Hello, you’re listening to unearthing gold, a podcast built to support solo self employed women as they Become small enterprise leaders. My name is Ashleigh Hayden, and I’m your host. I’m a professionally accredited behavioral coach with a background in financial services and a particular interest in stress management and burnout prevention.

My podcast is built on two core beliefs. The first being that everything you need is already within you. My role as a coach is to help you unearth your gold. Secondly, your business is a direct reflection of you, your thoughts, your feelings, your behaviors impact and influence the success of your business.

My goal with each episode is to explore a self development topic that may be affecting your role as a leader, your team, or the growth of your business, and to share ideas that you can take away and experiment with in your own way. My first episode is today, and I’d like to talk about imposter syndrome, a common and thoroughly misunderstood experience that can significantly undermine your business growth.

The first thing I want to say is that. Imposter syndrome is normal three over three quarters of businesses of business owners in the UK report feeling, having felt like an imposter at some point in their business. A really crucial aspect of imposter syndrome is that we often feel isolated, that we are the only people in the world experience to having this experience.

So the first thing I really want to touch on is that it is completely normal. Every time you try something new, it’s natural to feel a degree of fear. Your brain is built to keep things predictable and safe, so every time you try something new it will feel like a risk. You have to think about your brain as that slightly neurotic, well meaning best pal who often overreacts, and recognize the difference between your brain’s natural, bordering on hysterical panic, and the whispers of your intuition.

That can help to, in order to help you realistically assess a risk when you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone. It is also important to recognize that there are external influences that can be at play. We grow up with a degree of conditioning in life. Conditioning is where we normalize. external information like the expectations of others or feedback based on feedback that we receive from others.

We internalize this information and accept it as an unconscious rule. A really good example of this is when young girls are consistently praised for being good girls when they’re helpful and accommodating. Later in life, this can manifest as a woman who is unable to prioritize her own needs over those of others or who finds it difficult to set boundaries and consistently chases that kind of external, um, validation.

In reality, we all experience some level of imposter syndrome, some degree of conditioning, and our brains are built to create that, to make that, that experience a warning sign that we’re stepping outside of our comfort zone. We do need to recognize and validate our experience of imposter syndrome. We also need to consider untangling the underpinning beliefs that we’re, that we’re, before we’re able to banish that imposter.

With that, I want to explain what imposter syndrome is from a psychological perspective. Essentially, at the Query’s core, it is a thought pattern that depends on you buying into three key stories. The stories are self doubt, dumb luck, and the fear of being found out. Self doubt is this erosive, persistent feeling of inadequacy, that I’m not good enough.

That might, it might also underpin your belief that your achievements are not deserved. Dumb luck is that idea that all good things come to you through luck, good timing, or the wave of some other magic wand. Obviously absolutely nothing to do with your talent, skill, or hard work. And that fear of being found out is essentially despite Clear evidence of your success, usually external evidence.

You’re so convinced and wholly expect to be exposed as a fraud or entirely incompetent. When we talk about imposter syndrome on social media and things like that, we tend to oversimplify the experience. We ignore or downplay the impact and we tend to smother it with affirmations and mantras, essentially deeming it as an unhelpful personal flaw or some sort of a weakness.

By doing this, we’re actually exacerbating the impact and failing to address those underpinning, underpinning, uh, psychological patterns and not considering the possibility that there may be external factors that are having an influence on your feeling, your sense of inadequacy or fraudulence. So what I’d like to do is give you three really clear examples for you as a solo self employed woman transitioning to that small enterprise leader position and really stress the idea that this thought pattern can have a really erosive effect on your business.

I want to start with you personally. Let’s say for an example, you have a really big decision to make. Maybe you’re considering expanding into a new market. Maybe you’re considering adding some new services to your business model. Whatever it is, let’s assume that you need to make a significant financial investment.

I imagine that kind of an experience is going to come with a story, an internal story that says something like, I’m a fraud. If I make the wrong choice, everyone is going to see that I’m not capable of running this business. I don’t deserve the position. I’m just pretending to be the leader. Now I’d hazard a guess that internally, you are probably over analyzing every possible outcome.

I think you’re likely to be delaying the decision. I imagine that you’re constantly seeking validation or reassurance from someone outside of the business to assure you that making this big move is a good idea. That fear of making the wrong choice is probably going to be paralyzing, which means that your business productivity is possibly stalling.

You may be missing opportunities and that constant anxiety is pushing you toward burnout. It’s making you less effective at work and definitely prone to mistakes. I really want to stress this idea because this is the link between imposter syndrome and the effect it could have on your business, uh, on for you personally.

If we then look at your team, imagine for example, maybe you need to address a recurring issue with a team member. Let’s say they are consistently missing deadline or better yet, they don’t, they ignore your project guidelines. I imagine that the conversation that you know you need to have with that member of staff is going to feel really uncomfortable.

So you could be telling your story like You’re telling yourself a story like, I got lucky. I don’t deserve the respect of my team. I got lucky to be in this position. So if I now enforce my boundaries or I give feedback, they are going to see how unqualified I really am. Your story doesn’t have to be exactly this, but it could be something along those lines.

I imagine that you’re also hesitating to schedule the meeting. You’re probably redrafting that feedback. a million times over without sending it. And I bet at some point you have redone some work to make sure that that person’s work fits the project guidelines. When you avoid this kind of, um, clear guidance and accountability and feedback, you are effectively reducing the productivity of your team by creating an unconscious confusion and inefficiency.

In addition to that, you personally are probably feeling overwhelmed and overworked, which is putting you on that track to burnout and significant stress. It’s diminishing your effectiveness as a leader and it’s undermining your health. So not only is it eroding that relationship that you have with your team, but it’s creating those extra layers for you personally as a leader and for you as a human being.

Let’s think of another example in terms of your clients. Um, let’s say you’ve bagged that really big client, that high profile client that you’ve been daydreaming of for years. You, you know exactly what you want to do for them or how you want to work with them. You have a clear, comprehensive proposal, but as that date starts running closer, your anxiety sits in.

I imagine the story that you’re telling yourself is I can’t do this. Imagining that you’re not capable of meeting your client, that that ideal client’s expectations. I would bank on you telling yourself something along the lines of, I’m not capable of delivering what my client needs. If I charge too much or propose new ideas, they’re going to realize I’m not good enough and they’ll leave.

Let’s say you don’t cancel the meeting. Let’s say you get there. When you’re sat in front of the client, I imagine you will downplay your accomplishments. I suspect you’ll apologize excessively and I imagine that you’ll offer unnecessary and unplanned discounts. Or maybe you’ll just avoid pitching your risky ideas and stick to the inverted commas.

Script and avoid any kind of potential criticism. That lack of confidence is telling your client unconsciously that you don’t trust yourself and ultimately they will begin to doubt your abilities for the same reason. If they don’t notice that those discounts are going to eat into your profit margin and your reluctance to present new ideas is probably putting you in a situation where you can’t showcase your expertise and just how amazing you actually are.

I really want this to, I want to stress these points because I think that these examples demonstrate just how devastating these thought patterns can be and how undermining they can be for your business growth. A few years ago, I delivered this workshop, um, for a group and an audience member asked, what’s the difference between pregame, pregame nerves, and imposter syndrome.

And I think it’s a great question because we do need to acknowledge that there is a difference. Pre game nerves is, tends to be this acute, short, sharp experience of anxiety before you do something new. That’s your brain going, Oh my God, this is terrifying. I’m at risk. Imposter syndrome, on the other hand, is this chronic and persistent pervasive experience that undermines everything you do.

It can be crippling from the perspective of, from my perspective as a stress management and burnout prevention expert, that, um, imposter syndrome fuels the very early stages of burnout. When we talk about burnout, there are three very important early stages. The first is this compulsive ambition. So compulsive ambition might sound like, I need to prove myself.

It’s this idea that you’re not good enough and you need to do everything to prove how good you are. And that tends to be around educational pursuits, academic pursuits, or, uh, work. Proving yourself at work. That’s been exacerbated by this desire to do more. So I must prove myself. I must do more. And then it’s compounded by you choosing to neglect your needs where you decide that you don’t have time to take care of yourself.

So I must prove myself. I must do more. And then I don’t have time for that. Comp together puts you firmly on the path toward burnout. Now, I’ve stressed the impact. I know that, you know, it’s a thought pattern, but, and really the solutions are not there. The solutions are simple, but they’re not necessarily easy.

So I’m going to run through a couple of ideas that you might use at, in your own time, you might experiment with. What I want to stress is like, is that like all things human, we. Have a unique experience of imposter syndrome. There’s no one size fits all fix, and there’s no one size fits all experience. I really want to stress that because it’s important that you validate your unique experience of imposter syndrome.

Um, if, let’s say, for example, you and I were to work together. These are five things that I would focus on if we were, um, working together. What’s important to stress is that I would want to understand your experience of things before I decided how we could work together, um, in terms of setting, creating a strategy for you to move through this.

The first thing I want to address is that bloody name. Please excuse my language. I cannot stand the word or the phrase imposter syndrome. imposter syndrome. A syndrome tends to relate to something medical, an illness, something that we suffer from, something that we have distinctly no choice or control over.

Personally, I find the name imposter syndrome incredibly problematic because it has this indication that You don’t have choice or control. We need to be very careful with the words that we use because your brain receives that information as an instruction. So when you tell your brain that you have imposter syndrome, you are attaching that to your identity and creating a powerlessness around it.

So the first thing that I want you to think about is reframing how you talk about rethinking how you talk about imposter syndrome. When I work with clients, I like to think, I like to talk about it as a voice because in reality, we, if we, in reality, when we have an experience, an emotional experience of any sort, we need to validate that experience.

We need to, we need to acknowledge it and validate it rather than suppressing or ignoring it. So if I were to work with you as a client, I would want you to start to think about it as an imposter voice. And I would want you to listen to it and tell me what it told you. I would want you to validate its experience in terms of this is scary.

Yes, it is scary because we’re doing something new. And then I would want you to challenge that voice. This is scary. Is it though? Obviously there are that your voice, your experience of that voice is going to be unique and how you tackle it is going to be unique. When you have, when it becomes an imposter voice, you take control over the volume button.

You get to turn the volume down or up by changing the phrasing that you’re using. You’re giving yourself a degree of power back. I’ll get into that a little bit more because I want to talk about re uh, cognitive reframing. I’ll come back to that though. The next thing I want you to think about is the meaning that you’ve attached to imposter syndrome.

Often when I hear clients talking about imposter syndrome, they’ll say things like, um, I was, I was feeling a bit impostery or my imposter syndrome was, I felt I had a lot of imposter syndrome that day. I don’t want to know about the phrase. It’s just a big white label for me. I want to know what’s going on for you underneath that.

If it was a voice, what is your experience of that voice? What is the story that that voice tells you? And how does it influence your choices? Getting to know and understand your unique experience of whatever you’re calling imposter syndrome is going to help you and I work out a unique way of banishing that imposter.

The positive affirmations and mantras are great, but they’re not going to necessarily change the underpinning psychological patterns that are fueling your feelings of inadequacy and fraudulence. So you need to go back and tackle those before you start creating new language to I said about cognitive reframing, that’s something I would definitely like to work with.

If we worked together, that’s something I would definitely look at. Cognitive restructuring or reframing is a technique that I would use to help you reconstruct the story that the imposter voice might be telling you. So, for example, if you were saying, I’m a fraud. I might encourage you to think of reframing that as I feel like a fraud right now by making that distinction between I am and I feel you’re creating a level of distance.

You’re detaching the fraud from your identity. You are not the fraud. You feel like a fraud, but you’re also creating, you’re making it feel temporary because it’s right now. You’re feeling it right now. It’s not forever. It’s just here in this moment. So making that distinction is going to make it feel temporary, and it’s going to detach that sense of fraudulence from your identity.

Another example could be, I got lucky. I got lucky could become, I worked hard and I earned that. I earned this. That reframe acknowledges your competence. That’s the thing we want to do. We want to recognize that you are accomplished, that you can achieve things. So reframing to think about how hard you worked and earned this is a really, really helpful.

Perhaps another one could be, I mean, I love this one. I can’t do this. Thanks. If I can’t do this can become, I am learning and growing. You’re shifting your overall perspective on how you view your abilities and your achievements. And that’s gold. I really want to stress recognizing your achievements. You don’t know me if very well, if I haven’t made you incredibly awkward by asking you how you celebrate your successes.

When you make a conscious decision. and intentional effort to acknowledge your progress and success, you tap into your brain’s reward system and you naturally shift to a more helpful pattern of thinking. The fact is we are prone to wait. Negative information as vastly more important than positive information.

So when you document your successes, when you, you effectively intentionally rewire your brain to focus on what you’ve done well, celebrate your victories, no matter how small and build a habit of recognizing and appreciating your achievements. Finally, the fifth one, uh, I will excuse my language in advance.

I want you to reconsider all failure and fuck ups as do overs, an opportunity to try again, within reason. Sometimes failures and fuck ups are meant to show you a different direction, an opportunity you never saw before. You didn’t, you wouldn’t have considered had you not failed and all fucked up.

Equally, as much as you concentrate on setting expectations, setting the expectations and conditions of success, I want you to set this expectations and conditions of failure. I want you to pre plan how you will respond to failure. Failure can sit on your shoulder as this doom cloud that is so unknown and so terrifying in its unknownness that it becomes a thing to undermine your choices.

So get to know what failure looks like. Feel into that failure. What could it look like? What could you do if you failed? But I want you to also pre plan that success. Pre plan celebrating your progress, celebrating your success, center your attention on the emotion of celebration and anticipate.

Anticipate, anticipate, um, I don’t know why I’ve said it three times, anticipate the celebration, but appreciate that failure is a part of your growth process and you will, if you can do these things, you will significantly reduce your fear of making mistakes and, and that’s going to help you take bolder steps in your business.

Now I know as a business owner, you are going to have a lot more people relying on you. So as your business grows, you’re going to need to know how to recognize and support how to recognize imposter syndrome in your employees and support them through that experience. Recognizing imposter syndrome in others involves getting to know your team first and foremost and observing certain behavior patterns.

We’ve so far talked about your internal thought patterns. I want you to rethink when you are thinking about your staff. I want you to think about their external behavior patterns. Self doubt and inadequacy is something that you will have experienced internally. If you’re noticing in it, you may be noticing in it, noticing it in others in your team as expressions of not being good enough, being unworthy of their achievements.

I really want you to lean into recognizing people’s achievements and quite simply saying thank you for doing a good job. Attribution of, of luck. So anytime that somebody’s saying, Oh, it’s just done luck, I really want you to stress that they have done a great job. Recognize their contribution, recognize how much hard work they have done.

Um, If you are noticing that persistent fear of being found out or exposed as a fraud, it’s not necessarily something you will definitely notice. Um, you’re more likely to notice things like, um, someone who overworks. They might overprepare or work excessively to cover up their own perceived inadequacies.

They might procrastinate or delay topic, uh, tasks for fear of not meeting their own high standards, not necessarily anything external. Um, They may also be avoiding challenges. They could be shying away from taking new responsibilities because they’re worried that they might fail. Perfectionism. I’m going to cover perfectionism in some detail in our next episode.

But perfectionism is where we set unrealistically high standards for ourselves, and then we’re incredibly critical of our performance when we don’t hit those completely unattainable goals. There is also that underpinning reluctance to help now to ask for help. Now, I know as a solo self employed woman, trans transitioning to that, um, small enterprise leader, you probably feel yourself, you probably have a hard time asking for help.

It’s very common that we decide we need to do things all on our own. We don’t, it is okay to get support. Um, It is really unhelpful, however, to try to rescue someone from their experiences. What we need to do is be able to hold their proverbial hold their hands through the proverbial dark. So if you think a member of your team is experiencing something like imposter syndrome, what’s going to be the most helpful thing to do is to ask them what’s going on for them and to ask them how you might help them or what they need personally.

Recognize that they are going to be reluctant to ask for help, and you might have to ask a few times before they, before they allow you to help. If they do decide to share, I want to encourage that open, safe discussion space to discuss what’s going on for them. No criticism, no judgment. It’s really crucial that you validate whatever their experience is.

It doesn’t matter if it’s different to yours. I want you to ask kind, curious questions that begin with what or how, not why. And I really want you to, I want you to encourage them to highlight their achievements and strengths. If you’re finding it hard to get them to talk about their achievements and strengths, maybe you could highlight some that you’ve noticed and appreciated about them.

Sometimes other people notice things that we don’t notice about ourselves. Remember to not compliment anything someone can’t change

as a leader of a business. You also want to be creating a culture that promotes self that promotes that kind of open discussion and self awareness. So you can do that in a couple of ways. Um, obviously as a coach, I’m going to encourage you to come and talk to me. We can have a big chat. You can define your culture and We can create really specific, um, ways in which you can embody that culture in your, in your business and your small enterprise.

But the first thing is to encourage self awareness. One of the key ways in which we can encourage self awareness is challenging negative self talk. Anytime somebody says something derisive about themselves, we can say, but is that true? Gently and kindly, because sometimes people haven’t considered that it might not be true or that they might be speaking poorly about themselves.

The other thing is to normalize self doubt. As a human being, we are guaranteed at some point to feel a degree of self doubt. We’ve got to get comfortable with not having all the answers. And you can create that environment by encouraging your team to participate by saying something like, well, what do you think?

What do you think the answer is? Even if you do know the answer, creating a sense of openness and openness Vulnerability is powerful in terms of your overall team culture, and that’s going to help erode things like imposter syndrome, stress, burnout. I think I’ve exhausted everything I’d like imposter syndrome tonight.

I hope you found this episode helpful. And if you have, I’d love to hear about it. Um, feel free to like and subscribe. I would love you to listen next week. I’m going to talk about perfectionism. If you would like some support of your own, or you’d like to talk about your team, um, please go ahead and book a free taster session with me.

There should be a link in the show notes and thank you so much for listening to Unearthing Gold. Go ahead and share this episode with whoever you think it will benefit.