Donna Lichaw: preference

Transcript context

…I'm good enough, I'm strong enough, and gosh darn it, people like me or love me. There you go. It's like you could do that, and it's all very mechanical, and there's ways to prop yourself up, but what if you took a counter-intuitive approach and looked at that story, I'm an imposter, and instead asked, "Okay, that's a good story. How is that serving you?" Imposter syndrome, it's something everyone has at one point or another. When we default to these behaviors of, "Oh God, I'm an imposter. Okay," over and over and over again, I know it doesn't feel good, but we default to that because it's serving us in one way, otherwise it wouldn't become a habit. And I always think of habits as an itch. If you have an itch, you scratch it, you feel better. There's a reason why we scratch itches; it feels better. If you do it too much, it hurts. And something like that, telling detrimental stories, have that impact. But when you can intercept them at just the right time and say, "Okay, what if that is true? How does it serve me to constantly say, 'I'm an imposter whenever anything gets hard?'" One co-founder I worked with a while back, she did this whenever things got too hard. And then she was convinced, and founders have this a lot, "Who am I to be running this company? And what am I doing here? And oh my God, I can't be doing this." But when we looked at how that habit of calling herself an imposter served her, what she realized is that every time it kicked in, she worked harder. And it just meant she was hitting some kind of a growth edge. When she would jump into action, she would learn something new, she would read 20 books, she would go out, take a class, she would listen to podcasts and on and on. And she would get better at this new thing, it was fun for her, and then she would feel less like an imposter over time, so it was a very functional thing for her. The problem is when she did that too much... I work with a lot of women who this is the case for. She often did way much work. And so she took on emotional labor for other people. She did 10 times as much work as she needed to do, actual work. In her role, she was playing COO and CFO and CEO. And it's just like she didn't need to be doing all of that. And so on a spectrum of it's actually helpful, give yourself a pat on the back for jumping into imposter zone every time things get hard to the other side of the spectrum, which is, okay, but when it's too much, you burn out. You're doing way too much work for other people. You're falling into these unfortunate conventional gender roles that doing extra work you don't need to, so you want to find a happy medium. But I think that the trick is, with imposter syndrome, to not deny it, to embrace it as much as you can, but not embrace it so much that it ends up holding you back. Yes, functional. Even things that we think are bad for us are actually good. I love that advice. It's so much easier to just, okay, yep, it's true. Maybe I am an imposter, but here's how he can maybe help me while I feel this. And this actually reminds me of another coach who did a guest post on my newsletter a long time ago, and her advice is, "Yeah, you probably are an imposter. You're in a role you've never done before. And that's pretty normal, and that's okay. And here's how you should approach it."…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.