If You Have Impostor Syndrome, Then Follow These 3 Steps
“The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.” — Albert Einstein
I've struggled with Impostor Syndrome for nearly my entire life, but what if my brain is actually conjuring up this emotion as a tool for some twisted end? Follow 3 simple steps to break out of this self-infliction.
CREDITS:
Podcast Creator: Jordan Taylor
Article quoted: Commentary: Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Imposter Syndrome: A Systematic Review
Book quoted: The Courage to Be Disliked
TRANSCRIPT:
My name is Jordan Taylor, and welcome to the If Then podcast. Our brains our a conglomerate of if/then statements, like in computer code, and oftentimes new lines of code are hard to write in our mind when we’re trying new things, for example if I want to play piano, then I need to read music. Sitting down and coding that particular if then statement could take years of dedication, but when we do sit down and create new then statements for a complicated if, it feels freaking amazing. This podcast is your weekly motivation, and mine, to get uncomfortable and write some neurological code.
“The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.” —Albert Einstein
Before I announced my podcast to everyone this May, I sat in a dark room, alone.
(snap sound that echos out. Narration stops.)
(a ceiling fan eases in)
The fan was on. Too high actually, but I was in the middle of something, and I didn’t even notice my bare feet chilling on the hardwood floor from wind blasts as I sat on the couch. My brain was occupied with one of the most unique things a human can do. Something we’ve all done. Something that seems a little self-important and stupid, but… it’s actually maybe the most important thing. I had my phone, and I was typing, deleting, typing, deleting. I hadn’t used this app in years, and that was exactly why I was on it that night for that task. It was the perfect place for what I was doing.
(iPhone typing sound)
I was on Twitter. But I wasn’t tweeting. I was busy, in an inconspicuous place, defining myself. A place that was public, yet very hidden. A safe place: my bio.
(music)
“YouTuber. Hobbyist. Podcaster.” “YouTuber. Podcast host. Hobbyist.”
I was trying to make myself believe something I didn’t feel like even though I was really proud of the first two episodes that I had created but hadn’t posted yet. I knew I had a legitimate podcast, but that didn’t matter. See, I might have a podcast and therefore, by definition, be a podcaster, but every single other podcaster felt more authentic than me. I had the same suit and tie as them, we’re all at the same party, but it’s just a costume on me while it’s real on everyone else. I was an imposter. So I deleted the bio, turned off the fan, and slunk to bed.
According to the article “Commentary: Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Imposter Syndrome: A Systematic Review” “Imposter syndrome is a condition that describes high-achieving individuals who, despite their objective successes, fail to internalize their accomplishments and have persistent self-doubt and fear of being exposed as a fraud or imposter. Individuals struggling with imposter syndrome do not attribute their performance to their actual competence, instead ascribe their successes to external factors such as luck or help from others while considering setbacks as evidence of their professional inadequacy.”
I thought this feeling might go away as I released the first season of the If Then Podcast, acting super confident in each episode, even giving prizes away to those who shared. But it never went away. In fact, I’m still feeling it. Even right now, as I speak to you. I almost didn’t continue season 2 of this podcast for this reason, even though the podcast release went better than I could have imagined, reaching #25 for Education and getting 100s and 100s of shares online, all thanks to you. But as the success rolled in, I just felt lucky, like I had nothing to do with it. I was an inadequate, untalented onlooker to success that I could only attribute to luck. I was just there as the shares rolled in, as I moved up the charts, trying to convince you that I was something I wasn’t.
(Music builds like I’m going up in the charts. Then silence as keyboard typing comes in, typing the next sentence on the script.)
After all, I’m just a dude in a room, typing scripts on a computer.
This feeling was debilitating, and I needed answers to make it stop.
The other day I was pulling weeds in my unkempt garden, avoiding writing for the podcast as this imposter feeling was growing, choking out the creativity from my brain. I was listening to a book a friend had recommended called “The Courage to Be Disliked,” and in the midst of weeds as tall as me, a stalk yanked, a sapling shoveled, the author, Ichiro Kishimi, began talking about something that had me completely zoned in.
In his book, which I highly recommend, about Adlerian psychology, he began talking about where uncontrollable human emotions really derive themselves—like, for instance, when something happens and you find yourself reacting with seemingly no control. To exemplify his point of view, he uses the scene of a waiter spilling a drink all over a customer who then gets so uncontrollably angry that he shouts at the waiter, without meaning to, in front of everyone. To explain the origin of this uncontrollable anger, Kishimi writes, “The goal of shouting came before anything else. That is to say, by shouting, you wanted to make the waiter submit to you and listen to what you had to say. As a means to do that, you fabricated the emotion of anger.” Fabricating the emotion of anger? Could this really be true? To Kishimi, this anger, this emotion, was really felt and experienced. It was real, but it existed for a purpose, with an end in mind. Without that purpose, it wouldn’t have existed, he argues. This idea of fabricating emotions that I experience in order to manipulate a situation was profoundly interesting to me. I pulled another weed and thought, “What if, in some backwards way, I was conjuring up the emotion of imposter syndrome? What if I was using it as a tool for some end?”
I wanted to explore this potential paradigm shift further. Was there a buggy line of code that I was unknowingly writing in my brain—an if then statement that I needed to erase? To discover if this if then statement was embedded in my neurological code, I tried writing it out on paper. I asked myself the ridiculous question: IF I wanted Imposter Syndrome, THEN what would I gain?
To my surprise, as I stood amongst a cleared garden bed, the book still playing in my ears, yet somehow silent now, the answer was apparent.
By feeling like my success was luck, by not taking responsibility for those successes, I’m also slyly denying the responsibility for potential failure. I’m denying responsibility for my life. If my success is luck, then my failure is bad luck. None of it’s my fault. I can’t be blamed. I’m just here as external factors bump me this way and that. Sure, the amount of competence I have might play some factor, I’m sure, but just how much, really? See, by internalizing this luck-centered framework, I have little, if any, responsibility for my life. On the one hand, this framework does bring comfort in some twisted sense, but at a big cost: anxiety. And the more success I have, the more anxiety and fear I have that it might be taken away by some discovery from others that I really have no talent and that it was all just luck—that I’m an imposter.
To eliminate this buggy, imposter-syndrome if/then statement in my brain, I came up with a 3-line loop to replace it. In computer programming, a loop is code that runs again and again until a required outcome is finally met.
Take Responsibility
This step seems hard, and it is don’t get me wrong, but in a way, it’s actually easy because you already have it. Responsibility is like your shadow—it’s always there. Learning to not be scared of it or hide from it is what’s hard, because hiding from your shadow is just so easy, but it does come with a cost: you have to live in the dark, and the darker the engulfment, the more your shadow disappears, which short term is great because that was the goal, but now you have the weight of darkness over you, instead of that warm light. The more you want your shadow undefined, the more weighty the darkness around you has to be—the more you can’t see where you’re going, the more lost you become as you awkwardly stumble, still trying to reach that destination you’re dreaming of, but held back by the fear of your own small casted shadow, so you engulf yourself in even greater darkness and, opportunely, greater excuses for why you can’t see where you’re going, why you haven’t made it to your destination. I mean is it even your fault you can’t see, it’s this stupid cave’s fault.
You can’t hide from responsibility and live a meaningful life, so make it as defined as possible on the ground beneath you as you adventure openly in the warm light to your sought after destination.
2. Accept the outcome, whether success or failure.
The outcome isn’t what matters, because the result doesn’t define you. What defines you is that you actually got up, made a decision, moved in a direction. Sure it was your first decision—maybe it wasn’t the best one, but at least you made one, and learned. By accepting that you have the power to decide your outcome, is terrifying. It’s not luck, it’s not chance, it’s not other people, it’s you. I cannot think of something more terrifying and empowering than that. Accept that you can royally screw up and that you can wonderfully succeed, and either way, it’s on you, and that’s a good thing.
3. Treat success or failure the exact same way: as a learning experience.
Your reaction to success should be the same as failure. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, “If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same—yours is the world and everything that’s in it.” You’re never changing. You’re constant. If you’re praised for your work, you accept the praise and continue learning. If you’re corrected for your work, you accept the correction and continue learning. Either way, you’re moving forward. Constantly. The only way you move backwards is when you revel in praise or when you stoop in failure. By taking every scenario as the same learning experience, success and failure will start to meld into one continual forward motion for good.
After line 3 is complete, start again at line 1, accept responsibility, then get feedback from your decision’s outcome, then learn from the feedback, then start again at line 1, and repeat.
This is how you debug imposter syndrome from your mind and realize that your life and where and who you are is not luck and you don’t want it to be—it’s responsibility accepted, it’s outcomes experienced, it’s adjustments made. It’s you, and yes, that’s scary, but would you really have it any other way?
So I’ll leave you with this: “The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.” —Albert Einstein
Thank you so much for listening to the season 2 premiere of the If Then Podcast. If you have feedback you want to give me, I would love to hear from you over on my instagram @ifthenpodcast or by emailing me at contact@ifthenpodcast.com. And if you would, leave me a 5 star review if you found this podcast valuable. It really helps the podcast to get seen by other people like yourself. We’re almost at 500 reviews on Spotify and 250 on Apple Podcasts, and on a personal note, I love reading what you have to say in your reviews, like Apologetics Guy who said “I feel like this podcast has been removing my obstacles to success one by one. This is incredible.” If you remember, last season we surpassed 100 shares on Instagram, and for that, I randomly selected one of you who shared and gave away AirPods—Tyler was the lucky winner and was super excited, but this season, however, I wanted the prize to be even bigger and more exciting. I really wanted to go all out as a huge thank you to everyone who’s been sharing. So I’m giving away AirPods Max with a special If Then Podcast engraving. These things are sweet and I’m jealous of whoever gets them. All you have to do to enter to win is take a screenshot of this podcast and share it on your Instagram while tagging the account @ifthenpodcast in the post or story. If you’ve shared before, you can always share again to be entered to win this season. If we get to 200 shares by the end of season 2, you’ll have a chance to win the AirPods Max. And don’t forget, as an extra bonus, as you share and spread the word each week on Instagram as we’re building to that 200 mark, I always give away 2 free 1 month Audible gift cards every week I release an episode, which includes a free credit for an audiobook of your choice + access to their Plus catalog which includes thousands of audiobooks with no credits needed. Again, screenshot this episode, tag @ifthenpodcast in your post or story, and you’ll be entered to win both an Audible gift card this week AND AirPods Max at the end of season 2. And be sure to follow @ifthenpodcast on Instagram to find out if you’re the winner this week. Thank you so much for listening, my name is Jordan Taylor, and what if/then will you write today?
