The Secret to Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

We had a chat recently with one of our clients. She is a POWERHOUSE woman - a self-called boss bitch if you will - but when she first came to us, despite a ton of external success she still felt like a big fat IMPOSTER. She didn’t feel worthy of it. In fact she felt so unworthy of her success that she was in a constant state of anxiety that she had to have more success, in order to avoid being found out.

Have you ever felt that? So on this chat we asked her a question that may seem a little strange to you now… We asked, “how do you feel about your story now?” and she said “PROUD”. Let’s rewind to make sense of this.

You see, the secret to overcoming Imposter Syndrome, according to expert Valerie Young, is that you need to accept and integrate your “Crusher”. Say what now?

A crusher is a moment or memory that brings up such immense shame and humiliation that we unconsciously live our lives trying to push that crusher FAR away. It’s the thing you don’t want anyone to know about you. The history of addiction, the mental illness in the family, the experiences often marked with judgement and stigma that we worry we will get rejected for…

So here’s the irony. When we push it away - imposter syndrome grows - no matter our actual tangible success. When we bring it close, when we accept it and pull back the layers of shame around it in a process we call integration, we actually weaken imposter syndrome. Crazy huh? That’s the secret no one’s telling you. So the first time we spoke to that client about her story - her crusher… her first response to this was “HELL to the NO - I don’t want to reconnect with that story!” But even she, through integration, got to a point where she said she felt proud!

Wherever you feel you are on the Imposter spectrum, we hope that you too, one day feel proud of your story.

x

Sophia & Zoi