A Guide for Emerging Leaders: How to Beat the Impostor Syndrome

In my interactions with young leaders, I have come to appreciate the pressure that comes with being at the top, or near the top especially at a young age. I realize that perhaps I was so busy doing that part when I was younger that I didn’t actually notice it but the pressure is real. It is therefore no wonder that the impostor syndrome then plagues so many of us unless we are constantly affirmed and this is where both good bosses and mentors come into play.

Like every Ice berg, it’s the foundations of every individual that is most critical, the deeper the foundation the easier to keep the visible top free. Having read numerous books on leadership development and been lucky to be mentored by some of the great leaders in our society, I have listed a few habits that young leaders should emulate to help them beat the impostor syndrome and better still grow them into leaders of repute. 

1. Wake up Early

The habit of waking up early has been discussed time without number as a habit that enforces discipline in an individual’s life. It is so highly espoused that Robin Sharma has what is called the 5 a.m club which is a club said to be subscribed to by some of the biggest names in the corporate across the world. As an individual you have to define your early, however, this seem to be any time before the world and the Sun arise. These period must be scheduled, otherwise you could wake up early and just stare into space or on your social media handles. Waking up earlier gives you time to walk into the day with much more confidence and at your own pace. Start adjusting your wake up time by half an hour earlier every day until you achieve your desired early.

2. Plan Your Personal Finances 

The lack of proper personal finances is the cause of most insecurities that drive the “busy” rat race in the corporate world. Create a personal budget and strive to stick by it, there are millions of budget templates online which you can borrow. Strive to keep your utilities within 30% of your net income and find a way to use your money to make the world better. I have found that giving part of my income has freed me from the hard dependency on money. Knowing where your every shilling is sitting and where it is being spent liberates you from worry and gives you the strength to make decisions guided more by personal conviction than by fear.

Financial planning can do a lot of wonders. It frees you from greed commonly known as corruption, frees you from fear, commonly described as the yes man syndrome and frees you from the need to fit in also referred to as keeping up with the Jones’s. One small act can change your whole life. In Kenya programmes such as Centonomy can help guide you on this path to changing and liberating self.

3. Schedule Your Day

In fact, I implore you to err on over scheduling your day. The people around me always laugh that I live by alarms, I set an alarm to wake up, to eat, to sleep, to take a water break, name it, I have an alarm for it. Ridiculous I know, however for me it is serves two main purposes, one, I try to ensure I steward the one gift given to me by God in a prudent manner but also, two children later, I find that I do not have the best memory in the world to hold onto a lot of information, I digress.

Life moves at a very fast pace and a lot of things are expected of leaders all at the same time while being expected to also be human. Scheduling your time is critical in helping you achieve the most important things while keeping your eye on some form of balance. As a new mother, I followed Gina Ford’s schedule religiously in scheduling my children’s eating, playing, bathing and sleeping schedules and I must say it worked wonders in ensuring I did not lose my mind. As a leader, scheduling your waking up time, your operational time, your strategic activity time, your connecting time and your logging off time can help you take better control of your time and your energy overall and get a lot more done than you might with a random day.

In the modern world we can use alarms, excel sheets, calendar schedules and other gadgets to not only schedule but evaluate the schedules at the end of the week to determine how much time is being spent where and how we can adjust that in the following scheduling period for more productivity, this way, you can only get better. A little exercise I carry out with my mentees is to ask them to record what they do the whole day, hour by hour for 1 week and they are often shocked by the amount of time they could recover for rest or more strategic work by just scheduling. Just start, not having a schedule is planning to fail at the one resource given equally to all in the world.

4. Have a Plan.

I cannot over emphasize the need for a strategic plan for your life. I know that it has been said often that in the millennial age a plan longer than 3 years is too long, but when it comes to personal planning, you shall be with yourself in your corporation called Your Life for a very long time and the best thing to do is to put a plan in place. Starting from the long term and breaking it down to shorter plan periods will help you make a lot of decisions soberly.

Let’s take John as an example, he is 25 year old and has a plan to retire at the age 40. He sees himself retiring in a ranch in Nanyuki. With this plan in mind, John can make very many decisions which help him achieve his plan, he can decide to only focus on investments that only enable him to buy a Ranch in the next 20 years and this will stop him from running after each investment fad that is not aligned to his plan. He could, if he is married, perhaps disclose this vital information to his future wife who will be in the knowledge that at some point she will need to learn how to ride a horse or milk some cows, this will save John a lot of conflict in the future.

A life plan is more critical now in this fast paced life because if you have no plan you will end up in someone’s plan.

5. Always Be Present

Whether you are planning your life or living it, whether you are interacting at work or at home, always be present. The quest for a work-life balance is a consequence of the fact that people feel like they are floating without really getting the fulfillment out of life. However both in work and in life, you could get the best out of the interaction by being fully present.

Plan a time to have completely zero distraction, avoid carrying your phone to all meetings and to lunches and coffees. Avoid answering questions before listening, learn to stop and breathe. Try and catch the sun even by strolling to the coffee shop across the shop – without your phone at hand. Work at stopping to offer help and find opportunities to laugh, learn, hear or crack a joke. Whatever you start doing, focus on always being present.