Encourage Your Brain: How Impostor Syndrome can give you Confidence

I'm enjoying reading Adam Grant's book, which is Think Again, his latest book. And in it he talks about imposter syndrome, and he's got some insights about it that I thought might be interesting because I deal with it sometimes, and every coach that I've ever trained, every client that I've ever worked with has some degree of that sort of imposter syndrome. So he references some research in the book that was done by a colleague of his, Tufik from MIT, and she actually looked at med students who are getting ready to do their clinical rounds, and they were going to work with actors who would present different symptoms, and then those medical students would need to identify what the correct diagnosis was. Well, about a week before that all started, she had the students rate themselves on whether or not they had imposter syndrome thoughts. So questions like, how much do you relate to statements such as, people important to me think that I'm more capable than I think I really am? So then the students did their practice clinical rounds with those actors, and they found that the ones who rated themselves high on having imposter syndrome actually did not diagnose any worse than students who didn't have any of those imposter syndrome ideas. But the important thing was that the ones that were higher around the imposter syndrome thoughts had better bedside manner. And then secondly, and this is really critical, they asked better questions and shared information more easily and broadly. And then the researcher did a similar study with investment professionals giving investment advice. They too rated higher on being able to connect, ask questions and have a better impression amongst their clients and managers. So thinking about that, I'm not advocating imposter syndrome because I know that it can, it can feel debilitating when those doubts kind of come. And yet the important thing in all of this is that imposter syndrome can actually help us both to two things: reach out to others to kind of test or get information about those little niggling doubts that we might have about something and ask better questions. And so that's kind of an interesting positive on this side of it. So if we can use imposter syndrome and say, okay, I have a doubt about something, who do I reach out to? And as I ask those questions and reach out to those people, your brain's happy because you're going to get the oxytocin that comes from relationship and connecting with people, and you're going to get the dopamine hit that comes from learning new things. And that has a direct impact on our confidence. So Just a fun little tidbit. Enjoy reaching out, connecting, asking questions so that imposter syndrome can no longer be your foe, but perhaps your friend.