Overcome The Impostor Syndrome: Seek An Outside Opinion
Other people who can provide you with a positive opinion or praise about your good work, including your talent and skills, can wake you out of your feeling of being a fraud.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
It is the feeling that you are not worthy of your designation, title, position or success.
Your accomplishments may be due to luck or effort, but you feel you lack the talent or skill for them.
- The impostor syndrome is like a nagging feeling that our success might be due to luck, good timing, or even a computer error.
- It makes us think we have done nothing, and that we secretly are a fraud for taking undue credit.
- The person suffering from an impostor syndrome lives in fear that soon the 'secret' about his true nature will be uncovered.
The antidote to the impostor syndrome is self-efficacy, which is about learning one's own value.
Self-efficacy is described as a perceived ability to succeed at a particular task. It means having rock-solid confidence, a supercharged belief in your ability.
We subconsciously give undue credit to other people who are successful around us, while we undermine our efforts.
Understand that if other people can be successful using their skills, so can you.
Reframing our personal hidden bias and negative feelings into something positive can change our outlook towards the situation.
Example: If you are moving fast, you may think you are impatient, but it can be reframed as the enthusiasm of reaching earlier.
RELATED IDEAS
- Self-Awareness: understanding of one’s emotions.
- Self-Regulation: it frees us from being prisoners of our feelings.
- Motivation: having an intrinsic desire to achieve things.
- Empathy: the ability to understand emotions of other people.
- Social Skill: the ability to build rapport and manage relationships.
Most of the time we don’t second guess them, and even if we do, they often end up overwhelming us.
Negative feelings are very powerful and harder to question: we identify with them effortlessly. “I feel it, so it must be true” is often our default setting.
Lucky people do not wait for things to happen to them.
They take notice and act upon the opportunities that they find.