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A podcast for fundraisers who want ideas, examples and inspiration to help you raise more money for your charity or non-profit.
Rob is an author and award-winning fundraising trainer. Each week he and his guests share examples of successful fundraising, as well as lots of practical tips to help you apply these techniques in your own job.
Hi. This is Rob. Welcome back to the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast. Now if you've ever felt like a bit of a fraud at work, and it surely won't be long before your lack of ability is found out, then this one is for you. To debunk the unhelpful myths around impostor syndrome and give you some practical tools to help deal with it, I talked to Roche of Brilliant Learning.
Speaker 1:Lara is a fabulous and hugely experienced trainer and coach for the charity sector and is a regular guest trainer for our Bright Spots membership. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:Some of the most successful people in their fields openly speak about their imposter syndrome, all the way back to Albert Einstein. He said, I'm compelled to think of myself as a swindler. This is actually an experience that the vast majority of us will have and it's often a sign of quite how successful we've been that it starts striking. Lots of us set ourselves up to invite the impostor in because we set these incredible, massive, lofty goals. We set one single goal that's massive.
Speaker 1:Hi, Lara. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. So you and I have known each other for twenty years, not least one of the things we have in common is we both did a psychology degree. And for many years, you have been an excellent trainer and coach in the charity sector. Sector. Before we get into today's topic, top line, how did you come to be doing what you do now, organizing these training courses for Brilliant Learning?
Speaker 2:Well, as you say, we both did a psychology degree, and I particularly looked at occupational psychology, so humans in the workplace. I then went into the workplace and was in house in all sorts of different organisations in the people function, including heading it up at board level at a certain point, and I really enjoyed that work, but I found it took me further and further away from people as people, and became people as numbers on a spreadsheet, and the psychology was really the home that I wanted to come back to. So I set up Brilliant Learning, gosh, thirteen years ago now, and have been working predominantly with not for profit organisations ever since, bringing them brilliant learning that helps them to do what they do ever better and to maximize their positive impact on the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we at Bright Spots absolutely love these sessions, which is why regularly I twist your arm and invite you to come and do guest sessions for our Bright Spots membership, and it really helps the fundraisers in our club. A couple of the favorites we've enjoyed. One was your session about assertiveness, and another was ways all of us can be a little more resilient if we put our minds to it. And then there was this other one that truly resonated even more than the other couple I just mentioned there, and it was to do with this subject of when we feel like an impostor, so called impostor syndrome.
Speaker 1:It got such a great reception that I knew I really wanted to persuade you to do it for the podcast listeners as well. So let's jump in with that one. I have found it's a much more common feeling than many of us are necessarily aware when we are feeling it. What's your initial take on this idea of impostor syndrome?
Speaker 2:Firstly, I think you're exactly right. It is a much more common phenomenon, it's a much more common experience than we perhaps might think, and I think there, the labelling impostor syndrome is really unhelpful, because normally when we think of syndromes, we think of things that only affect a fraction of the population. Even if we look at some of the most common syndromes, if we look at, for example, anxiety disorder, affects apparently twenty percent of the population. Imposter syndrome will affect seventy percent of the population at some point in our lives. So actually it is more normal to experience it during a lifetime than not to.
Speaker 2:So the labeling straight away of imposter syndrome feels inappropriate. This is actually something very normal, something if you've experienced or are indeed experiencing at the moment, you're in great company. You're in the company of the majority of the population rather than a minority.
Speaker 1:Yeah, goodness knows, I have felt this feeling plenty of times and still do sometimes. And you mentioned to me that you have felt the same. And yet when you are coaching one of your clients, be it a high achieving leader or someone who's newer to a particular role, this feeling does come up. And I'd be really curious as to what some of the ideas are that you use or tools that you use to help us think about it a little differently and potentially live with it, and or reduce the number of times the feeling affects us in particular? What's one of the things you tend to talk about to help someone really tune in to what you just said?
Speaker 2:In terms of its prevalence, I think what it also really helps us to understand is that far from being a signal of lack of success, which is what the impostor is telling us when it strikes, you're not successful, you're a fraud, you're going be found out, it's actually the opposite. It seems to be the case that the more successful we become, the more likely we are to experience impostor syndrome. It's that feeling of having further to fall, or perhaps because we've become successful, there's more of a spotlight, as it were, on us than there was previously when we weren't so successful, or perhaps when we were more junior in our career, or perhaps when we were trying to bring in smaller donors, or smaller corporate partners to our organizations. As we get more and more successful, and the stakes are higher, and the value we're trying to add is bigger, we are more likely to experience imposter syndrome, but that's because we've been successful that we're there in the first place. So one of the things that always really helps me to remember is that some of the most successful people in their fields openly speak about their impostor syndrome.
Speaker 2:All the way back to Albert Einstein, he said, I'm compelled to think of myself as a swindler. He thought of himself as not one of the greatest thinkers of all time, as we all think of him. He thought of himself as someone who was kind of a bit of a trickster, someone who didn't really have as much to offer, but somehow fooled everyone. Sheryl Sandberg says the same, a Harvard graduate, one of the only female COOs of such a successful at its time tech organization, Facebook, she said that every time she was successful, or in her words, every time I manage not to embarrass myself, there's an impostor speaking straight away, I thought that someone would tap me on the shoulder and say that the gig was up. Even Tom Hanks, gosh, literally people in popular culture as well, Hollywood, one of the most cutthroat industries that there is, enormously successful as an actor, as a director more recently, and he said he thinks of himself as a fraud, and he thinks someday someone is going to realize and call it out in front of everybody.
Speaker 2:So that's perhaps one of the things that helps us to understand this isn't a syndrome that really unsuccessful minorities struggle with, this is actually an experience that the vast majority of us will have, and it's often a sign of quite how successful we've been that it starts striking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe another angle on it is the fact that I'm feeling it. Maybe it just means I care a lot. Maybe I really value my audience or this donor or the team that I need to do this piece of work for, and it's me caring so much that it causes me to feel a little more perfectionistic, and therefore discount actually just how competent I really am.
Speaker 2:I love that. It's also a sign that others value me too, because other people value me, they've got really high expectations of me. That allows space for the impostor to come in, but people don't have high expectations of people they don't think are great, so that's another sign that, yes, it shows that you value what you're doing, but it also shows that other people value you if you're feeling this impostor striking.
Speaker 1:And another angle on it is that often it comes about because we make a false comparison between how we feel, for instance, about our competence, or our right to be doing this thing inside, and other people's outsides. And so often, we're unaware that they have some challenges too. It's just that we don't see those. We see how confident they appear on stage or how well written their LinkedIn post is. And it's understandable.
Speaker 1:They may not choose to include all the other details as well. That's okay, actually. But it's an unreasonable comparison we're making to expect how we feel inside to compare with what other people are showing us.
Speaker 2:Definitely, definitely. You alluded to my coaching earlier, I coach people right up to CEO level. At one point, I was coaching someone on the world's rich list, and it's amazing how often impostor syndrome is part of the picture. For these people that we would look at and not imagine in a million years struggled with impostor syndrome. Challenge your listeners, I bet they've had the experience as well.
Speaker 2:At some point, when they were doing something that they're great at, but felt really nervous about inside, I bet someone said to them, how do you do that? How are you just so calm when you're doing that thing? How are you so confident when you're standing on stage giving a presentation, or when you are, I don't know, in one of your hobbies, you know, about to play for your five a side football team and you score a winning goal, how do you do that and be so calm and confident? And you think, are you joking? My insides were a mess.
Speaker 2:So as much as we're looking at other people thinking, gosh, they're so amazing, could never be like that, and seeing their outside. Other people are doing the same with us. We're all comparing our own insides to other people's outsides, which is a real shame, because of course we're going to come up wanting, and that gives the impostor a wide open door to walk through.
Speaker 1:And just you saying that reminds me that some of the things that genuinely I feel I have become quite skillful at now, the reason I am skillful now is because there was a time when I really felt that I wasn't. Mhmm. So I felt a level of this impostor, And actually, in a way, thank goodness I did. Because if I didn't feel that lack, I wouldn't have gone and worked quite so hard at preparing a certain presentation or working at a certain skill through that sort of early stage or that so called messy middle when it still wasn't as good as I wanted, it was in the feeling of the lack, and I'm not there yet, that I found the fuel to actually double down and try even harder.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think we've just gotta be careful that that doubling down doesn't become unnecessarily tripling down or quadrupling That's where it becomes unuseful, but definitely that initial imposter syndrome can push us to go, okay, well here's the extra bit I'm going to do to release that discomfort, or here's the extra safety net I'm going to put in place to prevent a negative outcome that I might fear becoming the case. That's where imposter syndrome is actually quite useful in that first stage space. It becomes really unuseful when it pushes us to do reams of preparation we don't need, or when it pushes us to overanalyse things that then mean our performance becomes worse rather than better.
Speaker 1:That makes sense, Lara. So I hope that for our listeners, at the very least, they feel that they're not alone if they ever feel this way, and it's not even necessarily a bad thing if they sometimes feel this way. But nevertheless, they probably are wondering, are there some things they can do to reduce the chance of it showing up? Or if it does show up, that it not derail things. So when you're coaching people, what are a couple of the things that you find practically helpful?
Speaker 1:Helpful?
Speaker 2:I think there's much more effectiveness that comes out of developing practices that generally serve well to inoculate you against impostor syndrome, or to mean that even if the impostor does strike, it strikes with less severity. I think we've already established that some degree of imposter syndrome is probably a bit of a fact of life really. So it's more about minimizing its impact when it does happen or minimizing its severity when it strikes. And there are definitely core practices that all of us can just weave into our day to day lives that help us to be more protected against impostor syndrome. One of my favorites is small goal setting.
Speaker 2:Lots of us set ourselves up to invite the impostor in, because we set these incredible, massive, lofty goals. We set one single goal that's massive. We decide, gosh, I've barely run at all, but I'm gonna run the marathon, and then we set the goal wide open for our impostor to strike. What if we run the marathon and we don't make it past mile 22? We've failed in our goal.
Speaker 2:Impostor syndrome, come on in. Actually, we ran 22 miles from a standing start. If instead we set ourselves small goals on the way to the big goal, we show ourselves regularly that we are an achieving person, so we should set out to run a mile, enter a five ks race, a 10 ks race, a half marathon, and then the marathon. And then if we get to the 22 mile mark, we know that, well, wait a minute, when I ran that five ks, there was quite a lot of people in the route who weren't running, or who I overtook. Same when I did the 10 ks, same when I did the half marathon.
Speaker 2:So when we do that, if we don't quite make it on the marathon, there is so much less space for our imposter to strike because we've already achieved our goal. We've already been a goal achieving person multiple times in this thing. So small goal setting works really well, and it's something I personally use all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Allied with that is noticing when we've made any progress at all in an area that we care about, and is allied to the initially setting the goal at all. But also, I just think in any given day, quite deliberately noticing these things I have made progress on rather than where our brain could go to, which is all of those things I still haven't done at all yet.
Speaker 2:Stop and smell the roses, right? That's where that phrase comes from. Unfortunately, most of us engage in a daily practice that reinforces our self belief as a poorly achieving person. Most of us reach the end of our day and return to our to do list and start mentally beating ourselves up about everything we didn't get done, everything that's still on the list. Now in the modern world, when most of us have complex roles with some quite long term lofty objectives within them, the likelihood that we will ever tick off everything on a daily to do list is tiny.
Speaker 2:That's not the kind of jobs we have, But we still kind of weirdly have that expectation of ourselves, and so punctuate every full stop of every day with us telling ourselves, look at all the things you didn't get done. If instead we replace that with a practice of a done list, what did I get done, reflecting on that instead, we're concluding every day by reinforcing our self belief as an achieving person. Of course, as you make the very good point, it's not just about what you get done, it's about what you make meaningful progress in. That's a much better benchmark when we've got complex, more long term roles. So I do this practice myself, at the end of every day, before I close my computer, because I often work from home, I stop and say out loud three things.
Speaker 2:There's something very powerful in the world of psychology, as you know Rob about three. Three things that have significantly moved forward because of my work today. So hopefully when I close my computer this evening, this podcast will be one of the things that I say out loud as something that I'm proud about from the day, something that really moved forward because of what I did. Will there still be things on the to do list that's down here that I haven't got done? Absolutely, but if instead, every day finishes for me, with me saying out loud, and therefore very actively reflecting on, three things where I have been successful, if you do that as a daily practice, by the end of a week, you've told yourself 15 things that you have been successful on, by the end of a month, 60.
Speaker 2:It becomes way harder for the imposter to play on a feeling that you might have one day that you're not very successful.
Speaker 1:Couple of things I really like about that. One is, I believe that you do this. You talk about it congruently as a practice rather than, oh, if I'm feeling good, then I do this thing. This is what happens every day, and it causes your brain to search for the three. And if it can only find two, then probably you're searching for three.
Speaker 1:You'll allow yourself to put a third one in to somehow create the three. So I like that it's a practice, and I also like that it's only three rather than 10, which again would go back to maybe making it harder to win at. And I also like that you're doing something explicit. Now if some of our listeners are thinking, well, I couldn't imagine myself saying it out loud because, you know, I sit work in an office or whatever. By all means, write them down or put them in a particular page in your notebook or put them on a post it note or do something.
Speaker 1:But my challenge to our listener is to see what happens. If you do this for a week, Definitely start today, the day you're listening to the podcast, and then see if you can just keep it going for a week and see if it actually, in practice, does shift something about whether you turn your work brain off feeling like actually you made some progress.
Speaker 2:Great. What we're talking really here about, in a psychological sense, is making a new habit, right? So two other suggestions as well that might help your listeners to start this practice off. One is tie this new practice to something you already do. This is called habit stacking, and people like Rob and I, who are fascinated by psychology, know that you're way more successful at creating a new habit if you tie it to a habit you've already got.
Speaker 2:So what is your end of day habit? Mine is closing my computer, hence why that's when I do my done list. For other people, it might be catching the bus on their way home. Maybe then it's your first stop, that's when you do your your practice. Whatever your end of day habit is, that is the full stop to your working day, every day, make sure this practice stacks on top of that, because then you will A, remember to do it, and B, it will just become second nature, it will become a habit way more easily.
Speaker 2:The second thing in terms of habit formation, you mentioned doing it for a week, that gets you off to a flying start, if we really want this to stick as a habit, aim for two, because there's something apparently magic in the world of psychology about doing a new habit for two weeks. When we do it for two weeks, that seems to be a really valuable tipping point that makes the habit infinitely more likely to stick. I think that's probably something to do with two weeks is probably the time when we start to really feel the benefits of the new habit. So week one, you might find that you feel better at the end of every day. By the end of week two, my guess is you'll be finding your impostor striking overall way less often, and then you're motivated to keep up the habit.
Speaker 1:I love this stuff, Lara, and I've got one more thing to add that I was reminded of because you made me think of an excellent book called Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. And he says we're also more likely to form a healthy habit if we feel good when we do it. So we've got to potentially at the beginning, consciously attach good feelings to the doing of the new thing.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And then to an extent, we are conditioning us to do more of this thing that feels like a reward in our nervous system. So in BJ Fogg's system, he says something along the lines of, when I turn off the computer, that's the prompt, I will do this thing. I will write down three things I'm pleased with because I made progress, And I will smile. Or and I will say, yes. Well done, Rob.
Speaker 1:Yes. And the act of that third thing quite deliberately doing a thing that causes you to smile physiologically physiologically causes your nervous system to want to do more of that the next day. And I guess what I'm saying is don't necessarily rely on your intellect to allow itself to feel good for being proud of these three things. Use your whole body, use your feelings, and do I deliberately feel good, even if that means intentionally putting a smile on your face?
Speaker 2:That's a great idea. Absolutely. Yeah, of course, we're all going be more motivated to do something that we always feel good about when we're doing, so if we have to make that intentional and a bit manufactured for the first while while we're creating the habit, we'll find again it will become second nature, just like the habit itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and again, for someone who thinks, well, whoever heard of deliberately doing a thing with your face and doing it on purpose rather than allowing it to come naturally? The truth is, in any given culture, we've created rules for when you're allowed to feel good. If your team scores a goal, it's culturally appropriate to stand up and cheer or whoop or put a smile on your face or even hug a stranger. In other contexts, those things just wouldn't happen. So just decide to create your rules for what is an appropriate thing to do, and I would suggest an appropriate time to deliberately smile, is at the end of the day when you've achieved three things.
Speaker 2:Makes total sense. Makes total sense. I I think I'm set off for wondering in my head. I think we're not necessarily a particularly self congratulatory culture, so maybe we've been conditioned to not do a lot of self praise, and perhaps that leaves us even more open to impostor syndrome, so if we can break that cycle by, in your words, celebrating ourselves very overtly, perhaps we break that cycle, and perhaps that in itself helps to keep the impostor at bay.
Speaker 1:Yes. And I wonder what other practical things could we do, Lara?
Speaker 2:Well, one of the things that I always recommend to my coaching clients, and which I do myself, is keep a wins file. I know you're familiar with this one, Rob. You call it a wins file. I call it a confidence bank. It's the same concept.
Speaker 2:The idea is you have a physical place. It might be a particularly fancy notebook, it might be a file on your computer, or a notes page on your phone, where you keep your wins, you make a deposit, if you like, in the bank of your confidence. So that is everything you're proud of and have ever achieved. So that could be it doesn't matter how far back you go, it was all you, anything from qualifications you got, to particular projects you've done that you're proud of, corporate sponsorship you won, donors that you managed to bring in, nice pieces of feedback that were formal on your appraisal, or just lovely pieces of feedback that someone gave you on prompted and just said to you, anything at all that is evidence that you are great, you put into that confidence bank or that wins file. What it means is then when the impostor is striking and you are in the middle of that cognitive distortion we talked about earlier, where you literally can't see the evidence that you are great, you can open up your confidence bank, you can open up your wins file, and be confronted with all the evidence that you are great, so then you can either choose one or two, and really feel them, that project, gosh, I remember when I started thought it was going to be impossible.
Speaker 2:I never thought I was capable of that, and then I did. I delivered it, and at the end of it, I just felt 10 feet tall, and I got all of this fantastic feedback on it. You feel it all over again. That's kind of making a really powerful withdrawal from your confidence bank exactly when you need or you'll find that as you keep adding to your wins file, because you should, every time there's something new that you achieve that's quite chunky, or something really great you hear about yourself or feel about yourself, you put it in, the bank grows bigger and bigger. You'll find over time that the impostor will be striking, you'll open up the fancy notebook, or you'll open up the document, whatever it might be, and you'll suddenly realize it's got really big, and just the act of seeing the volume of evidence is enough to counteract the impostor, because you know what?
Speaker 2:In order for this impostor to be right, all of this has to be untrue. Which is the more likely option? It immediately stops the impostor in its tracks, so it's a really powerful practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I've found that doing this has helped me a great deal, a, because I know it's there, but b, because I'm on the lookout for some of these things to happen. It's changed my perception of what I'm looking for, and when I spot one, I'm far more likely to spot spot it. And, ordinarily, maybe I would have passed it by or I might have discounted the compliment as being ill founded or that person clearly doesn't know me. The act of knowing I'm building it actually causes me anyway to be taking on board this proof that actually I'm competent in these areas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it primes your brain what to look out for. When we're riddled by impostor syndrome, our brain is primed to look out for all the evidence that we're not great, whereas if we're doing this confidence bank or wins file practice, our brains are primed to spot the evidence that we are great, and that immediately starts narrowing the opportunity for our impostor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so certainly journaling regularly has had the same effect for me because often one of the things I'm jotting down at the end of my day is something I could be pleased with or something nice that someone said about the effect of my work. And so it's having that effect and therefore reducing the chances that the impostor feeling will come up at all, and therefore I might not need to actually go and look in the file at all because the chances are lower.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah. It reduces the likelihood of it happening in the first place, it gives you a brilliant go to if it does happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hi. It's Rob. And just before we get to the last bit of my chat with Lara, I've got a quick question for you. Do you find it helpful listening to these podcasts and other Bright Spots resources like our breakfast club for fundraising leaders.
Speaker 1:Whether it's a bespoke training session for your team or our learning and inspiration club, the Bright Spot membership, or one of our two high value mastery programs, we would love to help you smash your target this year. To find out more or request a chat, go to brightspotfundraising.co.uk. So I love this one. Certainly, this has made a huge effect for me over the years. Is there any last idea we could fit in of something that you've noticed that helps?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Something I've noticed that helps, but which there's a lot of scientific evidence for, actually, is getting outside yourself. Imposter syndrome is a very internal syndrome, I hate this fact still that we're calling it a syndrome phenomenon. It's a very internalized phenomenon, you're literally in your own head. If we regularly try and get outside ourselves, and give of ourselves in some way to others, we get out of that internal dialogue, but we also show ourselves how much we have to offer.
Speaker 2:So that might be being a buddy to someone new in our workplace, it might be being a mentor to someone junior joining our profession, it could be offering to do some knowledge sharing with a different team in our organisation. Whatever it is, when we are offering ourselves in that way, it's because in that particular situation, we are either very competent, or probably very, very competent, which is why we've been the one called on to do that, or why we're the one who knows we have value to offer in that space. So whenever we help someone else in some way, it shows us how much we have to offer, and that really helps to keep the impostor at bay, and it serves to get ourselves out of our own brains where this cognitive distortion happens.
Speaker 1:Just thinking on that reminds me just how valuable it is to many charities if they can have at least one, if not more than one, trustee who knows about fundraising. And if any fundraisers are listening and sometimes they have moments when they doubt their expertise, I bet you are very competent, and a great way to reduce the chances of feeling this feeling is to potentially seek out and agree to become a trustee of another organization, and then my goodness, you'll discover some challenges out there other organizations and people have, but also that you've got so much more to offer in terms of how skillful and knowledgeable you have become than you might be aware of at the moment. It won't make you less busy. The downside is there'll be more to do, but the upside or but one of the upsides is to do with these impostor feelings showing up way less often. And the other thing I was reminded of was near the end of my book, the character called Claire who's been on quite a journey and learned certain fundraising skills and tactics and has become much more successful and impactful.
Speaker 1:She has a bit of a a wobble near the end because something goes wrong. And it's very interesting. The things that lift her again to her rightful place of knowing how good she is are a, seeking to serve by sharing her ideas along the lines you've said. She agrees to speak at a conference to help others even though there's a voice in her head, tries to dissuade her and says, who are you kidding? What do you know?
Speaker 1:She does it anyway. She feels the fear and does it anyway. And then the final bit that really lifts her is when someone at the end of that talk comes and asks her advice and seeks coffee with her. And at that moment, in the act of receiving that request, she realises, oh my goodness, no question, I'm in a different place for skill and confidence and knowledge compared to where I was before.
Speaker 2:Great. And I think that comes really neatly back to something you said earlier about your brain being primed to notice the right thing. If Claire had been primed to notice or make up a story about the negative thing, she might have seen that interaction completely differently. She might have thought, gosh, someone had to come up and ask me a supplementary question after my presentation. Maybe I didn't cover that area very well.
Speaker 2:Maybe this is proof I shouldn't have been doing the presentation in the first place. Instead, if Claire is doing this practice of wins, as I'm sure she was, then she will have been primed to notice this person coming up to her as being somebody who saw her as expert, somebody who saw her as having value to add to their direct experience. She was primed to notice it in that much more accurate way.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. So various of these ideas you've shared with us today, Lara, they all go together, And interestingly, the three or four things you've suggested we can do more of, the reason they work is they're the antidote to why these feelings show up in the first place. I've really enjoyed our chat as I always do.
Speaker 2:Me too.
Speaker 1:If listeners want to find out more about your excellent work, I'll put a link to Brilliant Learning in the episode notes on our website, on the podcast section of our website. I look forward to chatting to you again and doing another of these sessions with our Bright Spots membership soon. But for now, Lara Roche, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 2:You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me. It's been great.
Speaker 1:That's all, folks. Thank you as always for listening and for supporting the Fundraising Bright Spots Podcast. If you liked it, I'd be super grateful if you take a moment to share it on with your team or on LinkedIn. Good luck today with your fundraising and your ongoing self development. I look forward to sharing another Bright Spot story with you very soon.