The Unstuck Sessions Podcast
The Unstuck Sessions
"The Unstuck Sessions" is a podcast dedicated to helping listeners get their marketing unstuck. With a focus on actionable insights and real-world strategies, Bryon and Brandi delve into various marketing challenges and provide solutions to overcome them. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a business owner, or someone looking to enhance your marketing skills, this podcast offers valuable lessons to help you navigate the ever-evolving marketing world.
The Unstuck Sessions Podcast
Facing Your Inner Critic: The Journey to Defeating Impostor Syndrome
Have you ever wondered how successful individuals like Albert Einstein and Maya Angelou overcame impostor syndrome? The second part of our discussion uncovers strategies to combat this crippling self-doubt. Drawing from my own journey and lessons gleaned from luminaries, I share invaluable tactics for fighting back, such as finding a mentor, accepting praise, and keeping a success journal. Remember, it's not about achieving perfection, but learning to redefine success on your own terms and manage self-doubt.
Lastly, let's equip ourselves with practical steps to take control of our inner critic. By understanding our thoughts and feelings, we can confront our inner critic and take decisive action to prove them wrong. I introduce 'the traffic triangle', a potent strategy encompassing short-form social media posts, long-form content, and email marketing, designed to drive people to your business. As we wrap up, we'll engage in a powerful dialogue on accepting failure, taking responsibility, and moving forward, providing you with the insights to not just survive but thrive despite impostor syndrome.
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So, according to my ongoing inner monologue, I'm a fraud that's just waiting to be exposed. This episode is about dealing with imposter syndrome as a business owner. So that's what I got imposter syndrome. We're going to roll the intro and dive right into the fact of the matter. Welcome back to the unstuck sessions. Today's episode is going to be about how I deal with imposter syndrome. It's going to be a thing that surprises some of you, or it may not, but I don't have any woo-woo or any magic tricks or affirmations or any of the other stuff, just a pragmatic approach of how I deal with imposter syndrome as a business owner, and it's a little bit magnified by, as you all know, my ADHD. So that's what we're going to discuss on today's episode. So this episode is for you if you struggle with this piece of it and a lot of business owners actually do and it basically is giving you what I do to kind of navigate it. It's not going to be for everybody. So we'll do a little bit of background about imposter syndrome and I'll talk about my unique experience with it.
Speaker 1:Imposter syndrome, by definition, is it refers to a psychological pattern in which individuals doubt their accomplishments or fear being exposed as a fraud, despite having a lot of evidence about their competence. Basically, you constantly BS yourself into believing that you inherently don't deserve the success that you have, and that is something that I struggle with daily. My inner monologue should have a talk show of its own. It never stops. My inner monologue is one of the meanest people that I've ever met, is verbally abusive and is very punishing of any kind of mistakes or anything. And that's my inner monologue and that's what I deal with on a day-to-day basis, and I know that I'm kind of an edge case where that's actually something that's tied to some other aspects of my mental health. But I know that this is a common occurrence among business owners too, or anybody that's considering starting a business, or if you're in a management position. This thing does manifest a lot. And again we'll get into the nuts and bolts of what imposter syndrome is and I'll talk about my unique experience and how I try to overcome it on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:I'm not 100% perfect within this. I'm always beating myself up about because it is what it is. I'm critical of myself, all right. So there are different types of imposter syndrome and try to listen along and figure out where you rank along it and, if you feel comfortable sharing, drop where you rank, where you're at or what type you have, in the comments. So there's the perfectionist. They said excessively high goals and feel like a failure if any mistake is made. That's me right here. Superman or superwoman push themselves to work harder than others to ensure they're not discovered as imposters. I have a couple of people that are close to me that fit that mode.
Speaker 1:The natural genius feels shame when they struggle to learn something or I don't get it right the first time. That's kind of my. That's my daughter and a little bit of me, but I've kind of given myself a little bit of grace when it comes to learning things. The soloist feels like they have to accomplish tasks on their own and if they ask for help, they believe that they're incompetent. And a lot of these cross pollinate, I'm starting to realize. And then there's the expert. They feel like they've tricked others into believing that they have more expertise than they actually possess. You feel like you're running along a long con, even though people are constantly seeking you out for information and that information actually helps them. You feel like you're just bullshitting all of them.
Speaker 1:And so these are the different places and different types of people with the posture syndrome and it's not all inclusive. There's going to be some crossover. So if I'm looking at it, I'm kind of falling to the perfectionist, natural genius and soloist. Actually, it's strange enough. I don't have enough of the confidence to say I'm reached expert status yet in anything. But these are the different places where you see imposter syndrome crop up, and so common triggers and so this thing. I've written all this out and looking at common triggers everything. For me, com triggers is everything Sleeping at night, getting too much sleep there's always a critical voice in my head chastising me for getting too much sleep, and if I don't get up and get on the grind, then people are going to find out that I'm making it all up and just, you know, not adept at what I'm trying to do. But the common triggers are going to be starting a new job or project, being around high achievers and the crazy part is a lot of high achievers have imposter syndrome. The thing about learning is, the more you learn, the more you realize that there is to learn. So some of the most learned people on the planet struggle because they know that their knowledge of this thing is not all encompassing, and they know how much they don't know. And so a lot of high achievers are high achievers because they're struggling with imposter syndrome, because they're trying to prove to themselves that they are actually accomplished people.
Speaker 1:Crazy Criticism or feedback, that's one that's hard for me, and also it goes into rejection too. And so those are the things that actually bring out that imposter syndrome where if something doesn't go right, if a project doesn't go right, I beat myself up really hard and then doubt everything I know and want to quit literally want to quit doing this, doing live streams, even talking about it. But the thing that gets me back to where I want to be is you know, I know I'm aware of the imposter syndrome and what it looks like, so I can have my day of grieving. You know a project that went sideways or some criticism, but then I try to bounce back and basically I'm in this fist fight with my own inner critic. That's what it is. I'm in a fist fight with my own inner critic, all right.
Speaker 1:So the effects on your mental health? It is chronic self doubt that one hits home Because I constantly doubt I even doubt things that I know how to do. Creative Facebook ad is I can do that with my eyes closed and I doubt myself on that. Stress, anxiety, low self confidence, yeah, overworked, leading to burnout. The burnout piece is real and one of the things I did the reason why I left my old field that I absolutely loved I loved working with kids and families and running shelters and things along those lines was I was burnt out. And I always told my staff you don't want to do work that impacts people's lives on such a personal level where you're working with their households and providing stability. You don't want to be doing that while you're burned out.
Speaker 1:And avoidance of taking new challenges to evade exposure that's one that I kind of do. I force myself into new roles, hence why I'm sitting in my studio, live streaming to you, exposing the fact that I feel like an imposter most of the time. It's exposing myself constantly to that, all right. So the way you overcome it and so I'm going to go based on what they're saying, what the experts are saying about overcoming it, and I'm talking about how I overcome my imposter syndrome on a daily basis and, before I get too far in it, if you are listening, go ahead and drop where you rank in terms of imposter syndrome? In terms of what type of imposter sometimes do you feel like? You feel like the perfectionist, the Superman or superwoman, the natural genius, the soloist, the expert. Let me know what that looks like and what are some of the things that trigger your imposter syndrome.
Speaker 1:Hey y'all, it's Brian. If you guys are enjoying this content, go ahead and click the subscribe button. My goal is to teach as many business owners how to be their own media and marketing departments so that they can either manage it themselves or make good decisions when they're hiring out for social media managers and marketers. So go ahead and subscribe for more content like this. Thanks for tuning in. Back to the program Peace, okay. So how to overcome imposter syndrome? And again, there's going to be the canned answer that the experts give, and then I'm going to tell you how I do it and how I process it.
Speaker 1:Recognition is understanding that you actually struggle with this and realizing that your feelings about it probably aren't necessarily accurate. You can be critical and you can look upon what you've done with a critical eye and recognize what kind of came up short here, without it being all garbage. Find somebody to talk about it with and share it, and I would almost say and I know I'm bad with this one specifically, but find you know, maybe preface the conversation with I don't want advice, I just need to talk about this. I don't need your advice on how to overcome this. I don't want your book of affirmations, I don't want any of that stuff. Reframe your thoughts, stop attributing your success just to be unlucky, and take, stand on, stand on your square and be proud of the things that you've accomplished. Sometimes you can find a mentor, a mentor that kind of nudge you through it, maybe an accountability coach who could push you through that piece of it. So when you're having the stinking thinking, they can be a resource that you can tap into and call them and talk to them about what you're feeling. Then maybe they can help you redirect a little bit of that.
Speaker 1:Learn how to accept praise. That's what I learned a while ago. You know, and I have a bad habit of when somebody says thank you or tells me a good job on something, I always say no problem, and realistically, I should just be saying thank you, because being grateful for the moment is really empowering and it reframes your mind at least for me it does showing gratitude in the moment and instead of you know, saying no problem or don't sweat it or anything like that. I'm really trying to just say thank you and accept the praise as it comes, because a lot of people don't. And when you don't really accept the praise, it's hard to remember times when you've been praised for something and then make a success journal. Here's the thing with the journal. So I tried the success journal thing and what happened was I tried to kind of log. You know, I tried a journal. I've tried journaling before and what it turns into is me beating myself up because I don't stay consistent with my journal and doubting my ability to commit to things because I didn't stay with my journal. Choose your own adventure with that one.
Speaker 1:You see imposter syndrome in various groups. You're going to see in an academia a lot because of that paradox with learning, where the more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn about something. And so you end up doubting the knowledge that you have. So you can be, you know, an expert with 30 years of experience in a topic and because you have that 30 years, you think that you know much less than you actually do and you don't understand the gap between your knowledge and somebody who's a complete layman is the distance from Earth to Pluto versus what a layman knows versus a novice. The distance between a layman's knowledge and a novice's knowledge is from your house to the grocery store, and so that's the difference.
Speaker 1:In academia, you see it, where your job is to learn things and be astute at teaching other people things, you acquire so much knowledge that you forget how knowledgeable you are about a subject. That's why you don't see a lot of actual, legitimate, bona fide experts in any field arguing on Facebook about stuff. You don't see climate scientists on Facebook arguing whether global warming is real. You don't see astrophysicists logging on to debate flat earthers. It doesn't really happen that much because you know they don't necessarily have time for that. They're actually learning their pursuits, but you don't see a lot of them, and so what you get is a lot of the people that have.
Speaker 1:There's a difference between having real knowledge and being kind of acquainted with information. Having the real knowledge is you actually invested time and blood or sweat equity into building your knowledge base. Having being kind of aware of the information is I read about article about it or watched a video about it on YouTube In Tech and STEM. I can tell you that you know underrepresented groups in Tech and STEM. It's something that you struggle with because you're constantly feeling like you have to prove yourself.
Speaker 1:One of the things I grew up with and a lot of you know, a lot of my 70s and 80s babies can attest to this. You know they put you in all you know if you're smart, they put you in the gifted classes and whatnot and then use that to compare you against the other kids that didn't make it and stuff. And so you got to work twice as hard to go half as far. And that's something that's ingrained in a lot of black entrepreneurs that are my age. And you feel like a fraud. Whenever you let up or whenever you take some kind of break, or whenever you relent, or whenever you take a vacation, or whenever you just need to have a crisis moment and completely collapse into a pool and kind of grieve what you're going through so that you get back on your track, you feel guilty rigidually for that Guess what it is. And entrepreneurs, which is what I'm kind of talking about today Entrepreneurs constantly feel like this because there's always somebody that's earning more money than you.
Speaker 1:There's always somebody that has a bigger following you, then there's always somebody that has more than what you have and it's really easy to feel like an impostor and it's hard to appreciate what you have and really embrace that piece of it when you are constantly comparing yourself to the bigger dogs. And that's what it is. Comparison is a thief of joy. It will rob you of your joy in accomplishing things when you're constantly comparing yourself to things. All right, so I can go into notable people with imposter syndrome, you're going to have your Albert Einstein struggled with and Maya Angelou struggled with it, and these are very accomplished people. They felt like they were fraud. So my question to y'all because I'm getting to a little bit of the more personal side of this is if names like Albert Einstein and Maya Angelou struggle with feeling like frauds or charlatans or they're not deserving, what makes you think you're going to get away with it? You're not alone. It's a shared company and a lot of very accomplished and intelligent, beautiful people on a day to day basis feel like they aren't enough and when you constantly have a voice in your brain that's telling you you're not enough and you need to go harder and you need to gain more.
Speaker 1:A constant thing is I can imagine YouTubers go through this constantly, where you can literally add an infinite number. You can have an infinite number of subscribers to your channel there's always going to be somebody that's ahead of you. Unless you're on the Mr Beast level or some of these other massive channels where they get more views than the Super Bowl. You're always going to have somebody in the game that's ahead of you and it's never going to be enough until you say it's enough, until you're actually happy with what you're getting. It's always going to be on the hamster wheel running trying to catch up. And you're never going to catch up and at some point you're going to have to say this is good enough. Bill Wethers put that over man. I saw it on his documentary Still Bill, where he said it's great to head out to wonderful and I'm definitely paraphrasing this one it's great to head out to wonderful, but on your way to wonderful, stop and enjoy Good enough, because it's good enough and you've got to be comfortable with good enough on your way to pursuing wonderful.
Speaker 1:So the question is, if these people struggle with imposter syndrome, what hope do us mere mortals have? If my Angelou struggles with it, what hope do I have as a guy that sits here and talks to a camera in the studio and trying desperately to grow an audience. What do you do? So the way I perceive it and the way I handle it is it really is tied to my recognition of what it is. I know that I have a very abusive inner critic and they're loud and they wake me up out of my sleep at night sometimes and they make me feel like I can never take any time off and I can't enjoy things that are tied to some form of work, and it's always been that way. I don't necessarily want to say I'm driven, but I think that's kind of the definition of being driven. It doesn't always manifest that way and so it's the high achiever with bad habits kind of thing. And the way I deal with my imposter syndrome is this I recognize what it is and I call it bullshit.
Speaker 1:So I'm constantly arguing with my inner critic and trying to constantly disprove my inner critic. Oh, you can't record a podcast you don't know anything about. You don't know anything about audio and stuff like that. I also had four years in college radio, but my brain tells me I don't know anything about audio and recording content or anything like that. So I go out and actively try to disprove my inner critic, and I do it. Anything my inner critic tells me I can't do I go and try to accomplish.
Speaker 1:When I was really into, when I was a gym rat and I spent most of my morning hours before going to work in the gym, my inner critic told me that I couldn't do chin ups and so I made the goal of being the fat guy in the gym who finished out his workout with unassisted chin ups and I got to the point where I was pretty proficient at them. My shoulders are screwed up now so I'm relegated to assisted chin ups. But you know, late 20s, early 30s, I wanted to be the fat guy in the gym doing chin ups and I set my mind to it and I did it. And then when I didn't you know if I was doing four sets of 10, if I was on the four set and around rep number seven, my arms started giving out, my shoulders started getting weak. My inner critic would chime up and start talking. But then I could kind of counter my inner critic and say, look, man, I've already done, I'm on my last set here. I'm going to a failure, and failure is good enough.
Speaker 1:So I constantly find ways to counteract what my inner critic tells me that I cannot do. If I tell myself I can't do it, I try to prove myself wrong. The only thing I haven't accomplished is getting on American Ninja Warrior and I think that ship is sailed the way that my knee was talking to me after I was doing some hand clings last week. It's not in the that one's not in the cards for me and I'm cool with that. But the way I process it, in the way I deal with my imposter syndrome is I constantly prove to myself I'm not an imposter, I'm not a fraud and I'm not a fake. I'm not taking decisive actions. That's the thing. So it may not work for everybody.
Speaker 1:Your mileage on this will absolutely vary, but for me, as I stand here right now and talk to you all, I actively work against what my inner critic tries to tell me that I can't do. That's how I deal with it. There's no meditations, there's no mantras, no affirmations, no rituals along those lines or anything along those lines. It really is just me saying, inner voice, you're full of shit. And here's why Everything my inner voice tells me I can't do. I try to go out and do, and if I fail at it, then at least I started it and I can always. I know where I fail and I can try again. That's how it works. My inner voice told me you know you can't build this business model. That's never been built before with Coach Mo Athletics. Let's do it. Build a business model to two kids from North Omaha with no entrepreneurship experience really. And now we're on track to do six figures this year. I mean all my stuff sometimes, you know, and the jewels I've gotten from running the marketing for CMA are the things that I share with y'all on here Again.
Speaker 1:I mentioned this in a meeting I was in earlier. I couldn't really conceptualize or put it into words about how I've grown CMA, but it's kind of what somebody heard. I heard this morning they described it as the traffic triangle. Traffic triangle is this, and I'll probably do another live stream about this specifically. But the traffic triangle are these things. The first side is going to be your awareness side, which is social media posts, putting content on social media, you know, informational posts on different social media, letting people know that your business exists and what y'all do and in my place, in my mind is also giving people a little bit of help so they can make a right, a good decision, so they're aware of your expertise. So your short form social media posts are one side of the triangle. That's the awareness piece. Short form content, tiktok Reels, facebook, instagram, even YouTube shorts that's one side of that traffic triangle. The other side of the traffic triangle is going to be longer form content. This is podcast, youtube, longer form videos where you're actually flexing your expertise and engaging your audience. And the piece that underpins all of that is going to be an email marketing strategy where now you're in their inboxes and you're having ongoing conversations with them and trying to convert them into clients. So that's what your traffic triangle is, and also a little bit off topic, but it kind of goes into what we're talking about here. And so your organic traffic is going to be more of that social media stuff, the stuff that requires you to be social. But you know, that's why I learned, you know working CMA. That's how I learned how to put this stuff together and make it work for me.
Speaker 1:Again, the imposter syndrome thing is it can be paralyzing. It can paralyze you from decisions. It can be the step of you not taking the next step with your marketing and launching those ads or putting yourself out there to be criticized, because that's the hardest part when you deal with a relentless inner monologue. The hardest part is dealing with criticism, and even the criticism of strangers can kind of send you spiraling if it catches you at the right time, and so it's really learning how to fight against that and still yourself against what the critics are saying, because everybody's a critic online and if they could do it, they'd be doing it instead of you. That's the reality. People don't see it that way. You know. Critics can pop up and tell you what you're not doing and it doesn't work like that or this, that and the third, but then they can never show you what their results are. They can only criticize what your results are. That's the challenging part, y'all. It's not easy.
Speaker 1:That's the strategy, isn't, for everybody is having a really keen awareness of my inner monologue, is saying negative stuff is getting me to doubt myself on multiple levels, taking account of that and saying I'm going to go prove it wrong. I'm going to prove my inner monologue wrong and go make some things shake. That's how I deal with it. Other people are going to need therapy to deal with it. You know, I know business owners. That's why I started.
Speaker 1:The unstuck sessions really managed to get you guys moving forward and unstuck and be a voice to combat this imposter syndrome that's keeping you paralyzed, as choking the life out of your business. It's keeping you from putting yourself out there and trying new things with your marketing that may yield good results. That's what the unstuck sessions is. It's literally designed to get you moving forward. That's why I'm so passionate about helping business owners and that's why I'm moving all of my energy over into creating content and consulting and telling people how to navigate the log jams that they encounter in their business life. With unstuck sessions. That's what this entire thing is.
Speaker 1:You know, the reason why a lot of people never start anything is because they never have anybody there at the beginning to help them counter and push back against that inner critic that's going to tell them that tells them that they're going to fail. You're moving the regulators. I'm a nerd. You're moving your regulators like Saitama, in one punch man. You're taking those regulators off, and it's a scary process because the regulators are also the things that keep you emotionally safe and keep you from making dangerous decisions with your career or your business, and so the inner critic keeps you from experiencing these negative outcomes.
Speaker 1:But when you avoid the negative outcomes all the time and you don't go out and decide I'm going to learn this now and fail hard and fail fast and get the lesson in it, you never progress. When you constantly try to avoid the worst outcome, when you constantly are worried about how are people going to perceive me if I'm posting about, if I'm talking about my business or industry on Facebook or YouTube or Tiktok or whatever, and you never create the avenue or create the channel, you'll never build the audience. You'll constantly be doing low leverage marketing things that don't really yield anything. You got to put yourself out there y'all. That's the real. And the way I address that the inner monologue, that negative monologue, and that the imposter syndrome constantly tells me I'm a fraud is by just saying I don't believe you and I'm going to go do it and then, when it chimes up, when I fail with the thing, say here's the lesson I'm taking away from this thing. So it wasn't a complete failure. All right, let's go ahead and wrap this thing up. If Albert Einstein and my answer to struggle with this, I don't know what thanks y'all think we go all get away with this.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing, charlotte Timbs fraudsters, con men, rip off artists, bullshit artists, whatever you want to call scammers, whatever you want to call these people, they don't suffer imposter syndrome Because they never doubt themselves. That is part of being an accountable person is dealing with self doubt occasionally, because you can even deal with the self doubt of is this thing ethical to hurting people? The people that don't care about that stuff are the fraudsters in the scammer class of the world. As long as you're feeling something and feeling some level of accountability for the outcomes you provide, based on the value that you receive, you aren't in that class of ripoff artists or scammers or charlots and frauds.
Speaker 1:Now, can you take on a project, get paid for it and fail miserably? Yes. Did you try your best with it? Yes, if it didn't work out, it didn't work out. But does it mean that you're a complete fraud? No, because there's other sides of this thing that you may not have any control over. If you're a house builder and you build a house for a person that makes bombs in their spare time, if the house blows up, you're not a fraud, and you didn't build a raggedy house. They have a pastime that undermined what you're trying to do, which is provide a home for them If they blew it up. That's how it works. You messing up doesn't mean that you are a fraud.
Speaker 1:This one's for me because there's been plenty of times this last week that had been trying and challenging I had to deal with. I didn't do this right or something came out. Something happened where it was an outcome I was not expecting and I had to adjust and it didn't yield me the level of success I wanted. Instead of looking at the success I had with it, I actually looked at the part that didn't go successful and was pissed and beat myself up for about 12, 16 hours. Then I realized it's not meant to be it. I move on.
Speaker 1:Tools in my tool bag for dealing with imposter sins are this proving my inner critic wrong and using sour grapes for a lot of stuff? If you don't know what sour grapes are, it's the parable of a fox who couldn't reach the grapes and the fox basically said all those grapes are sour anyway. It allowed the fox to not crave the thing that he couldn't reach, not crave the unattainable. To be honest with you, that's not a bad way to go If something is impossible for you to attain and you know that there's no way through your own effort that you're going to achieve it, I beat yourself up for not attaining it. I'm not saying don't aim high. I set my goal super high and I know that if I put in the grind and have a little bit of luck, I'm going to reach those goals. But am I going to say tomorrow, my goal is to step outside, spread my arms and fly like a bird in the sky with no equipment? That is an impossible goal and it will not happen. No matter how hard I will it to, no matter how hard I try to will it in the existence is not going to happen. So you have to be cognizant of making sure that your goals aren't actually impossible goals.
Speaker 1:And one thing that did send me spiraling years and years ago was I had a job that was actually almost impossible to do, and this was doing case management with the state, and even the best people, the best case managers, were absolutely getting a mentally and emotionally destroyed by the demands of this job, because they took multiple people's jobs and consolidated it down to one and then didn't really have the training to uphold that piece of it. So everybody was just flying by the seat of their pants and doing their absolute best, trying to reach unattainable goals, and it did a number on a lot of us. Some of us still have. There's some people I know that are still dealing with the. Maybe it's PTSD.
Speaker 1:I don't want to diagnose anybody, but I know for a fact that I was dealing with some level of PTSD from that job and there's a lot of negative things. You know where I'm like. I got to the point where I'm like okay, so if I'm crossing the street, maybe a car can just run a light and then I can go rest and go rest in the hospital for a little bit. It was that bad and that's when I realized I had to get out of there because I just had a newborn baby and I did not want to. I was having a hard time getting up in the morning and kind of being mad that I was that I got up if you know where I'm going with that and I realized that this job was not. There were no reasonable expectations of completing this job on a day to day basis. I could come in and be at work at five in the morning and work till eight o'clock at night and still be behind. You never catch up.
Speaker 1:And so the people that they, either they had years and years of experience to learn how to really manage their time and manage their expectations and really be, you know, saying this is all I can give to this case specifically, and then they can pivot off of it. Or in some cases and very in a few cases where people just kind of phoned it in and filled out the required paperwork and filled out the required hours and tentatively did the visits but didn't give a whole lot of effort to any one aspect of it, just so that they could give equal attention to everybody and that they were responsible for. It was no ideal solution and, like I said, there was a lot of people ended up with. It was kind of a PTSD thing, you know, and it got to the point where I was actually actively dreading that job more than the unemployment line or hospitalization or anything along those lines, and so I just got to that point where I'm like I got to get out of here and an environment like that really does it can worsen your imposter syndrome because you aren't, no matter how hard you work, you are never going to get caught up. You're never going to be. You're going to barely be proficient at the job, based on the standards the state sets, and then the state is always reducing your resources to do the job. That's what it was, and so it's really easy to feel like you're a fraud and you don't know what you're talking about, just because it's impossible to do on a day to day basis. You need to make sure that if you're in an environment like that, you got to get the hell out of there. I'm not even talking about ways to navigate that. I'm saying you got to get out of an environment like that. You need to be aware of when you're in a position, that nothing you do is ever good enough and no matter how much effort you put into it, it's never recognized or anything. This is where you got to hit the eject button and move on, because no amount of information or tips that I can give you here is going to improve your lot, a lot in life with that. It's just not going to happen. So find your exit and find it expeditiously. All right, let me finish up with the posture syndrome. I got to go pick up a kid.
Speaker 1:So the historical context, cultural, societal pressures can exacerbate imposter feelings. Just like I was saying, having a job that's literally impossible for you to do will make you feel like a fraud on a day-to-day basis and in some cases, depending on who's mentoring you or who's supposed to be training you, if their training style is very draconian and really beats you up while you're learning, it can make that imposter syndrome even worse because you're terrified of making a mistake. I've been in that position too. We're actually so terrified of making mistakes that you make multiple mistakes throughout the day, and then the feedback sessions are even worse at night. This comes from working group homes, but it can exacerbate imposter feelings.
Speaker 1:A couple of failures will get you right back into feeling like you don't know anything, no matter where, no matter how much experience you have with a job or a business. A couple of back-to-back failures and as a business owner, I can tell you when you run a business, things go wrong in clusters. That's just how I go, bro. Things don't happen bad in isolation, they happen bad in groups and clusters, and so you string a couple of little together. You're going to be in imposter syndrome territory. You have to be aware of this.
Speaker 1:I think maybe and I said, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. My solution ain't going to fit everybody, but I think maybe the first step in addressing imposter syndrome, if you're struggling with it, is mindfulness and realize that the feelings you have, the negativity you feel, the harshness of the voice of your inner critic, it's not real. It is all manifestations of your brain. Your brain is a great implement. It's a great thing that keeps you alive, but it's very poor at making you feel happy. You got to figure out what makes you happy. Your brain doesn't make you happy. It keeps you alive. It keeps your heart beating and your lungs breathing oxygen and keeps your function, your kidneys running and all the other stuff. But as a thing that allows you to be happy, you actually have to make that effort and find the things that make you happy.
Speaker 1:If you live in a society or in a house, a family that has rigid, where they rigidly prioritize achievements or have rigid definitions of success, you are an imposter syndrome. Land Work twice as hard to get half as much. Having that constantly driven into our heads for a whole group of young black professionals or middle-aged black professionals now, having that driven into our heads on a daily basis. But every adult that cared about us leads you feeling like an absolute fraud if you screw up one small thing on your day and you're not perfect. That's what it is Not saying. Black folks are the only ones that do it, but that's the one that I can really relate to. It drives you. It absolutely does. It makes you go above and beyond on every single thing, where sometimes you don't need to go above or beyond to have success. You just need to be present. There's a lot of times where your presence is enough. Parenthood is one of those. Being just present for your kids as a mom or a dad sometimes is all it takes. You don't have to go above and beyond, just need to be present. If you ain't got PlayStation 5 money sometimes the kid is just happy with you being there. You don't have to pick up the extra shift to buy the PS5. They ask you to come to their games and share them on. That's a personal one. I'm not going to cry on this thing.
Speaker 1:The danger about an imposter syndrome is if you allow that imposter syndrome to take root, it will absolutely combine. If you got anything else, any other diagnosis out there, if you got any kind of depression or anything your imposter syndrome loves to cozy up to those and then they both conspire to strangle you. If you have ADHD and you're hypersensitive to criticism or rejection, it will absolutely eat you alive and punish all your best efforts If you do not rein in feeling like you're a fraud. You deserve it and you're worthy and you know enough and there's nothing holding you back from going out and trying to at least start working on your dreams. There's nothing holding you back except that negative inner voice. Sometimes you just got to learn how to listen to that negative inner voice.
Speaker 1:Say, point taking I shut up and sit back and watch me do this thing that you're telling me that I cannot do. It's gutting through. It is what I'm saying. I don't have any magic trick. I don't have anything else. It's not any kind of mind hack or anything. It's me telling my negative inner voice shut up and watch me do this thing. You're going to sit back and you're going to see as I go out and do this thing that you told me that I was not able to do. That's my hack. That's my trick Just doing it. If my brain tells me I can't do it, then I go out and do it, just to prove my brain wrong or shut it up or fail and learn the lesson in the failure. That's what I do. I'm sorry that I don't have any QTSI diagram or acronym to defeat this thing. I just bear down and cut through it.
Speaker 1:Maybe, if this helps one person where they're built like me, where they're kind of built like me, where they can just kind of tell their inner voice to shut up and watch me do it, I hope this helps you. If this means anything to you, give me a like. That's what I'm going to ask. If this helps you navigate your imposter syndrome, give me a like. If you're a business owner and you feel like imposter syndrome is holding you captive, I do have consulting services available, which is kind of me coaching you through some of the negative perceptions or your worldview and shifting some of your perceptions and giving you some actionable steps to move forward. If that's something you're interested in, I'm going to leave my link in the show notes because this is going to be cut for a podcast, but I also can put up my email, which is actually I put up my website, iselwordsnet. You can figure out how to contact me through there, but also my email is mail at iselwordsnet. So yeah, this is what you can do to reach out to me.
Speaker 1:If you want to schedule a time, sit out and start navigating through something that has you stuck, and so if it's an imposter syndrome that has you stuck, schedule a time. Especially if you are looking to get started as a business owner or you've reached a sticking point with your business or the marketing in your business, go ahead and shoot me an email. We can schedule a time to sit down and talk. I appreciate y'all. I really do, and I know I don't have a big audience, but I'm grateful for the audience that I do have, and maybe one day, if I'm lucky, I can earn more people watching me on a weekly basis. That's all I'm asking for. If this has helped you at all, just leave me a like and that's how you can help me out. And if this connects with you or you know somebody that this could help, go ahead and share this with them. I'd appreciate that too. Again, my name is Brian. My job is to get you on stuck. I'll talk to y'all later. Have a great week, Peace.