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In this episode Adam and James chat about something that plagued even the likes of Albert Einstein - Impostor Syndrome. As 4/5 people suffer from it, it's important we know everything we can to properly manage it.
The Power Skills Project is a free podcast from Assemble You (https://assembleyou.com).
You may not have heard the term Power Skills before, but you’ve probably heard of soft skills.
We think Power Skills better acknowledges the importance and impact of things like leadership, resilience, productivity, and communication. The transferable superpowers that are some of the most valuable skills you can develop.
We’re all works in progress, and we want to improve ourselves and share our improvements with you - that’s why we chose to call this the Power Skills Project.
Every week, we discuss essential skills like active listening, motivating people, confidence, curiosity or dealing with change. We interview experts and practitioners across a myriad of industries and share their stories and learn from their experiences.
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Impostor Syndrome
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Adam Lacey: Hello and welcome to the Power Skills Project from Assemble You. My name is Adam and I'm joined today by my friend and colleague James. You may not have heard the term power skills before, but you've probably heard of soft skills. However, we think power skills better acknowledges the importance and impact of this particular skillset.
We're talking things like leadership, resilience, productivity, and communication. These skills are anything but soft. In fact, they are transferable superpowers. That can be some of the most valuable skills you can develop in life. We are all works in progress. And we want to improve ourselves. And James and I would like to share those improvements with you.
That's why we chose to call this the Power Skills Project. So let assemble you. We create short, succinct audio power skills courses and what we're gonna do each week as part of this project in this podcast is we'll dive into one of the subjects that we teach. We'll discuss our favorite facts, insight stories, and share some of our most insightful discover.
We'll also be bringing on special guests that are experts in different power skills to learn directly from them. So on that, James, what are we talking about today?
James Wann: Hey Adam, this week we're going to be covering imposter syndrome. Like me. You may have felt a level of imposter syndrome before in researching for the track that we did for assemble you.
I remember finding that 82% of people face feelings of imposter syndrome, and it's not limited to just people like us. There's a great quote I've got here from Al Einstein who said, The exaggerated esteem in which my life work is held makes me feel very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.
Adam Lacey: I love that. If Einstein thinks of himself as a swindler, then uh, What chance do the rest of us have?
James Wann: I know, right? Even the wording, I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler makes me feel like an imposter with the English language. He's not even English. . I couldn't think of something as nice as that.
Adam Lacey: And he is not the only one. So there's a, there's a host of famous people who have also suffered from imposter syndrome and. I think most importantly spoken out publicly about suffering from imposter syndrome. So Cheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, billionaire, philanthropists, she said in her book, Lean In that every time she excelled at work, she felt that she had managed to fool everybody yet again, and that one day she'd be caught.
Tom Hanks is another. He said, no matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, How did I get here? When are they gonna discover that I'm in fact a fraud and take everything away from me like that one as well.
James Wann: Yeah. I mean, in fairness to Tom, he did crash onto an island where he was for multiple years and go back to FedEx and had his job without having to do any training. Sorry. Castaway joke. Not just being horrible about the great Tom Hanks.
Adam Lacey: One of my all time favorites. But yeah, there's loads of people. There's uh, you know, Howard Schultz, Starbucks ceo, Serena Williams, Agatha Christie, Seth Godin, all these people have kind of come out publicly talked about imposter syndrome, how they felt like they're maybe not good enough, and look at someone like Serena Williams, probably the greatest tennis player of all time in terms of what, what she's won.
And for her to be feeling like she doesn't deserve her spot or her place, or her accolades. It's something that is incredibly common, affects the majority of people, and what we are gonna talk about today is dive into what it is a bit more. So maybe why we feel it and some of the things we found when, when researching imposter syndrome, and then look at some of the ways to combat it.
So some practical tips on how to reduce those feelings or how to reframe them.
James Wann: Yeah, I like the word reframe because I don't think it necessarily is something that you have to at every moment that you have to combat it. A part of it is about accepting it. Um, we'll probably get into it a little bit more later on, but I think if you look at those people that we've listed, one of the commonalities is that those are people who know their field, who've mastered their field, and there is a line of argument for people who have imposter syndrome, that it's those who know something very well that become most aware of their own flaws and their gaps in knowledge. And I think that's why it's quite common for high achievers to be imposters or to feel as though they're an imposter. Certainly.
Adam Lacey: Yeah, that's a, that's a great segue actually, James, into one of the things I wanted to talk about when framing this, which is something called the Dunning Kruger Effect, and the Dunning Kruger Effect is, Well, let me read out a couple of quotes.
One of them from very well mind:
Low performers are unable to recognize the skill and competence levels of other people, which is part of the reason why they consistently view themselves as better, more capable, and more knowledgeable than.
Effectively the Dunning Kruger effect is where people with lower ability in a certain area overemphasize that ability in something and people with higher ability in a certain area underemphasize their their current ability.
So it's a, I guess a confidence versus actual capability question.
James Wann: Yeah, I have seen the Dunning Kruger effect challenged.
Adam Lacey: Yeah.
James Wann: And of course this isn't a hard and fast rule, but... we've all met those people. I think the really classic example that you can think of, I think sort of 40, 50, 60 years ago for Adam, was when he did his GCSEs, um, [LAUGHING]
But you'd get those people...
Adam Lacey: They were called O- levels back those James.
James Wann: Yeah. You'd get those people... if I'm being completely honest, I think I've been that person once or twice, where I've come out of an exam that I've probably not revised for and thought, God, that was a lot easier than I was expecting. I think I've done fantastically well there.
And then you get your results back and yeah, it's back to the drawing board to say the very least.
Adam Lacey: Yeah, we've all been there. Ano... another quote actually from there is, um, top scoring individuals know that they are better than the average, but they're not convinced of how superior their performance is to others.
The problem in this case is not that experts don't know how well informed they are. They tend to believe that everyone else is also knowledgeable. So you've, you've got that. If you know something very well, you may automatically assume that other people have a similar. Level of knowledge to you. And I think, I mean, I've certainly experienced that in the past where I've been talking about something or someone has been talking about something and I've had to stop them and say, Okay, you need to, you need to kind of simplify that a bit because I don't, I don't have the depth of knowledge that you do in that area.
James Wann: Yeah. Quite often it's what makes a brilliant teacher or a manager, Is the ability to recognize where a knowledge gap for somebody is and be able to help them with patience and without frustration. Again, I've been on both sides of that and hopefully as I've got better as a manager, the frustration's gone a little bit, but I've certainly been guilty of thinking, "How don't you get this? Why don't you understand this? I like, I understand this, so why don't you?"
Adam Lacey: Exactly. And so, I mean, the reason we're talking about the Dunning Kruger effect is the, the opposite of the low ability over emphasis is imposter. So thinking that you are not good enough or deserved or whatever of something in particular based on your current knowledge and where you position yourself against others is kind of imposter syndrome.
So the message that we're trying to get to is if you are suffering from imposter syndrome, then it could well be because you are more capable in the area that than you think you are.
James Wann: One of the examples could be, in an office where multiple people doing the same job, you may feel as though the workload is very intense and that it's not manageable.
There are two ways that others may be thinking that the second one will get onto, but the first way may just be that they don't quite understand the difficulty of, of what's in front of them. Or they aren't putting in the same effort or, or getting the same output as you are when it comes to the work. And so the reason that you may feel that things are more difficult is simply because you have a better understanding of the task and the requirements.
Adam Lacey: That's a really good point. And you're, you are moving into the, one of the other things we found when, when researching this, so it's just a fascinating topic, to be honest with you. Um, touches in psychology, and James and I are certainly not experts in this area by the way. You're learning along with us here, but it's a term called pluralistic ignorance.
James Wann: Yeah. This was the second way. As I said, there's kind of two ways to think about it. I think the first is that everybody else around you is confident and maybe erroneously, but this other way, this pluralistic ignorance. I'll let you go on.
Adam Lacey: It's quite simple. I'll start as I like to with a quote, but effectively it was first coined by a gentleman called Floyd Henry Allport in the 1920s who was a social psychologist, and he saw it in psychological terms as an illusion, as unwarranted and mistaken impressions of how other people feel and think on various matters. So this is the, the concept that what you think other people are thinking isn't right, effectively.
James Wann: Yeah. The idea of pluralistic ignorance is the, and I'm taking this from Google, but I'll build on it a little bit. It's the incorrect belief that one's personal attitudes are different from the majorities attitudes and thus one goes along with what they think others think.
So in this work example, the incorrect belief would be that your personal attitude that this work is really hard, unmanageable you, you're not gonna be able to get it done, is different from the majority. You are thinking: why am I thinking this is so difficult? Everybody else around me seems to be thinking that this is so easy or so straightforward, so you end up believing the thought that you think that they think. It must be easy, and I am the one who's not good enough. But actually what you often find in workplaces is that these people aren't talking to one another, and many of them are feeling like this. So what you have is just this uncommunicated idea that the work's really hard, but every, everybody looks around silent believing everybody else is able to do it.
Adam Lacey: It's multiple people with the wrong conception of something, isn't it? Or a misconception over something, which I guess is the pluralistic element.
James Wann: It's the kind of thing that can lead to missing deadlines or just generally poor levels of output for a business, just simply because people have been stretched so far, but they've been unwilling to admit it because they feel a little insecure about doing so.
Adam Lacey: Yeah, big time. I think my favorite quote from, from all of this that we found is from Charles Darwin in the Descent of Man, where he says, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." I love that one. Cause that sums it up really nicely in just a few words. Imposter syndrome A is incredibly common and B is often more prevalent in high performers or people that are knowledgeable in certain areas.
James Wann: So with those two things, In mind, I'd even go a step further than just, than saying it's more prevalent in high performers. I think the fact that it's so prevalent in high performers is an indicator that it's not factual, it's not true.
Adam Lacey: Yeah, I love it.
James Wann: I think it would be totally unfair for any of us to say that Einstein was an imposter in his field or any of the people that we've talked about.
Adam Lacey: Yeah, no, exactly. You, you, um, said a really good line to me earlier, which is thinking something doesn't make it so, and I think that's one of the cornerstone pieces here of, of dealing with feelings of imposterism, separation of thought from fact, and it's really difficult to. All of us have negative thoughts over all sorts of different things.
We worry, we fret, et cetera, but the ability to separate those thoughts from what is actually going on in real life can be a kind of a key weapon in dealing with thoughts of of imposterism.
James Wann: You hear a lot in stoicism and also when it comes to therapy, particularly kind of cognitive behavioral therapy about this idea that thoughts aren't fact, and the idea that events aren't good or bad, it's how we feel about them. So if we can look at our workload, for example, and think this is very challenging, but leave it at this is very challenging, then that's one thing, but that's not what we tend to do. We spiral, we start to think, "Well, if I find it so challenging, why doesn't everybody else?"
And if nobody else does, does that make me less capable than other people? Am I ever going to be able to catch up to other people? And it's really typical for us to ruminate and spiral, and that's where imposter syndrome gets really unhealthy and it can have a really lasting effect as well. Many people who experience it if they leave a job without being able to perform how they wanted to, It can be quite obstructive confidence-wise, when you're trying to take the next step in your career, No matter what the results are saying, if you think you can't do it, you're probably unlikely to go for the kind of job that really you probably could excel in.
Adam Lacey: Exactly. You'll stop short of going for some of the jobs that you think you probably should be able to do, but yeah, maybe don't meet all the criteria. Your kind of level of confidence and imposter at the time will definitely determine those kind of decisions and it spills over into all elements of life.
We're talking about work specifically here, but you know, will it, will it stop you from doing certain outreach or will it stop you from closing a next deal or whatever it is. Those thoughts can have a negative, very negative impact and like James said, can lead to kind of a, a downward spiral and in some cases, you know, lead to catastrophizing in terms of you, you thinking about worst case scenarios over something that isn't even a fact it's just a, a thought, but you play it through in your mind, getting worse and worse and worse.
We all do it regularly. I certainly do. Um, I'm sure James does .
James Wann: Yes, it's one of my bigger challenges. I face catastrophizing about things, but I think one of the things that you find, and again you could sort of link this back to, um, some therapeutic approaches, but I think it's generally something that we all know in reality, is that facing things is quite often a really healthy growth minded activity.
When we talked at the very beginning about embracing imposter syndrome and about welcoming it in, what it brings to mind to me is something that I hear and see a lot on LinkedIn and you see it. There's an article on HBR that I read a little while ago, which is called, If You're Not Outside Your Comfort Zone, You Won't Learn Anything. And I think if you can learn to reframe imposter syndrome as an opportunity, then again, it could be amazing for you. Um, because ultimately if you are operating outside of your comfort zone, but surviving and hopefully at some point thriving, then that's how you will take the next step. If you've never felt like an imposter - though, we wouldn't, I wouldn't want to wish it on anybody - there is a chance that maybe you aren't going for the, for those stretch goals or for those opportunities and testing yourself in that way. I think if you feel like an imposter at times, then try to translate it into something positive. Try to remember that you're challenging yourself, you're being brave, you're being courageous, and this is where you will learn the most.
Adam Lacey: Yeah. Link it to a learning curve. And we found a great quote from Bar Barone in a speech he gave, and we'll put the link to the speech in the show notes. But he said, asking for help isn't a sign of weakness. It's a sign of. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don't know something and to learn something new, and that's a great way to frame anything like that.
So if you are being challenged, if things are difficult, Maybe you're not an imposter in that area. Maybe you are meant to be in that area and you're just part of a, this is all just part of the learning curve to help you get to, to the next stage of where you need to get to. I think that's a really good way to put it.
So yeah, reframe it, spin it into a positive. You're there to learn, to develop, to grow. And if you're listening to this, then hopefully doing it to learn and to develop and, to, and to grow as well. So all these things have been part of that process.
James Wann: There's something scarily adult about imposter syndrome. If you think back to when, when we're kids, or if you have kids and you see the wonder with which they approach the world and the fast pace at which they learn, they don't know any better, so they aren't afraid. Um, if you can approach these scenarios with that same kind of childlike curiosity, then it may just be the opportunity that you've been looking.
Adam Lacey: Exactly. I mean, James and I both experience feelings of imposter syndrome when deciding whether or not to start this podcast. You know? Do people want to listen to the two of us drone on for hours?
James Wann: Yeah. Well after heavy, heavy editing they might...
Adam Lacey: Exactly, Exactly. So yeah, it's all in the editing. Um, One thing we haven't touched on, James, actually, that I think is really important, especially for the context of what we're doing here... So obviously we're a, we're all about power skills and being able to deal with imposter syndrome, um, reframe it, et cetera, is a, a, a super power skill. If there was such a thing in terms of the impact it could have on your life, your career, professional, personal, the rest of it, it's definitely one of the big ones... it's... this probably isn't the only podcast we'll do on the topic over the, over the coming months and years, to be honest with you.
But as someone in a company or a team working in a business, it's not necessarily all about you. Sometimes this is about recognizing imposter syndrome in somebody else, whether that's a colleague, direct report, or, or something like that, and the ability to be aware of it, recognize it in others, and then support others through it, I think is like a key skill of a manager, leader, colleague, and, and one that's kind of worth time investing in. And it, and it might be more subtle than you think. So I was thinking about examples of where I've seen this in the past, and I've definitely experienced this before, where maybe I've asked somebody to do something and perhaps they reported into me.
And they haven't done it for whatever reason. So what's the reason behind that? Why have they deprioritized it? Are they just too busy? Have they got loads of other stuff on? No. So then what is it? And in quite a few cases I've found it's because I've maybe asked them to do something that they don't feel comfortable doing, or they don't feel qualified to do, or they don't have, they feel like they don't have the ability to do so they just don't get to it or they push it down the list or however they kind of hide it under the carpet type thing. And yeah, that's kind of a, a work or a, or a business example of where you might see something like that. But there's probably hundreds of, of examples like that daily in the, in the workplace.
James Wann: Yeah. It might sound a bit trite, but the antidote for imposter syndrome is breaking the silence, but that doesn't have to be done by the person who's at the center of it. It could be done by their manager. It could be done by a family member or a friend who simply opens up and says, I feel the same, or I have felt the same. What you're feeling is entirely normal. It can help negate some of those... or make positive some of those negative thoughts that have been swilling around your head as you catastrophize.
I do have a fairly funny story, actually, a really, really brief one about the process of writing this script.
Adam Lacey: The script for our short course on imposter syndrome.
James Wann: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, so when I was writing the script for our course, my mum lives close by and we go for a walk every day. We walk the dog and I was walking her through a local park and she asked me what I've been doing today. And I said, I've been writing a script on, uh, on imposter syndrome. And she said, You sure you are qualified to do that?
Adam Lacey: Hahaha. That's excellent.
James Wann: And it wasn't a joke as witty and as timely as it felt that it was, uh, it was not meant as a joke. Such a delicate subject, no matter how much you know about it. When you see some of the people you've talked and written about it, like, uh, Einstein may, maybe it can knock your confidence when somebody questions whether you should be doing it or not.
Adam Lacey: Well, you did a great job, James. I'd recommend you listen to that particular track of ours if you have access to them. That one, I, I found it really helpful actually. I, I think you're right. In terms of manager report or colleague to colleague, responsibility is, is actually showing some vulnerability and making it okay to talk about impulse syndrome, imposter, and that it's okay to feel like an imposter.
I think there's nothing worse than if you work for someone who looks or seems or feels completely impervious to anything bad or anything wrong, or you know, basically someone who can't get anything wrong. That's a very difficult person to work for. You're always gonna feel like you're not quite good enough there.
Whereas if you are working for a, maybe someone who's a bit more human, who understands the, the issues that everybody might be feeling, understand. People catastrophize and feel like imposter sometimes and is able to lead by example, talk about it, be open about that kind of stuff. There's a balance of course, in terms of being open, but it's that not putting yourself on a pedestal if you're a leader.
James Wann: When it comes to leadership, I would say I broadly subscribe to the Brene Brown approach about the power of vulnerability. That openness goes a lot further than brash confidence. People will appreciate you for it significantly more, and also empathize with you. I think as a leader, showing a level of vulnerability, it opens up a discourse and strengthens relationships in my experience.
Adam Lacey: Yeah, couldn't agree more. James, is there anything else we need to cover on this topic? I, I think we've gone through quite a lot and I can run through a quick summary.
James Wann: Yeah. Why don't you give a quick summary?
Adam Lacey: Yeah. Cool. So first thing we talked about was how common imposter syndrome is.
So 82% of people, that's more than four out of five. Face feelings of imposter syndrome, including lots of very famous, very successful people. Um, we talked about the Dunning Kruger effect, how um, people with liability and something sometimes overemphasize their ability and people with higher ability, underemphasize.
And then we talked about pluralistic ignorance as well and how that can, and what we think other people are thinking can also lead to, to imposter. And then finally we looked at some of the solutions or some of the ways of dealing with it. And the big thing is to remember our thoughts aren't facts. And thinking something doesn't make it so we can reframe it, we can spin it into something positive.
We might not be feeling confident in something, but we are learning, and maybe we're on a learning curve. And that's an important part of our development and taking the next steps. And yeah, asking for help isn't the sign of weakness as Barack Obama says. And finally, we. How to maybe recognize imposter syndrome in someone you manage or in a colleague, and how to help negate those, those feelings through openness, sharing a level of vulnerability, et cetera.
I think that's everything. Brilliant.
James Wann: Well, thank you for your time, Adam. Always enjoyable to sit and chat.
Likewise, James really enjoyed this and, uh, yeah, we'll see you all next week.