Why most CEOs secretly struggle with impostor syndrome

Why most CEOs secretly struggle with impostor syndrome

This might sting a little although my clients tend to appreciate candidness and I’m writing this for others that do too.

Impostor syndrome, however else you wish to look at it, is a negative feeling designed to alert the brain to a perceived THREAT.

That feeling is combined with a whole hormone cascade that is designed to prepare the body to fight, flight or freeze.

The brain has decided that this current environment and course action (what you’re saying) could possibly result in death.

Not likely in terms of a spear in the eye from someone in the board room or in the audience but the type of death that results for being excluding from the group, lowered in hierarchy, kicked out of the tribe.

You likely cannot control the current environment so the bit we need to focus on is the course of action.

Which is to say WHO you are being and what you are saying.

If who you are being is rooted in,

someone else’s ideas,

how you THINK they THINK you should be,

How THEY think you should lead or

How you’ve READ or OBSERVED other CEOs being

Then you are doomed to always feel like an impostor.

Think about it.

Operating how we THINK others suggest we operate is the very definition of ACTING and actors are LITERALLY paid to be impostors.

The truth is this isn’t a finger point, this is all of us. We were told what to do and what to think at school, most of us were raised being told what to do and what to think and often that’s how it should be. We need some sort of compass to navigate the world.

But until we start to determine what we believe and value and understand our own Majik we will always operate from beliefs put their by others or what we think others expect of us in order to validate ourselves within the tribe.

If you feel like an impostor then you’re operating from someone else’s script.

Is it time to write your own?