Imposter Syndrome can affect any one of us, and it’s important to know that you’re not alone. We tend to get more stressed as it can trigger feelings of anxiety, self-doubt, low self-worth. Here are some tips that we’re sharing based on our conversation with leading clinical psychologist, and Head, Mental Health, Dept of MH and Behavioural Sciences at Fortis Hospital, Kamna Chhibber in the video linked to this course.
Disclaimer: Please note that these are tips and suggestions, and not intended to substitute for advice from a therapist or to imply that you shouldn’t speak to a professional if you are feeling overwhelmed
- Take a beat: When you start feeling these feelings of self-doubt, do take a step back to assess what’s going on
- Don’t judge yourself: What you’re feeling is valid
- Increase self-awareness: Learn to understand yourself better, so that even when you are in a situation where you’re not getting reinforcement from the outside, your entire internal understanding of your own self, or self-awareness, can contribute towards ensuring that you feel more positively about yourself
- (Try to) Change your mindset: Work to busting those myths where you feel that only certain types of people, or people who are ‘a certain way‘ (that you feel you are not) will reach certain positions or have certain achievements. Remind yourself that you may be different from other people, you have different talents and your expectations also may be different.
- Positive reinforcement: Remember that you’ve reached where you have thanks to your own skillset and potential. You need to be able to trust in that and believe in that — you’ll be able to move fwd as you tell yourself you’ll keep building on that.
- Keep an eye on your support system: If they’re not coming in with a problem-solving approach, but only highlighting where the problems are, this will likely only increase your self-doubt…maybe you need to rethink those relationships and how you are engaging in them
- Rethink perfectionism: Everything we do doesn’t need to be perfect
- List it out: Make a list of your achievements where you can see it: Include objective facts so that your imposter syndrome can’t negate these. You can include your career milestones, awards, reasons for promotion, anything objective that shows you where your growth is
