Welcome to Visionary Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your big, bold ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Welcome back. This is episode 26 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Thank you for joining me today. I'm going to talk about a topic that I think you're going to find useful and relevant because it's a topic I've covered with almost every individual I coach and it's imposter syndrome. And it's so important because when we're leaders, when we're going first, when we're taking risks, Imposter syndrome always shows up, and we tend to think that imposter syndrome happens when we're new at something, when we're beginners, but really, imposter syndrome is a thought pattern that all humans have, you know, some humans
Months ago, I was coaching a woman who is the COO of a global company with presence in more than 100 countries with over 6, 000 employees, and she had been CEO of this company for several years now, and in our conversation, she told me, well, I don't feel like I'm the COO type, and I had to chuckle.
Because she is a COO and the thousands of employees that report up to her see her and recognize her as a COO. They trust her leadership. They follow her. They have so much respect and admiration for her. And I'm sharing these stories to start by. Busting the myth that imposter syndrome only happens when we're beginners or we're doing something for the first time.
As I'm sharing this story about this woman, I'm sure you're also thinking why would she ever think she's not the COO type when she has evidence that she is a COO. And the reason is because her story was that COOs look different than her. Let in different ways that she leads, are more extroverted, more outspoken, and she's more of a quiet but very influential leader.
So let's start with a definition. Imposter syndrome was a term coined by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. Imposter syndrome refers to the persistent feeling of self doubt and the fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite evidence of success. It doesn't matter how much you've achieved, how much money you have, what titles you have, experience.
The imposter syndrome tells us in some way we're going to be found out, that we're not prepared enough, capable enough, smart enough, you name it. As I was doing research for this episode, I stumbled upon the research by Dr. Valerie Young around imposter syndrome. I love it because she named five different types of imposter syndrome.
And I loved her categories, because as I read each one of them, first, I could see myself in many of them, and two, so many of the stories my clients share with me. I could see how they fit or they are representations of this category she created, so I'm going to share them with you. The first category is the perfectionist and Dr.
Young defines it as the belief that unless work is flawless, we are a failure. And we all struggle with perfectionism at times. And it made me think of someone I was coaching who was an ex Google executive and now had started their own business. And we were in a meeting and this person was asking all the other people in this meeting to review an email campaign they were sending.
And I was just looking at this person, very confused. Why is this person asking everyone to review that email campaign? That seems like a small thing in their business. What's going on? And what was going on is this person wanted to be perfect, wanted the email campaign to create the results they wanted.
And that perfectionism had made this person hold on to this email for many, many days. They didn't want to make a mistake. They wanted to get exact results to know that their work, the effort they put into this email campaign. Before I continue with the other categories of imposter syndrome, I want to take a moment here and talk a little bit more about perfectionism and refer to the research of Brené Brown because I think it's huge.
And for visionaries and leaders and high performers like all of you, perfectionism is one of the biggest obstacles we need to overcome. Brené Brown names perfectionism the 20 ton shield. She says we carry it around to keep us from getting hurt, but actually she says we carry perfectionism around to keep us from being hurt.
But what it actually does is keep us from being seen. Perfectionism is the mistaken belief. That tells us, if you look perfect, work perfect and do it all perfectly, I can help you avoid ever feeling judged or blamed or criticized or failing. But the problem with that definition is that perfection doesn't exist.
The nature of us human beings is to That we're flawed. We make mistakes. Things don't go exactly like we expect them. But here's the trap. When we fail, which if you heard other episodes, you know failure is inevitable. Instead of saying, you know what? Perfectionism is not working for me. The story we tell ourselves is something like I wasn't perfect enough.
And that's why I failed. I wasn't perfect enough. And that's why that meeting didn't go as I planned. I wasn't perfect enough. And that's why revenue is not where I want it to be. And that thought, I wasn't perfect enough, like all the thoughts of I wasn't blank enough, takes us into shame, into hiding, into not taking action.
Perfectionism is a way. of feeling like an imposter that really holds us back. And in a little bit I'll tell you how we can overcome this. Moving to the second category that Dr. Yang defines as the expert and she says, no, moving to the second category. That Dr. Young names the expert and defines it by the feeling we get when we think we need to know everything before we can take action.
This reminded me of another person I coached. She was the head of sustainability for a corporation and she was invited to give a talk in sustainability. For all of us, we would think that makes sense. She's the head of sustainability, but the story she created in her head was that she didn't know anything about sustainability because she didn't have a Ph.
D. in sustainability. So she spent the night, so she spent the entire night researching and reading very dense papers about sustainability to be able to feel prepared for the talk the next day. I think it's important that we bring humor. To the imposter syndrome, because I'm sure as you're hearing these examples and stories from my clients, you're probably thinking, what, where did this story come from?
But I bet that if you and I sat down and talk about your own imposter syndrome, we would end up laughing at the stories your brain creates because that's what they are. Stories. Moving to the next category, the soloist. And the way Dr. Young defines this category is the thought. that tells us that if we ask for help, it means we're incompetent.
Again, I'm thinking about another client who is the VP at a multi billion dollar company with thousands of employees. And she was at a meeting with her peers and the CEO, and they started talking about something that was out of her scope, a very technical part of their business. That she had no business really knowing what it was because it didn't belong in the area she managed.
And yet she got so scared when she heard those terms. And thought to herself, they're going to find out, I don't know what this is, and I'm never going to get promoted. So she disconnected from the meeting, stopped paying attention and instead went to her phone and started Googling those terms. Has that ever happened to you?
That you're talking with someone and you're in a meeting and they bring up a term that you think, Oh my gosh, I have no idea what this is. And you keep going pretending that you know, I hope together we can laugh about this. Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, has inspired me a lot around this topic because she has the funniest stories of when this type of imposter syndrome has happened to her and how now she just raises her hand and says something like, probably I should know this, but I have no idea what you're talking about.
Can you explain it to me? I'm so inspired by her stories because It's refreshing to see the founder and CEO of a very large corporation still not know everything and be able to be herself and say, I just don't know. So maybe we can all be a little bit more like Sarah Blakely. Okay, moving on. Fourth category is the natural genius.
This happens when we struggle when something doesn't come easily. I bet we all have this. As kids, we don't even notice that we're bad at something. You know, I think of my girls when they were learning to walk, how many times they fell and it didn't matter. Or when my oldest one started writing, it was the cutest thing because she would write this.
Long letters to us and it make no sense to us, but in her head, it was written perfectly. But as we grow up, we start becoming so self conscious of being bad at something, at being a beginner. So what I've noticed is that the majority of adults don't create a lot of change in their lives. They stay in the same industry, in the same jobs, in the same companies.
Continue with the same hobbies, because doing something that we've never done before and being really bad at it, it's really hard for us as adults. But the problem with that is that it holds us back from expanding our horizons and learning new things and training our brains in new ways. And the last category proposed by Dr.
Young is the superhuman. And it's when we try to prove ourselves worthy by juggling multiple responsibilities perfectly. And I see this happen all the time. Entrepreneurs who want to do everything by themselves in their business, who are afraid of hiring people that know more than them or inside corporations when my clients can't set boundaries, can't say no to certain projects.
They want to do everything to prove that they're worthy. Maybe you can relate with this one as well. And I want to add one more category that I thought about thinking about my clients and their stories and it's the outsider. And the outsider is when we start thinking or believing that we don't belong here.
We start looking around and we tell ourselves people here are older than me or smarter than me or graduated from a more prestigious university or have more experience or are more famous, richer. Maybe they're mostly men and I'm the only women, or maybe they're all a certain race and I'm a different race.
To me, the outsider is when we feel like we're imposters because we tell ourselves the stories that we don't belong. So to recap all the different types of imposter syndrome that exist. The perfectionist, the expert, the soloist, the natural genius, the superhuman, and the outsider. Why am I talking about imposter syndrome in this podcast?
And this is why, as visionaries, as leaders, we are growing, constantly growing, and that means that we're always putting ourselves out of our comfort zone. And the more ambitious the goal. The more the imposter syndrome shows up. And also when we're high performers, we often have unrealistic expectations for ourselves, right?
Like we believe we need to know everything, do it all by ourselves, have all the experience, have all the knowledge when the reality is we are humans. in constant growth, in constant process, and we don't know it all. And that is okay.
One of the things I've noticed by coaching so many people around the imposter syndrome is that when we start believing we're imposters, we actually start behaving like imposters. So for example, when we pretend to know something because we're scared of saying that we don't know, We're actually being an imposter by saying, Oh yeah, yeah, I know about this.
We don't know it. When we're trying to do all the things by ourselves. We're being imposters because there's not enough time or, or we don't know how to do everything well. And I feel like it becomes a cycle, right? When we act like imposters, then we start seeing evidence of, see, I'm an imposter. And that imposter syndrome starts getting stronger and stronger.
It is fundamental that we learn how to manage this thought pattern because it is key for our success as a leader or a visionary. And here are ways that the imposter syndrome holds us back. It keeps us playing small. It stops us from taking risks. It stops us from hiring the best in the industry, people who are older, more experienced, who know more about something than us.
It makes us procrastinate and take longer than we need to, to put things out in the world or keep moving forward. It makes us hide. And as visionaries and leaders, we need visibility. We need others to learn about who we are and about the work we're putting out there in the world. And finally, imposter syndrome stops us from doing new things and learning from our mistakes.
So what can we do to overcome the imposter syndrome? I have some suggestions. The first one is to shift your perspective, to not see the thoughts that the imposter syndrome brings to you as a sign that you're not good enough, but as a sign that you are growing, that you are taking a risk, that you're putting yourself in scenarios that are outside of your comfort zone.
So next time when you're feeling like an imposter, you can remind yourself, Oh, this is a really good thing. It means I am growing. The second strategy, and if you've been a listener of this podcast, you know, this is 80 percent of the work is to be able to be aware, to recognize the voice of the imposter and understand that it's just a thought.
And it's not your reality that it's not a fact that it's a story you created in your head because when you have that awareness, you can detach or you can separate a little bit from the imposter and then be able to engage your prefrontal cortex to manage it. The third strategy is to work on strengthening your ability to self validate.
If you go through life waiting for other people to tell you that you're not an imposter. Every day more you're going to feel like an imposter. You need to learn how to look at your successes and believe in you and see what you've been capable of. As well as staying on your own side when you fail, when you make a mistake, when you're being ridiculed, when you really mess up.
Self validation shows up when you can say, I don't know, when you don't know. When you can reveal your point of view, the way you see things, even if others disagree. I think many entrepreneurs feel like they need permission to be an expert or to take up space. But I think it's a decision we make. We don't need to know everything to help others.
We don't need all the titles to take up space. Self validation is when you look at your results, your experience, and your unique perspective, and you decide that those are valuable enough. And here's the trick. The more you show up as yourself, the more people will trust and buy from you and want to follow you.
Another great strategy is to see failure, not as a failure of character, but to see failure as a requirement for success. Every major success story includes setback. We become visionaries and leaders because as my coach Stacey says, we go first, we go often, and we go with purpose. Embracing failure will help you move beyond the sense of imposter and really own who you are.
When self doubt shows up, you can also borrow belief from other people. When I was growing up, I would tell my mom, I don't know if I can do this. And my mom would always look at me and say, You, Carolina Zuleta, of course, you can do it. And many times as a grownup, when I've looked at challenges and doubted myself, I bring her voice to my mind and tell myself, me, Carolina Zuleta, of course I can do it.
So you can borrow that belief as well. You can name yourself and say, of course I can do it. I can figure it out. Another strategy to manage this self doubt is doing it anyways. Even if you're scared, even if you feel like an imposter, even if you're doubting yourself, go ahead and take action. Confidence is the result of taking action multiple times until we know for sure we can do something.
Confidence is not the prerequisite. The prerequisite is courage. So, if you're feeling doubt, lean into courage and take action anyway. Another strategy is to practice and strengthen the ability to be in integrity with yourself. And what I mean by integrity with yourself is that if you decide or you say to yourself or to other people that you're going to do something, then you do it.
We start increasing our self doubt when we tell ourselves, Oh, I'm going to do A, B, C, D, and we don't do it. I've noticed there is a cycle of increased self doubt when we fail to follow what we said we were going to do. It counts in small things as well as big things. If you said you were going to wake up at 6 a.
m., then wake up at 6 a. m. If you said you were going to exercise, then just do it. If you said you were going to complete these projects during this day, go ahead and do them. Because the more we do, do what we say we're going to do, the more confident we feel in ourselves, the more we can trust ourselves and the lower the voice of self doubt is in our heads.
And the last one, like I mentioned at the beginning, perfectionism is huge for high performers and you really need to stop being perfect. As I mentioned at the beginning, perfectionism is huge for high performers. So a great strategy is to detach from trying to be perfect. Brenner Brown says that the opposite of perfectionism is striving for excellence.
Striving for excellence is when you decide to try your best and then embrace when you fall short, when you don't meet the mark that you had set for yourself. As you heard from all the stories I shared from my clients and the people I've coached, who are all very successful. Everyone has had, at some point, self doubt.
Everyone feels, at times, like an imposter. The difference is that some people believe the voice of the imposter and hold themselves back, and others lean into courage, into self validation, and even when they doubt themselves, they keep moving forward. Imposter syndrome is not a reason to stop yourself.
Remember, it's the signal that you are walking into something new, into uncharted territory, that you are growing, that you are becoming better every day. Your vision exists because you are the one to bring it to life. So let's recap. Imposter syndrome is normal. It's a sign that we're growing, that we're getting out of our comfort zone.
And it can be managed by becoming aware of that voice and using the multiple strategies I offered to shift it. and instead take action. Something you can do after this episode is choose one of the strategies I shared and start applying it and see the results that come from it. And if you want to work on this topic in a deeper way, you can book a consult with me at carozuletta.
com forward slash consult. And we can explore how coaching can help you overcome imposter syndrome. Be everyday more of who you are, have more energy and strength and courage to make your vision a reality. So keep going after your boldest ideas. The world really needs your vision until next time.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea, we need to talk! In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions, as well as your team and your money, so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality.
Go now to carozuleta. com slash consult, that is C A R O Z U L E T A dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me. See you there!
