Have you ever felt like you’re faking your skills, expertise, or talent? Do you worry that customers or associates will ‘find you out’ and discover you’re a fraud? Have you bought into the idea that you haven’t earned your success and that it’s all just happened by luck, regardless of evidence to the contrary?
All business owners and entrepreneurs have faced challenges, missteps, and the occasional bad decision during their careers. This is a natural part of business life.
Sometimes, these routine setbacks can shake our confidence and create self-doubt. This too, is not uncommon.
But if the sense of unworthiness, self-blame, and negative feelings persist, it’s likely you’ve experienced, or are currently experiencing, imposter syndrome.
Questioning your ability can eat away at your confidence, limit your opportunities, and leave you exhausted. This can have a devastating effect on your business performance and stop you from reaching your potential.
Imposter syndrome does not discriminate. It affects people from all walks of life, at every level of success. And imposter syndrome isn’t limited to the workplace. It can stop you from making a major purchase, delivering a speech at your daughter’s wedding, running for an elected position, and so on.
The good news is, there are ways to navigate these feelings and enjoy success. Today, I want to show you one of the biggest steps you can take for yourself to combat feelings of imposter syndrome - Raise your confidence.
When you’re self-confident, you’re not trying to be someone else. You know exactly what you have to offer and can bring your best to any situation. Developing your confidence will help you keep your imposter syndrome in proportion to reality.
Combating imposter syndrome for some people isn’t simply a case of developing more self-confidence. But it can play a part, and the exercises in this module can help whatever severity of imposter syndrome you experience. Some will work better than others and you’ll be drawn to some rather than others. It’s a personal thing, definitely not a one-size-fits-all scenario.
Try them out and see for yourself. You may develop variations over time that suit you better or find other ways entirely. What’s important is that you build in mechanisms to raise your self-confidence.
We are all confident in certain situations or certain roles in our lives. However, there are probably areas where we don’t feel so sure of ourselves.
For example, you may feel particularly confident managing arguments with your kids, but shy away from confrontation in the workplace. You may feel totally sure of yourself when negotiating deals with suppliers, but get uncomfortable when you have to do a deal with your builder.
Your comfort zone is where you feel most confident. It’s where many of us live most of the time, doing the things that are easy and familiar to us. The comfort zone will be different for everyone, but whatever that zone is, it limits everyone’s growth.
The more you can move out of that zone, the more you can expand your boundaries. You’ll find out exactly what you can do to build your confidence. Once you know your own process, you can replicate it in other situations and expand your comfort zone.
One of the greatest areas of difficulty for many people is making decisions. If you’re a manager, entrepreneur, or small business owner, it will often fall to you to make the major judgement calls.
If you experience imposter syndrome with perfectionism, you’ll continually search for a way to ‘get it right’ every time. This will put considerable pressure on you when it comes to making decisions.
For example, if you were repeatedly told “Be careful, you might make the wrong decision!”, you’ll end up fearing making any decision. You’ll freeze, feel powerless, and do nothing. This will lead to a lack of progress and settling for the safe and comfortable, because no matter what you do in the end, your internal dialogue will tell you that you’re making the wrong decision and that you’ll only get criticized for it.
If this is a familiar narrative going on in your head, it’s time to put another strategy into action.
This means shifting your mindset to accept that for each negative outcome, there’s a positive one that’s just as likely. It might take a while for this to sink in!
Once you know this shift is possible, it will change how you view decision making. You’ll choose a no-lose model rather than the no-win model. In other words, whatever decision you make, you know that the outcome will be positive. In this way, you’ll release the pressure on yourself, and you’ll learn valuable lessons in the process. You may even discover constructive results that you hadn’t even considered, which will lead you to even greater success.
Most of us are still learning and growing and have the capacity to develop more. As we said earlier, everyone has a ‘comfort zone’, living in the situations where we feel confident that we can handle whatever comes along. Self-confidence develops when we widen this comfort zone by taking on and meeting challenges.
Every challenge is an opportunity for personal growth. Appropriate challenges should stretch our comfort zones, without being overwhelmingly daunting. We start from a lack of confidence, we practice, gain experience and, step by step, achieve a level of confidence. Becoming an inspiring public speaker or a confident user of smart technology are examples of this process in action.
Your challenges will be personal to you. For example, you might be willing to invite colleagues out for an after-work drink, but not feel comfortable inviting your senior managers. You might feel fine spending $75 for a pair of shoes, but draw the line at $100. You might be happy to sell a product or service for $299, but can’t imagine offering something at $2999.
As you expand your comfort zone, you bring more power and greater self-confidence into your life. And you can do this quite consciously by taking something on each day that makes you a bit nervous.
Challenge yourself to go as far as you can, without stepping too far ahead, too fast. You’ll end up disappointed and feeling like a “failure” if you set unrealistic expectations for yourself.
How you set yourself up for the day will have an impact on the hours that follow. If you have a tendency towards anxiety and pessimistic thinking, your first thoughts on waking may be programming your brain for negative outcomes.
You can take control of this by making sure that your first thoughts are energizing, motivating, and focused on the positive. Make a habit of this and see how things change for the better.
You’ll increase your confidence and set yourself up for a really great day.
Here’s an example of a question that’s focused on the positive:
Search around and you’ll soon find something to be happy about!
Sometimes it helps to imagine you’re someone else. The distance this gives you can free you from your habitual feelings and behaviors and open up possibilities to experience life in a different way.
One way to do this is to imagine you’re reporting on your own success. You could write about successes you’ve already had, or are having now, or set the article in the future. It’s more impactful if you project to the near future, as that will get your brain working along those lines and bringing about the outcome you want.
Once you’ve worked out your text, you could video it as if it’s a TV report. Be creative and have some fun!
Are you ready to put all that into action? Get the Build Your Confidence Exercise Here
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