How To Stop Being An Imposter

Who am I?

I imagine every thinking person can recognise the idea of not feeling like ourselves, not behaving like ourselves, or acting out of character.

And if we can recognise it in ourselves, we can in others too.

This points to the idea that we have a concept of who we are that is fixed, as well as a concept of who everyone else is.

Interestingly, we are more likely to attribute deviations from this perceived identity in ourselves to factors such as lack of sleep or environment, whereas in others we’re more likely to attribute them to character flaws (attribution bias).

This is obviously pretty convenient from a perspective of moral superiority and avoiding self-analysis.

Aside from that though, from an evolutionary perspective it allows us to prepare to face the worst version of the people around us — making us more likely to survive physically and socially should it look like it might appear again.

On the flip side, it may have the effect of inviting the worst side of them forward while causing you to assume they are out to get you.

Not ideal if you’re looking to build a good relationship with them, work with them, or even marry them. Worse still if they’re your kids.

Your partner is statistically the most likely person to murder you — but acting as if that’s true makes it far more likely, I would imagine.

And of course avoiding self-analysis is hard to maintain. You get up to all sorts of things and have to write them off as random events caused by external factors.

If someone points out your misalignment you have to make them wrong. Which makes you defensive and not so much fun to play with.

You have to drastically limit the people in your life and be willing to cut out anyone at a moment’s notice who somehow holds up a mirror to you.

We’re all aware of what incongruence tends to look like.

You tell yourself and others you eat healthily but your body reflects something different.

You tell yourself you’re money savvy and even give advice — but you’re always broke.

Or my favourite: you tell someone what a two-faced gossip someone else you both know is.

That isn’t to say we’re all dealt the same hand, but to blame the hand you were dealt is to become a victim. Which is to say life is happening to you rather than for you.

The former leaves you bitter and resentful as well as disempowered. The latter puts you in a position of power and influence over your experience of life while learning to master the game.

It’s easy to read this and ask, Which one am I?

Then as quickly as you ask yourself you start gathering evidence as to why you are the empowered individual. You perhaps even have a victim in your mind that you’re comparing yourself to.

And that’s of course the trap. We’re all both.

We all construct environments both internally and externally that will push us into the threat networks of our brain — making us infinitely more likely to respond with fight, flight or freeze. One of those behaviours we’d like to disown as not being representative of who we are.

For example: get some sleep deprivation, spike the blood sugar with some sugar, spend the day in meetings barely moving, talking about things that bring no real value to the world, then arrive home and yell at your partner because your definition of messy is different to theirs and holds different meaning — and you believe your way is the right way.

That build-up makes that action way more likely.

Then your anger is followed by resentment because it’s easier to blame them, or it’s followed by guilt because they didn’t deserve it and/or that’s not who you want to be.

But the action is confirmation that that’s who you are. Just like the brain evolutionarily prepares to survive the worst of others, it prepares to survive the threat of a messy house. You start to arrive home half ready to unload. That’s how habits are created.

What we want is to show up as the version of ourselves that most aligns with who we say we are — and as often as possible.

There are many ways to do this, but I believe we have to start by answering the question:

Who am I? (And there are ways to do that).

Impostor syndrome points to our tendency to subtly shift who we say we are to best serve who the people around us need us to be. (We guess, but we’re pretty good at it).

It’s also why so many people are repulsed by the idea of sales — or the slimy salesperson who will find out where it hurts and capitalise on it, or work out what you need to hear to make the sale.

Often it’s those who did the best at school that are best at it.

How do you make mum happy, and dad, and the teachers and the other adults around you simultaneously?

Often we don’t know we’re doing it. It’s almost conditioned — “behave!”

There is plenty of reason not to decide who you are. Just like there are plenty of reasons not to plan your day or have goals. You’re suddenly exposed to where you’re falling short of who you said you’d be.

Suddenly you’re further away from perfect than you thought you were.

On the plus side though, you no longer feel lost. You have an antidote to fear of judgement and criticism. You can become authentically you.

That’s how you start the process of consciously engaging the denied side of you and integrating it into one unified self.

One in need of constant improvement but one that also has a method for that improvement.

That sounds hard. Why bother?

Seems like a perfectly legitimate question to ask. But it seems to me, that’s what we’re up to anyway. We’re never not trying to be all that we could be. Both unskilfully when we fight to protect ourselves from the judgement of others, when we’re being impostors, and when we’re skilfully, honestly acknowledging where we aren’t being all that we could be and forthrightly acting to change our behaviour.

Who are you then?

Kind, generous, caring, confident, strong, loving, truthful, attentive, playful?

There are so many possible ways of showing up in the world.

Some you admire, some you aspire to, some it makes you anxious to imagine living without. Some that seem perfectly fine but hold little if any emotional resonance for you.

What I’ve found is that there is a hierarchy of values unique to you.

There are those that you find and dismiss. That forms the base of the hierarchy. There are those that you compare and again discard the weaker ones.

There are those that you need to make more robust. You define, refine and align with what you’d be doing if you acted them out in the world. You keep those that seem like they’d cause you to act how you most aspire to act.

You start to form a more and more concrete idea of what you value and how you would be acting if you lived your life by these values.

Then you start to measure yourself every day against who you said you’d be.

Did I treat myself, my kids, my partner, my friends, my colleagues how I said I would?

What would I do differently if I ran today again?

What went well?

You could just start with these three questions every day — that alone would make things better. But defining your values is what makes you bulletproof to stress.

— Ed Ley