold us back in the workplace and the impact of imposter syndrome on leadership. We'll also discuss practical strategies you can use to overcome these feelings and become more comfortable trying new things. I hope you enjoy the show. So you're welcome to Shortlist. This is obviously a 40 minute podcast and it's a. We get to run this every week. We get to broadcast live. And for those of you listening live, we'd love to get your questions and comments coming in here. Do so by commenting on LinkedIn and YouTube because we're going to be talking about imposter syndrome. And today, as you'll see sitting beside me, if you're watching live, we're going to be chatting with Amy Bateman. Amy is the CEO and founder of Career Kick, and you may know Amy from her wonderful videos on LinkedIn Learning. You may know her from a conference you've been at when you thought, wow, that speaker was amazing, or you've had a fortunate look of meeting her in person and you'll be even more bowled over. But Amy, somebody who is passionate about this subject, and we're going to discuss how doubt can hold us back in the workplace and the impact of imposter syndrome and leadership. And more importantly, look at strategies to use to overcome these feelings. Amy, you're so welcome to the show. Wonder if you could perhaps, in your own words, tell our audience about you, your background, what brought you here, and why this subject?

Yeah. Okay. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. So, I. Yeah, who am I? Just this random Welsh woman that you've brought on on the shortlist this week, we had loads of really talented people coming into our offices and we didn't have any jobs for them. So I started a YouTube channel called Career Cake and started making YouTube videos in my kitchen that I didn't think anyone would watch. To just try and help people find their voice in a really competitive marketplace and not need me, not need recruiters like me, and hopefully go out there and do it themselves. And obviously that grew and Career Cake now is the last decade has turned into a sort of an learning platform, helping people with. With softer skills stuff. So. So confidence and imposter syndrome has been. Getting out of my own way has been the biggest battle I've had to cope with over my 20 year career. And it's my favorite thing to talk about. So I'm really excited to be chatting about it today.

I love it. I started social talent by broadcasting and making YouTube videos under a staircase in an accountant's office.

No way.

Maybe different. The kitchen. We used to have the staff who worked in the accountancy firm, they'd march up the stairs to bring our post and we'd be in the middle of filming and go, oh, because it was just so noisy and small. So we'd have to stop filming, wait for the post to be delivered. Yeah, start filming again. Then they go, oh, I forgot a letter. It's like, no. And likewise, you just didn't know who's watching.

Yeah. Humble beginnings, right? I remember my first ever YouTube comment. I was so excited and it was somebody asking me why I. I hadn't washed my dishes because my dishes were in the back. I was like, probably need to up my production game here.

Thanks for tuning in. We're going to be finding out why Amy Bateman did not wash her dishes all those years ago. Amy, I want to jump into our first article. There's a lot in the press about imposter syndrome, particularly post pandemic. Right. As people reevaluate themselves and their careers. I want to start with one that was published in Fast Company last month. The title of this article was this is the Surprising benefit of having Imposter Syndrome. Real clickbait title there. Okay. But this article is kind of talking about, you know, a positive spin on imposter syndrome and kind of, you know, zooming in on the fact that the type of people who, according to the article, tend to have imposter syndrome are high achievers, people who are actually successful. What is your take on this article? And that particular point is that something that we should see as a Positive. Do you find it to be true or is this misleading or, you know, taking the focus off something we should be focusing on?

Yeah. So firstly, I would like to say that I love this article and I wish that this messaging was out there a lot more and I'm delighted to see it. Imposter syndrome is my best friend. Like, it's one of my. I almost call it my superpower. I often call it my superpower. The reason that I think imposter syndrome is a positive thing is imposter syndrome. Right. Firstly, 70% of people experience imposter syndrome and high achievers. So you can be a high achiever and not experience imposter syndrome. I have a friend who's kick ass, amazing, she's fantastic and she doesn't experience imposter syndrome. That's fine. But if you do experience imposter syndrome, then you are a high achiever. So instantly, in those moments where you feel like I'm not good enough to do this, I feel like a fraud, or how it sounds to me is, who am I to do that? Who do you think you are? That's what I get in my head a lot. That feeling instantly puts me in a position of power because it means I'm a high achiever. I'm, you know, if you're feeling that, you're awesome. So the first thing you should be doing is patting yourself on the back because if you weren't a high achiever, you wouldn't be feeling these things. So. So if you want to do anything, we know psychology, if you're going to go to a positive, you have to come from a positive. So you can't. If you're beating yourself up because you've got imposter syndrome and you see it as a weakness and as a failure, then it's very, very difficult to get to a positive from a negative. So you want to instantly put yourself in a position of power, pat yourself on the back and say, I've got imposter syndrome. Clearly that means I'm awesome. Now what am I going to do about it?

I loved a particular line in this article. I've just never heard this said before and I never thought about this. And again, talks about actions to try and, you know, counteract these feelings, which. The feelings. My understanding is, Amy, you can't stop the feelings from happening, most likely, but you can do something with that feeling. Yeah, I love this concept. It talked about confidence and courage, which I never thought about the two words side by side. And if I read it correctly, the article Saying that people say you need to be confident, but confidence only comes from experience. You can't just say, be confident. You need a lot of experience. But actually it's better to have courage, which is acknowledging that you're not yet in the position to be confident. But instead, if you can have courage and make that the thing you focus on, you can get over some of these issues and you can make that first step, like, does that ring true to you?

And that's what I do with the people that. When I'm coaching as a career coach, that's what I do. And also when I'm coaching myself through stuff. So you can't be confident and insecure. It's not. It's not like you're either one or the other. You can be a. You can be a person that's confident in some situations and a person that's insecure in other situations, and vice versa. What you can be consistently, however, is courageous. And confident people are not people that are just born confident and they're confident all the time. I've done some really, really courageous things, but I was absolutely panicking in the background. So courageous is. Being courageous is so much more than being confident, and it's so much more important because even when you see these people out there doing big things and they don't need to be big things in the whole world, isn't it like starting a company or, you know, launching a podcast? It could be speaking up in a meeting. It could be going for a promotion. You don't have to feel confident. You have to feel the fear and just be courageous anyway. So courage comes from feeling frightened, but doing it anyway. And that's where the strategies really, really fall into play. So when I hear people say, oh, you're so confident, I just think, no, because there's lots of situations where I'm not confident. You can be both. And we're imperfectly complex human beings, and we always. Depending on which room we're in, which situation where we're always either one or the other, but we can be courageous.

I love this. And you mentioned about trying to use imposter syndrome as a power. Reminds me. And we haven't discussed it because I'm in. I'm in the middle of reading Dan Pink's new book. Pink's work for years. He's got a new book called the Power of Regret. He analyzes regret and he's trying to. Basically, general thesis is regret is actually a really positive thing, and it's a really good thing, and we need it as opposed to being something that you want to avoid. And the chapter I was reading last night, and you know, this will make sense in a second, I swear, was talking about how one of the four categories of, of regret that he talks about are the roads not traveled, essentially. And he talks about in, in his analysis of, I think he was, got 8,000 pieces of information of people posting their regrets online. And he collected all the data he was able to find out, he said, like the acts of what he called a mission are things you don't do. And this was a category and it's kind of, I call it the road less traveled. Right. Or not traveled. So as people who kind of go like, I didn't do something, I should have taken that action. Right. Again, the lack of courage, you might say. And in the data, and this is supported by research going back 40, 50 years in psychology, people regret things that they didn't do twice as much as things that they did do. So if you even just take that as a measurement, even if you took it, it might not be the right thing and you might regret it, but the feeling of, of regret that comes from not doing something lasts much longer and is twice as profound than doing it and it being wrong. So I read that as ah, a justification for courage that on a two to one ratio, giving it a go will end up working out better twice as often as not giving it a go.

But if you're going to have a.

Regret about doing something, which you might have a regret about doing something, it will last half as long, be half as impactful as the regret of not doing something, of not having.

Yeah. And to really, to be courageous and to show up courageous, you have to really take the time and the energy to question the fear. Like, what is it that you are actually frightened of? What's the cost? I don't necessarily mean financial cost. It could be a financial cost. It could be the cost of somebody thinking, thinking that you're stupid if you say, if you talk about a new idea, but really digging into the why is super, super important to overcome anything.

So, so let me flick to our second article because it comes from Business Insider and it talks about, talks about narcissism, which is maybe right on the other end of the spectrum. And this article is by Amy Morin, again published a few weeks ago, and it's called the five reasons Narcissists are Successful at work and what you can learn from them. Now my reading of the article was that she goes heavy on the five reasons narcissists are successful at work and talks less about what you learn from them, you have to kind of make that up by yourself. But talk to you about narcissism and you know this alleged truth that narcissists actually tend to get on quite well in workplaces, what do you think about that? And then, you know, what is your take on what you can learn from them? Because I don't think the article really goes deep enough on that. But what, what can you share with our audience about what you learn from the successes of narcissists?

Well, firstly, we all have narcissistic tendencies. So some of us are clearly more than others and we wouldn't be labeled a narcissist, but we do have tendencies. So when it comes to the work environment, so we know that the majority of politicians, I mean there's a statistic that the majority of CEOs in Fortune 500 have score quite high on narcissist profiling. The thing is with narcissists is one, well, if you are one, great, I mean, it doesn't matter what I say because if you're a narcissist and you're listening to this, you're not listening. You wouldn't listen to anything I said anyway because you're a narcissist, so that's fine. But if you're working with a narcissist, you might not know. So if you're having a personal relationship with a narcissist, then you'll know. But narcissists are quite good at hiding certain elements and only showing you certain, certain parts of their Persona. And in the work environment it's pretty easy to do that, right? So especially the more senior that you are, you get more boundaries, more layers, that kind of stuff. But the thing is with narcissists is that they're really, really good at backing themselves so they, they don't really suffer from self doubt and they also take rejection really well. So I would say that those are the two things that can be in a personal relationship, quite destructive, but in a professional capacity can actually help people get on. Now I would say that I personally would never look at a narcissist. I've worked for narcissists. I've, you know, I've seen them and I've used it to motivate me in the way that, you know, you are everything I don't want to be. I'm going to watch everything that you do and I'm going to do.