Well Being

Impostor syndrome is one of those interesting and universal things – in my opinion we all suffer from it.  It shows up in many ways – failure to try new things because we’re afraid we’re going to fail, we don’t speak up in a meeting and so we never get credit for the idea, we don’t ask for the promotion, we don’t ask for help, we avoid asking for feedback or we over defend if we do get it, we overwork something to death because it’s not quite perfect yet, we fail to advocate for ourselves… We all suffer silently and repeat the same patterns I could go on and on.  And we’re somewhat aware of the cost of this, as it makes life a lot more painful to live.  We KNOW in our heads that we suffer from impostor syndrome.  We might read books on it, we’ve taken the online quiz, maybe even our therapist told us.  So we look for new techniques on how to solve this problem, we look to apply a new perspective and think carefully about what the morning affirmation needs to say (that is, if we remember to do it.). Maybe we practice meditation hoping and praying it will disappear, or we call our doctor and ask for a prescription for the daily anxiety we’re battling and just can’t seem to shake no matter how successful we are, no matter how many things get ticked off the to do list.  Because there’s always more.  We practice self-care because that’s the solution, right?  A massage, getting the nails done, we tell ourselves that we need to be kinder to ourselves.  But deep down we KNOW we don’t deserve it.  Our nails look great and inside we’re still a mess.  And we go about our business of repeating the same cycles, the same patterns of suffering, because obviously there’s no real fix to this, otherwise somebody would have figured it out by now. Impostor syndrome can’t be solved by the same thinking that creates it There is a fix.  The problem is we’re often looking in the wrong place.  Impostor syndrome can’t be solved by the same problem that creates it.  It’s not a thinking problem.  It can’t be solved in the head.  It can only be solved in the heart.  The heart – an interesting concept for many of us to take in.  It’s a place many of us aren’t super familiar with and frankly don’t have much experience with.  And yet we all have one.  How does this happen and how can this be?  Because adulthood often entails learning how not to feel things.  Learning how to hide things.  Learning how to cope with the difficulties of life, and feelings will just get in the way and get us in trouble.  We learn early on as children that feelings are often scary and if we express them, we’ll probably get punished, or worse.  We learn how to not take emotions to work because emotional […]

We tend to focus a lot on outcomes in our society.  Outcomes are how we evaluate success.  That project didn’t achieve the stated outcome, so we brand it as a failure.  The business is no longer a going concern, so it’s a bust.  Maybe we don’t get the promotion we were longing for, or a particular dream job, and we make ourselves miserable thinking about what could have been.  What should have been.  Focusing solely on outcomes is a recipe for misery I realize this headline may sound ironic coming from a woman who in a former career was responsible for pulling together performance dashboards and kpi updates, but I’ve found it to be true.  For many of us it would behoove us to embrace the Buddhist concept of non-attachment.  Which isn’t the same as not caring or becoming apathetic.  Let me share an example of what I mean by this. I love what I do as a career and leadership coach and facilitator.  In many ways I look at it as a vocation, rather than a job.  I’m deeply attached to the purpose of enabling and helping others to be effective and to develop clarity of purpose, compassion for self and others and confidence.  But my work in this space can feel like heaven, or it can also feel like hell.  And a lot of the difference has to do with how attached I am to certain outcomes. Any job can be heaven or hell Take career coaching for instance – there have been occasions when I’ve been sucked into my client’s outcome, that attachment to finding the perfect job or the perfect career (even though I emphatically assert there is no perfect job or career!).  I become aware of when that happens because I start noticing a few things.  I start worrying more than usual about my client interactions.  I worry they’re not getting enough out of the coaching process, or what they would say about me as their coach.  I start to worry about my reputation and whether I’ll get a bad review.  If it gets extreme, I start judging myself – maybe I should have suggested this or that.  I even start questioning my credibility as a coach.  And when that happens, I find myself violating my own rules as a coach, because I move from curiosity and inquiry into tell mode.  I lose sight of the fact that my role as a coach is to facilitate the process and instead try to drive the outcome.  In essence, I get overly attached to the client’s outcome and as a result make myself miserable and drive myself crazy. When I practice non-attachment that same interaction can look and feels very different.  The reason it feels so different is because I’m not attached to the outcome, and if I’m not attached to the outcome I can rest fully in the present moment. I’m not worrying about the question I just asked and whether it was good enough.  I’m […]

As human beings we are masters at creating narratives.  We create colorful stories that have the capacity to stir up emotion.  And that can be very wonderful and inspiring.  I’ve often said that emotions are the elixir of life.  The problem with our innate gift for story telling is that we often tend to cling to the negative and painful narratives and replay them repeatedly in our minds.  If she just hadn’t said that.  If I just hadn’t done that.  Then the relationship wouldn’t have been ruined.  I wouldn’t be in such dire straits. We create headlines of negativity And off this rumination we create high level headlines, scripts that sound like:  I am always getting taken advantage of. I am estranged from this relative. I am always making bad choices. I am bad at leadership. I am horrible at relationships. I am not assertive enough. I am weak. I am not hardworking enough to pull that off. I am overweight. I am stupid. I am never going to get ahead in life. I am damaged. I am a victim. I am powerless to change anything. Just let it go, right? We’re often told by self help experts that we have to let go of these negative scripts.  Release the negative self talk, they exclaim!  But how?  Especially when they’re so ingrained.  Many of these stories have been kicking around in our brains for decades.  Maybe I’m crazy for saying this but “Let that sh%t go” sounds trite and condescending.  If it was that easy, I would have done it by now, is what I often think when I’m met with platitudes like that. I often speak about the power of language with folks I am coaching, and direct coaching clients to pay particular attention to anything that comes after the phrase “I am.” Why?  Because words are literally magic.  And they have the capacity to expand the possibilities in our lives or close them down for good.  Words, whether spoken out loud or spoken in our head, are incredibly powerful.  If you’ve ever read or heard of the book, The Four Agreements, Ruiz speaks to this when he addresses the first agreement – Be impeccable with your word, who says: “You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love.  How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word.” Beware of the negativity bait and switch So what would impeccability of word look like as it pertains to releasing negative self-talk?  Would it be the converse?  Instead of I am not weak, perhaps the answer lies in the reverse – I am powerful.  That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?  Just a simple bait and switch should be enough to do the trick, right? In my experience it’s tough to go from one extreme to the other.  We as humans also have an animalistic ability to sniff out the falseness of a message.  If […]

Today’s blog is hitting on a topic near and dear to my heart.  It reminds me of the proverbial phrase, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”  If you grew up in the South like I did, you’ve probably heard a version of this in your formative years.  And if you didn’t – welcome to my world, filled with many such sayings like this one and “There are a million ways to skin a dead armadillo.”  (the latter of which we won’t be focusing on today just in case you were wondering…) Idle hands aren’t the problem But we do live in this way – idle hands are to be avoided at all costs.  I’ve often wondered why. Maybe, deep down, we’re afraid of calm.  Fearful of it even.  Silence can be terrifying if we’re not used to it.  When I first started practicing mindfulness and meditation, I heard horrible stories about adverse reactions folks were having upon trying a few minutes of meditation.  It scared me as a facilitator.  Panic attacks.  Participants reporting they felt their skin was crawling.  And when I’ve felt forced to sit for a long time at a meditation retreat, I’ve often experienced similar sensations.  Feelings like boredom can be unbearable, especially if we always have the constant companion of the smartphone and scrolling to keep us company.  That’s the annoying problem with mindfulness practices like meditation.  They’re difficult only because we must sit with ourselves.  We are finally alone with ourselves.  And when you’re alone and have nothing to distract you, you have no choice but to feel what you’re feeling.  Human beings are masters at avoiding feeling the difficult things.  We become workaholics, alcoholics, shopoholics, foodoholics instead.  I’ve even seen working out become an obsession. I have a friend who manages this dance better than anything I’ve ever seen.  She runs a successful business, she’s always on the go.  She stays in perpetual motion.  We have a party and she’s on her phone responding to a text, in-between bouncing around from guest to guest engaging them in banter, then running to the kitchen to straighten things, helping with the dishes (which I greatly appreciate by the way!).  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her sit still.  There’s a look in her eyes that I’ve picked up on, she’s scanning the room looking for the next thing she can do, straighten, clean, or put away.  I get this compulsion all too well because quite often I’ve been this person.  If you look hard enough in those moments, you’ll notice what’s sitting underneath the surface is a restlessness.  An emptiness. The restlessness is a clue – We’re really running on empty I’ve been feeling quite a bit of this myself lately, so I know.  The difference is I’ve finally learned it’s not a sign that I need to speed up.  That’s how I used to handle it.  I would find ways to occupy myself, anything I could do to keep that empty, restless, grasping, sticky feeling […]

Developing a healthy sense of confidence, whether it’s in your leadership, or whether it pertains to your career direction, is important.  We often report feeling like we lack it.  But how to build confidence?  It’s intangible and fuzzy – it’s nice to say we need it, but what do we do about it?  There are three elements critical to building confidence in my experience as a coach.  As I describe these, think about for yourself which of the three you would rate as high, and which you would rate as low. How to Build Confidence – The Three C’s of Confidence Clarity – Direction is important, and to the extent we lack it, we can feel rudderless in our lives and in our leadership.  Do you have a vision for your career?  Do you know who you want to be as a leader and how you want others to experience you?  I remember when I was making my career change from accounting to leadership development back in 2012, I knew what I wanted, I had a direction.  I might have had no idea how I was going to get there, but the passion I felt for the vision I was cultivating kept me going.  Clarity is inspiring.  Once we have it, we can take steps to materialize our vision. I often have clients think about their values as a method of making a way out of the fog.  It can sometimes feel like an arbitrary exercise, but it’s not.  Our values guide the choices we make, and we all have values, whether we are conscious of them or not.  One of mine is autonomy.  It came into play recently when I was faced with a difficult business decision.  Tuning into my values helped to navigate this situation, knowing that I was tuning into my own True North.  Competency – Building skills builds confidence.  Every job has competencies associated with it.  Some are technical, and some are what folks often refer to as the softer skills.  Things like communication, presentation skills, time management.  Leadership does as well.  Good leadership is about two main things – building relationships while getting tasks accomplished.  We often sacrifice one for the other.  Maybe I over-focus on delivery and ignore important opportunities to coach and mentor my team.  Or maybe I focus too much on relationships at the expense of deliverables.  Good leadership requires balance between these two elements. How do you stack up on the competencies for the role you’re currently in?  Do you even know what they are?  What are you strong on?  What needs some work?  When we’re feeling less confident, we often try to hide our inadequacies.  We’re ashamed of them.  We may shy away from things that will challenge us because we’re afraid to fail.  The more willing we are to cultivate a growth mindset by leaning into our strengths and working to improve our weaknesses we better we will feel.  Movement in this direction generates energy and motivation.  Compassion – […]

I look around and see everyone is pursuing these amazing careers and they have great lives.  They all seem to know what they’re doing, and they have a purpose.  I don’t understand why I can’t get in gear.  What’s wrong and missing in me that I can’t figure it out? I hear this a lot as a career coach.  And I also recognize it’s hard not to compare yourself to others.  When we are caught up in the cult of comparison, we are often caught up in the trance of the inner critic.  It’s our brain’s flawed way of trying to motivate ourselves to move into action by using comparison as the carrot to dangle in front of our faces or more aptly the switch to use on our backs.  It works up to a point where it stops working as a motivator. We prove and we prove and we prove and then we get tired. And wonder what it was all for.  And that is when we find ourselves on the messy path to growth.  To wholeness.  To uncovering our true value. When I first started out as a coach, my confidence was lower.  I was trying something new; I was worried about whether I would be a success and I spent a lot of time and energy ruminating about what I was doing in relation to other coaches.  I’d see their fancy LinkedIn posts of workshops they were running, filled with pictures of smiling participants, complete with slick materials bearing perfectly polished logos and I’d feel woefully inadequate.  I’d use it as fodder to beat myself up with.  I’d start to spring into action to post something, to plan something, in a desperate desire to compete, to put my own words out there too.  And then I’d be riddled with thoughts about how my idea wasn’t as good.  It would never work.  And I’d abandon the idea to the graveyard we each have in our heads.  Following your true north isn’t easy The inner critic comparison attack still happens from time to time for me, and chances it does for you too.  But it looks a little different now.  Recently I’ve turned down a few opportunities that have come my way, because I’ve sensed they weren’t the right path for me and didn’t resonate with my values.  Perhaps they would have been right for a different coach, or if I had a different idea or vision for my business.  And it was extremely hard to do because I knew deep down my inner critic wasn’t going to like it.  I was afraid of the fire that I knew saying no would brew.  Now Gertie (my inner critic) is telling me I was crazy to walk away from the revenue.  Telling me I am woefully inadequate compared to the coaches that took that path and look how successful they are.  And it’s getting in the way of progressing a couple of initiatives I want to kick off, which was […]