The Antidote to Imposter Syndrome
In this solo episode, I share everything I know about overcoming Imposter Syndrome, transforming self-doubt into a powerful pathway to personal growth. You'll learn inspiring, authentic stories both of myself and other recognizable names who've navigated their inner critic. This episode will help you break through limiting beliefs, embrace your unique potential, and courageously go for your dreams.
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Podcast Transcript
Hello there, friend. Welcome to another solo episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I am your host, Lou Redmond, and I'm a little under the weather today, so excuse me for my voice. I've been coming off of a cold for the last few days. Tis the season as we enter into the darkness of winter in the Northern hemisphere, coming up towards the holidays and just feeling, feeling a lot of energy around this time and so welcoming whatever you might be feeling during this season and really giving yourself permission for some self care, permission to slow down and to take what you need. And so as I shared before, if you're newer to the podcast, I share this as someone who quit a corporate job in 2015 and it's coming up on 10 years. It will be 10 years since I made that decision in January and I am sharing a bit about what I've learned on the journey to quote unquote, making it to finding how I can be used, how I can be of service in this world and to receive the financial support that allows me to do that full time. And so that's maybe why you're here, right? Because you have that intention, that desire, and also maybe this poll, this knowing that you are here to serve and to let something serve through you, that you are an instrument of the Great Spirit, that you are an instrument of God, to be used in the way that you're meant to. So thank you for listening. Today we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, something I have a lot of experience in experiencing, and that is imposter syndrome. What is imposter syndrome? I am going to share the best definition of imposter syndrome I've ever heard from an amazing book called the Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer. In her book, she calls imposter syndrome being afraid of the fraud police, right? This feeling that we are frauds. And what she says is the fraud police are the imaginary terrifying force of real grownups who you believe at some subconscious level are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night saying, we've been watching you. We have evidence that you have no idea what you're doing. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it. You are guilty of making shit up as you go along. You do not actually deserve your job. We are taking everything away and we are telling everyone, imposter syndrome is like this outside judge that we think is always critiquing us and we're needing to get permission from in order to do what we feel like we're allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do, we fear other people calling us phonies. And the ironic thing about imposter syndrome is that it rarely happens when you are at the beginning stages of whatever it is that you feel like a fraud about. It often comes later when we've gained some more skills and we have more time to compare and learn about others that are doing it. And so in this episode, I want to share just a few stories that are going to help you normalize imposter syndrome and work with it and embrace it. The overarching lesson here is that imposter syndrome, when coming from a place of care, is a sign that we are on our edge, that we are putting ourselves out there. And so just right away, shifting the mindset around imposter syndrome, as this is a good thing. This means I am on my creative edge. This means I am going where I have not gone before. And this means I am being visible enough where I might get judged, I might be critiqued. And that is the recipe for success, and that is the recipe for expressing things that we could never imagine that we would have expressed. And so there's some great stories of really popular singers that have gotten huge success, yet still feel like a fraud. There is a musician, Lauren Diego, who wrote a beautiful song called you'd say, which is about her journey of feeling like she wasn't enough. And she felt that because she succeeded in her first album, now there's expectations. Now that she had expectations, she began to doubt her identity and whether she could live up to the expectation. Adele has a similar story. After her first album, success came so fast that she didn't feel like she earned it. And she had a fear that people were going to find out she was a fraud and that it would all crumble down. And so what do two successful musicians facing imposter syndrome tell us again? It means we're on the right path. If you feel like you're an imposter, you are taking chances, you are doing things that scare you, and this is how we grow. And so there's a couple qualities that I want to name that can be really helpful to keep as we navigate this journey. And it's actually qualities that we possess naturally at earlier stages. That's why I said that imposter syndrome often comes when we've gotten some level of knowledge and progress, because at earlier stages, there are two things that we possess. One, a beginner's mind, and two, healthy naivete. A beginner's mind happens when we endeavor into something that we know little to nothing about and we enter it with a curiosity. We don't think that we have it figured out and we're open to receiving new information. A beginner is more open to learning about the process and is less consumed with the outcome. A beginner doesn't compare themselves or feels like others expect anything from them because a beginner doesn't put that kind of pressure. They don't have that self doubt. And that's in some ways what we're working for. We'd love to be like that. And there's such the teaching of the beginner's mind, because that is especially in Zen or some Buddhist meditation. Having a beginner's mind actually allows us to not come in with our preconceived ideas, which are illusionary. They're actually getting in the way from reality. A beginner is able to more fully be present, more fully be present. And in that presence, there's a magic, there's something that we're able to access because we're able to access actual reality. We're not filtering it through our preconceived ideas. And that is why beginner's luck is a thing. It's not that beginners are lucky, it's that they're just less self conscious and thus more present to flow with their experience. It's only when we start to develop the ideas and the concepts, we start to reify them and they start getting in the way of the flow and of what wants to come through. So invitation to see, even if you've been doing this for a while, what would it be like if you enter in to your next project or just even tomorrow and just have this beginner's mind mentality, see what that helps to open up. The next sort of antidote to imposter syndrome is healthy naivete. Now, this is actually a term that I've never heard before, so I don't know if I've coined it, but mark that in the trademark books for anyone listening. Healthy naivete, meaning that I believe and I've experienced that naivete is a good thing in some ways. Now, we don't want to stretch too far, but healthy naivete is like this idea that we have big dreams and if we knew everything, if we knew how hard it would be, we probably wouldn't start. And so it's almost like doping ourselves with a placebo. It creates a belief that we can do it and it creates action, which leads to learning, which leads to knowledge, and then we can bring knowledge into, into our next step. We at the later stages learned that, whoa, it's not as easy as we thought. And if we knew it all in the beginning, we might not have started. And so I was fortunate to start this. Being so naive. When I started sharing meditation, I thought there were like five meditation teachers in the world. It was like Deepak Chopra, Jack Kornfield, forget who others. But I didn't know many meditation teachers. And with that I felt like, wow, there's this real need because it's not in my world. And so that naivete helped me to get started. And if I had known the landscape beforehand, I might have been stymied. And so really inviting you this to trust, to not need to know everything that. How can you let that childlike beginner's mindset also open a healthy naivete? Let yourself believe something that you didn't believe before. Let yourself open to the possibilities and trust that as each step you take, the path will show itself. And so let's diverge this into permission and certifications, because I think so many people deal with imposter syndrome through an external process. They think they need another certification to give them permission to do something. And I love talking about the story from the Netflix movie the Dig. And so the Dig is a story about an archaeological discovery in England during World War II. And the protagonist and the excavator, Mr. Brown, is hired by Mrs. Pretty on a hunch that there's something special on her land. Mr. Brown calls himself an excavator because he doesn't have a degree in archaeology. He dropped out of school when he was 12, and through apprenticeship with his father, he learned everything about soil and the art of excavating. He has great love for his work and his energy is infectious. After some missteps, Mr. Brown breaks ground on what looks to be a 900 year old Anglo Saxon ship. It's the discovery of a lifetime. And in the career of Mr. Brown, it's like Einstein discovering E mc2. Of course, in all good stories and lives, a problem occurs that tests Mr. Brown's resolve. After his finding gets around, official archaeologists of England come and forcibly take over the project. They discredit Mr. Brown because he has no archaeology degree. Poof. Poof. Mr. Brown is then offered a subservient position on the crew, but is too angry and disheartened to accept. He instead leaves the job altogether in a calmer mind. Mr. Brown realizes that even though he's no longer in control, he didn't get into his work for Status. He digs because he loves it and because it's important for the future generations to know where they came from. He swallows his pride and returns. He proves to be invaluable, bringing a unique insight and intuition that others did not possess. And so what do we learn from this story is that Mr. Brown's passion and overall passion, caring, heart, love, matters more than degree. The energy and intention with which you do things matters. And we connect more with someone who cares than someone who simply knows. Mr. Brown knew as much as the snob from the British Museum, but it was his love and his caring that set him apart. And the system and business of schooling, the education industrial complex, as Seth Godin calls it, trained us to think that we can't make an impact without a degree. And this conditioned us to always look for permission from some higher entity. And this causes so many to outsource their worth rather than cultivating it from within. What we also learn from school is doing things in order to, in order to get a grade, in order to get a test, in order to get through it so that we get a degree. What do you remember from your schooling? You likely remember things that were interesting to you and that's where true learning is. And if you're doing this work, you're probably doing it because it's pretty interesting. You feel called to it and you're interested, you love it and that's how you learn. We live in the age where information is abundant. We live in the AI world. You could find out anything at your hand tips. We go watch your YouTube videos, we take masterclasses. There's so many ways that we can get educated. But if you're also in this work of spirituality, know that the, the biggest thing to do is your own personal work, your own spiritual work, not your own spiritual certification, but your actual healing work. Because that is what's going to be felt. Your presence is your certification is what is going to resonate for people, what is going to draw people to you. And so invitation to get out of the education industrial complex to think that do I really need that degree? This is not to say that you don't do certifications and degrees. I love them. I've been in a almost two year long coach training myself. I always do trainings, but I do them out of a genuine interest and curiosity, not out of a who am I, I don't have enough, I'm gonna do this so I can feel more worthy and give myself more permission. It's always come out of a genuine interest. So don't throw degrees out. There are important, especially in some fields. Of course, you don't want a doctor that hasn't been to medical school. And there will be some for sure that say, I've talked about this before. I've named this insecurity around teaching meditation and why I consider myself more of an artist. And this is the art of meditation, not the teaching of meditation necessarily. But to know that some really legit teachers, they spend a lot of time in practice and it takes years for their teacher to say, okay, now go ahead and teach it right. They didn't often didn't do the as you found. You want to find my episode on do we need a certification to teach meditation? That's a helpful episode if this is resonating with you. To realize that the most legit meditation teachers don't have a certification. They have authorization from their teacher. From their master. Certifications have only come later by some teachers or some people are creating their own training. And so those are great. And we're learning and we're healing and we're growing. But I again, you know me, I want you out there. I want you trying things out and doing the work. So I'm going to tell one more story on imposter syndrome. It's going to be my own story and then I'm going to end it with our friend Seth Godin, who has probably influenced me the most around imposter syndrome and continues to to be a guide to so many. So my personal story, and I'm actually gonna go back to something I wrote at the time of the imposter syndrome. So I was working on a new book that's still been worked on. This was in 2018 and I was writing a book. I wrote a book called Find you'd Truth. And I was still am in some ways working on a book called Live youe Truth or some iteration of that. And I wanted to capture the moment, the most intense imposter syndrome that I ever felt in the moment. And so this is literally me writing down what happened in that moment. I write this just a few days after confirming my highest paid booking to date. The opportunity came after I reached out to 100 schools in the New Jersey area about doing a yoga and mindfulness workshop with students. Out of all these schools, nothing of what I had in mind materialized. I did, however, have one school respond to me and asked if I had an offering that taught teachers how to use yoga and mindfulness techniques in their classroom. My initial reaction was disappointment. At the time, I did not have an offering like that, nor did I feel qualified to lead a training where I'm teaching teachers. I was going to respond, dismissing the opportunity, but then I paused and thought about it more. Huh? Wait a second. Could I do this? There's a Richard Branson quote that says, when someone hands you a great opportunity, say yes and then figure out how to do it. I think there's a Teddy Roosevelt version of that as well. And so with that in mind, I thought about, why couldn't I do this? I didn't have the exact offering, but I could create what they wanted. So I pushed my insecurity aside and I responded, yes, I do have a program like that. And I asked them if they would like to hear more. Now, I understand to some you might be a little like, that's kind of deceitful. What do you mean? Did you have a program? You didn't have a program ready? And so it's not like they asked me if I can build an addition to their gymnasium. It's not like this was some foreign field. I had spent the last 18 months leading meditation workshop, and I was a certified yoga teacher. I had actual experience. I just didn't have this exact thing that they were asking. But I knew that I could create it. I had put the work in, and now there was an opportunity. So without knowing what would transpire, I got the ball rolling. And the next part I'm sure every new business owner deals with was, how do you price this? How do you price the value something you don't even know you have yet? And this is a constant fun thing to figure out and learn, and maybe we can do another episode on it. I'm kind of speaking to you as I'm also reading this thing I wrote in 2018, so bear with me here. Coming back to it, I decided that I wasn't gonna short myself, and if I was gonna do it, it'd be worth creating. I had to be compensated well for it. So I decided to do a rate, and I would never do this again. So just note that I decided to do a rate of $25 an hour per person in attendance. So with 20 people for six hours, that would be $30,000. Sent my quote. I waited. A few days went by, I didn't hear back. I thought, oh, my gosh, I asked too much. They hate me. They think I'm some greedy person. Da, da. You know, all those feelings when we have a poor. Again, Lou from the future speaking, when we have a poor mindset around money and value and energy and time, whatever that voice is, when we say a price and we are imagining what they might be thinking, that's our work right there. Like, oh my gosh, it's too much. You know, those are our voices. That's our stuff. So just wanting to note that. Anyway, I waited again. I got a reply and they confirmed that they'll have 22 people interested and they were looking for four hours of program and doing the math, that was $2,200. And at that time, I promise you, that was more than anything I'd ever gotten paid for in one offer. And so I was ecstatic this was going to happen and I was to the moon. And so I enjoyed that great feeling of success for the weekend. And then Monday hit, my mood changed and it hit me that I now had to deliver what I said I was going to do. And that is when this feeling of overwhelm and under qualification hit me like a ton of bricks. Who am I to do this? My mind raced in fear of completely failing on my promise. I got inflicted with what seemed like a deadly case of imposter syndrome. There's more I can say. I'll just riff on it. I won't read what I wrote six years ago on it. But the imposter syndrome just starting to work on the thing helped it. There was getting over the fear of actually delivering the first one. But once I was actually there and got through the first session of it, it was so rewarding and fulfilling and connecting and it worked. And it just, it was a paradigm shifting moment for me to feel that amount of imposter syndrome, to move through it and to see that I can do it, I can do it. And I believe you can too. That action led me to starting a business of mindfulness in schools that lasted in some ways, it's still lasting. It was a big focus for me for a few years and it really, in a time when I really needed it, gave me the direction, the hope, the financial resources to actually make this work as a living that I needed. So it was by leaning into imposter syndrome. So I hope I've given you a lot of inspiration, ideas, encouragement to welcome, to embrace imposter syndrome, to see it as the sign that it is helping you, showing you that you care. Because remember, actual imposters don't care. They know they're imposters. They're trying to con people, they're trying to get away with something. The fact that you care, the fact that you feel imposter syndrome means that you care. And so as I mentioned the wonderful, great Seth Godin, his blog on Imposter syndrome, I will paraphrase we are all imposters. Everyone who is doing important work is working on something that might not work, and it's extremely likely that they're also not the very best qualified person on the planet to be doing that work. Time spent fretting about our status as impostors is time away from dancing with our fear, from leading, and from doing work that matters. Go out there friend. Go dance with your fear. Go lean over the edge. Go do your work that matters. I am rooting for you so hard. I will see you on the next episode of the Art and Business of Meditation Podcast. And before you take off, if you like this episode or like this podcast, please consider taking a moment to leave a review. It really helps the podcast grow. And if you are someone wanting to use meditation to share your gifts, I have a free course called Meditation Script Mastery. You can click the link in the podcast description and get you set up with learning how to create unique meditations that you can share with your students, your clients, and you can share with your friends. So thanks again for listening and I'll see you next time.