Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #97| Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Overwhelm and Be Your Awesome, Full Productivity Self
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: So remember that the thing that is causing imposter syndrome is not your ability, but your thoughts.
- 0:07Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:19Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, ichelle Gothier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:22Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
- 0:36Michelle Gauthier: Hey friend, thanks for joining.
- 0:39Michelle Gauthier: I'm glad to have you here with me today.
- 0:42Michelle Gauthier: Today, we're going to be talking about something that affects many - maybe all - the women, but often goes unspoken, and that thing is imposter syndrome.
- 0:51Michelle Gauthier: You know that little voice or maybe not- so- little voice in your head that says, you're not good enough, even when you're crushing it, or the one that says who gave me this job anyway, I'm not qualified for this, even though you're completely qualified for it.
- 1:06Michelle Gauthier: Yep, that's what we're talking about.
- 1:07Michelle Gauthier: So we're going to talk about why it's more common among women, and I'm going to share some stats that might surprise you and then, most importantly, we're going to talk about some easy strategies for you to break free from imposter syndrome, so you just don't have to have all of those thoughts zooming around in your mind and instead you can just get to work and do the thing that you were meant to do.
- 1:30Michelle Gauthier: Before I dive into that, though, I want to tell you that I have been working on my 2025 Your Best Year class.
- 1:38Michelle Gauthier: It's a one-hour workshop.
- 1:40Michelle Gauthier: I do this every year, and my whole goal in doing it is to offer a very low cost - it's $25 for the hour workshop - a very low cost way for you to learn about how to plan goals and strategize, to plan out your whole year, so that, at the end of 2025, you're not thinking what were my goals this year?
- 2:02Michelle Gauthier: What was I supposed to do?
- 2:04Michelle Gauthier: Instead, you get really clear on your goals.
- 2:07Michelle Gauthier: You learn how to write good ones, you learn some of the things that cause people to fail on their goals, so that you don't do it.
- 2:14Michelle Gauthier: It's one hour that will be very worth your time.
- 2:17Michelle Gauthier: I'm putting the link in the show notes.
- 2:19Michelle Gauthier: Go and sign up now.
- 2:21Michelle Gauthier: You will not regret it.
- 2:23Michelle Gauthier: Okay, back to imposter syndrome.
- 2:25Michelle Gauthier: So what is imposter syndrome exactly?
- 2:28Michelle Gauthier: It's that little feeling of self-doubt that makes you think that your success is just luck or timing versus the result of your hard work and talent.
- 2:39Michelle Gauthier: You might feel like you're a fraud and that you're constantly worried that others will find out the truth about you, even though you're completely fully qualified and capable.
- 2:50Michelle Gauthier: When I was 27 years old, I got what I consider to be my first big promotion and I pitched myself for this promotion.
- 2:59Michelle Gauthier: I interviewed against other people and I got the promotion, and at the time I was much younger - I can't remember how much younger - but much younger than the other people who had that position.
- 3:10Michelle Gauthier: And when I got the position, I was so excited and it came to be my first day where I was moving, I moved to a different area of the office, and I was getting ready to start my new job and suddenly I was like, oh my gosh, there's no way I can actually do this job.
- 3:24Michelle Gauthier: Who hired me to do this job?
- 3:26Michelle Gauthier: Why did I put my name in for this job?
- 3:29Michelle Gauthier: What was I thinking?
- 3:30Michelle Gauthier: And I ended up getting a terrible migraine and having to go home from work for the day and start again the next day.
- 3:37Michelle Gauthier: And that's a great example of what can happen in our minds.
- 3:40Michelle Gauthier: Even, for example, in my case, I pitched myself for this job.
- 3:44Michelle Gauthier: I knew I could do it.
- 3:45Michelle Gauthier: I interviewed against other people and got the job, but there was just something in my mind that was telling me I had no idea what I was doing.
- 3:54Michelle Gauthier: The very same thing happened when I decided to become a life coach.
- 3:57Michelle Gauthier: After having a 20-year business career, I thought, who am I to do this?
- 4:01Michelle Gauthier: Who's ever going to hire me to be their life coach?
- 4:03Michelle Gauthier: What do I know?
- 4:04Michelle Gauthier: And those kinds of thoughts are really normal and common.
- 4:11Michelle Gauthier: But that's what causes imposter syndrome, and I think if we can understand why that's happening for us, especially as women, and what we can do about it, we can just reduce the amount of time we spend even thinking about imposter syndrome or thoughts like that.
- 4:27Michelle Gauthier: So let's think about why it's a bigger issue for women.
- 4:35Michelle Gauthier: Two stats that I think are really interesting that I want to share with you: So research shows - this is 40,000 participants across 108 studies, like big money research on this topic - shows that women consistently score higher on measures of imposter syndrome than men.
- 4:47Michelle Gauthier: Okay, raise your hand if you're shocked by that.
- 4:50Michelle Gauthier: Nope, no one's raising their hands.
- 4:52Michelle Gauthier: And then the second thing is that women who experience imposter syndrome often feel increased levels of anxiety and depression which hold them back from thriving in their careers and their personal lives.
- 5:04Michelle Gauthier: So that example that I just gave you, where I clearly felt so much anxiety and stress on my first day of getting a job that I wasn't qualified for that I gave myself a headache and had to go home from work for the day.
- 5:16Michelle Gauthier: So that's a good example of like why imposter syndrome matters and what happens when we have it.
- 5:22Michelle Gauthier: I don't think anyone's surprised that this happens to women more than men.
- 5:26Michelle Gauthier: But let's look at, why is that?
- 5:29Michelle Gauthier: Are men just like genetically wired not to worry about these things?
- 5:33Michelle Gauthier: I don't think so.
- 5:34Michelle Gauthier: I think it's much more socialized than that.
- 5:37Michelle Gauthier: So, in looking up the research on this, women have perfection pressure.
- 5:42Michelle Gauthier: Again, no one's surprised by this, but we are socialized to believe that we must have very high standards to succeed and that to us, mistakes might feel more costly.
- 5:55Michelle Gauthier: I think a lot of times too, women feel the pressure for, like all women, meaning if I'm the first woman in this position, or I'm the only woman at the table, it's not just me who fails, it's all of us who failed.
- 6:08Michelle Gauthier: So we have a lot of pressure on us to try to be able to do it right from the get-go.
- 6:15Michelle Gauthier: The other day I was listening to my favorite podcast, Armchair Expert, you guys definitely heard me talk about this before with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, and Monica was talking about how, when she was a little girl, she was older than the average kid who learns how to ride a bike.
- 6:31Michelle Gauthier: But she wanted to learn how to ride a bike, but she didn't want anyone to know that she didn't know how to ride a bike.
- 6:37Michelle Gauthier: So she wanted to learn how to ride a bike, not in public.
- 6:40Michelle Gauthier: So she made her dad teach her how to ride a bike and she taught herself how to ride a bike in her garage with the door down.
- 6:47Michelle Gauthier: Now, even if you're talking about a big three-car garage, that's going to be really hard to do, to learn how to ride a bike inside the garage with the door closed.
- 6:56Michelle Gauthier: But I just thought that that was such a good example and such a good metaphor for all of us women to think about, because when you try to be perfect on the first day, that's exactly what can happen.
- 7:09Michelle Gauthier: I really wanted to ride my bike in the garage and get very good at it before I showed up to my first day of my new promotion and I really wanted to see clients in the garage with the door down before I publicly spoke about the fact that I was a life coach so that I had some experience.
- 7:30Michelle Gauthier: That that's just not the way that life works.
- 7:33Michelle Gauthier: So we have this pressure to be perfect.
- 7:34Michelle Gauthier: We have also it's often called a confidence gap.
- 7:36Michelle Gauthier: So, again, research backs the fact that men are more likely to overestimate their abilities, where women often underestimate their abilities even when they're equally skilled.
- 7:48Michelle Gauthier: So if we, and obviously this isn't every man and every woman, we're just talking, you know, stereotypically, majority of the time a woman is learning how to ride her bike in the garage and a man's like, uh, I've never actually ridden a bike, but let me just give it a try, but I can probably do it.
- 8:05Michelle Gauthier: And so when you approach it from that perspective of, yeah, this isn't something that I know how to do right now, but I'm sure I can learn, that is what can take away that pressure of having to already know how to do it.
- 8:18Michelle Gauthier: Even my daughter when she first started playing soccer and she was in kindergarten and she was going to her first day of practice and she started crying and said, I don't want to go to soccer practice because I don't know how to play soccer.
- 8:28Michelle Gauthier: But that is what practice is, is learning how to play soccer, and nobody on the team is good and you're going to have to all of you learn together and you might learn it quickly or you might not learn it quickly, but you can expect that you won't know how to do it on the first day.
- 8:45Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so the reason why this happens more to women than men is that we have this pressure to be perfect.
- 8:50Michelle Gauthier: We have this confidence gap when compared to men, where men overestimate their skills and abilities and women underestimate theirs.
- 9:03Michelle Gauthier: Men are conditioned, even as little boys, to see risk-taking as a path to growth, while women treat it as a threat to their stability or to their reputation.
- 9:16Michelle Gauthier: So little boys are taught to go out and explore and see what happens, and learn what you learn, and girls are taught to not take those kind of risks and to try to get everything perfect and then go out and do these things.
- 9:32Michelle Gauthier: So I think this is really interesting because, for many reasons one, to apply it to ourselves, and then two, to apply it to our children or younger women who we come in contact with.
- 9:43Michelle Gauthier: So let's talk about how to break free from this.
- 9:46Michelle Gauthier: Now that we kind of have an understanding about what imposter syndrome is, why it's more common in women than men okay, great, what do we do about it?
- 9:55Michelle Gauthier: So remember that the thing that is causing imposter syndrome is not your ability, but your thoughts.
- 10:03Michelle Gauthier: Just the thoughts that you're having in your head about your abilities are what's causing you to feel like an imposter.
- 10:11Michelle Gauthier: The good news about that is you can change your thoughts, and changing your thoughts needs to feel true as well.
- 10:20Michelle Gauthier: So, instead of saying I'm totally underqualified for this job or I have no idea what I'm doing, maybe the thought that you replace it with isn't oh, I can 100% do this job, no problem.
- 10:31Michelle Gauthier: Maybe the replacement thought is something like, I'm a really smart person, I am a hard worker, I have learned how to do new things before, something along those lines to just shift yourself back into a more confident state.
- 10:47Michelle Gauthier: Another great thing to do is keep an evidence journal where you write down your wins, big or small, and go back to it often.
- 10:54Michelle Gauthier: S o an activity that I go through with my clients when they're feeling imposter syndrome is to say okay, starting from school, tell me all of the successes that you've had and I have them just give me high level the success that they've had.
- 11:09Michelle Gauthier: And a lot of times they'll try to say, I just got lucky, I just got lucky, I knew someone, I just got lucky.
- 11:15Michelle Gauthier: And so I will continue to ask them questions on that, because I think luck is part of life and sometimes it happens, but you have to be qualified and ready and competent when luck comes in your direction.
- 11:27Michelle Gauthier: So just keeping a journal or even just a note in your phone about successes that you've had small, everyday successes or big ones that you've had over your career, is a great thing to look back on, just to remind yourself oh yeah, I'm actually really a badass.
- 11:43Michelle Gauthier: That's right, I forgot about that for a second.
- 11:46Michelle Gauthier: Another thing is leaning into the community of women.
- 11:49Michelle Gauthier: So I'm not sure what your workplace has, and maybe your workplace isn't a great place for community with women.
- 11:56Michelle Gauthier: Do it with your friends, do it with your neighbors.
- 11:59Michelle Gauthier: Just talk to other women about your feelings, and women, while they are less likely to see how qualified they are, women are very good at encouraging and seeing the strengths in other women, so lean into that and consider joining a group where you feel like you're encouraged.
- 12:17Michelle Gauthier: Obviously, I don't have an office here full of co-workers who I can depend on, but I have a gym where I can get that.
- 12:24Michelle Gauthier: So lean into a community of other women where you can feel like you are lifted up and strong.
- 12:31Michelle Gauthier: And then just remember that you were taught, probably since you were a little girl, to celebrate perfection instead of progress, and that's okay.
- 12:41Michelle Gauthier: We can't go back and undo that, but you can switch your mindset to work on celebrating progress over perfection.
- 12:48Michelle Gauthier: So I got this new job, I felt a little bit nervous about it, but what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to keep going.
- 12:55Michelle Gauthier: I'm going to write down my wins when I have them and I'm going to keep looking back on the progress that I am making.
- 13:02Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so to sum it up, imposter syndrome is more common in women and it's tied to societal norms and the way that we were raised that it happens to women more often than not.
- 13:13Michelle Gauthier: This is completely not just in your head.
- 13:16Michelle Gauthier: Research backs this up.
- 13:17Michelle Gauthier: If you're feeling this way, the women next to you is probably either feeling that way today or has felt like that at some point in her career, but you don't have to let it define you.
- 13:26Michelle Gauthier: You can reframe your thoughts, you can come up with new thoughts, you can lean on other women and you can really focus on your progress.
- 13:34Michelle Gauthier: And I really recommend writing your progress down so that you can shift from that self-doubt to self-confidence.
- 13:41Michelle Gauthier: Now let's switch to my Do Less for More Success tip for this week.
- 13:47Michelle Gauthier: So I love this book called Do Less by Kate Northrup, and one of the things she talks about in that book is that time is finite and energy can be managed.
- 14:06Michelle Gauthier: So there's 24 hours in a day.
- 14:08Michelle Gauthier: There's nothing you can do about it.
- 14:10Michelle Gauthier: You can't make more time, you can't make less time, but you can manage the way that you spend your energy and you can manage situations that suck your energy away from you or take a lot of energy versus situations that give you energy.
- 14:25Michelle Gauthier: So my Do Less for More Success tip for today is to think about spending time with people who drain your energy or undermine your confidence or just make you not feel good about yourself, make you waste a lot of energy - Kate Northrup calls it an energy leak - and think about who those people are, and my Do Less for More Success tip is to spend less time with them.
- 14:49Michelle Gauthier: Figure out a way to spend the least amount of time possible with people like that, so as to preserve your energy for all the ways that you would rather use it.
- 14:59Michelle Gauthier: Okay, that's a wrap for today.
- 15:01Michelle Gauthier: I hope you have a fantastic week and don't forget to sign up for my Your Best Year 2025 class to get yourself all in order.
- 15:10Michelle Gauthier: The great thing about signing up now is you don't have to start getting stressed around New Year's Eve and think, oh my gosh, what am I going to do?
- 15:16Michelle Gauthier: How am I going to change my life?
- 15:18Michelle Gauthier: You can just remember, oh yeah, I signed up for Michelle's class.
- 15:21Michelle Gauthier: I'm totally good to go.
- 15:22Michelle Gauthier: I'm going to get that all figured out on Tuesday, January 7th, at noon central time.
- 15:26Michelle Gauthier: Okay, I'll see you then, if not before.
- 15:32Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 15:36Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier.
- 15:40Michelle Gauthier: com.
- 15:42Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.