Do you feel like an impostor because of your success therefore preventing you actually being your true self?
The running of a successful business can lead us to question whether we deserve success when such compromises weigh heavily upon our sense of duty.We can feel like an impostor or fraud.
If you are a business owner struggling with negative feelings of this nature Life Coaching with Claire Buck will help you to move on while being true to yourself.
At some point in our professional lives we all feel it: “I’m a fraud and I’m going to be found out”. While it’s healthy to question and reconsider our own qualifications and training, we still need to move forward and regain self-confidence.
Impostor Syndrome: what is it?
Impostor syndrome is feeling like you are an impostor when you are, in fact, not one. You feel like you are a fraud that is going to be found out. While this might be a rational feeling for a charlatan in some field of purported expertise, it makes no sense to someone like you who is making a positive contribution to the world.
8 Top Tips on How to Overcome Impostor Syndrome
- You must come to come to accept that you have played some part in your successes. We tend to feel like frauds when we are unable to internalize our successes. A common feeling is guilt that we were given an opportunity that others weren’t. Therefore, success achieved after that opportunity was actually undeserved. Opportunities arrive at the door of those who expose themselves to them.
- Keep a record of complimentary comments people have made about you in your professional capacity. Feelings of being a fraud will be put down when you look back and read how what you have done has helped people and made impact on their lives
- Remind yourself that being wrong about something doesn’t mean that you are a fake. Top stock brokers, football managers and the Prime Minister make mistakes all of the time. Losing is part of the game at play – just don’t lose the lesson. However, don’t glorify failure, you mustn’t allow this to make you feel that you are not a contender in the game.
- Let go of self-importance – thinking that you’re more important than you actually are can result in feeling that you’re a fraud. Perfection doesn’t exist: come off it!
- Find one person to whom you can say “I feel like a fraud”. Empathy is a like gold dust and a problem shared is a problem halved.
- Direct the focus of your efforts on providing value. We feel like fakes when we are turned in ourselves – “what will they think of me”; “I don’t know as much as her”; “they won’t like me if I fail”. Want to get over feeling like a fraud swiftly? – then genuinely try to help someone else.
- Stop comparing yourself with others. Collecting and measuring the achievements of others makes us feel like a fake. You are not here to live the life of another person. You’re here to witness and experience whatever life you can. Turn off Facebook and Instagram, stop reading biographies of “successful” people and learn to respect your own experience. You are not a fraud, you’re just you.
- Say what you are able to say with authority. Business owners are frequently put in the position of “the expert”. Consequently, people look at us as though we should know everything about a topic. Nobody knows everything about everything. If you find yourself in a situation that has the potential to make you look like a fraud then be honest about your limitations. People respect this more and for good reason.
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