How Can Breathing Help You To Ditch Imposter Syndrome?

Your mind is running wild with self-talk about how, if you speak up in the meeting with the brilliant idea you've just had, they will 'find you out' or realise they made a mistake in hiring you. Everyone will spot that the rest of the team knows more than you do. 

"Who am *I*, to mention my idea?!"

You sense your stress levels rising. Your jaw tenses. Your heartbeat increases. Your stomach tightens.

Inside your self-talk is like a pantomime - 'you can say it!' - 'oh no you can't!' - 'oh yes you can!' as you try to apply the latest positive thinking or resilience training.

And then Fred pipes up with an idea. It's nowhere near as good as yours was. But the moment has passed. And you get a new theme to beat yourself up with at 3am tomorrow morning.

This isn't lack of confidence or a dose of self-doubt. It's Imposter Syndrome - the fear of being found out as not good enough, despite the rest of the world knowing that you are.

And when it strikes, you can't sort it out with cognitive processes - you can't think your way out of a problem that your thinking is creating, right when you're in the middle of it. A quick dose of positive thinking won't touch the sides. Anyone who tells you that you can doesn't fully understand how Imposter Syndrome works - how our thoughts affect our emotions and the biochemical reactions in our bodies and how this is a cycle that feeds itself.

Dealing with Imposter Syndrome goes beyond mindset tweaks. It's an identity-level issue (that's why our Imposter Syndrome self-talk is packed with 'I am' statements, according to the 2019 Imposter Syndrome Research Study). And there's no time for the navel-gazing of figuring out which limiting belief needs to go, when you're in the middle of a meeting with that bright idea lighting up your mind.

You need to press 'pause' on Imposter Syndrome and you need to do it fast. 

One of the most powerful things you can do is to breathe.

Yes, obviously I know you're breathing, or someone in the meeting would be calling an ambulance. I'm talking about conscious breathing - based on 'pranayama' breathing techniques from the worlds of yoga and meditation.

When we're stressed (which is what happens when Imposter Syndrome strikes), our thoughts start to race. We become an instant expert in 'what if' scenarios.

You're focusing on survival, because your body has obeyed the stress-thought-prompt and fired off your stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenalin, to get you ready to escape from a threat. It doesn't care whether it's a sabre-toothed tiger at the open entrance to your cave or the risk of your boss and colleagues judging your idea. This diverts the blood flow from the frontal cortex at your brain - which does your rational thinking and idea generating - to the primal part that only cares about immediate survival. It has one priority at that moment: survival. And it has three options: fight, flight, or freeze.

So it's no wonder we shut up. Or if we dare to talk, it feels like gibberish.

There's another side to this: your body's hormones in that stress response generate your emotions. Emotions are basically a chemical reaction in your body. And the hormones and emotions feed those thoughts - and so the cycle continues.

It's really hard to change an emotion when it's in full swing. After all, those biochemical reactions that create them are managed by your autonomic nervous system - the bit of you that keeps your heart beating and reminds your hair to grow. It's not within our conscious control.

And it's tough to press 'pause' on those thoughts that feed our mind-story fears, unless you know how (though it's something I love to teach my clients).

So the 'quick win' way to press 'pause' on an Imposter Syndrome emergency is to work with your body, to reset the hormones that feed the emotions, which trigger those thoughts. And you can work with your body using your breath.

Any emotion can pass through your body in as little as sixty seconds, if you stop telling yourself the story about it. Yes, the Buddhist monk who taught me that twenty years ago got the verbal version of an election campaign milkshake lobbed at him. But he was right.

When you know how to get out of your stress-head and back into your body, you can use your breath to get grounded and to reset your nervous system, so that you can shift from stressed to 'relaxed and alert'. This stops the cortisol cycle, calms your emotions, redirects the blood flow back to the common sense part of your brain and even slows down your thoughts.

Your breath can do this in under sixty seconds. You can do this while you're sitting in that meeting, without anyone knowing. Then you can talk about your fabulous idea with courage, grounded confidence, and perhaps even excitement.

It only takes a minute.

And you've pressed 'pause' on Imposter Syndrome, before it causes you to self-sabotage.

Your breath is your business superpower, there for you whenever you need it, ready to help you feel happier, less stressed, more confident, empowered, think more clearly, stay calm in stress, be genuinely resilient and even to re-energise yourself, if you're tired.

If you want to learn my favourite techniques from twenty years of teaching this stuff to high-achievers and business leaders, let me know. I've got three spaces left for Q3 for my Ditching Imposter Syndrome Intensive 1:1 programme or you can be one of ten people on my 2019 Ditching Imposter Syndrome Inner Circle group programme.

Get in touch via a DM if you'd like to find out more and grab your spot on either of these.

And if you want to find out more about how you can ditch Imposter Syndrome, I've got a whole website of practical inspiration for you here: www.ditchingimpostersyndrome.com