Beyond Impostor's Syndrome: 3 Other Professional Afflictions

Being at the height of your career is no guarantee you feel comfortable in your professional skin these days. Afflictions like Impostor’s Syndrome and other limiting beliefs can hold us back?from experiencing deeper fulfillment and creating?greater impact.

For most people, confidence and ease appear to come with practice and accomplishment, except when they?don’t. In fact, in the original study on impostor's phenomenon - as originally called - the co-authors noted that repeated successes weren't the cure.

Let's consider three other kinds of afflictions that many accomplished professionals have shared with me. The names are mine based on the patterns I've witnessed.

I’m well acquainted with?these afflictions in part because I’ve had my version of each?of them at different stages. I also have worked with, studied, and interviewed numerous fulfilled innovators who admit some version of what we generally call "impostor's syndrome." Scholars, VPs, corporate consultants, leaders, directors, established authors, professors, media personalities, restauranteurs, tech whizzes, spiritual guides, entrepreneurs, coaches, performers.?

They are usually motivated by impact, innovation, leveraging ideas, and a hunger to keep learning. Yet they also have their own set of limiting beliefs about who they are professionally.

See if you recognize yourself in any of these and what you want to contribute to the conversation.

#1 Contradiction Affliction

A relationship counselor wants to write a book about relationships, but their own relationship is a complete mess. How can he possibly be an authority on the subject? The VP who runs a tech firm cannot organize her personal life and feels like a fraud. A spiritual teacher promising enlightenment rages?at erratic drivers on the road. The scholar still wonders if his peers will finally "find him out" as being inferior in his field.

Contradiction Affliction often arises when an accomplished leader, entrepreneur, or professional feels that what she’s promising is inconsistent with what she’s doing or how she’s living in the moment.

With every success or accomplishment, more people look up to them. So they might feel an obligation to uphold an image of perfection which in their private view means 100% consistency in their actions. Vulnerability in public makes them squirm. The schism between their outward success and their inward doubt only deepens their negative self-image. They meet any compliment, praise, or award with suspicion.

Inevitably, their suffering is private. They assume they're the only people who feel this way. So when they're offered genuine praise for their accomplishments or character, they often deflect or downplay compliments.

Disrupt the Contradiction

There are no surefire cures for such self-doubt. But a few actions and a reframe can challenge this default pattern.

#1 Learn to Accept Genuine Praise.

Some clients have told me they try to "unhook from praise." I get what they mean. They're trying to change the people-pleasing pattern. They want to stop being attached to getting praise.

In the book TRACKING WONDER, I emphasize how fostering self-admiration differs from seeking other people's adulation - a trap. When you foster a healthy unconditional self-admiration, you acknowledge the parts of your character that are strengths or parts of your work that are indeed uniquely valuable.

When you armor yourself from absorbing genuine praise for your craft, character, or accomplishment, you worsen that feeling of being a contradictory impostor.

If you can practice accepting a genuine compliment with grace, you might make a chink in the protective armor of your imperfect self-image.

#2 Don't promise perfection.

If you're a business owner, service-providing professional, or entrepreneur who promises “enlightenment” or “perfect health” or even “happiness” as a permanent state, those promises are unrealistic and probably untrue. Refine your business promise to assure you can deliver.

Author of the book Start Finishing Charlie Gilkey breaks down a veritable toolbox for keeping momentum on complex projects. In the book, Gilkey admits he never finished his PhD in philosophy. Although that fact might have been a private stigma in his past, he reconciled and shared it with his readers. He framed that fact not as a flawed contradiction but to acknowledge that a part of finishing work that matters requires stopping other work that no longer serves you or your goals. Finishing stuff that matters means stopping stuff that no longer matters.

#3 Take a cue from Walt Whitman.

The American bard writes, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I?contradict?myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)." You are wide and full of contradictions.?You are likely a symphony of selves. When you recognize your own contradictions as potential creative paradoxes, then you stop expecting your public persona to be monolithic, simplistic, and perfect.

The Field-Crossing Shame Affliction

Field-Crossing Shame arises when someone accomplished in one field wants to excel in another field.

Consider an accomplished professional or leader in a non-writing-related field who wants to write a book but doesn’t know where to start. A month or two into writing a book, they recognize how daunting that endeavor is. They start to doubt themselves in a way they have not for the past 20 years in building their professional reputation.

Some accomplished entrepreneurs and professionals, even those with master status within their?fields, find it challenging to be open to new knowledge, frames, and concepts in another new field. They’re used to being in charge, being the ones with the answers, the ones who know what they're doing.

Many of the systems we've inherited frankly do not support a lot of people to venture into new fields of knowledge.

Disrupt the Shame

#1 Harness your curiosity. If you want to enter or excel in a new field, break down the core conventions you need to know and the core skills you need to learn. Find a mentor or resources you can trust, and open up to learning again. Ask more questions, test out, and remember what it felt like to be inquisitive and open-minded.

#2 Take on an experimenter's mindset. Find models and study them. Practice and prototype over and over. Treat failure as data.

#3 Find a Support Pack. Chances are there are professionals and contractors with genius strengths and skills you lack. At the right time, get them on your endeavor's micro-team.

Recognize that field knowledge and domain knowledge change so rapidly in the 21st century that we all should perceive and present ourselves as fluid experimenters more than fixed experts.

The Expert's Affliction

A social psychologist recently confided to me that he feels none of his colleagues experience or express a healthy wonder toward their field or even toward the human beings who are their subjects. They hide, he says, behind a "healthy skepticism."

The Expert's Affliction happens within a field - not across fields. It often gets in the way of an accomplished professional or entrepreneur?advancing their authority and leadership?within?their existing field.

Consider the person who's thrived for 20 years in companies as a CMO and wants to branch out to advance his own body of work. He's amassed a lot of know-how within domains such as marketing and branding. If an outsider with different angles within those fields for these times suggests a new approach for him to advance his own body of work outside of a company, he might respond implicitly with, “Yeah, yeah, I know that. Been there, done that.”

Maybe. But more than likely, not.

Been there, done that is an understandable defense. For someone else to suggest that there’s a more useful approach or more to know about their own field can be threatening.

That defense often means they hold an incomplete frame of knowledge that biases them from grasping a new, expanded frame of knowledge.

Bust the Bias & Assume Beginner's Mind

Open Up. It takes a confident person to accept new knowledge. When someone presents a potential new way of looking at an “old” idea, open up and see what insight you might take away. An open intelligence, that’s the operative mindset.

Jeff Tisman is an internationally recognized photographer and is regarded as one of New York's best wedding photographers. He recently told me he attended a photography workshop. A lesser-known photographer tapped him and said, "Are you Jeff Tisman? What are you doing here at this workshop?"

"I'm here to learn. I always have something to learn."

In this new world of work, don't we all?

In Jeffrey's Notebook

• Ideas for shifting a certain company's work culture toward more genuine curiosity & leaders toward more admiration
• Seeds for new initiatives
• Ideas for inclusive nature-centered retreats
• Wonderings about how we can move toward a world where we assume a collective agency with more uplifting care for one another
• Ideas for stoking my daughters' curiosity and wonder over the summer

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I’ll see you soon for the next issue of Wonder@Work.

Be well, and thanks for running with me,

Jeffrey