"I don't feel good enough" - IMPOSTER SYNDROME

Most of us feel inadequate. We imagine others are better than us, think they have a perfect life, and feel we are frauds waiting to be discovered. Most of us think that someone else could do better. It's this feeling that can lead to binge-eating or addiction.

• Here, I talk about how this comes from a belief about not being good enough, whether from your past or from society.  
• I encourage you to be realistic about your limitations and strengths, and to let others be impressed by you.

Try this podcast next: How to Stop Procrastinating

Citations
Some ideas here were inspired by a Nicabm training on working with Imposter Syndrome. You can buy your full training programme here

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, this is Shelly Treacher from Underground Confidence. Today I'm talking about what some people call imposter syndrome. The reason I say some people is because we're going to reframe this phrase today. But the part that I'm sure many comfort eaters can relate to is having to keep a part of yourself hidden and feeling like you might be a fraud in some way. The fear of being found out even. Found out to be not as good as other people might think you are. Like everything that I talk about on these podcasts, this is a really familiar human experience. And it's also something that you can't actually talk yourself out of, but you can understand it very differently. Social media contributes massively to this in our culture. We imagine that everybody else has a perfect life, and people present themselves as having something perfect. But the antidote to imposter syndrome is actually real connection. But let's start taking this bit by bit. First let's start looking at what's behind imposter syndrome. The basic message is that we're not good enough. The fear is that you don't fit the image that you think you should fit, that someone in your position should fit by now. The hurt underneath this will be previous failures. For example, something that came from family pressure, or some other imagined view that others have of us. So something to start understanding is how you shaped your self-worth. You can listen to my podcasts on self-worth to understand a bit more about that. But you can also investigate what someone actually does in your position and what it's like to be them. But I know it's impossible to feel that you're doing a really good job when you don't feel like you are doing a really good job. It's impossible to hear someone else say you're amazing, and for you to believe that, what you're more likely to think is, are they talking about me? Or to gloss over that piece of information altogether and completely deny it. I had an amazing friend once, and she really was amazing. She was a specialist in her particular field, and she was always in demand to be speaking in the media, speaking on television about this particular subject. And she wrote and she spoke and she made a lot of money out of this. But she never ever fell up to the task. She was always saying, I'm really nervous about doing so and so, because what if I'm just no good? And every time I saw her, she literally blew my mind with how good she was. But she can't be told. She couldn't be told. And I'm sure you can't either. This is the voice of self-doubt. It may not be true what this voice is saying, but you believe it. For example, maybe they think I'm boring. This is a really common one that comes up in your mind automatically. In most of our minds when we're talking. I feel like this all the time talking on my podcast, and it may it may be boring to some people, but it's not to me. The thinking of imposter syndrome is that you have to be an expert before you've even started something, before you even know how to do it. Again I can relate to this. My podcast started a year and a half ago, and I would never have ad-libbed in the way that I do now, but I really thought that I should be able to. I can see now with the journey that I've taken for a year and a half that there's no way I'd be able to just talk off the cuff in the way that I can now. Because I've become a bit more of an expert. I've I've got into my groove of being able to speak, which I really had to learn. But the voice was there. Why would they want to listen to me? What have I got to tell anyone? This has all been said before. You can see how imposter syndrome affects performance. So imposter syndrome is about feeling we don't belong. So it's important to look at how that developed for us in the first place. For most of us that developed in the attachment that we had to our caregivers, but also in society. When lots of my clients come in having a similar experience, it shows a societal thing. And people do come in often with a sense of whether they belong, wondering whether they fit in. You can see my shame podcast to understand some of the background to that as well. We wonder whether we are accepted. And this may actually always be a struggle for us. But one of the interesting things about imposter syndrome is that it comes up when we start being seen. We may have been told in society or in childhood that we're not supposed to be seen. And if we have, part of us may have been split off so that we now pretend that we're not who we are. The way I see this most commonly occur is in feeling too sensitive, in somehow getting the message that being emotional, being vulnerable, is weak, or is undesirable, is unattractive. Definitely a bad idea. So most of my comfort eaters have learnt to hide their emotions and their experiences and have become not very expressive. It's a form of internalized oppression that's been inherited from somewhere. Add to this that we might also never feel enough because of society, because we're female, we are of a certain colour, we're gay. You get the picture. And for many of the people listening, because we feel we should be a certain weight, and certainly get treated as if we should. And so here is where triggering gets involved, where your nervous system has a response, where imposter syndrome can be viewed as a dysregulated survival state. Again where you start to hide who you really are, because in some way that's safer. Imposter syndrome can contribute to a dissociative state, as for example standing in front of a group of people and talking. All of this happens when your narrative, the story that you learned, has not developed, and now you it's outdated and is not in line with your adult development. So of course you can see what the remedy might start to be. As I've heard from Lynn Lyons, being successful is not being free of self-doubt. Like I said earlier, you can't defeat or argue with self-doubt or imposter syndrome. You can start to educate yourself on what the factual evidence actually is of your own self-worth. You can start to value the effort that you make, the sincerity that you have with it, the intention that you have, and the fact that you're getting better and better at this all the time. Those are the things to start focusing on. Establishing a realistic view of what you're actually good at, and maybe facing what you're not good at. As one of my clients said recently, and this is actually the same client that I quoted last week, she said we all have these kinds of thoughts. It doesn't have to stop us. As children, we learn by getting pushed out of our comfort zones. We do the things that we don't know how to do yet, and we carry on doing this for the rest of our lives. I've recently taken up running, and boy is it hard. I've never done it before, and certainly not to any extent. I am up to 20 minutes at the moment, but it took me a long time to get here, and I did feel really out of my depth to begin with. I still find it really difficult, and I hate doing it, but I'm also getting the rewards of finding that my stamina is increasing, and I have these muscles in my legs which I've never had before. It feels really good. And that's realistic, isn't it? We can't be good at something before we're good at it. And we can't expect ourselves to live up to the expectations that we have of ourselves. Where does that even come from? I recently heard Kelly McGonagall speaking about Parker Palmer. He described it as normal for anyone who's ambitious to change the world or to help in some way to feel like they're not living up to their ideal of what they really believe is possible. That's quite a lot of us. 99% of life apparently is in this tragic gap that will never ever close. I talk about high achievers quite a lot because comfort eaters often are high achievers. Someone with imposter syndrome is also a high achiever and very likely to get burnouts. Because really they're spending a lot of time trying to prove that they are who they aspire to be, when really they already are. So like I said, connection, real connection, might be the way to start thinking about this. Perhaps start thinking about who you actually want to be in the change that you're trying to make. What about really connecting rather than trying to be better than somebody else? Maybe start treating it as valuable information, something to embrace rather than to deny. This is where growth actually is. It's part of your work. It's information about trying to do something you've never done before. That's not to say that you should ignore that it's been triggering. It might be helpful to recognise that this is a traumatic response and to be compassionate about that, particularly by following how your nervous system is responding physically, sensationally. Then you can start to explore what might happen if you deserved to be recognized. What might that be like? If you were successful, what might happen? And if the response is fear, then you know that this is a protector. A way to start to change that is to help regulate your nervous system. So you to help identify what triggers you off in the first place, what makes you feel something is dangerous enough for you to need to protect yourself, and then taking in some new information where you calm yourself down by connecting, by looking in the eyes of somebody, by putting your hand on your heart, by sighing, by saying, That was then, but this is now. I'm an adult now. Things are different. Creating a new story from a calm, empowered place. Have you acknowledged that you have an impact on other people? That you might co-regulate others or co-regulate with them. Your body needs to take this in. As long as you're authentic, you can't actually be an imposter. And this means making yourself available to others. This is the key for everything at the moment that I'm talking about, I think. Being safe with others. You can't be an imposter. The imposter was a way to interact from not feeling safe. The idea that you have that you might be a fake of some kind is not a fact. It's a belief coming from memories of inadequacy. Where doing and busyness mask this feeling to cope with it. Learning how to express what that belief is, that where it comes from, what it feels like, it gives the attention to that part of you, that inner child. And so then transformation is possible. You might have a belief like life is hard work, or I have to give double in order to receive support. You're naming it here and reframing it as a defensive response. Like I said about my friend, with imposter syndrome, we invalidate what others think of us and we cannot possibly hear a compliment. So to start doing something differently, to start pushing yourself slightly out of your comfort zone, ask how other people see you and listen to what they say, and see if you can let your body take it in. Or use this as an investigation to be curious about what happens when someone compliments you. Apart from anything else, often comfort eaters come to see me and they say that they don't know who they are. You can start to understand why with imposter syndrome. So again, asking others how they see you might be really interesting. You are someone to other people. Another idea I heard recently for discovering who you are is to just decorate a small piece of your home just for you. Without the perfectionism of imposter syndrome. Do you put yourself into projects too much? Do you work all night? Do you not respond to other things? Do you not eat? This is not the attitude that I'm asking you to take on in discovering yourself. This is the imposter again, this is the protector. So the idea is to just look at the look at your house, look at this area of your house that you're going to decorate, and just do it however it makes you feel happy. If you want to do it for two minutes one day, that's right for you. If you want to spend an hour on it but it feels good, that's right for you. And start to notice that when it becomes tiring, when the shoulds start to come in, when the perfectionism starts. Often the people who come to me describe themselves as lazy. They often feel that they're lazy because that's the social stigma that we've got attached to comfort eating. But my experience is the absolute opposite. Comfort eaters work too hard. So my question to you would be: how do you do slightly less? If you're going to take on this project of decorating something for yourself so that you can discover who you are, how can you do less? This is a nice little step that you can take towards a realistic goal, where curiosity is possible. Replace doing with curiosity about what you're doing. Here's an interesting little exercise that I've heard about. Let's do this one together. Without going into too much depth, just see what your answers are to the following questions. Do you like toast? How do you feel about rain? What about rock music? Now see what happens in you if I say, No, I'm sorry, you're you just can't be allowed to have that feeling. You can't be allowed to feel that way. This is what the imposter syndrome is doing all the time. If you keep trying this every time you put yourself down for feeling something or doing something, you're gonna get the picture that the oppressor really can't control what you feel and think. You can try and use this when trying to accept those compliments I was talking about earlier. As Michael Yapko said, if somebody wants to think you're wonderful, let them. If somebody wants to think you're sexy, let them. If somebody wants to think you're really good at what you do, let them. You don't have to agree, you don't have to understand it, you just have to accept it. If someone else you love did what you do, what would you think of them? And what advice would you give them? It wouldn't be to speed up and try more, would it? It would be to slow down and take a break because they're already fantastic. This brings me to the end of today's podcast. Today I've talked about how feeling inadequate lies behind imposter syndrome. I've talked about how this can come from a past belief system that you were brought up with or that you learnt earlier on in life. So we can describe imposter syndrome as a trauma triggering and also something that upsets your nervous system. I've normalized imposter syndrome as something that we all have because we all want to fit in. So this can also be understood as a self-protection mechanism. I've offered that the way out is to become more authentic and connected, and to get realistic about what our real limitations and inadequacies might be, as well as our things that we do well. And I've suggested that we learn to see ourselves the way other people see us, or at least to challenge what comes up in us when we contemplate that. I've also talked a little bit about my imposter syndrome in producing this podcast. To that end, and this might help you with your view of yourself. I can only offer you. I can't decide what you do with this offering. I can only know that I made the best contribution that I could do today. And that's how I'd encourage you to learn to think of yourself. If I can help you with that, then please join one of my groups. Check me out on undergroundconfidence.com and sign up to receive my have you ever felt like this list of feelings? I would love to hear your response to that. Next week, I'll be giving you a reminder about how the self-critic works because this is such a huge component of being a comfort eater, and I know it takes repetition to really get a handle on this. Thank you so much for listening today. I'll see you next Wednesday. This is Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence.