Do you ever secretly fear you’re in over your head in your new job? Are you receiving praise that you think is unwarranted?
Do you think you might get exposed as a fake? Do you often wonder why they hired you?

If this is you, you’re not alone. Over 70% of the population has experienced Imposter syndrome. I have and I’m keen to share my lessons and free exercise, so you can tame your Inner Critic and stop feeling like a fraud. 

Here’s what’s waiting for you inside this episode

In this episode and the next I’m going to cover the second common mistake we can all make when we start a new job (go back to episode 1 if you’d like a summary of all 3 common mistakes).

Mistake number 2 is all about ‘Playing it Small’.

Playing it small is almost the opposite of hitting the ground running, I characterise it as ‘sliding into’ your new role, not wanting to ‘make a splash or a fuss’. It’s a bit like hanging around the edges at your teen disco, not wanting to create a stir, not wanting to stand out, too afraid to have an opinion of voice a challenge.

I used to be the queen at this behaviour and I even had a term for it, I called it ‘flying under the radar’ and I was good at it.

I told myself that this ‘small’ behaviour suited me because I’m an introvert, I don’t enjoy being in the limelight and I lacked the confidence to overcome this so I justified it instead. I told myself that performance is what really matters - the results I achieved should speak for themselves.

But that didn’t always work out so great for me

Playing it small has, at times in my career, meant I really batted beneath my potential.

The thing that kept me acting in this ‘small’ way was my Inner Critic, that negative, painful voice inside my head telling me I wasn’t good enough and that I was better off staying out of the limelight. My Inner Critic has always been there but she became a lot more insistent when I started a new job - when she would make me feel like I didn’t deserve the job I was in and that I was going to be found out as an impostor.

I’ve developed a very effective exercise to tame your Inner Critic and help you escape the trap of Impostor Syndrome. I know it works because I’ve relied on it myself for years. It’s helped me successfully build a much more positive approach and to feel materially better about myself.

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Transcript

Hello I’m Elise Finn and welcome to Her Career, Her Life - the podcast that helps professional women create a career and life they love.

This is episode 4 of the first season of Her Career, Her Life and in this first season I’m focusing on the advice you need when you’re starting a new corporate job.

In episode 1 I talked about the 3 big mistakes people often make when they’re starting a new corporate job and how to spot if you might be in danger of making them. In episodes 2 and 3 I talked about the first of these 3 mistakes - ‘hitting the ground running’ - which sounds great, but isn’t always so successful. If this sounds interesting, be sure to check out episodes 2 and 3.

In this episode and the next I’m going to cover mistake number 2 - playing it small.

So what do I mean by playing it small?

Playing it small is almost the opposite of hitting the ground running, I characterise it as ‘sliding into’ your new role, not wanting to ‘make a splash or a fuss’ - it’s a bit like hanging around the edges at your teen disco - not wanting to create a stir - not wanting to stand out. I used to be the queen at this behaviour - I even had a term for it - I called it ‘flying under the radar’ and I was good at it.

I told myself it suited me because I’m an introvert, I don’t enjoy being in the limelight and I lacked the confidence to overcome this so I justified it instead. I told myself that performance is what really matters - the results I achieved should speak for themselves.
But that didn’t always work out so great for me

Playing it small has, at times in my career, meant I really batted beneath my potential.

It’s had a material effect on my career - for example, I’m sure that my tendency to ‘play it small’ meant I was overlooked for a promotion that was ‘mine to lose’
 
I was acting as an interim - I hate that word - a dreaded title which needs such careful handling! I was asked to be Head of Marketing for a business on an interim basis whilst they looked to fill the permanent role.
 
I thought my work ethic and results would speak for me. I slipped quietly into my role and worked my butt off for my (charismatic but somewhat lazy) boss who was keen to take the credit for my graft.
 
I kept my head down, didn’t talk about my experience, my qualifications or expertise, I passed on opportunities to make presentations because I lacked confidence, I people pleased (something that plagued my early career), I never spoke in meetings.
 
Is any of this sounding familiar? I was definitely PLAYING IT SMALL.
 
I only realised the damage I’d done when I didn’t get the permanent job. They said I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have the experience and Marketing credentials.
 
Objectively I had both. I had held down more senior marketing roles than this before and had an honours degree in Marketing - but I hadn’t played to those strengths.
 
The person they brought in had a fantastic personal profile, he definitely had presence and maybe you’ll know what I mean when I describe him as a ‘schmoozer’. He didn’t have any better experience or credentials than I had.
 
The facts don't matter. Perception matters.
 
Playing it small has encouraged me into the role of a people pleaser. 
 
Because I thought it was more important to be liked (I think I confused being liked with having influence - but more on influence later in episode 7, so watch out for that in a couple of weeks). People pleasing led me to do things for others that weren’t anything to do with my role. I got the reputation for ‘getting things done’ - so more and more things came my way - but they weren’t necessarily the right things! 
 
This strategy might be successful when you’re just starting out in your career and need to build your experience, but it doesn’t help position you for promotion.
 
Playing it small has also encouraged me to stay stubbornly in someone else’s shadow - and even to be happy for them to take credit for my work. Now we’ve all done this at some point, but I do really mean all of my work! 
 
This one is particularly bizarre when I look back on it, but a long time ago, I worked for a guy who did very little, don’t get me wrong, he was very nice, funny, charismatic and …. Happy to sit back and let someone else do all the work. The alarm bells should have rung for me when I we first met and he asked me how important status was to me. I thought he was talking about title and hierarchy - which didn’t matter to me at the time, and I said so - but what he really meant was, would I be happy if I did all the work and he took all the credit? 
 
It took me 3 years to break free from this particular straight jacket that I created for myself, but I learnt some valuable lessons. 
 
Looking back on this experience still makes me cringe at how small I was making myself in this role, I even remember him asking me to attend conference calls not so I could join in but so I could send him comments and suggestions over messenger! It really did get comical at times.

So what was behind this self sabotage?

I think it was the loud voice in my head playing an endless loop of how I wasn’t ….. Enough.

The thing I wasn’t enough of, depended on the circumstances - maybe it was smart enough, brave enough, intelligent enough, funny enough, eloquent enough, charismatic enough, or even male enough (I was never going to win that battle).

This voice inside my head, was of course my inner critic and I now know we all have one - it’s that voice which leaps into action whenever we start to doubt ourselves.

And it’s a very proactive voice - Research tells us we talk to ourselves about 50,000 times a day and 80% of these conversations can be classed as negative! Thats a lot of negative conversations we’re having with ourselves.

One way our inner critic shows up is as Impostor Syndrome.

So let’s see if you might be suffering from Impostor syndrome in your new role?

Do you ever secretly fear you’re in over your head in your new job?
Are you constantly second guessing every decision you need to make? 
Are you receiving praise that you think is unwarranted? 
Do you think you might get exposed as a fake?
Do you often wonder why they hired you?

Mistrusting yourself is one of the most common feelings caused by imposter syndrome.
But if this is you, you’re not alone. Imposter syndrome is the feeling that you don’t deserve to be where you are in life, and over 70% of the population has experienced this particular flavour of our inner critic.

In 1938, John Steinbeck confessed to his diary “I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and everybody else!” A year later, Grapes of Wrath was published, for which John won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

I’ve cited a man here on purpose - almost as evidence against what I’m about to say!

Now I’m totally sure that some men experience impostor syndrome - I know because they have personally told me - but I do believe that this is something that happens more - or at least more intensely for women.

And there does seem to be evidence for this.

There’s a study I found looking at Impostor Syndrome in academic professionals in the 80’s - it involved research of 150 highly successful people - all of whom had PhDs in various specialties and were respected professionals in their fields.

The research showed that the majority of these women attributed their successes to temporary causes, such as luck or effort, in contrast, the men included in the research who are much more likely to attribute their successes to the internal, stable factor of ability.

Maybe more important than the difference between gender, is the bizarre evidence that despite these high achieving women being objectively successful and intelligent that they did not feel successful. They consider themselves to be “impostors.” And many of them used that word - impostor.

What’s more, this study showed that Women who experience the impostor phenomenon have a strong belief that they are not intelligent; and that they have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise. Women in this group felt over evaluated by colleagues. One women professor said, “I’m not good enough to be on the faculty here. Some mistake must have been made in the selection process.”

And she wasn’t alone with her thoughts - the chairperson of her department, said, “Obviously I’m in this position because my abilities have been overestimated.” Another woman with two master’s degrees, a PhD., and numerous publications to her credit considered herself unqualified to teach remedial college classes in her speciality.

In other words, these women find innumerable means of denying the evidence and clearly felt like impostors.

And I can so relate to this study!

For much of my career I was convinced that I’d be ‘found out’ at any moment - that my inadequacies would be exposed and I would be shamed into admitting I had been faking it all along. Have you ever felt like that?

And this didn’t get much better as I got more senior - you might think that the evidence of continual promotion would help quieten some of the voices inside my head who were busy telling me I wasn’t good enough. But that wasn’t the case.

I remember the story I told myself when I secured my last corporate role as a CMO for a billion dollar business - it went something like this ‘They’ve only chosen me because I’m a female and it will balance out some of the middle aged men on the executive team’.

This was despite the fact that I had battled through a very rigorous recruitment process with something like 5 or 6 rounds of interviews and when I was offered the job, the CEO of my previous company (when I told him I wanted to leave) made me all sorts of counter offers to keep me!

I guess it’s no wonder that our vulnerability can increase the more senior we get in our careers; the demands of leaders are greater than ever, with increased responsibility and loads of pressure to acquire new skills and expertise against a backdrop of rapid change
 
 Maya Angelou famously said:
 “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody…’. 
After she was quoted as saying this, Maya went on to publish more than 30 works and was most significantly awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the USA’s highest civilian honour. 
So if, like me you suffer from impostor syndrome sometimes, you are in very good company.
Despite that wonderful company I’m not going to convince you that you should enjoy it. I know it’s no fun! But it might be a necessary sometimes.
But if you are committed to growing yourself and your career, you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. You need to commit to stretching beyond the things you’ve already done.

Along the way, you’ll experience self-doubt, for sure. 
But you can learn to read this as a sign that you're pushing yourself in ways that can deliver great payoffs.

But it is unpleasant when you feel impostor syndrome - so what can we do when we find ourselves in it’s grip?

Here are my 3 practical tips

1. Know you’re not alone and find someone to share your thoughts with

We know from the research that everyone suffers from impostor syndrome sometimes and we all have an inner critic who is fast to leap to criticism and biting judgement. Just knowing you’re not alone can help, but finding someone you trust to talk to about this is even better.

Giving our negative thoughts a real voice and sharing some of our darker impostor fears can be incredibly positive experience.

Just saying the words out loud is often therapeutic in itself because it’s much easier to spot how ridiculous our thoughts and fears are when we hear them voiced - when we stop squashing them. But saying them aloud to someone else - someone who respects and likes us is hugely potent. In my experience these conversations can often lead to raucous laughter as your trusted partner can so easily help you see how inaccurate your impostor fears really are.

They can help you connect back to the truth, they know the reality of how worthy you are and they can help you identify the very real evidence to help you overcome these impostor claims and ultimately bring you back to a kinder reality.

Try this - tell someone who loves you, what you’re telling yourself in your head, I’m betting that it this might turn out to be one of the most valuable conversations you’ll ever have.

Here’s my second tip:

2. Recognise that you don’t and can’t have all the answers - and actually that’s a good thing

Impostor syndrome often rears its ugly head when we’re navigating new challenges and we’re stressed by a lot of unknowns - that’s why it’s so common when we’re new in a role.

So let’s compare this to what you do when you’re driving a car and you come across a new area where there’s lots of potential for risk - pedestrians crossing, cyclists on the inside lane, traffic lights or a roundabout ahead, it might be raining, snowing, sleating - and you just don’t have a clear view ahead?

What do you naturally do? You slow down! You know you need to give yourself time to adjust to potential challenges and threats.

It’s the same when you face new challenges at work, if your Impostor voice is getting louder then ask yourself - do I need to slow down? Are you racing ahead to find a solution before you’re clear on the problem? Burdening yourself with the expectation that you have to find an immediate solution, combined with a ranting impostor voice in your head can be overwhelming and intimidating. It’s not a recipe for success in your new job.


Remember that two heads are better than one - you’ll quieten your inner critic by engaging with others to find solutions.

And if that voice in your head is telling you that you should be able to solve all of this on your own because that’s why they hired you. Then remember that someone who thinks they have all the answers doesn’t leave any room for anyone else.

So involve others, collectively you’ll come up with better ideas.

Finally lets move on to my third tip

3. Don’t be afraid of the voice in your head

This is the big one. This lesson took me 2 decades to really learn and when I did it literally set me free.

The voice inside our head - our inner critic is actually only trying to protect us - that those negative thoughts are designed to keep us safe - to take us away from danger and back to our comfort zone, then it doesn’t seem so bad. They just have a very clumsy and at times mean way of communicating.

Also knowing that this voice gets louder when we’re stressed and stretched - and that’s a common feeling when we start a new job. The number of unknowns that surround us kicks off the protective instinct in our inner critic - and her way of telling us to get back to safety - to get back to familiar territory is to scare the pants off us with stories of impending catastrophe.

Once we know our inner critic is just trying to keep us safe, it somehow makes it easier to deal with. But that’s not enough to quieten her - and you must quieten her if you’re going to step into your full potential.

So I have developed a simple but powerful exercise to tame our inner critic and I’d love to share it with you. I created it because I needed it myself.
If you’re suffering from impostor syndrome this is a fantastic way to get control of your thoughts and start to change your internal narrative.

You can download my inner critic exercise from my website - it’s at www.elisefinn.com/hercareerherlife/episode4

Listening to your inner critic can be painful at first - especially if you’ve been trying to squash her voice or drown it out but it’s the critical first step to reframing the conversation you’re having with yourself.

I’ll share a story about my own journey with my IC in case it helps you with yours.

For years I beat myself up about the amount of time I spent away from home working - living in Southern Ireland and having a global job meant I was always travelling even if it was just to the London office. My routine was to leave the house at 4am on Monday and get back late Thursday - and that was on a good week. I did this for more than a decade.

With 3 children at home this was a huge sacrifice to make and although my husband was a wonderful work from home Dad, my Mummy guilt was huge and my IC would use that as fuel for many flame throwing, horrible accusations - about how I was a terrible mother, how I would ruin my children’s lives, how I would never have a good relationship with them, how I had made terrible choices ……. And so it went on, it had a lot of time to developo.

Every time there was a drama at home it would amplify her voice - it was all my fault, I wasn’t good enough, I’d brought this to the family and so on.

I worked hard to reframe this conversation with my inner critic - believe me I did!

And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t - its a subject that is so close to my heart that it’s harder to be objective about relationships than it is about your performance. 
When my clients are struggling with their IC over how worthy they are in their job I often encourage them to look for evidence on how well they’ve done, to dig out performance reviews that show they’ve performed well, to look at their track record, to recall their best moments, to ask previous bosses how they would describe them etc.

This is harder when you’re busy beating yourself up about personal relationships, but my middle daughter Cassie did offer me a fantastic reframe of her own on this subject when she went off to Manchester Uni to study Law.

I was anxious for her, but she was raring to go. All I could do at the time - because of the fearful place I was in was looking at all the potential downsides, the distance and the fact that she was a year younger than her peers. Would she be happy and able to cope?

She said to me ‘Mummy you’re the one who has shown me what’s possible, you need to stop stressing, I need to get out into the world and you can’t be worried about that because you’re the one who has shown us all what’s possible’

That one comment killed my IC dead on that subject about being a dreadful mother - and I had been beating myself up on that for more than a decade.

I hope this shows you that our IC isn’t right in her opinions and you can overcome the negative self talk - start today by downloading my exercise.

So those were my 3 tips on how to wrestle your Imposter Syndrome to the ground and quieten your Inner Critic - just to recap:

Recognise that you’re not alone and find someone to share your thoughts with 
Know that no one has all the answers and that’s a good thing because it fosters collaboration and stops you isolating yourself
Reframe the conversation using my 4 step process

Finally - know this is never done, Jennifer Lopez said in an interview ‘even though I’ve sold 70 Million records I still have a feeling that I’m not good at this!’

You’re in good company - we all are!

I’d love to know how you get on and if you have any questions you can email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (in the notes) or DM me on LI

Swipe the artwork on your podcast player to find the notes and the link to my exercise.

Finally, if you’re into this content, go and write me a review on itunes, subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend. This is a new podcast so the most important thing you can do is write a review in itunes and as a thank you I’m going to be giving away a free 30 minute coaching session to someone who leaves a review

In the next episode we stay on the topic of ‘playing it small’ and explore how we can move past our inner critic and build our own compelling evidence of our true potential. So I hope you’ll join me next week, in the meantime, get out there and create a career and life that you’re going to love.