Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

Hello, I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement.

In last week’s Muse, I talked about my personal battle with the ebbs and flows of imposter syndrome. As a quick refresher, imposter syndrome is the self-doubt and negative self-talk that swirls in our minds after we’ve found success in life or at work. Put differently, those who suffer from imposter syndrome do not feel worthy of their achievements and the resulting accolades and respect they are afforded by colleagues and the public.

This week, I’d like to continue the conversation by adding more color to the frequently asked question: Andy, you seem so confident, how do you overcome feelings of imposter syndrome and self-doubt?

Myriad Psychological Spectrums

To start, I am confident, but I can also feel weakness and vulnerability. Under the surface, I am much more complicated than the labels that are ascribed to me by both myself and others.

As humans, we want to categorize ourselves and others. We place labels on people and put them in boxes. This behavior is a natural extension of our brain’s sorting mechanisms that attempt to simplify the vast complexity that surrounds us. Put simply, the brain is a pattern recognition and estimation engine. All this mental sorting and simplification that our beautiful minds perform leads to the initiation and calcification of unconscious biases. So much bias!

For example, people who have seen me rocking out on stage in front of 2,000 people, or see my public author/podcaster/former CEO persona, put me in the confident, outgoing, people-person box in their minds. Those same people are then shocked when they learn that at my core I’m highly introverted and second-guess myself frequently. Their brains have a difficult time dealing with this apparent inconsistency which is a direct result of an unconscious bias that was formed from seeing only one or two sides of the complex human that is me.

You see, we live our lives on messy, non-linear spectrums of competing emotions and psychological constructs. Examples of these spectrums are introversion/extroversion, passion/measure, confidence/self-doubt, selfishness/selflessness, determination/curiosity, and courage/timidity, just to name a few. I can be passionate in one setting and measured in another. I can be selfish in one context and selfless in another. Our individuality and uniqueness stems from the fact that no two combinations of point estimates along these spectra is the same—much like our fingerprints and the outer ear.

However, we get ourselves into trouble when we can’t or won’t accept that we dance along a continuum of thought and emotion. We get into trouble when we assume that we are either one thing or another. We get in trouble when we try to live up to the standards of inauthentic labels and won’t afford ourselves the grace that’s necessary as we move along myriad psychological spectra depending on our situation and environment. This is the main premise of my first book, Balancing Act—that we are continually striving for balance along these psychological spectra.

Oh, and as a quick aside, I know that I’m using terminology that may be foreign to some. The term ‘spectrum’ refers to a range or series that extends between one extreme and its opposing extreme—for example, deep extroversion versus deep introversion.

So, Andy, How Do You Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Self-Doubt?

In last week’s Muse, I introduced the concept of living my personal purpose, which is to teach, coach, mentor, and inspire. If I’m living my personal purpose in both life and work and striving toward my long-term personal vision, then the likelihood that I feel unworthy of my successes is reduced because my success is more genuine to me and, no pun intended, purposeful. So if natural feelings of unworthiness and self-doubt creep in, I can remind myself that my success didn’t come out of nowhere, but was instead the result of planning, skill, and hard work.

To bolster my personal purpose, I’ve also identified a few “words that I live by” which are outlined in Part 4 of my first book, Balancing Act. My words—that I work diligently to put into action—are calm, consistent, persistent, thoughtful, agile, and industrious. These are behaviors that I’ve defined for myself and they are treated as verbs. I strive to be calm, consistent, persistent, thoughtful, agile, and industrious. They represent additional tools in my emotional intelligence toolkit that I use to support my personal purpose, vision, and roadmap.

Said just a bit differently, if I’m consistently turning the words I live by into action, living my purpose, and working toward achieving the long-term vision I’ve established during periodic personal planning exercises, the success I achieve is earned and I have a much easier time accepting it. Note that I said easier. The feelings of doubt and unworthiness are not fully eliminated, but they are much more controllable in their duration and acuity.

This journey of defining purpose, vision, the words I live by, and other tenets of my personal continuous improvement have allowed me to bolster and support a sense of self-belief and worth that I would not have if I hadn’t engaged in this work. I encourage everyone to go through a similar set of exercises and adopt a lifelong learning and continuous improvement mindset. It’s never too early or too late to take the first step.

Thanks for listening and have a wonderful weekend as you recharge for the week ahead!