54. Imposter Syndrome Isn’t Your Fault
I’ve talked about imposter syndrome on the podcast before, and we’ve discussed the basic thought patterns at the heart of this very common experience. But we didn’t discuss where those thought patterns come from. And that is equally important.
Just like most thoughts, the thought patterns at the heart of what we call imposter syndrome come from outside of us. They come from our culture at large, our family of origin, authority figures, our peers, the media we’ve consumed, and more.
And what we know about these sources is that many of them are steeped in ideologies that are unhelpful and even downright harmful. Ideologies like patriarchy and white supremacy and ableism.
And when we absorb these ideologies, they impact us not just on the outside of our lives in how we’re treated by others but from the inside of our own heads, in how we speak to ourselves and what we believe to be true about us.
If you believe your work isn’t good enough because it’s just not good, of course you won’t want to dive too deeply into that and question those thoughts. But when you see that your imposter syndrome thought patterns come from growing up in a flawed, sexist, ableist, white-supremacist culture that directly or indirectly informed your opinions of yourself, then looking at these thoughts sounds much more compelling, right?
If you’ve been struggling with imposter syndrome but unable to overcome it, this week’s deeper dive podcast is just the thing you need.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why feeling imposter syndrome is completely normal, especially for women and people with marginalized identities.
How oppression starts externally and becomes internal.
Why it’s so important to understand how the flawed world around you has shaped your thoughts about yourself, including thoughts you may label as “imposter syndrome.”
What I want you to consider next time you feel self-doubt coming up in your work environment (or anywhere).
How I help my clients think differently instead of absorbing the thoughts that people around them are offering.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
Harvard Business Review: Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome
Satisfaction Guaranteed by Karelia Stetz-Waters
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we are digging more deeply into imposter syndrome.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, I read a book a while back that I meant to tell you about even though it has nothing to do with work, and it's just a delightful little romance novel. But I always like to just pepper in my reading recommendations into the podcast because I think it's super fun.
And I think it's a good reminder that part of having an amazing career is doing stuff that has nothing to do with your amazing career. Unless you're a writer, and then this might have something to do with it. Either way, a friend of mine recommended this romance novel to me and I read it, tore through it really fast.
It's a fun book. It's called Satisfaction Guaranteed, it's a queer romance novel. So if that sounds like something that's fun to you, I highly suggest you grab yourself a copy and enjoy. It's a delight to read.
I am so grateful for fun novels and things to read because they really add so much delight to my life. And I love, I just love getting to know the characters. And it's also just a really interesting way for me to engage with how other people do things. Even though in this case the other people are fictional characters, usually. It's really interesting to get to know them and to get to know their mindset.
Especially for me as a coach, I'm like, “Ooh, what are they doing? Why are they doing that? Look at this thing that's driving their behavior. It's so fascinating.” So anyways, if you're into that, check that out.
And now that I've given you my informal book review, let us get to our main topic, which is imposter syndrome, again. Yay! We're going to talk about it again. So I was coaching a client of mine recently and we were talking about imposter syndrome. And I was like, “Why don't we just call it what it is? Like stop calling it imposter syndrome and call it internalized oppression. And I feel like that's a big phrase to throw around, like oh, oppression.
But in the other podcast where we talked about imposter syndrome, I talked about the thought processes, the thought patterns rather, that I think are pretty central to this concept of imposter syndrome. But we didn't talk about how you get those thought patterns.
But we do often on this podcast talk about where thought patterns come from. So you probably already know, but let's review. They usually come from culture at large, our family of origin, authority figures from when we were younger, peers. And also things like books, and movies, TV shows, all that kind of stuff.
So if you have imposter syndrome thoughts, you didn't just make those up. You didn't just decide one day to think you're not good enough, you don't belong. Or I'm not good enough, I don't belong, if you think in first person. I actually often think in second person, as I've discussed before.
And I actually wanted to mention, I think that's because a lot of the stuff we're thinking is stuff that someone else literally said to us. So there is some of that implicit like where we absorb things. But I think a lot of our thought patterns are things literally other people said out of their face holes to us, and then our brain started repeating.
So I do see a lot of that second person, which is the you. For those of y'all who are like, “What the fuck is she talking about with the grammar?” Second person is you first person is I or me.
Okay, anyways, so I wanted to do another podcast episode to talk about this because, like I said, I was coaching my client and I've been thinking a lot about it. And then I went back and listened to my podcast episode on imposter syndrome, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, there's so much information missing that I think is really important for people to get a deeper understanding of this and to also be able to turn it around and to change those thought patterns.” Because if we're like, “Oh, I have the thought I'm not good enough because I'm not,” then of course we're probably not going to want to change that thought pattern.
But if we are like, “Oh, I have the thought I'm not good enough because I grew up in a sexist, ableist, white supremacist culture that informed me that I was not good enough, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and then I absorbed that idea.” Then we're like, “Oh, for sure I'm going to fucking floss that back out of my brain because that's not my idea about myself based on evidence or any things I've done or my capacities, capabilities. It's messaging that I absorbed from other people who probably didn't have my best interest at heart.”
So why is this so important? Like I said before, one of the reasons it's so important to understand this is because you might not feel compelled to change those thought patterns if you think they're true, or if you think they actually have something to do with you.
Whereas you might feel more compelled to change them if you see that they're coming from somewhere else, or they came from a society that you also think is flawed in the way that I do. And some of y'all might not. But that is the way I see it. And it's my podcast, so that's what we're talking about here.
Okay. I also want to alert you to an article that you may or may not have seen, it's called stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. And it's by, I'm going to do my best with pronunciation Ruchika Tulshyan, and Jodi-Ann Burey are how I'm guessing we pronounce these names.
And it's in the Harvard Business Review. And I read it a while back. And I've been like thinking about it sort of and metabolizing it ever since it came out earlier this year. But after I had done my first podcast.
So one of the first points they make in this article that I think is incredibly powerful is that by calling this imposter syndrome, like naming things is powerful, and it's important and can help us get help. But one thing it can also do is it pathologizes this thing that's actually very normal, which is just doubting our abilities and wondering if we fit in.
A lot of people doubt their abilities, a lot of people wonder if they fit in, those are very normal things to have happen. And when we package those up as a syndrome, it can make it seem like something is wrong with you if you have those thought patterns. And that's a really reductive view.
It also makes it about you, the person experiencing the thought patterns, versus like where the fuck did these thought patterns come from? You didn't make them all up, like I was saying, you absorbed them from culture. And in a culture that is still full of patriarchy, you're probably still being offered these thought patterns all the time.
Even if you intellectually as an adult don't agree with those thought patterns, they could still be playing out subconsciously for you. Especially if you learned them from when you were a child. And they seem like just the rules of how things in our culture go.
Another thing this article talks about that I thought was really interesting is that when they were studying imposter syndrome, they really only studied a very specific group of people. And they did not look into other things that probably were having an impact.
So they looked at this group of high achieving women. And the idea was that these women had all these accomplishments, but they still had all this self-doubt, and they didn't see themselves the way other people saw them.
But that original study that looked at imposter syndrome didn't look at other impacts. Like the impacts of how the people in the study were treated, like how women are treated in the workplace and what's happening culturally, that might be impacting those thought patterns that they're having. And they also didn't look at the experiences of people of color, or women of color, or other groups that experience bias and marginalization.
So what the article talks about is that by doing this, it really puts a lot of the emphasis on the person experiencing the doubt, and the lack of belonging. Versus also looking at the bigger picture, and what the culture is like, and how people are treated and how that impacts how they think about themselves, their capacity to fit in and their capacity to do good work.
So all of this brings me back to what I was saying I said to that client. When the client said that she was experiencing imposter syndrome, and I said, “Let's call it what it is, let's call it internalized oppression.” Because here's the thing, in this article they're talking about let's not blame women if they're experiencing imposter syndrome.
Which is let's not blame and pathologize women and people of marginalized identities if they're experiencing these thought patterns about worrying if they're good enough, and worrying if they fit in, being uncertain of their capacity to do the job that they're trying to do. Let's not blame those women for that when there's all these other things at play.
And in this article, they're talking about workplace culture. And I agree that that's a really important thing to work on. And they talk specifically about how women and people with marginalized identities are excluded and unfairly critiqued or given vague feedback that doesn't actually help them improve or do whatever it is they're trying to do in the workplace.
And then those women begin to doubt themselves and they become disengaged, and their career trajectory shifts and suffers because of that external experience where they're not being treated fairly, and they're not being supported and things like that.
And that's all very important, but what I want to point out because my podcast is more about what you can do for yourself and what you can do for your office versus working at the level of the organizational culture as a whole. I want to point this out to you so that when you hear this self-doubt and you hear this questioning in your mind of like, “Do I belong? Do I fit in? Am I good enough? Am I okay?” You can understand what that is, and you can shift your thoughts internally.
Now, obviously, shifting your thoughts internally isn't necessarily going to change the things happening in your workplace. You may be in a workplace where you're experiencing microaggressions, or you're experiencing bias, and you're basically being invited into imposter syndrome thoughts all the time. That's possible.
But what I think is important to think about here, and this is how I think about it is that thought work, the kind of work I do with coaching, teaching you how to think differently and to not just absorb the thoughts everyone around you offers, is I think about it like building an immune system of your thoughts.
So when we're babies and little kids, we will just absorb what everyone around us teaches us, we don't question things a lot. Or even if we do question them, they might still get absorbed into our subconscious as this is the way it is, these are the rules. Even as we bristle against them there's part of our brain that's like assessing like, these are the rules of the game in this world I've been born into and will absorb them. And then they will limit us in what we can create and do for ourselves.
And when we know that that's happening, then we can see those thoughts, understand that they're not an inside job, you are not your thoughts. These are things you absorbed from outside of you, they are just patterns. We can unlearn them and learn a new pattern. That gives you so much power back.
And specifically with imposter syndrome I think that is very important because, like I said, we do live in a world that's full of patriarchy, and white supremacy, and all these things that are going to really encourage you to think about yourself in ways that I think they're oppressive. When we absorb this enculturation, oppression becomes internal not just external. We will police ourselves from inside our own heads based on the thoughts we have. And when we know thought work, we can see and question that, then we don't have to do that.
Now, I want to be really clear, I do want culture to change. I want workplace cultures to change. I want to see big broad changes in how we treat humans. And I would love to see us as a species overcoming and unlearning these biases. And I think it's really important we do that individually as part of that process.
And it's not to take the responsibility away from other parties. I do think workplaces have responsibility in what kind of work culture they create for their people. And if you don't change the internalized thoughts, sometimes you'll stay in situations where it's problematic for you because you believe it can't be any better. Or you believe this is just the way it is, or you believe like, “Oh, I just have imposter syndrome, I'm always going to feel like this.”
So this is why I always want to encourage you to be doing this work on an individual level. Because when you do it on an individual level, then you'll start to make changes in your life. And the changes you're making in your life will help you get to a better place. And they'll also give you the fuel you need that if you want to go change culture, you have energy available to do that.
So I think this is a really important distinction because I really want y'all to understand that if I say that imposter syndrome comes down to the thoughts you have that you've absorbed from culture, that doesn't mean it's your fault. It doesn't mean everyone else who taught you those thoughts is off the hook. It doesn't mean it's okay that they did that.
It just means, hey, at this point, the place that the imposter syndrome is doing the most damage is inside your head. We want to get it out of there. And once we get it out of there, then you'll be able to make different choices about what you're doing with your career, what kind of workplaces you want to work in, what kind of activism you want to do. And you'll be able to do that because basically it's like having a layer to protect you from that external oppression.
So in our culture as it is today, people are going to be offering you unhelpful thoughts all the fucking time. They're going to be offering you the thought that you're not working enough. They're going to be offering you the thought that you should feel guilty for X, Y, Z. They're going to be offering you the thought that you'll never fit in.
Whatever, people are going to offer us unhelpful thoughts all fucking day long. It's not even because they're bad people. It's because they've absorbed all this socialization too. And thoughts are like viruses, they just want to spread. They will spread through people, they'll spread through people's mindsets, and they'll try to basically go get in other people's brains.
But when you understand how thoughts work and that you're going to be offered that socialization and that you can choose to think differently, like I said, then you have an immune system, you have something to protect you against all those thoughts out there that are inviting you to doubt yourself and inviting you to question yourself and inviting you to think that this is the only kind of life you can ever have.
Okay, so let's review. Number one, if you have the thought patterns that I was talking about before and I've talked about today that we're going to call imposter syndrome thought patterns, it's not because of you, or what you've done, or what you're capable of. It's because a lot of us are offered those thoughts or were offered those thoughts in our childhood a lot.
And I want to be clear here that some of this comes down to how we're socialized as women or girls, some of it comes down to other socialization if we belong to a marginalized identity, some of it comes down to individual socialization. If we experienced someone in our childhood telling us we're not good enough and we should doubt ourselves and will never fit in, then we're going to probably have those thought patterns now, even if you don't fit into any of the categories I've been mentioning here.
There's lots of different ways we can absorb thoughts. And if you have them, you get to work on them even if you know the groups you belong to mostly don't have them, that happens too.
The other thing I want to talk about, and this article mentioned that I thought was so good is like, I think it's also important to normalize that a lot of people have some self-doubt. And a lot of people want to fit in and aren't sure if they will. And just because you have those thought patterns doesn't mean you have to put this label of imposter syndrome on them. You could also call that being a human with a human brain.
And what you may notice is when you call it being a human with a human brain, it feels different than when you call it imposter syndrome. Being uncertain sometimes isn't necessarily a problem. It is part of human life and part of living in a world that's full of uncertainty, y'all. And when we live in a culture that's full of biases, we're going to absorb that bias thinking into our brains. And then we're going to experience it not just from the outside world, but from ourselves also.
And I personally think unlearning it internally first helps us create the changes we want to see in the larger world. And again, that doesn't mean it's okay that other people are doing that. It just means we have to pick somewhere to start. And I think as much as I would like the world to just be magically different, we have to start where we are. And changing your thoughts about yourself is a way to do that.
And it's not just for you. And it's not just for your benefit. Although if you only ever do it for you in your benefit, I think that's fine, and you get to choose. But when we do it for ourselves, I think it also ripples out and makes bigger changes in the world. And then we go on to create better work cultures that are more inclusive, and diverse, and equitable for all kinds of people.
And if you want a deeper dive on, once you've identified the thoughts, like what they're from, and you want to just work on the thought piece, go listen to the other podcast on imposter syndrome because it's going to help you figure out how to do that. Okay, that's what I have for y'all today. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, I read a book a while back that I meant to tell you about even though it has nothing to do with work, and it's just a delightful little romance novel. But I always like to just pepper in my reading recommendations into the podcast because I think it's super fun.
And I think it's a good reminder that part of having an amazing career is doing stuff that has nothing to do with your amazing career. Unless you're a writer, and then this might have something to do with it. Either way, a friend of mine recommended this romance novel to me and I read it, tore through it really fast.
It's a fun book. It's called Satisfaction Guaranteed, it's a queer romance novel. So if that sounds like something that's fun to you, I highly suggest you grab yourself a copy and enjoy. It's a delight to read.
I am so grateful for fun novels and things to read because they really add so much delight to my life. And I love, I just love getting to know the characters. And it's also just a really interesting way for me to engage with how other people do things. Even though in this case the other people are fictional characters, usually. It's really interesting to get to know them and to get to know their mindset.
Especially for me as a coach, I'm like, “Ooh, what are they doing? Why are they doing that? Look at this thing that's driving their behavior. It's so fascinating.” So anyways, if you're into that, check that out.
And now that I've given you my informal book review, let us get to our main topic, which is imposter syndrome, again. Yay! We're going to talk about it again. So I was coaching a client of mine recently and we were talking about imposter syndrome. And I was like, “Why don't we just call it what it is? Like stop calling it imposter syndrome and call it internalized oppression. And I feel like that's a big phrase to throw around, like oh, oppression.
But in the other podcast where we talked about imposter syndrome, I talked about the thought processes, the thought patterns rather, that I think are pretty central to this concept of imposter syndrome. But we didn't talk about how you get those thought patterns.
But we do often on this podcast talk about where thought patterns come from. So you probably already know, but let's review. They usually come from culture at large, our family of origin, authority figures from when we were younger, peers. And also things like books, and movies, TV shows, all that kind of stuff.
So if you have imposter syndrome thoughts, you didn't just make those up. You didn't just decide one day to think you're not good enough, you don't belong. Or I'm not good enough, I don't belong, if you think in first person. I actually often think in second person, as I've discussed before.
And I actually wanted to mention, I think that's because a lot of the stuff we're thinking is stuff that someone else literally said to us. So there is some of that implicit like where we absorb things. But I think a lot of our thought patterns are things literally other people said out of their face holes to us, and then our brain started repeating.
So I do see a lot of that second person, which is the you. For those of y'all who are like, “What the fuck is she talking about with the grammar?” Second person is you first person is I or me.
Okay, anyways, so I wanted to do another podcast episode to talk about this because, like I said, I was coaching my client and I've been thinking a lot about it. And then I went back and listened to my podcast episode on imposter syndrome, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, there's so much information missing that I think is really important for people to get a deeper understanding of this and to also be able to turn it around and to change those thought patterns.” Because if we're like, “Oh, I have the thought I'm not good enough because I'm not,” then of course we're probably not going to want to change that thought pattern.
But if we are like, “Oh, I have the thought I'm not good enough because I grew up in a sexist, ableist, white supremacist culture that informed me that I was not good enough, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and then I absorbed that idea.” Then we're like, “Oh, for sure I'm going to fucking floss that back out of my brain because that's not my idea about myself based on evidence or any things I've done or my capacities, capabilities. It's messaging that I absorbed from other people who probably didn't have my best interest at heart.”
So why is this so important? Like I said before, one of the reasons it's so important to understand this is because you might not feel compelled to change those thought patterns if you think they're true, or if you think they actually have something to do with you.
Whereas you might feel more compelled to change them if you see that they're coming from somewhere else, or they came from a society that you also think is flawed in the way that I do. And some of y'all might not. But that is the way I see it. And it's my podcast, so that's what we're talking about here.
Okay. I also want to alert you to an article that you may or may not have seen, it's called stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. And it's by, I'm going to do my best with pronunciation Ruchika Tulshyan, and Jodi-Ann Burey are how I'm guessing we pronounce these names.
And it's in the Harvard Business Review. And I read it a while back. And I've been like thinking about it sort of and metabolizing it ever since it came out earlier this year. But after I had done my first podcast.
So one of the first points they make in this article that I think is incredibly powerful is that by calling this imposter syndrome, like naming things is powerful, and it's important and can help us get help. But one thing it can also do is it pathologizes this thing that's actually very normal, which is just doubting our abilities and wondering if we fit in.
A lot of people doubt their abilities, a lot of people wonder if they fit in, those are very normal things to have happen. And when we package those up as a syndrome, it can make it seem like something is wrong with you if you have those thought patterns. And that's a really reductive view.
It also makes it about you, the person experiencing the thought patterns, versus like where the fuck did these thought patterns come from? You didn't make them all up, like I was saying, you absorbed them from culture. And in a culture that is still full of patriarchy, you're probably still being offered these thought patterns all the time.
Even if you intellectually as an adult don't agree with those thought patterns, they could still be playing out subconsciously for you. Especially if you learned them from when you were a child. And they seem like just the rules of how things in our culture go.
Another thing this article talks about that I thought was really interesting is that when they were studying imposter syndrome, they really only studied a very specific group of people. And they did not look into other things that probably were having an impact.
So they looked at this group of high achieving women. And the idea was that these women had all these accomplishments, but they still had all this self-doubt, and they didn't see themselves the way other people saw them.
But that original study that looked at imposter syndrome didn't look at other impacts. Like the impacts of how the people in the study were treated, like how women are treated in the workplace and what's happening culturally, that might be impacting those thought patterns that they're having. And they also didn't look at the experiences of people of color, or women of color, or other groups that experience bias and marginalization.
So what the article talks about is that by doing this, it really puts a lot of the emphasis on the person experiencing the doubt, and the lack of belonging. Versus also looking at the bigger picture, and what the culture is like, and how people are treated and how that impacts how they think about themselves, their capacity to fit in and their capacity to do good work.
So all of this brings me back to what I was saying I said to that client. When the client said that she was experiencing imposter syndrome, and I said, “Let's call it what it is, let's call it internalized oppression.” Because here's the thing, in this article they're talking about let's not blame women if they're experiencing imposter syndrome.
Which is let's not blame and pathologize women and people of marginalized identities if they're experiencing these thought patterns about worrying if they're good enough, and worrying if they fit in, being uncertain of their capacity to do the job that they're trying to do. Let's not blame those women for that when there's all these other things at play.
And in this article, they're talking about workplace culture. And I agree that that's a really important thing to work on. And they talk specifically about how women and people with marginalized identities are excluded and unfairly critiqued or given vague feedback that doesn't actually help them improve or do whatever it is they're trying to do in the workplace.
And then those women begin to doubt themselves and they become disengaged, and their career trajectory shifts and suffers because of that external experience where they're not being treated fairly, and they're not being supported and things like that.
And that's all very important, but what I want to point out because my podcast is more about what you can do for yourself and what you can do for your office versus working at the level of the organizational culture as a whole. I want to point this out to you so that when you hear this self-doubt and you hear this questioning in your mind of like, “Do I belong? Do I fit in? Am I good enough? Am I okay?” You can understand what that is, and you can shift your thoughts internally.
Now, obviously, shifting your thoughts internally isn't necessarily going to change the things happening in your workplace. You may be in a workplace where you're experiencing microaggressions, or you're experiencing bias, and you're basically being invited into imposter syndrome thoughts all the time. That's possible.
But what I think is important to think about here, and this is how I think about it is that thought work, the kind of work I do with coaching, teaching you how to think differently and to not just absorb the thoughts everyone around you offers, is I think about it like building an immune system of your thoughts.
So when we're babies and little kids, we will just absorb what everyone around us teaches us, we don't question things a lot. Or even if we do question them, they might still get absorbed into our subconscious as this is the way it is, these are the rules. Even as we bristle against them there's part of our brain that's like assessing like, these are the rules of the game in this world I've been born into and will absorb them. And then they will limit us in what we can create and do for ourselves.
And when we know that that's happening, then we can see those thoughts, understand that they're not an inside job, you are not your thoughts. These are things you absorbed from outside of you, they are just patterns. We can unlearn them and learn a new pattern. That gives you so much power back.
And specifically with imposter syndrome I think that is very important because, like I said, we do live in a world that's full of patriarchy, and white supremacy, and all these things that are going to really encourage you to think about yourself in ways that I think they're oppressive. When we absorb this enculturation, oppression becomes internal not just external. We will police ourselves from inside our own heads based on the thoughts we have. And when we know thought work, we can see and question that, then we don't have to do that.
Now, I want to be really clear, I do want culture to change. I want workplace cultures to change. I want to see big broad changes in how we treat humans. And I would love to see us as a species overcoming and unlearning these biases. And I think it's really important we do that individually as part of that process.
And it's not to take the responsibility away from other parties. I do think workplaces have responsibility in what kind of work culture they create for their people. And if you don't change the internalized thoughts, sometimes you'll stay in situations where it's problematic for you because you believe it can't be any better. Or you believe this is just the way it is, or you believe like, “Oh, I just have imposter syndrome, I'm always going to feel like this.”
So this is why I always want to encourage you to be doing this work on an individual level. Because when you do it on an individual level, then you'll start to make changes in your life. And the changes you're making in your life will help you get to a better place. And they'll also give you the fuel you need that if you want to go change culture, you have energy available to do that.
So I think this is a really important distinction because I really want y'all to understand that if I say that imposter syndrome comes down to the thoughts you have that you've absorbed from culture, that doesn't mean it's your fault. It doesn't mean everyone else who taught you those thoughts is off the hook. It doesn't mean it's okay that they did that.
It just means, hey, at this point, the place that the imposter syndrome is doing the most damage is inside your head. We want to get it out of there. And once we get it out of there, then you'll be able to make different choices about what you're doing with your career, what kind of workplaces you want to work in, what kind of activism you want to do. And you'll be able to do that because basically it's like having a layer to protect you from that external oppression.
So in our culture as it is today, people are going to be offering you unhelpful thoughts all the fucking time. They're going to be offering you the thought that you're not working enough. They're going to be offering you the thought that you should feel guilty for X, Y, Z. They're going to be offering you the thought that you'll never fit in.
Whatever, people are going to offer us unhelpful thoughts all fucking day long. It's not even because they're bad people. It's because they've absorbed all this socialization too. And thoughts are like viruses, they just want to spread. They will spread through people, they'll spread through people's mindsets, and they'll try to basically go get in other people's brains.
But when you understand how thoughts work and that you're going to be offered that socialization and that you can choose to think differently, like I said, then you have an immune system, you have something to protect you against all those thoughts out there that are inviting you to doubt yourself and inviting you to question yourself and inviting you to think that this is the only kind of life you can ever have.
Okay, so let's review. Number one, if you have the thought patterns that I was talking about before and I've talked about today that we're going to call imposter syndrome thought patterns, it's not because of you, or what you've done, or what you're capable of. It's because a lot of us are offered those thoughts or were offered those thoughts in our childhood a lot.
And I want to be clear here that some of this comes down to how we're socialized as women or girls, some of it comes down to other socialization if we belong to a marginalized identity, some of it comes down to individual socialization. If we experienced someone in our childhood telling us we're not good enough and we should doubt ourselves and will never fit in, then we're going to probably have those thought patterns now, even if you don't fit into any of the categories I've been mentioning here.
There's lots of different ways we can absorb thoughts. And if you have them, you get to work on them even if you know the groups you belong to mostly don't have them, that happens too.
The other thing I want to talk about, and this article mentioned that I thought was so good is like, I think it's also important to normalize that a lot of people have some self-doubt. And a lot of people want to fit in and aren't sure if they will. And just because you have those thought patterns doesn't mean you have to put this label of imposter syndrome on them. You could also call that being a human with a human brain.
And what you may notice is when you call it being a human with a human brain, it feels different than when you call it imposter syndrome. Being uncertain sometimes isn't necessarily a problem. It is part of human life and part of living in a world that's full of uncertainty, y'all. And when we live in a culture that's full of biases, we're going to absorb that bias thinking into our brains. And then we're going to experience it not just from the outside world, but from ourselves also.
And I personally think unlearning it internally first helps us create the changes we want to see in the larger world. And again, that doesn't mean it's okay that other people are doing that. It just means we have to pick somewhere to start. And I think as much as I would like the world to just be magically different, we have to start where we are. And changing your thoughts about yourself is a way to do that.
And it's not just for you. And it's not just for your benefit. Although if you only ever do it for you in your benefit, I think that's fine, and you get to choose. But when we do it for ourselves, I think it also ripples out and makes bigger changes in the world. And then we go on to create better work cultures that are more inclusive, and diverse, and equitable for all kinds of people.
And if you want a deeper dive on, once you've identified the thoughts, like what they're from, and you want to just work on the thought piece, go listen to the other podcast on imposter syndrome because it's going to help you figure out how to do that. Okay, that's what I have for y'all today. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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