I want you to picture this. You're standing in the middle of a stadium and you're just about to take the penalty, the shot that could send your team through to the next round of the championship. You're about to do a skill that you've practised thousands of times. You know exactly how to do it. You've got history, you've done it before, but all of a sudden, you start to question. You're standing there, you're thinking, you're contemplating, but you're thinking about what could go wrong. You're thinking, what if I miss? What if I'm not good enough? What if I can't do this? What if everybody finds out that I'm a fraud? Then all of a sudden, everything that you thought you knew, you doubted, you start to shake, you hit tunnel vision. You're all of a sudden consumed with what everybody else is going to think when the inevitability happens, you miss and your team doesn't go through. They're knocked out and it's your fault. What we're describing here is imposter syndrome and something I think everybody, on some level, at some time, gets exposed to and suffers from. So in today's episode of Brain in the game 107, we're going to look at imposter syndrome.
So, without a doubt you would have heard the term imposter syndrome. You may even sometimes consider that's what you've got when you go out and you start to self doubt, when you start to unravel at the seams, when you're doing something that you've done a squillion and seven times before. Maybe it's a closed skill, like taking that penalty, or maybe it's standing in front of your school to give a presentation or in front of your colleagues to give a pitch. Now, I want to start today's podcast by sharing an experience that even though I've been involved in mental performance psychology for so many years, imposter syndrome impacts everybody, including myself. Now, although I come from a background in education, a few years ago the University of Sydney here in Australia approached me and asked me to deliver a unit of education on performance and sports psychology within their education and coaching degree. My initial gut reaction when they called me and asked me to go and meet with them was I think you got the wrong person. That's not me. I'm a hands on kind of dude. I'm out there and I'm working in the field or I'm out there in on the coal face with the athletes or the coaches or the corporates.
I'm not an education person to standing a lecture room and lecture students. So I declined. My first response was thank you, but no thank you. Then they reached out again and said, look, we really want you to come and do this. We have been watching what you do, we've seen, seen your stuff online and been exposed to some of your educational tools and we want you to be able to deliver that to our students. And reluctantly and with a bit of nudging from my wife, I accepted the invitation to go and meet with them. I hadn't taken the job, but I went to meet with them. And the whole time I'm heading into the university to have this meeting, I'm thinking, it's not me, it's not my skill set, it's not what I do, it's look, you know, it's outside of my purview, it's not my kind of programme. And so I convinced myself the whole way there that I was going to go in there and decline. I met with the dean and we spoke about the programme and they said to me, look, all we want you to do is deliver an already existing programme.
You don't have to innovate anything, you don't have to design anything, we just want your delivery. And I thought, okay, all right, maybe I can do that bit. Yeah, all right, okay, I'll accept that. And I accepted that protocol to go and deliver something that already been established and accepted and was part of the curriculum. Very quickly, before the first lesson, I realised that I can actually do a good job here. And in conversation with the people running the course, I'd gone from, okay, I'll deliver somebody else's work and just be a presenter to I think we can rewrite this. And so I embarked on a process of rewriting the curriculum for the sport and performance psychology component to this education and coaching degree. And I've been delivering that now for a few years. If I hadn't have accepted that role, my world would have been very different. It wouldn't have been any less or any more, it would have just been different. But it was a sliding doors moment for Me. And I realised in retrospect that, you know what? That performance ability was impacted by my own internal imposter syndrome. I'm fortunate that I could check myself and realise what I was doing.
I could see the fact that I was robbing myself of an opportunity through fear. And because I was thinking of what could go wrong, and I did have that imposter syndrome, I was concerned they're going to find out in the education system that maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was. So what is imposter syndrome? And if it's something that is so prevalent in any way that we have any kind of performance, why do we not talk about it more? And maybe because everybody has been exposed to or is even going through that imposter syndrome, that low confidence, that doubts of what could go wrong, we just don't talk about it. But I think we should, because it is so prevalent on so many levels in so many aspects of everybody's life, we need to better understand it. So be imposter syndrome, or it can be known as imposter phenomenon or impostorism, all these terms mean the same thing. It's that internal drive that maybe I'm not what I present. The person that I put out there, the athlete, the performer, the boss, the worker, the education, whatever that is, I'm not actually that person.
That facade could be found out. So if we think back to the start of this podcast and I talked about standing on that spot to take that penalty shot, there's so many performers who would lay awake at night concerned with the fact of making that big, important mistake, and they would convince themselves that it's best not to engage and do that for fear of potentially making the mistake, rather than go out there and go, okay, I've got to push through this. Those long, sleepless nights is something I think we can all connect with and have experienced and probably will continue to experience. So a little bit of history. In America, there's actually an institute for imposter syndrome because they started to recognise that it is such an important, integral part of your who we are as humans and why so many people hold themselves back. There's also a financial monetary cost to this. If we think about this from a business perspective, how many corporates choose not to put themselves in that challenging situation for fear of having a consequence on their careers or having a consequence on their financial stability or even their jobs?
So what we know about imposter syndrome is it's an internal process. I'll give you a couple of stats on this, KPMG in 2020 released a report they'd done on female executives stating around 75% of them reported suffering from imposter syndrome. Now I think our numbers are proving that there's way more than 75%. If we look at high performing athletes, the estimation is around 95% of high performing athletes suffer with some form of imposter syndrome. Now that can be anything from self doubt through to creating mental blocks and choking under pressure. It has such an impact on so many areas of performance that we need to understand some of the consequences as well as the causations to that. So the terminology imposter syndrome really comes from a self doubt around our skills or our skill set, our competency or our talent or our ability to perform under pressure. And we start to create a worst case scenario in our thought process, a catastrophization about what could go wrong. Human nature is we have an imagination. And one of the great things about being human is our imagination. We can create the potential of so many things and then go out there and create them.
And that's what realistically sets us apart from a lot of the other animals on the planet is our ability to imagine what we could do and then imagine how we do it and then execute that. It's less about reaction and more about response. But the flip side of that great thing that we've got inside our head, our imagination, is we can also imagine what could go wrong. And there's a survival component to that and that stops us going and doing stupid things or waiting for us to experience those really stupid things before we stop doing them. So we don't have to go and put our hand on the stove to realise that's going to burn and hurt. We can imagine putting our hand on that stove and we almost sensory feel that pain and go, yeah, I'm not going to do that. So we can train our brain through our imagination not, not to put ourselves in situations that cause pain or cause damage or cause a consequence that is not beneficial to us. We can take that too far. And this is essentially where our imposter syndrome comes from. That extrapolation out to the worst case scenario, that catastrophization of that moment where everything is so dramatic and drastic that we choose not to put ourselves in that situation.
Often people come to me when they already realise that they have some form of imposter syndrome, Whether it's a recognition of low self confidence or that they've held themselves back from an opportunity, or they've gone to a performance and in the moment absolutely capitulated and they realised that they'd done that to themselves. It wasn't a skill shortage, it was a self belief shortage. When they come in and start talking with me around that strategy, the first question I will ask them is, how do you know you could do that skill? So again, if we use that penalty shot as an example, if that person had come to me and gone, look, Dave, I, I clutched it at the last moment and I missed that shot, but I knew that I could do the shot under pressure, I didn't. The first question I would ask him is, how do you know you could do that skill? What's your metrics, what's your success ratio? To know that you were in the right place at the right time and you were the right person to do that. And that confronting question often brings up a huge amount of emotion for them and they will either turn around and go, I'm not the right person, I shouldn't have been there.
A little bit like my experience with the university, I'm not the right person, I shouldn't really be here, or they'll turn around and be very defensive and turn around and go, because I know I can. But how do you know you can? And it's this quantification of how do you know? How do you turn around and know that under pressure you should be able to do that? Your blueprint in your brain to perform that skill is so ingrained into your thoughts that you should have been able to do that. And what I hear very often is athletes or anybody in any performance sphere don't really look at why they should be able to do it. They often go straight to that end, step and go, but what if I can't? What's the consequence of getting it wrong? Rather than what's the consequence of getting it right? If we think about what the consequence of getting it right is first, where I can do, I can go through to the next round using the penalty shot or I can get the next contract for my organisation if that pitch is right, or the next generation of coaches will have a better understanding of performance psychology when I deliver that content to them, we naturally go to, but what if I can't?
And that what if is often heavily weighted with negativity and part of our history too. So our imagination partners up with our past, our memories of what other things hurt or caused a consequence that was negative in our background and our history in all of us saying, yeah, we don't want to go back there, we don't want to do that again. We don't want to feel that way again. And this increased emotion, this increased focus on what we don't want to feel negates any kind of practical, pragmatic process we've put in place. The way that we do, the skill, the how we do the skill, the history of the amount of times that maybe we've done that penalty shot and been successful. What did I do to be successful? What did I do to make sure that I could kick and hit exactly where I wanted to hit in the that goal? So the focus on our metrics allows us to wait in our positive, okay, this is a stressful situation. There are consequences. If I don't get this right, we won't go through. So there's a reality to that, but we will go through.
Because I know how to do this. I know. And it's that phrase I know. It's rooted in evidence based metrics and it's that evidence based decision making that we often negate to think about. We go straight to that highly emotional. But what if. And that's a survival mechanism of our brain. And again, if we're going to put our hands on the hot plate, it makes sense. But as a high performer, we are often putting ourselves into stressful and challenging situations to be competitive, to be the best at what we do, to be the best versions of us. And so learning to be able to push through that uncomfortable and trust the process in the moment is a critical skill set that will help us overcome imposter syndrome. Whenever we learn anything, we learn it in our prefrontal cortex. The boss in the office, the person that creates and crafts the how, when we're taking that first ever shot at goal. Learning how we do that is a pragmatic process. We're learning where to put our body, where to put our foot, where to focus on the ball. Do we focus on the ball? Do we focus on where in the net we want to put the ball?
Strategies like this are our ability to be in a student mode and learn. And as we're learning, we're making mistakes, we're pushing boundaries, we're trying new things, we're working out what works for us. Our technique, our strategy, our process. When it gets to the point where we can trust that we've got those metrics, I've done it before, I've got a history of success here. I've got numbers, I've got statistics, I've got, I've got a process that I can follow that blueprint in my brain, and I've got a higher percentage of consistency and replicability. I can trust this. We can then delegate that to our limbic system, our subconscious, where we can feel our way through that skill. We can trust it. That's where we want to operate from. Our flow state, our being in the moment, that allows us to execute under pressure. Because what we're doing is following a process. When we put it in our subconscious, all of a sudden, straight away, we're not thinking how we do it, we're thinking, how do we trigger it? And often thinking about dominoes, a whole line of dominoes, tipping the first one all the way through.
That's where we want to operate from, where we want to perform from. That allows us to overcome and push through some of the imposter syndrome. It may not feel comfortable, and it won't. When you're standing there in front of a hundred thousand people and the weight of a nation is on your shoulders, because it's up to you to sink that goal. Absolutely. That will not feel comfortable. But it's not about how it feels. It's about how we do it, how we execute, what we do to trigger that subconscious flow state and just do what we do. The second we connect all of that pressure, all of that consequence to the action, the steps we take, that is when it comes out of our subconscious and back to our conscious and we go, I've got to make it up in the moment. I've got to do it right now. The challenge with that, the challenge with putting it in here and thinking, how do I do it? We're not thinking about what we've done in the past. Our history, our strategy, our metrics of success, the things that we know have worked in the past, that worked in our training.
We're essentially recreating that skill in the moment. We're going all the way back to the first time that we ever tried that skill. And very rarely the first time we ever try something is it trusted and well executed. So it makes sense for it to be awkward, clunky and chunky, because that's what it was when we first learned it. My philosophy around making sure that there's a piece of a game day or a competition in every training session is so that we can take the trained version of you into game day. And that familiarity, if I've been here before, I know how to do this. This is not new to me. This is not something that I need to reinvent. There's a whole history of success here that I'm bringing along and that trust mechanism. And again, we frequently see coaches and athletes who treat training different to game day and they put a bigger emphasis on game day and they'll turn around and say, on game day, now is the time to step up and do something you probably haven't done before. Well, that's not a smart thought process because now you're saying everything you've done in preparation is irrelevant and should be pushed aside.
Create it in the moment. If you're good at what you do, you create it in the moment. That's not true. We want to create that familiarity, all that normalisation of, okay, it's a penalty shot. I, I've done a squillion and seven of these. I know what I'm doing, I know how to do it. I've got history that allows us to push through that imposter syndrome, that. But what if. What if it goes wrong? Okay, what if it goes right? What if I can't do it? Okay, what if you can do it? Or what if the consequences are that we don't go through? What if we do go through? It's a choice. The avenue we choose to process is dictated by what we choose to focus on. If we've got history, if we've got a process that we can follow, we've got replicability and consistency, then it makes more sense for us to utilise that and use those words of I can rather than what if I can't. Switching into that flow state. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow state of performance is predicated on the fact that it's frequently used and is a comfort zone of switching into that.
I know how to do this. I've done it before. I've got a good blueprint, I've got history, I've got statistics on my side, metrics. What that does is lower our emotions and increase our process. And it's all happening subconscious. It's all happening in the back of our thought process rather than in our conscious process. We focused a lot on in the moment, those high pressure performance moments. Here, however, we can see an evolution of imposter syndrome. And it doesn't start in the moment. Often it starts in training. Often it starts in those familiar environments where a performer chooses to retract, step back, not put themselves in those pressure moments, not put themselves in those learning strategies. Instead, they start to exclude themselves. So the first phase of recognising somebody who's maybe going down the path of that imposter syndrome, that lack of self belief that then leads to a lack of confidence. We know that internal self belief is our primary driver. Confidence is their external driver, what other people see and think and thoughts around that. But our internal self belief is what impacts our imposter syndrome, either positively or negatively. And so the first phase is often disengagement.
As a coach, when you start to see your athletes disengage now that might be socially or emotionally, they might stop being part of the team, they might stop communicating with the rest of the team and with you as a coaching team community, or they might disengage from certain activities, they might turn around and go, yeah, no, I'm not going to do that today, coach, I'm going to go and do this. Or they might emotion disengage, I don't care. Yeah, no, it's all right. No, I don't want to do it. These are terms that we frequently hear with athletes who are all of a sudden starting to self doubt. They're starting to create that internal, but what if, if I engage, then they're going to find out maybe I'm not as good player as I thought I was, or if I engage, I might make a mistake and all of a sudden the team don't want me as part of their team. And remember, humans are pack animals and how we add value to that pack, how we interact with that pack and where we see ourselves sitting in that pack hierarchy is important to us.
So if all of a sudden we're no longer as valuable member of that community, of that pack, as we thought we were, we're going to feel disconnected. So controlled descent. We know that through controlled descent, if I'm going to be kicked out of this group, then I'm going to step out on my own accord. I'm going to control the exit rather than me being kicked out. So we start to see disengagement as the first phase of, of somebody who's going through an imposter syndrome process. The second phase that comes after disengagement is distraction. And distraction could be losing a skill. And when we talk about mental blocks, it's this part of the phase, this distraction where we start to see athletes get mental blocks, not be able to perform under pressure, start to self doubt that their skills they've had in the past, they can continue to do. And so whether it's losing skills or have niggly, niggly injuries that stops them engaging, that they report that they can't do that technique anymore or that tactic, all of a sudden this comes from, well, if I'm going to control this, I've already disengaged, be that socially or emotionally.
Now I'm going to physically disengage. I can't, it's not my fault I've got an injury. It's not my fault I can't do this skill anymore, I can't compete that so I'm no longer part of this community. It's not my fault, it's the skill or it's my physicality or it's an injury. We're looking to validate and create some kind of proof point, confirmation bias to why we can't be part of that community, that pack anymore. So we've mentally and emotionally and now physically disengaged. The third phase of this escalation is disruption. So this is where we tend to see when the first two phases haven't given the athlete enough breathing space to not feel under pressure, not put themselves in that environment that could potentially expose them. Now they start to create that victim mindset. I'm not getting selected, the coach doesn't like me, the team doesn't like me, they won't pass the ball to me. I go to be in the right position and all of a sudden they've gone in a different direction. No one, no one told me, no one's discussed this with me, but they're excluding me. So this victim mindset of them and us, the coaching staff against the athletes, the teammates against the you as a player, these are common distractions and disengagements at the optimal level.
If I've not been able to do it subtly, I'm going to do it overtly. That conflict mindset of I'm going to force the outcome, I'm going to force the disengagement, I'm going to force the distractions is a final cry for help. So early recognition, either as a performer yourself or as a coach or as a co worker or in the environment, as a teammate. The earlier we get in and start to address this, the more opportunity we have of heading it off. And there's a couple of things that we can do collectively to better understand and better manage and create a little bit of an immunity towards these fabric of breakdowns in athlete behaviour. One of the most important things for us to do as a human is, is to have recognition and reward. When we do something and it works, we want to be able to recognise what did I do to make that work? Not oh, well, it happened. I should just enjoy it and revel in it before it Gets taken away, that whole what if, the bubble burst thing. But okay, what did I do to create that? This is helping us create those metrics of success.
If I know that when I was training and I was doing those penalty shots and the strategy that I used that worked was X, Y and Z, and I then turned and said, I'm really good at X, Y and Z, this really works for me. I'm more likely to utilise that under pressure. I'm more likely for my brain to go, have I been here before? Yes. What did I do last time? X, Y and Z worked for me. So recognition and reward of success, of progress, it doesn't have to be the fully formed outcome. All it needs to be is a recognition that I am better at this today than I was yesterday. That progress, that growth, mindset, recognition and reward. When we recognise what we did to get the outcome, like the dominoes, we want to be able to tip the first domino. So we want to create trigger skills or trigger words or trigger actions. Every time that I trigger this by saying, or every time that I trigger this by doing, we get that consistency in blueprint. The choice to choose to use when we can choose to use. We are more likely to have control over the outcome when we don't choose and it chooses us.
So a reaction, not a response. All of a sudden, our emotions take over control of the steering wheel, because all they're going to try and do is get us out of that situation, not optimise that situation. Our emotions are a defence system, our choices are an opportunity system. So when we're triggering this skill consistently, we've got it in the moment. When we're practising, we've got them. When we're going through processes and we've recognised that when I do this, that works. Those triggers, we also want to embed them in a controlled environment. So visualisation is a really good way of saying, this is the blueprint, the picture inside my mind. This is what I want to execute under these conditions. And my trigger is this. So when you are visualising and if you say my trigger word here is push, then if you think and you see that inside your mind consistently, those two get anchored together. So in pressure situations, when you get to step out and take that penalty shot, if you turn around and say, yeah, I've done this before, I know what I'm doing, push, your brain will execute that blueprint that you practised.
Another thing to make sure that we do is collect viable data. So we've talked a lot in the past about journaling. These proof points are put into construct, they're put into your journal, you've written them down, you have to put them in a way that they make sense. Less about emotion, more about context. When we can do that, even if, as we're coming towards a big game and we're thinking, I don't know if I should be here, I think they've selected the wrong person. My case in point with the university, what I did, I went back over some of the lectures that I've given, some of the really important places that I've stood on the stage and delivered my content and gone, you know what, I've got proof here. I've done this so many times and it's been exceptionally well received. People like my content, they're using my content globally. Why wouldn't I be able to do this? So I've gone back in and I've utilised actual data to show that, yeah, I am the right person to do this. Actually, I'm good at this because I've written it down. Sometimes I've watched old lectures that I've given and gone, actually, that's really cool stuff.
And it's not egotistical, it's just facts, it's metrics driven. It's. I'm good at this because I have proof. Those moments, those factual proof moments, allow us to negate the what if, what if I can't? Well, I know I can. What if it goes wrong? Well, actually, I know how to make it go right. These proof point metrics are allowing us to put context and perspective into an emotional soup. We want to make sure, and I said this earlier, taking a little bit of competition and putting it in our training, because we want to have realistic pressure testing scenarios. If I've never stepped up to take a penalty shot in front of a goalie before, doing it on a big day doesn't make sense. So what I want to do is familiarise myself with putting myself in that situation. Sometimes we can't. We can't put ourselves in a situation of taking a penalty, for argument's sake, in front of 100,000 fans, 50% of them being hostile, 50% of them having such high expectations of you that you feel that pressure. And this is where that realism in visualisation becomes important. Often with my athletes, I'll get them to visualise, but also have a soundscape with them as well.
So we'll have audio of an event. It could be a crowd, it could be a hostile crowd, it could be a cheering crowd. What we're doing is adding different senses into that visualisation, that familiarisation that I know what to do under these circumstances are way more reliable for our brain to select than a random. Let's make it up in the moment. So what we want to be able to do is give them a blueprint and say, look, yeah, we have been here before. Remember we were doing this, we could hear that crowd that's screaming for my blood. Or we can hear that crowd that were right behind me and saying, you can do this. But also conditional as well. So one of my cricketers, I used to get them to visualise barefoot on the pitch. They could feel the grass, they could feel and smell the environment. And that realism allowed their brain to connect to. I've been here before, I know what I'm doing, I know how to do this. Not everything goes right in a world where we're putting ourselves in extreme conditions every now and again, despite our best preparation, despite everything that we've done to be the best version of us, sometimes it doesn't work.
Where imposter syndrome is at its most powerful is when we connect what could happen now to something that happened in the past. Because when we store our memories, we store them with every piece of emotion that made it feel that moment. Be that positive or be that negative. We take those emotions and we store them as the last genre of that memory. How did it make me feel? So when something doesn't go right in that pressure moment, we connect them. We look for a pattern, pareidolia. We want to be able to see a pattern in everything that we do. And sometimes that negative pattern has nothing to do with the moment in front of us, but it does validate how we feel. Our internal dialogue is often looking to validate how we feel so it will make a connexion to something, to kind of go, see, I knew you couldn't do this. We should never be here. We should never put ourselves in this situation. You are not the right person to take this penalty shot. Whereas the fact behind that is that's not true. It just makes us feel validated. So when something doesn't work, we want to have a strategy that takes the message from that, which is, that didn't work because you didn't step on the right foot the right way, or you hit the ball in the wrong quadrant of the ball, or you didn't take into consideration the wind gust that was happening.
Alright, I've learned from that. I now know how to correct that move on the vessel that it comes in the emotion is no longer relevant to us, it's no longer valuable. So having a reset point of learn a lesson, next job back on track, do the next thing allows us to take the learning and move forward without the emotion. If we don't take the learning, if we don't do anything to recognise that moment, our brain will keep hold of the emotion. Because as far as it's concerned, we've not learned, we've not got what we need to get from that experience. So all of a sudden we're now carrying baggage of I missed that penalty or I didn't get the ball this time, or I didn't stick my landing here, or whatever the context is, I didn't land that pitch to get that contract. That emotion is a poke in our brain and kind of going, you need to learn something from this. So the smart thing for us to do is to navigate that, go, yeah, I learned that it didn't happen because. And I now know how to fix it. That will allow it to stay in our subconscious.
It doesn't get kicked back to our conscious and go, well, this isn't working. You've got to recreate, can stay there and go, okay, that didn't work because of this. The more micro we can make that, the more, okay, my left toe didn't hit the ball at the right place, the easier it is to keep the vast majority, the 99.9% of it, in our subconscious. And we just make those micro adjustments. If we turn around and we say, that skill didn't work, I can't do it. Then all of a sudden we're chucking the baby out with the bathwater. We no longer have any blueprint. We've got to go and recreate and this will feed an imposter syndrome. I can't do that. I can't do that skill. I'm not great with penalties. I think anybody who follows football or soccer and watched the England team in any World cup, soon as it gets to penalty shots, most of us supporters will put our heads in our hands and go, here we go again. That's not because they're not talented enough. Absolutely. Every single one of those penalty shooters is talented enough to put the ball in the back of the net.
What they're focusing on is history. Oh, when we get to this, we don't do this. Well, that's so not true. We're relying on history and emotion rather than strategy in the moment. That learning mechanism is important. And you've probably heard me in the past talk about the three W's what worked? What didn't work? What would I do different? So what worked is emotional. Yeah, I'm really good at this. I did X, Y and Z and it worked. What didn't work? We need to be pragmatic and go, I didn't get my left toe on the ball. What would I do different? Next time make sure my foot is in the right position. Move on. That's it. There's no more in that. So imposter syndrome, albeit something that we all are exposed to, we are all vulnerable to. The reality is there's so many strategies that when done right, will either completely minimise, if not get rid of imposter syndrome. And like when I shared my experience at the start, none of us are immune to it until we start putting strategies in place. I'm happily lecturing in front of all my students now, walking into the university and going, I'm good at this is what I do.
And it's the same when I go into a corporate. There's often times I will walk into a boardroom, I don't know what they do day to day, but I'm really good at what I do. I'm really good at seeing human behaviour and looking at that dynamic. How do we create the right team in this corporate environment? And of course, when we build teams and players in sporting context, that's my bread and butter. I know I'm really good at that. And as much as that sounds egotistical to most people, it's what is my immune system towards imposter syndrome? I know what I'm good at and I know why I'm good at it. I'm open to learning and evolving. So I was going to ask you the same question here. How good are you at recognising what you're good at and why you're good at it? And when you get those confidence wobbles and all of a sudden you got this imposter syndrome of what if they find out I shouldn't be here? What if they find out I'm not actually as good as I say I am? What's causing that? Is it fact? Are you in a situation that you shouldn't be in or are you in a situation you should be in but you think you can't do this?
Imposter syndrome is a self created limitation. That limiting belief of I can't isn't actually based in fact, it's based in assumption. An assumption of what if, what if it goes wrong? So I hope this has given you a better understanding of why imposter syndrome is such a big issue in any sphere of life, be that sport, corporate education, even relationships. So imposter syndrome, do you have it and do you now know how to better manage it?
Hope you got a lot from this episode of Brain in the Game. And until our next episode, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle.
