Dr. Lisa Orbé-Austin: World Renowned Psychologist, Executive Coach & Authority on Imposter Syndrome

In the 100th episode of "Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee," host Alex Pascal speaks with Lisa Orbé-Austin, a psychologist and executive coach specializing in impostor syndrome, career advancement, and leadership development. Lisa, the author of "Own Your Greatness" and "Your Unstoppable Greatness," shares her personal struggle with impostor syndrome, which began in her childhood and persisted through her academic career at Columbia University. A turning point came when she left a toxic job, redirecting her path toward helping others through psychology and coaching.

Lisa explains that impostor syndrome goes beyond mere self-doubt, encompassing perfectionism, difficulty internalizing success, and a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud. This syndrome is widespread, affecting individuals at all levels of achievement and often leading to burnout and career stagnation. She argues against the idea that impostor syndrome can be a positive motivator, instead advocating for overcoming it to achieve true success and fulfillment.

To combat impostor syndrome, Lisa suggests acknowledging and accepting the learning process, embracing imperfections, and internalizing successes. She also highlights the importance of seeking supportive mentors and fostering self-awareness through continuous conversation and reflection. The episode concludes with a focus on the necessity of humanizing the experience of impostor syndrome and maintaining open discussions to support personal and professional growth.

Transcript

Lisa: I do think it’s super important to be able to take a look at a moment in which you are learning and growing and feel not good enough, like you’re not top of the game but that doesn’t mean you’re an impostor. You can be learning and still be competent and capable and doing what you can in this moment with what you have.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is the 100th episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. For this very special episode, we have a very special guest. Lisa Orbé-Austin is a psychologist and executive coach specializing in impostor syndrome, career advancement, and leadership development. She’s the author of Own Your Greatness and Your Unstoppable Greatness. Please welcome Lisa Orbé-Austin.

(Interview)

Alex: Hey, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi, Alex. 

Alex: Great to have you here today. You were just doing your Coaching.com Summit session the other day so this is like – this week is all about Lisa at Coaching.com. I love it.

Lisa: That’s very sweet.

Alex: It’s a pleasure to have you here. The topic you’re an expert in is the topic that’s always been very relevant to me in my coaching practice and I believe it’s very relevant to most people in the workplace and most coaches that work with those books so I’m really excited to have a conversation today. But before we do, let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, we don’t always drink coffee, what are we drinking today?

Lisa: I’m drinking water. Yes, I’m drinking water. I don’t drink coffee because I’m actually allergic to caffeine, which I learned when I was 15 years old, traveling back from Italy and had an incredible reaction to drinking coffee. My parents were quite disturbed when I got off the plane, thinking something had happened to me but I was like almost like manic. It was pretty funny. Funny in retrospect but not in the moment. So, I haven’t really touched coffee since then. So I drink generally water. 

Alex: That’s honestly – I feel you. Once you have an experience like that, you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t really need that,” so, yeah. Well, thank you for accepting the invite to this usually caffeinated podcast. I am also drinking water but I ran out, as I was telling you, I am at a hotel and I ran out of the regular water so now I’m on sparkling water so, yeah, love a little sparkling water. 

Lisa: I do too. I love a bubble.

Alex: Yeah, can’t go wrong with that. Amazing. And this hotel, they get it right. It’s all glass. I have a thing for like, I like glass. I don’t like plastic. I saw the other day at LAX, now they’re selling like water, Evian water that’s on glass after you can go through security, which I feel like that could become a weapon but maybe that’s a conversation for another day but, yeah, I was like, huh, now we’re letting people buy glass on the other side of the security line.

Lisa: That’s an interesting choice, yes. I understand why but it definitely could be an issue. 

Alex: Good for the planet, maybe not great for the people on the plane at some point, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I don’t want to give anyone any ideas but our audience, I think, rarely would have a problem with that so we’re good. See, this is me in a great mood because we’ve just had such a great day in the summit with great sessions. 

Lisa: Oh, that’s so great. 

Alex: Yeah. So I’m probably making more jokes than I usually make in this podcast but that’s great. So, take me through your journey. How does one become an expert in impostor syndrome? It’s fascinating to me? 

Lisa: Yeah, I don’t think that’s where I was planning to go. I don’t think this is what I thought my career would lead to but it came from my own experience and so I’ve probably struggled with impostor syndrome my entire life. I grew up in a very kind of like homogenous environment where we were the only family of color growing up and often felt not good enough, not smart enough, not capable enough, was often told that, so it was really kind of like reinforced for me a lot of my life that I really wasn’t good enough to be in spaces. And so this is something I had probably thought was just a thing I was experiencing, I really didn’t recognize that it was a larger global thing probably until I was introduced to the term in graduate school but it was something I was contending with all the time. I always felt like I was a fraud. I always felt like I was one step away from destroying everything or kind of everyone seeing what I was truly capable of. And so it was super familiar to me. And going through grad school, every single moment I think I will have an achievement, I always felt like it was going to be ripped away from me because it wasn’t real. As I remember, when I started my doctoral program at Columbia, the first day we were there, we had an orientation, and doctoral programs generally in the US are pretty small, like a class is like five people, six people, and so it was the six of us in our cohort talking about what we had done to be there and what we’re excited about and who we were and I remember just feeling like everyone had all this experience and had done so much and I had done so little and what was I doing here and I left it feeling really insecure and I ran into my advisor on the way out of that room and he said, “How you doing? How was your day?” and I said, “Well, I’m just feeling like I don’t belong here,” and he said, “Well, I guess we’re gonna find out if that’s true.” And it really made me anxious. He didn’t comfort me, it made me feel like he doesn’t even know if I belong here and I spent the rest of my doctoral career doing what I typically do, which was proving myself, overworking, over functioning in order to prove I belonged there for years and years and years until I was heavily burnt out. So burnt out that by the time I finished my doctoral program, I felt like I was barely crossing the line – like barely graduating, like I felt I was on my last fumes. So I ended up taking a job that was probably far underneath what I could achieve but I just felt I had nothing in me. It actually wasn’t the worst job, the first one, and then the second one after that job ended was like a short-term contract. After it ended, I took another job and that was a super toxic job and that toxic job had a very terrible boss who would humiliate me and the job was actually – I would teach faculty how to teach, which is a very difficult job at a university setting because faculty are the top of the rung and, as an administrator, you’re not seen as smart, credible, even if you have a doctorate, and so it can be really hard to get them to listen to you and to try different techniques when they’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years. And so to be humiliated in front of them was very difficult because it really made my job harder because if they didn’t think my boss thought I was capable or smart, they weren’t going to think I was capable or smart so it became really hard to do my job. People would question me very actively, felt like they could challenge me, which I don’t mind a challenge but it often made the work harder and longer and more difficult. And he was just – I found that I was being paid half what the person who did the same job as me was being paid and he refused to change my salary or increased me. He was just a very terrible person. But I couldn’t leave the job, I really felt like this is all I can get, this is all I deserved, I’m never going to find anything else, and even though everyone in my family was telling me and my friends were telling me you got to let go of this, I could not do it. I couldn’t search up anything. I told this story on a Monday coaching seminar, Coaching.com seminar, which is that we were in a meeting of senior staff members and it was all female senior staff members and there was music playing in the background and someone said, “What is that music that’s playing in the background?” he said, “It’s music to soothe the savage breast,” and in that one moment, I became absolutely clear that he knew what he was doing, this was never going to change, and the only person that was going to change it was me. And so I went back to my office, I called my husband, I said, “I need to quit,” and he said, “Quit,” and so I made a plan as I’m talking to him to clear out my office over the weekend, I came back into my office over the weekend, cleared everything, cleared my computer, cleared my shelves and did all that and then I quit on Monday morning and what I didn’t share on Monday was that when I quit, he threatened me. He said I would never work in education again. My money was what we call in the grants world encumbered, which meant that it couldn’t be spent for anything but my salary so he couldn’t use the rest of the money for anything so he was angry at me. He yelled at me. He cried at some point. He threatened me. It was a really emotional and very difficult moment but because I had cleared my office and I did it on purpose, I could not go backwards. Because I knew if he was emotional and did these things, I might go backwards. I might say, “Okay, I’ll stay two weeks, I’ll stay three weeks,” but I knew my office was empty. I knew my computer was – I knew everything was gone, I could not go back to it. And so I walked out of that office and left and I felt terrified. I felt terrified. I came home and had a panic attack where I was like circling my living room in a panic that I had messed my whole life up because he said some words that were terrifying and especially after all the work I put into my life and my career, it just felt terrifying. But in two weeks, I had a new job and the job was paying more than my full-time job was paying, I was only working two days a week, and it began the beginning of me starting the thing that I wanted more than anything, which was to start a practice and to see if I could do this on my own. And so I started the practice, I started to build the practice, both the psychology and career coaching practice, and I also started working on my impostor syndrome and I started writing about it. And so I started talking about what it was like, I started writing about what it was like for different people, I started doing research on it, and I started a deep dive into it. And from my writing, that’s where my editor found my work and she reached out to me and she said, “I see you’re writing about impostor syndrome. We wanna write a book on impostor syndrome. Would you like to be the author?” And it felt crazy. I actually thought she was punking me, that this wasn’t real. 

Alex: So you felt the impostor syndrome as you were offered a book on impostor syndrome. 

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And the entire I’m writing it and everything leading up to it, everything was impostor syndrome galore. It was real.

Alex: You had to walk the talk. 

Lisa: Yeah, I had to walk the walk that I was like saying, I was preaching constantly. And so that’s how it all happened. It’s a long answer to your question. 

Alex: It’s supposed to be long. Sometimes, I ask that question and after 35 seconds, my guest is done and I’m like that was a very quick journey. I am not ready to ask you another question.

Lisa: Yes, that’s how it happened. My own personal journey led me to this moment. 

Alex: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. So many questions are coming up for me and I’m really excited, like I said at the beginning of the episode, because I think this is one of the most pervasive, most common issues that come up in coaching. And perhaps some coaches feel like that too. I think it’s actually super common and I hear from a lot of my coaching friends, “How am I going to CEO of a Fortune 500 company?” I mean, when you think about like the essence of coaching, you’re going to be put in positions where that’s going to be something that comes up. 

Lisa: Yeah. That came up for me. I remember my first C-suite person really clearly, it was a CFO of a tech company that just sold and I remember I put a suit on, I straightened my hair, I just felt I wasn’t good enough as I was because he clearly thought I was somebody other than I was if he was coming to see me. And we still work together and he’s fantastic and we’ve had a lovely experience together and I am much more who I am today with him than I was back then and I think I’m much better of a coach than I was back then today for him. 

Alex: I love that we’ve seen to the first question that I have, there is a positive element of impostor syndrome in that it pushes you to want to be better, to kind of want to earn what you think you may not have earned yet. Where does that cross into something negative that hinders your growth?

Lisa: So, I don’t believe there’s anything positive about my impostor syndrome. If I could have done my career, my educational experience without it, I would have. Even if it would have meant giving up, like giving up the current kind of fame I have or expertise around impostor syndrome, I would have given it up in a second because it was incredibly painful. So much of my career spent overworking, trying to prove myself and never ever feeling like I ever did. So, I do think like there is often this understanding that impostor syndrome is what’s making you successful, what’s making you drive, what’s making you push harder, and, frankly, I would say I’m on the other side of it. Sure, I get triggered at times but I’m on the other side of it, I still drive, I still want, I still do. It hasn’t made me less of an ambitious person. It actually has made me more ambitious, frankly, and actually has made me do more with my career because it feels much more in my hands in less than other people’s hands. I own what I want, I take charge of what I want, I less let people bestow it on me, and when I was impostor syndrome, I let people bestow – from my hard work, I would earn things, but I would never kind of go out and get it or I would never go out and seek it, it would always have to come to me. So I’m not a big believer that there’s any good reason to be holding on to it and the research sort of backs that up, that you will be more successful or as successful without it. It’s not the reason you are successful.

Alex: How do you recognize the difference between a genuine concern about one’s abilities and actually falling in the trap of impostor syndrome?

Lisa: Yeah, I mean, I think you point to something really interesting that’s really kind of entangled with impostor syndrome, which is that we like to be perfect at the thing. Even if it’s our first time doing it or we’re just beginners, we want to be at that echelon because we feel like mistakes are proof that we don’t belong or we’re not good enough or we’re a fraud. Meanwhile, so we have a really hard time tolerating learning or being in a space of not being at the end point. And so I think that’s such an important piece of dealing with your impostor syndrome is being able to tolerate that learning phase where you don’t know everything, when you’re not on top of your game, and that that experience is normal and it’s also healthy for us to be able to tolerate that experience. So, I do think it’s super important to be able to take a look at a moment in which you are learning and growing and feel not good enough, like you’re not top of the game but that doesn’t mean you’re an impostor. You can be learning and still be competent and capable and doing what you can in this moment with what you have.

Alex: What are some of the strategies for recognizing that you may have impostor syndrome and shifting that mentality so that you can come out the other end?

Lisa: Yeah, so I think, in social and other places, because of the format, you see these very simplified notions and maybe because also people don’t understand what it truly is of what impostor syndrome is. It is not solely self-doubt. It is not solely the experience that you don’t feel like you belong. It is not solely feeling kind of inadequate or anxious. It is a constellation of things. So, when you think you might be guaranteeing impostor syndrome or your client may, you’re trying to kind of understand are there a number of these points that may be showing up that make this impostor syndrome? Self-doubt alone is not it. So, is it sort of this experience of you are very perfectionistic about the way that you show up at work, anything less than perfect feels like you’re not good enough? Do you have trouble making mistake? Do you feel like once you make a mistake, it is evidence that you’re not good enough or not capable? Do you hyper focus on mistake making as a way to cover back up the feelings of being an impostor? Do you have trouble internalizing successes and wins? Do you overestimate others and underestimate yourself? Do you choose mentors because the mentors are here to externally validate that you’re doing the right thing rather than have mentors for the variety of reasons that mentors can be helpful and useful to us? So, it’s really looking at the constellation of things that actually show up. And if they’re ticking most of those boxes, then now we’re talking about impostor syndrome. I think, because I do this for a living and I’m public about sort of what I do, most people come to me and kind of have already done that work so they know it so I don’t see a lot of people who may or may not have it. I don’t have to tease that out generally. But for people who do, you’re looking for a variety of checkboxes and, oftentimes, they’re like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You’ll see that as opposed to just self-doubt.

Alex: Be interesting if we could capture the people that believe they have impostor syndrome but believe they’re not good enough for you to work with them too.

Lisa: I mean, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen people have a consult with me and they’re like, “I don’t know if you would see somebody like me,” and always amazing. Think they often feel like a sense of am I good enough even to work with somebody. I always talk about my own struggles. I feel like it’s really important that I’m human in all of this too. Having impostor syndrome, the humanity of it all is often hidden behind walls. You know the humanity, you’re living with it but nobody else is privy to it so I’m big on really being human in my own experience, because I think it’s important model for other people who struggle with it.

Alex: Like so much of the human experience, there’s layers of complexity here where some people can really be aware of their impostor syndrome and some people may actually look super confident and may even think they’re confident but there’s some deep-rooted issues that come up in some ways. 

Lisa: Yeah. 

Alex: Do you find that the impostor syndrome kind of manifests itself differently? So, sometimes, I’m thinking of some situations when I’ve worked with a client and they have a difficult boss and the boss first sounds like all knowing, incredible, wow yet tough in some ways that they need development, but, in some cases, I’ve thought I actually think this person has impostor syndrome and they’re going about dealing with it in the wrong way where they’re lashing out with others. Is this something that you’ve seen?

Lisa: Yeah. So two things make me think about, one is that we do see gender differences to some extent, not the amount. So you hear this all the time, women experience impostor more than men, that’s a myth, that’s not true, it’s not validated by the literature. But we do see differences in the ways, and this is not for every woman but, generally, what we see for women is that they tend to be counter phobic. So, for women, and this is just under women, we will tend to face the thing that we fear, but as a result, we’re triggered more often because we’re not afraid to kind of face the thing. Where men, what we see persistent in men is that they tend to really be much more wary of risk. So, as a result of being wary of risk, they tend to affiliate with peers that are less qualified than they are just because they are more aimed toward mastery and they don’t want to be exposed and they prevent or kind of want to reduce risk of exposure. So we see a lot of underperformance in men who have impostor syndrome. But, to your other question about impostor syndrome and leadership is that we do see leaders with impostor syndrome show up in very unhealthy or unhelpful ways to their direct reports. So they tend to be very micromanaging of direct reports and they tend to want to be overinvolved because of the way that impostor syndrome works, because the idea is if you mess up, then you are representing me and then I will be exposed as not a good manager. So, oftentimes, that is part of what’s undergirding this experience of their overinvolvement in your work or their hypercriticism of when you make a mistake. The other thing that they tend to not be good at is they tend not to be good at when they make mistakes or other people on their team make mistakes, they can be critically very, very harsh and not taking this as an opportunity for everyone to learn, that learning happens, mistakes are normal, they tend not to be in that camp. And then also too, they’re really not often good at representing the team’s wins or the ways that they tend to be like, “Okay, we did that. Let’s move on. What’s the next thing?” and so, as a result, the team doesn’t get the credibility or the kind of notice that they need to get and so they can be a problem in a variety of ways that are really hard to manage as a direct report because you don’t really have influence in the way that they’re going to deal with this and you have less power to kind of have that conversation with them. But I do think, for managers of managers who see this going on, it’s so important to be able to nip this in the bud, address it, tell them what you may see is going on. I also think coaches who coach managers who are exhibiting this need to examine what’s going on with the way they’re so harsh on their direct reports or the way that they’re showing up for their direct reports and get underneath it. So I think there’s a points of intervention but they typically come from either coaches or their managers, rarely from the direct reports. 

Alex: If the coach has a sense that their client is suffering from impostor syndrome, what’s the best approach? Is it, do you talk about some of the underlying mechanics? Do you actually bring up the fact that they perhaps have impostor syndrome? Like what’s best practice for a coach to go about managing that?

Lisa: Yeah, typically, I would say you want to have a relationship with that client, it probably isn’t in day one or day two of your working relationship because, currently, there’s quite a backlash against impostor syndrome, especially on social where people are saying, “Don’t tell people that they have impostor syndrome,” and blah, blah, blah, so there can be reactivity from the client around being told that they might be experiencing impostor syndrome so I do think building a solid relationship with them is key first before you kind of venture into that zone in case there is some defensiveness or reactivity. But I do think then kind of after you have a sense of what some of the key elements might be is to raise, “I’ve noticed X and Y and Z going on with you and I think it connects to this experience of the impostor syndrome. Here’s what it is,” and then you explain it to them. “Does that resonate for you? Or does that feel familiar to you?” And if they have some reactivity, process the reactivity. Why are they being reactive? And I think what you’re hearing currently in the zeitgeist is don’t tell women that they have it, it’s another form of oppression, don’t tell people of color. But what’s interesting from the research is that because of the marginalization of women and people of color, the consequences to them are much more significant. And so it is so important for your client to realize what you’re seeing on social about the fact that it’s a way to kind of marginalize people of color is actually erroneous, because if you keep this impostor with you, you’re likely to have more negative consequences than if you actually believe you don’t have it and this is normal, this is normal and this is okay for you. Because what we do see is lower salaries, more organizational loyalty so people don’t actually leave jobs they need to leave, that they’re really bad at networking and building relationships so it has all kinds of career-related consequences that if you don’t deal with them, have all kinds of repercussions long term. And I think once they can understand that and see that, they can kind of connect to it. And you could tell them, “Look, there’s a way out of it. It’s not something you have to be dealing with the rest of your life, there’s a way for us to deal with it and have tools so that you don’t have to deal with it the same way you are today.”

Alex: That makes a lot of sense to me. And, sometimes, the people that are out there as kind of saviors of anyone, there’s this complex of wanting to save everyone these days and it comes from a good place but the way it gets manifested is actually not a good thing and we see that at society at large so I’m glad that the research here supports that it’s better for them to acknowledge that they have impostor syndrome so they don’t fall in the trap that lead them to a lower salaries and all these negative consequences from being afraid of feeling bad about having impostor syndrome. Well, maybe it’s better to feel bad about having impostor syndrome and working through it and having a higher salary and better career path than not feeling bad about not having it –

Lisa: Yeah, less burnout. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And I think, to me, one of the fundamental things I think that is wrong with that kind of line of argument is what you do is you take marginalized people, like women and people of color, and then they’re stuck with impostor syndrome forever because now you’ve told them they don’t have it and this is society putting it on them. Meanwhile, they are individually struggling with this. That’s the piece that I’m most upset about nowadays, because I even have people coming to me to do work who say, “You know, I’ve told a friend or colleague that I have it and they’re like that’s garbage, it’s garbage.” And they’re like, “I felt so hurt and so dismissed and now I feel even more shame about it.” And so it’s actually putting people further removed from actually doing the work that they need to do to be stronger, better, more of what they want. 

Alex: It does. You know, I’ve been studying kind of like different human development for a very long time and I think a lot of that specific level of development that’s represented with post modernism and pluralism, sometimes, it’s a very narcissistic thing to tell someone not to engage in this kind of understanding because it makes you feel better about the way you’re managing your relationship with a marginalized group but it’s actually not benefiting the marginalized group when you’re doing it and I think it’s probably one of the core, most problematic areas of society today is how you deal with the fact that we all want, or most people want to be good to each other but, sometimes, the way we’re good to each other is having difficult conversations. And you’re in academia, I think – my favorite thinker and writer is Ken Wilber and he wrote my favorite book in 1995, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and, essentially, that book is a rant against post modernism in its negative form, which essentially says no hierarchy is better across the board without recognizing that that in itself is hierarchical. So when you’re missing the point that your perspective has this very limiting perspective that’s actually counteracting your own perspective, it creates all sorts of use so when you were describing that, I was like that’s a great example of how the side of post modernism that is a little bit extreme and misguided actually doesn’t benefit people and the only people that feel good after that conversation are the people that just feel like they just said to someone, “Don’t feel marginalized because you’re not,” when they actually are and it doesn’t help, at the end of the day. And these conversations are difficult, even I struggle sometimes in the podcast, opening up this side, because, immediately, there’s politics to it but there’s also a human development perspective that is neutral, it’s not politicized. You can politicize these topics but the reality is that they’re real. So I love the example that you brought up around impostor syndrome because it’s one of those very clear, like, “Well, if you wanna help someone, it’s better for them to get help and not to prevent them from getting help because they may feel some shame around having what they have.”

Lisa: Yes. Yeah. And to kind of like – because I think the argument is, structurally, racism did this to or misogyny did this to you and it’s like it can be both/and. It can be misogyny is a problem, racism is a problem, and they have an individual work that they have to do to kind of deal with the ways that it’s impacted them individually. And so I don’t like this either/or dynamic, it can be a both/and situation, problem is they’re going to have a lot harder time dealing with and eradicating the systemic issues than they are going to have dealing with the individual issues. And I always say this, which is like we are going to work faster on your impostor syndrome than we’re going to racism and sexism and all of these, all are going to still exist but you’re going to have a very different relationship to it at the end. And so I do see people who are coming out of racism or in racist systems or misogynist systems and they go back and they have a very different orientation to it. They have a lot more agency, they have a lot more sense of their own power, they have a lot more sense that they can actually control whether or not they belong to the system or not. Where before, they didn’t feel like they had a choice. And so it’s not that these things are going to go away but your interaction and the way that you handle them are going to be different when you actually deal with these things.

Alex: There’s a brilliant book by an African American academic at Columbia, I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work, John McWhorter. 

Lisa: No.

Alex: He’s really incredible around this topic and he has a book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, and I think it pretty much aligns with what we’re talking about and it’s just very –

Lisa: Is he the communications guy?

Alex: Yeah, he is. Yeah, yeah.

Lisa: Oh, gosh, I don’t know if I align with him. I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of ways that he looks at things but I do see that we do need to have a more nuanced conversation about these things because I do think sometimes people are missing the boat and, as a result, hurting people to kind of believe in kind of like a blank slate way that it’s all this or it’s all that. It is a mix of these things and so important to really be able to kind of see that. And to see also your power in these moments because I do think it exists – I’ve seen it exist. It’s not even like I think, I actually have watched it happen. 

Alex: Yeah. And like everything, maybe sometimes there’s a little bit of an extreme perspective to kind of push a point forward.

Lisa: Yes, I think he has an extreme perspective but, yeah.

Alex: And he definitely has that, for sure. But, oftentimes, truth comes from the extremes when they meld together and it’s a message that I think is important but, yeah, I can totally – you know, as you’re saying that, it’s like I think I know the elements of his perspective that maybe you don’t agree with but, yeah, no, it’s interesting. And it’s an interesting voice and perspective. Yeah, I think what I like about that book is just you don’t hear that perspective that often and you either hear someone that’s very pro something or very against it and kind of like how they weave into like a perspective that is in the middle, it’s hard to attain that in the modern world when you’re looking at the media. So I think exposing yourself to that is good. 

Lisa: Yeah, I think it is hard to attain the middle ground. I don’t think he’s the middle ground. He’s another extreme. I think the far right also love his argument.

Alex: Right, right, right, but then you read that and then you read someone that is – you know, I’ve read both, I’ve read people that would be considered woke, people that have been considered anti-woke. 

Lisa: Yeah, and I hate that language of “woke,” because I think it’s so important –

Alex: It’s not a very –

Lisa: Yeah.

Alex: – conducive –

Lisa: No, because I think it sort of pejoratizes really important social justice issues and diversity issues that are so important. If we’re not awakened to these issues, then what is wrong with us as a society? And so I do not like that language because I think it makes social justice, DE&I , so pejorative and especially in this time where DE&I is getting decimated and social justice is getting decimated, like it’s such a really troubling – you know, and I’m not saying that at all, I really want people to really think about the systemic perspectives. My whole second book talks about the systemic perspective but I also want you to see your agency within the system. That is so important to me is like finding agency within the system and not believing the system, just as going you have no other choice but to be oppressed by the system. I think there are choices.

Alex: I think you summarized it perfectly, how we get out of this conversation is, at the end of the day, it’s about agency and it’s about other people letting them have their agency as well –

Lisa: Yes.

Alex: – not feeling like it’s your role to give everyone agency because –

Lisa: Yeah, and to dictate what is happening with them ever, we should never be doing that.

Alex: Right. I mean, if we agree that agency is important, then we agree that you can’t go out there giving it to people because literally that’s the opposite of what agency is, right?

Lisa: Yes, absolutely.

Alex: And I think that’s how these topics get entangled and progress gets slowed down because it is, like sometimes we have to think about like, huh, maybe if I say A but do B, maybe it’s never going to lead to A, so it gets complicated, but having this conversation in the first place in a way in which you can feel like you can have a free conversation, I sometimes, as a white male, I feel like maybe I shouldn’t be having this conversation, but I think when white males are also engaged in a conversation and they can learn from someone else and put out their perspective, that’s how we all learn together, right?

Lisa: So critical. Yeah, we all have to be talking about this in different ways and being able to kind of listen to each other and hear each other out.

Alex: A hundred percent. Cool. So, as we head towards the last couple moments, and I know our audience is going to be sad that we are kind of reaching the ending of our episode today, what are some of the recommendations you have for coaches, both, I want to separate this kind of question into two, for themselves, we discussed how a coach can feel like, “Wow, how am I gonna coach? How am I gonna add value to someone that runs a $100-billion company?” so I’d love to hear some recommendations for coaches in terms of their own experience, but also hear some recommendations from you on what coaches should know about impostor syndrome to work with their clients and what’s a good kind of way to, I’m sure that a lot of coaches listening to this podcast will think, “Hmm, how do I start my road to become more of an expert in this area?”?

Lisa: Yeah, so I think one of the things that I would – when you asked the question about sort of as a coach, how do you not feel like an impostor when you’re sitting in front of somebody who’s super accomplished and has come to kind of work with you, and I think when I was interviewing at my doctoral program and I was feeling super anxious because it was my number one choice and I just felt happy to be there, I didn’t think I was going to get in, and I got super nervous and I had to get up and leave the room because all these other interview candidates were talking about their experience and I just felt super anxious, and I got up and I ran into a current doctoral student in the program and he said, “You look anxious,” and I said, “I am.” He’s like, “They asked you here for a reason,” and he was like, “They asked you because there’s something about you that they see is special and exciting.” He’s like, “Go in there and show them that.” And so I do think when someone comes to work with you, they have a sense of why they want to work with you. Go be yourself and go be that amazing coach you are and go just be yourself. If I think about the first time I met with my first exec, I was not being myself. I was trying to force myself into something I thought he would want. But he wanted to work with me and I ended up – the more authentic I was to the way that I worked, the better our work became. So I would just say be authentic, be who you are, because that’s the work they came for. And if they didn’t come for that work, they should go find another coach, because you can’t be anyone other than you are and you can’t be anyone different than that so I think that’s super critical.

Alex: Love that.

Lisa: And they’re human and so you’ll end up finding that out as you coach them. They’re human and they have their own struggles and they’re here because they have struggles and they’re asking you for help.

Alex: You’ll end up finding out they have impostor syndrome themselves.

Lisa: Probably. Probably. Changes are, three out of four, changes are yes.

Alex: Seriously, the higher you get in organizations, the more I think likely it is.

Lisa: Yeah. People sometimes think it actually becomes easier as you get more. Actually, the reality of that is no. You feel like you have more stakes, you have more things to lose, you have more kind of an image protection, it becomes really, really hard actually to deal with it. So I would say that. But for becoming like more familiar, I would – there’s a ton of really great research and literature out there about impostor syndrome. In the literature, it’s not called impostor syndrome, it’s called impostor phenomenon so if you’re looking for it, it’s impostor phenomenon, O-R, and then I would reach, there’s a really great – I would encourage you to read my book, my books are super practical. They are full of kind of exercises and they’re workbooks and so many of my clients have done the workbook with me and many coaches use the workbook with their clients. It’s a really easy way to go through it, and we actually have researched the first book and we’ve been able to show that it can decrease impostor syndrome by 30 percent in 14 weeks so it’s very effective, it’s all research-backed. There’s tons of literature, so read it. There’s a new book by the American Psychological Association called The Impostor Phenomenon, I have a chapter in it, but there are many chapters by all the best researchists across the globe who study impostor phenomenon and talk about all kinds of different disciplines and how they experience impostor phenomenon. So, there’s so much out there to become an expert, I would just really dive into it. I think it will help you to feel more competent in being able to deal with it. There are very clear interventions you can engage in that will help change your client’s life forever. So, I’m very hopeful about the world of impostor phenomenon, impostor syndrome that coaches and people in the world that deal with it can find the resources to kind of give their clients a whole new way of dealing with it and kind of be on the other side of it. That’s my professional mission in life is to get as many people on the other side of it as possible.

Alex: I love it. That is super high impact, very in tune with what people navigating through the modern world need, so thank you for the amazing work that you do. Thank you for joining me in this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee and looking forward to future collaborations as you continue to do amazing work in the world.

Lisa: Thank you so much for having me, Alex. It’s been fun.