Feel imposter syndrome? You have been asking the wrong questions!

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

There has been so much debate and discussion lately on “imposter syndrome” esp with a recent viral article on “stop telling women they have importer syndrome”. I am not going to engage in the debate of if this is legit or not and if women have it or not. My focus here is — if you ever struggle with questions of “do I belong here?” or “am I good enough?”, regardless of your gender, then here are 3 reframing strategies that I have found to be very impactful for resilience. Magic lies in, by changing the questions we ask ourselves, we get a different answer!

Reframing Competence

• I remember reading an article in which someone asked Jeff Bezos what is one quality he was looking for in his wife and he said “resourceful”. For some reason that has stuck with me. Often I find myself anxious when I don’t have the answers (aka knowledge resources) and then it suddenly leads to a feeling of incompetence. But over years I have really worked hard to shift the mindset/question from “do I know the answers?” to “can I find the answers?”. This is going from “resource full aka full of answers” to -> “resourceful aka who can find answers”. This has been so powerful esp. in current times where we are constantly learning, growing, businesses/societies are growing, oftentimes we will find ourselves at the edge of innovation (aka unknown) and no one knows the answers. However, I know I am competent enough to ask the right questions, find people who can help curate the answers and that is the true measure of competence.

Reframing Courage

• When we attempt to do something hard/new and we are afraid or anxious because our brain is looking for certainty. Certainty comes from past experience and hence something new gives our brains a lot of uncertainty and related anxiety. The root of this anxiety is the question we are subconsciously asking ourselves “Can I do this?”. The problem with this question is, if you have never done this before how will your brain know if you can do this. So a better approach is to consciously reframe the question from “can I do this?” to “can I attempt this and recover from a failure?”. The truth is, we will have the learning curve when we try new and hard things. So for resilience we have to focus on recovery, not avoiding failure (which is impossible). And for us to get started on this attempting-failing-recovering journey, we have to give ourselves PERMISSION to attempt, permission to fail and permission to recover (learn/seek support etc). Simple example: When I took my first adult ski lesson, all they taught us was to fall and get up (recover) because they knew as soon we hit the slopes that is the first thing that is going to happen. And if we did not know how to get up again from a fall, we wouldn’t be able to ski down. Similarly when we attempt something new at work, we need to intentionally first figure out the courage to fall and get up before we can find courage to blaze the slopes.

Reframing Capacity

• When taking on new initiatives, most of the time we ask ourselves “do I have time for this” and if the answer is No, then we go on some reshuffling to “create time” aka squeeze stuff or working longer hours. In essence time is the only/primary metric of our capacity. But this is faulty since this leads to a “false” sense of productivity and hence eventual burnout. We need to reframe capacity from “do I have time for this?” to “do I have energy for this?”. Energy is the true measure of capacity which includes both mental energy and emotional energy (and physical energy if your work is also physically laborious). In Computer science there is a classic problem called “thrashing” where your CPU gets so overloaded with tasks that all it does is scheduling and rescheduling tasks but its output actually goes down by taking on more tasks to run. That same principle applies to us humans too. Taking on more work till we hit our capacity increases our output and after we hit capacity more work reduces our output. So if you are bored in your current workload then you probably have unused energy/capacity and probably should figure out how to rearrange to take more challenging work. But if you are feeling enough challenge, anxiety and burnout then you need to figure out not only how to offload some work but also how to self-care and recharge to increase your capacity.

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