September 20, 2013 • 21 mins
Why are successful women more likely to suffer from the "imposter syndrome?" In part two of their special series on "Lean In," Cristen and Caroline discuss fear in the workplace and how to overcome it.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You From House to
Works not comed. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Krystal and I'm Caroline, And this is part two of
our special Stuff Mom Never Told You series on Cheryl
(00:23):
Sandberg's book and foundation, Lean In, which is all about
empowering women in the workplace. And last week for our
inaugural episode, we talked about negotiation and how women can
negotiate their way into better salaries and better positions and
their jobs. And now we're going to talk about something
(00:47):
that comes up for a lot of women and especially
successful women, once they're in their jobs. Hopefully they negotiated
their way in, and now comes the fear, right, the
fear which could be called the imposter syndrome. Basically, now
that you're in an awesome position, you're making some good money,
you're making some good contacts, you're doing some good work
(01:07):
during the day, but there's still this sneaking suspicion that
it's all fake and that you have just fooled everybody. Yeah,
and the book reference for this episode is chapter two
called Sit at the Table. And the big question that
we want to look into is why successful women are
more likely to feel like frauds for their achievement and
(01:31):
how we deal with this because personally speaking, Caroline, I'm
no Ryl Sandberg obviously, but I do find myself undercutting
my own achievements by even just saying something like that,
we'll listen, I'm no Chryl Sandberg, or yeah, what I
(01:51):
did was okay, I guess you know. Do you ever
do you ever find yourself doing that? Sure? Sure? I
mean when I do get praise for a project, I'm like, well,
they don't they don't understand that I didn't put like
a hundred and ten percent into it, you know, like,
I don't think maybe they're just used to getting something
that's subpar. Yeah. And I think I've mentioned this on
(02:13):
the podcast before as well, that even in the early
years of stuff, mom never told you, and even recently,
if someone would mention, oh, don't you do a podcast,
I would brush it off as, Oh, it's just this
thing that I do, it's women and such, and then
mumble into the childer I I, well, I love telling
(02:35):
people about the podcast, mostly because of the entertainment I
get when people don't understand what a podcast is, and
then I'm like, well, it's like a radio show. Uh,
and then I have to explain the difference between a
video and a podcast. But I digress. Well, if you
ever get that feeling that you are a bit of
a fraud, or you aren't deserving of your achievements, or
(02:59):
that everybody's actually working harder than you and your somehow
secretly just getting ahead, you might have a case of
something termed the imposter syndrome. Right, And this was coined
in nineteen seventy eight by Oberlin psychologists Pauline Klants and
Suzanne i'ms And really since ninety eight little has changed.
(03:20):
I mean, you know, if you just anecdotally, if you
talk to a lot of women, a lot of women
report feeling like this even now, even way after night. Yeah.
In Lenan Cheryl Sandberg describes it as capable people being
plagued by self doubt. And it's not just women who
(03:41):
are more in the thick of it, in the weeds
of their career trying to get ahead. It's even women
at the top of the ladder, such as Tina Fey,
who talked about it pretty directly in an interview with
a British newspaper in which she referenced the roller coaster
ride that she experiences between egomania and impostor syndrome. Say,
oh I won this, Emmy, look at me. Oh my god,
(04:02):
everyone's going to know that I'm a fraud. Yeah, and
I think I totally can kind of get her there
that rollercoaster, because like, let's say you do do something
awesome and you're like, yes, I worked really hard. But well,
you know, speaking personally, like if I do something awesome
and I have worked really hard on it and then
I get a lot of praise for it, I'm like, wait, wait,
(04:23):
I don't know if I deserve all that, because in
the moment, I'll feel like, yeah, I kicked that things,
but and then if people are recognize me for it,
then I start to feel a little awkward. So this
imposter syndrome is really an underlying feeling of being a fraud,
but particularly in male dominated fields. Maybe not so much
in fields that are stereotypically dominated by women, but like
(04:45):
a lot of women who are in maybe the stem
fields or or other fields that are dominated by men
report feeling like this, yeah, and it got a lot
of ink. In the two thousand eight book The Sexual
Paradox by Susan Pinker, and she talks about how studies suggest,
for instance, that when success eludes men, they're more likely
(05:05):
to blame external factors, whereas women are quicker to point
to internal factors if they aren't successful. So, in other words,
that comes back to, well, I just I guess I
just couldn't do it that well, whereas men might say,
well I didn't have enough resources or X y Z right.
(05:26):
It's really just not realizing how valuable your own knowledge is,
really kind of under undercutting yourself, but not even in
a public form, not even being like, no, I didn't
do that much. It's it's really internal. And Pinker's book,
she points out that it's this intermittent, fleeting imposter feeling
exists in the general population yea, so it's definitely men
(05:48):
and women alike who are feeling like this, But in
the workplace setting it does anecdotally seem to be something
that persistently affects women are often and also persistently holds
us back, which is one reason why Sandberg talks about it.
And she initially heard about impostor syndrome during a speech
(06:10):
called Feeling Like a Fraud that was delivered by Dr
Peggy Macintosh from the Wellesley Centers for Women, and she writes,
for women, feeling like a fraud is a symptom of
a greater problem. We consistently underestimate ourselves. Right. So, in
her book, Sandberg cites a study of about one thousand
Harvard law students which found it in every category, women
(06:33):
gave themselves lower scores than men, and the results are
even more drastic when women had to evaluate themselves in
front of other people. Well, that reminds me of what
you said a minute ago about how when you're receiving
praise from other people and all of a sudden, it
puts that anxiety and fear into high gear all of
(06:54):
a sudden, Right, I mean, I don't know what's going
on there. Like a minute ago, I might have felt
great about what I just made or did or wrote.
But but once you have an audience and then you're like, no, no,
it's not that good. Please leave me alone. I'm blushing. Well.
Research also shows how imposter syndrome is reflected in gendered
concepts not just a success, but also of failure, because again,
(07:16):
when women fail, we're more likely to believe it's due
to our inherent lack of ability? Why? Why why must
we constantly undercut ourselves like that, I can't tell you,
I really can't. Um, But so how does this end
up affecting our actual work? I mean, are we are
we losing confidence? Is it? Is it making our work
(07:39):
taken nose dive kind of the opposite, because we think
we have this inherent lack of ability, or we're just
not comfortable with praise because we don't think we're doing
a great job. We overcompensate by working two to three
times as hard and over preparing, and that leads to
kind of obsessing and getting burned out. Sure, and even
though we might be working longer hour and arguably harder
(08:01):
than employees around us, that kind of hard work is
not necessarily setting us up for promotion because it's all
rooted in this fear and this assumption that we're not
good enough. So we're probably not spending the time we
should be promoting ourselves and owning our own successes. Right,
And it's what psychologist Julie Norum refers to as defensive pessimism,
(08:24):
just that thing of like, I'm gonna work really hard,
but you know what, it's probably not going to be
great and I'm not going to do a good job
and it's going to fail. But because you're you're pessimistic
and fearful at the same time that you're also striving
three thousand times harder than you would otherwise. I mean,
that's just it's not going to have a happy ending. However,
you shake the dice out, sure, And it can also
(08:46):
manifest too in procrastination. I know I've done this before
as well, of knowing that something needs to be done
and just pushing it and pushing it because of the
risk of what happens when it is done, because it
might be a marker of success or a marker of
in my mind at least, failure. And I feel like
(09:08):
a lot of times in the workplace, what we might
consider failure is so much greater in our eyes than
in our manager's eyes, you know, unless it's something that
can maybe be measured out in numbers and statistics. I
feel like a lot of times we see things as
exponentially greater than they are unless it's a success, in
(09:30):
which case we minimize it. Yeah. Well, in that same vein,
Valerie Young, who's a long time lecture on the topic,
told Forbes that there's a real bias against female competence
that persists. She says, being female means you and your
work automatically stand a greater chance of being ignored, discounted, trivialized, devalued,
(09:52):
or otherwise taken less seriously than a man. So, whether
that's conscious or unconscious, you know, maybe we do have
that fear of well, it's it's not going to be
that great, and nobody's gonna think it's that great. I
think there's definitely a degree of overcompensation that will happen
because I think, you know, even though those biases might
(10:14):
be unconscious, I think we're pretty aware of them. We're
pretty aware of of kind of the risk of putting
female work out there to be judged. If that makes sense. Well,
so what do we do? What do we do with
these fears and these inherent feelings of failure. We got
to get rid of them, Caroline, we do, um we
(10:38):
One thing that we have to do, I think is
really just allow ourselves to make and learn from mistakes.
We have to realize. So if we already are pessimistic,
we have this inherent defensive pessimism, why don't we just
take a deep breath kind of relax and say, hey,
you know what, if I'm going to make mistakes, I'm
going to make them, but I will learn from them
and move on from there. And Cheryl Sandberg also says that,
(11:01):
you know what, it's also okay that you react emotionally
to criticism. Now you need to move on from it
and quickly. But trying to separate all of that emotion
out of it is going to be probably impossible. So
it's gonna be probably healthier to react in an authentic
(11:22):
way and then who move on to the next thing. Sure,
I mean, especially if the work you are doing is
tied up in your identity, like if if if you
know you're you know, an editor, for instance, like my
background isn't editing. If someone comes to you and it's like,
well you're not. You missed the stuff, you didn't edit
this correctly or well enough, then it's like, oh my god,
(11:42):
you know that almost reflects something about you, not just
maybe you made some mistakes at work, right. And another
thing that she suggests, which might seem counterintuitive, is go
ahead and just fake it till you make it, sort
of embrace that fear in a way, oh and and
move forward. Use it as a motivating factor. Right, Well,
(12:05):
I you know, I in college. You know, I went
to a very like uh college, preppy type of private
school growing up, and the all of my classes were
super writing intensive, and so when I went to college,
it was kind of a breeze writing paper. So I
felt like a total fraud. I was like, oh my god,
I'm getting all these a's, but like they don't understand
(12:28):
like I just you know, like I didn't think that
I was doing as good a job as they thought
I was doing. But that did give me kind of
the confidence to go forward and do more interesting things
or things outside of the box because I felt like
I have more room. But anyway, I mean I realized
that sort of rambling. But I guess that leads us
to the point of having to remember that your point
(12:51):
of view, just like you said earlier about your boss,
and your point of view is not the same. Your
point of view of what you're doing is probably not
the same as the person who you think is judge
in you. Yeah, and that's one reason why she talks
a lot about finding your authentic self. And this is
something that we could even devote a whole podcast to
um And there's a lot of research and talks have
(13:14):
been given on this idea of the authentic self and
seeing and speaking your own truth. And that really has
to do with what you're talking about in terms of
recognizing that there is your point of view and there's
someone else's point of view, and that you know what
you have weaknesses and that's okay, but you also have
strengths as well, and sort of learning, I guess, to
(13:37):
accept who you are in the workplace and be authentic
about it rather than trying to hide behind some sort
of shell of perfection, because nobody is ever going to
be completely perfect. She even talks about us. Sandberg does
how there's a motto at Facebook which is better done
than perfect, and how at first she was like what,
(14:00):
how No, and how she's learned to kind of embrace that,
just sort of getting rid of this notion of perfectionism
and saying, let's just get it done. And one thing
that Sandberg talked about that I actually really enjoyed because
I was like, finally she speaking right to me directly
to Caroline Irvin, she says that instead of putting on
some kind of fake all work persona, I think we
(14:22):
benefit from expressing our truth talking about personal situations and
acknowledging that professional decisions are often emotionally driven. And well,
I'm not so sure about the like emotional part, although
I see what she's saying and I agree with her.
I I do struggle with like a work persona and
and a regular Caroline at home persona and figuring out
(14:44):
how to to merge them or have separate them. Well, no,
separate them because I can't. But she would say that,
of course you can't. That there's a if there's a
phrase that Sandberg is not a fan of its work
life balance because it's that mental reality that you have
a work life and that you have a home life,
and that the two should not inter sect. It's like
(15:05):
a separation of church and state kind of thing. Whereas, no,
I mean, obviously you don't want to take everything from
your home life into your work that the stresses from
there and vice versa. But it's it's gonna it's gonna
blend at some point. Yeah, it is unrealistic to think.
(15:26):
I mean, just think about like, you know, let's pick
on moms in the workplace. I mean, you know, they're
going to be issues, like your kid's gonna be sick,
or you have to pick somebody up from a practice
or something like. It's unrealistic to assume that your life
will never interfere with your work, just as your work
will never interfere with your life. These things do blend,
(15:46):
like you said, right, and I think circling back to
that idea of finding your authentic self, speaking your truth,
those are things that can be applied to both the
work realm and the non work um to maybe merge
those two identities into one so that you're not just
jumping back and forth, because that can also be exhausting. Yeah,
(16:10):
and also maybe a reason why we should just wear
power suits all the time. Shoulder pads give us power.
That's right. But she also talks about how, you know humor,
use humor too, because we get so bent out of
shape over all of these stressors that are going on,
(16:31):
not just in work but also in life, and it's
good to just not take ourselves so seriously all the time. Yeah,
I mean that that is something I do struggle with
as far. Not that I can't see the humor in things.
I definitely try to. But you know, when when a
project is stressing you out and you're having a nervous
(16:54):
breakdown or you know, I don't know, have to code
your car and cry. Not like that's ever happen to me. Um,
but it is important to remember that, like, Okay, you
have that other person's point of view, which is probably
going to be more lenient than your own crazy point
of view where you're like, you know, slaving over this
project and killing yourself over it, when really it's probably great.
(17:17):
So like to be able to step back and have
that sense of humor and be like, you know what,
like at the newspaper, for instance, I would be stressing
over designing and editing and getting it all done and
is this perfect? And oh my god, is this headline
the right point size and all that stuff, and then
you have to remember tomorrow morning it'll be lining bird cages.
That's what I always told myself to to stop myself
(17:37):
from freaking out. And I mean, and that's such a
good tool to bring into conflicts that might arise in
the workplace, Like it's such humor is such a perfect
deflector not just for the issues going on within you,
but also with that other person sitting across from the table,
because if you can share a laugh, then it's probably
gonna be a lot easier to hash things out well true.
(18:00):
And I mean also, you know, if you have already
the reputation of a hard worker and somebody who does
his or her best, then you know, maybe maybe you
can lighten up on yourself. Maybe there's a little room
to lighten up on yourself, because I mean, if people
think you're a slacker, then yeah, you probably do have
to bust your butt a little bit. But if you're
already a hard worker and people know that, then they're
(18:22):
not gonna, you know, they're not going to punish you
for doing your best. Do you think that maybe this
whole issue of the impostor syndrome and feeling like a
fraud and how do we deal with it, maybe it's
just a bit about taking a breath and relaxing. Do
you think maybe we're just like asking too much of
ourselves and just assuming that no one sees anything that
(18:46):
we do. It could be it could yeah, I mean
I do think we need to step back and realize that,
you know, our hard work is evident. You know, people
people would not rely on us if they didn't think
they could rely on us. Right, Well, I can tell
you that it definitely resonated with me reading that, because
(19:06):
I know that it's something that affects me, and I
know even more importantly in a way, that it's something
that does hold me back and I hate it. It's
like when I'm in yoga. For instance, I was in
yoga last night. It's time to do headstands. I've never
successfully done a headstand. You know why, Caroline, because I'm terrified.
I know that I probably won't break my neck, but
(19:26):
whenever I even approach getting up to the top and
I feel the ground going away from me, I'm scared,
and so I stopped trying. And I feel like it
is such an analog to these kinds of workplace things.
So you're feeling like a yoga fraud, even though you've
been doing yoga forever years. But to extend the yoga
(19:48):
metaphor in the same way that my teacher came over
and actually grabbed one of my legs, was like, come on,
we're gonna do this, and she stood there to be
my support person. Sandberg also says that there are institutional
supports that we need to put in place, recognizing that
this kind of imposter syndrome runs rampant. She writes, if
(20:09):
we want a world with greater equality, we need to
acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up.
We need institutions and individuals to notice and correct for
this behavior by encouraging, promoting, and championing more women. And
women have to learn to keep their hands up because
when they lower them, even managers with the best intentions
(20:29):
might not notice it. Yeah, so there are things that
need to be done on both sides. Well, let's be brave,
right and and don't be afraid to be your own advocate.
Absolutely So, now we want to hear from you. Does
this issue of the imposter syndrome of fear resonate with
you and is it something that you've been able to overcome?
(20:50):
Please let us know your thoughts. You can email us
moms have Discovery dot com, or we highly encourage you
to head over to our Facebook page Facebook dot com
slash stuff mom Never told you and share your experiences
with us and come back to us next Friday when
we'll be talking about unbalancing that's so called work life balance.
(21:13):
So we hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see
you next week for more on this and thousands of
other topics isn't how stuff works. Dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You From House to
Works not comed. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Krystal and I'm Caroline, And this is part two of
our special Stuff Mom Never Told You series on Cheryl
(00:23):
Sandberg's book and foundation, Lean In, which is all about
empowering women in the workplace. And last week for our
inaugural episode, we talked about negotiation and how women can
negotiate their way into better salaries and better positions and
their jobs. And now we're going to talk about something
(00:47):
that comes up for a lot of women and especially
successful women, once they're in their jobs. Hopefully they negotiated
their way in, and now comes the fear, right, the
fear which could be called the imposter syndrome. Basically, now
that you're in an awesome position, you're making some good money,
you're making some good contacts, you're doing some good work
(01:07):
during the day, but there's still this sneaking suspicion that
it's all fake and that you have just fooled everybody. Yeah,
and the book reference for this episode is chapter two
called Sit at the Table. And the big question that
we want to look into is why successful women are
more likely to feel like frauds for their achievement and
(01:31):
how we deal with this because personally speaking, Caroline, I'm
no Ryl Sandberg obviously, but I do find myself undercutting
my own achievements by even just saying something like that,
we'll listen, I'm no Chryl Sandberg, or yeah, what I
(01:51):
did was okay, I guess you know. Do you ever
do you ever find yourself doing that? Sure? Sure? I
mean when I do get praise for a project, I'm like, well,
they don't they don't understand that I didn't put like
a hundred and ten percent into it, you know, like,
I don't think maybe they're just used to getting something
that's subpar. Yeah. And I think I've mentioned this on
(02:13):
the podcast before as well, that even in the early
years of stuff, mom never told you, and even recently,
if someone would mention, oh, don't you do a podcast,
I would brush it off as, Oh, it's just this
thing that I do, it's women and such, and then
mumble into the childer I I, well, I love telling
(02:35):
people about the podcast, mostly because of the entertainment I
get when people don't understand what a podcast is, and
then I'm like, well, it's like a radio show. Uh,
and then I have to explain the difference between a
video and a podcast. But I digress. Well, if you
ever get that feeling that you are a bit of
a fraud, or you aren't deserving of your achievements, or
(02:59):
that everybody's actually working harder than you and your somehow
secretly just getting ahead, you might have a case of
something termed the imposter syndrome. Right, And this was coined
in nineteen seventy eight by Oberlin psychologists Pauline Klants and
Suzanne i'ms And really since ninety eight little has changed.
(03:20):
I mean, you know, if you just anecdotally, if you
talk to a lot of women, a lot of women
report feeling like this even now, even way after night. Yeah.
In Lenan Cheryl Sandberg describes it as capable people being
plagued by self doubt. And it's not just women who
(03:41):
are more in the thick of it, in the weeds
of their career trying to get ahead. It's even women
at the top of the ladder, such as Tina Fey,
who talked about it pretty directly in an interview with
a British newspaper in which she referenced the roller coaster
ride that she experiences between egomania and impostor syndrome. Say,
oh I won this, Emmy, look at me. Oh my god,
(04:02):
everyone's going to know that I'm a fraud. Yeah, and
I think I totally can kind of get her there
that rollercoaster, because like, let's say you do do something
awesome and you're like, yes, I worked really hard. But well,
you know, speaking personally, like if I do something awesome
and I have worked really hard on it and then
I get a lot of praise for it, I'm like, wait, wait,
(04:23):
I don't know if I deserve all that, because in
the moment, I'll feel like, yeah, I kicked that things,
but and then if people are recognize me for it,
then I start to feel a little awkward. So this
imposter syndrome is really an underlying feeling of being a fraud,
but particularly in male dominated fields. Maybe not so much
in fields that are stereotypically dominated by women, but like
(04:45):
a lot of women who are in maybe the stem
fields or or other fields that are dominated by men
report feeling like this, yeah, and it got a lot
of ink. In the two thousand eight book The Sexual
Paradox by Susan Pinker, and she talks about how studies suggest,
for instance, that when success eludes men, they're more likely
(05:05):
to blame external factors, whereas women are quicker to point
to internal factors if they aren't successful. So, in other words,
that comes back to, well, I just I guess I
just couldn't do it that well, whereas men might say,
well I didn't have enough resources or X y Z right.
(05:26):
It's really just not realizing how valuable your own knowledge is,
really kind of under undercutting yourself, but not even in
a public form, not even being like, no, I didn't
do that much. It's it's really internal. And Pinker's book,
she points out that it's this intermittent, fleeting imposter feeling
exists in the general population yea, so it's definitely men
(05:48):
and women alike who are feeling like this, But in
the workplace setting it does anecdotally seem to be something
that persistently affects women are often and also persistently holds
us back, which is one reason why Sandberg talks about it.
And she initially heard about impostor syndrome during a speech
(06:10):
called Feeling Like a Fraud that was delivered by Dr
Peggy Macintosh from the Wellesley Centers for Women, and she writes,
for women, feeling like a fraud is a symptom of
a greater problem. We consistently underestimate ourselves. Right. So, in
her book, Sandberg cites a study of about one thousand
Harvard law students which found it in every category, women
(06:33):
gave themselves lower scores than men, and the results are
even more drastic when women had to evaluate themselves in
front of other people. Well, that reminds me of what
you said a minute ago about how when you're receiving
praise from other people and all of a sudden, it
puts that anxiety and fear into high gear all of
(06:54):
a sudden, Right, I mean, I don't know what's going
on there. Like a minute ago, I might have felt
great about what I just made or did or wrote.
But but once you have an audience and then you're like, no, no,
it's not that good. Please leave me alone. I'm blushing. Well.
Research also shows how imposter syndrome is reflected in gendered
concepts not just a success, but also of failure, because again,
(07:16):
when women fail, we're more likely to believe it's due
to our inherent lack of ability? Why? Why why must
we constantly undercut ourselves like that, I can't tell you,
I really can't. Um, But so how does this end
up affecting our actual work? I mean, are we are
we losing confidence? Is it? Is it making our work
(07:39):
taken nose dive kind of the opposite, because we think
we have this inherent lack of ability, or we're just
not comfortable with praise because we don't think we're doing
a great job. We overcompensate by working two to three
times as hard and over preparing, and that leads to
kind of obsessing and getting burned out. Sure, and even
though we might be working longer hour and arguably harder
(08:01):
than employees around us, that kind of hard work is
not necessarily setting us up for promotion because it's all
rooted in this fear and this assumption that we're not
good enough. So we're probably not spending the time we
should be promoting ourselves and owning our own successes. Right,
And it's what psychologist Julie Norum refers to as defensive pessimism,
(08:24):
just that thing of like, I'm gonna work really hard,
but you know what, it's probably not going to be
great and I'm not going to do a good job
and it's going to fail. But because you're you're pessimistic
and fearful at the same time that you're also striving
three thousand times harder than you would otherwise. I mean,
that's just it's not going to have a happy ending. However,
you shake the dice out, sure, And it can also
(08:46):
manifest too in procrastination. I know I've done this before
as well, of knowing that something needs to be done
and just pushing it and pushing it because of the
risk of what happens when it is done, because it
might be a marker of success or a marker of
in my mind at least, failure. And I feel like
(09:08):
a lot of times in the workplace, what we might
consider failure is so much greater in our eyes than
in our manager's eyes, you know, unless it's something that
can maybe be measured out in numbers and statistics. I
feel like a lot of times we see things as
exponentially greater than they are unless it's a success, in
(09:30):
which case we minimize it. Yeah. Well, in that same vein,
Valerie Young, who's a long time lecture on the topic,
told Forbes that there's a real bias against female competence
that persists. She says, being female means you and your
work automatically stand a greater chance of being ignored, discounted, trivialized, devalued,
(09:52):
or otherwise taken less seriously than a man. So, whether
that's conscious or unconscious, you know, maybe we do have
that fear of well, it's it's not going to be
that great, and nobody's gonna think it's that great. I
think there's definitely a degree of overcompensation that will happen
because I think, you know, even though those biases might
(10:14):
be unconscious, I think we're pretty aware of them. We're
pretty aware of of kind of the risk of putting
female work out there to be judged. If that makes sense. Well,
so what do we do? What do we do with
these fears and these inherent feelings of failure. We got
to get rid of them, Caroline, we do, um we
(10:38):
One thing that we have to do, I think is
really just allow ourselves to make and learn from mistakes.
We have to realize. So if we already are pessimistic,
we have this inherent defensive pessimism, why don't we just
take a deep breath kind of relax and say, hey,
you know what, if I'm going to make mistakes, I'm
going to make them, but I will learn from them
and move on from there. And Cheryl Sandberg also says that,
(11:01):
you know what, it's also okay that you react emotionally
to criticism. Now you need to move on from it
and quickly. But trying to separate all of that emotion
out of it is going to be probably impossible. So
it's gonna be probably healthier to react in an authentic
(11:22):
way and then who move on to the next thing. Sure,
I mean, especially if the work you are doing is
tied up in your identity, like if if if you
know you're you know, an editor, for instance, like my
background isn't editing. If someone comes to you and it's like,
well you're not. You missed the stuff, you didn't edit
this correctly or well enough, then it's like, oh my god,
(11:42):
you know that almost reflects something about you, not just
maybe you made some mistakes at work, right. And another
thing that she suggests, which might seem counterintuitive, is go
ahead and just fake it till you make it, sort
of embrace that fear in a way, oh and and
move forward. Use it as a motivating factor. Right, Well,
(12:05):
I you know, I in college. You know, I went
to a very like uh college, preppy type of private
school growing up, and the all of my classes were
super writing intensive, and so when I went to college,
it was kind of a breeze writing paper. So I
felt like a total fraud. I was like, oh my god,
I'm getting all these a's, but like they don't understand
(12:28):
like I just you know, like I didn't think that
I was doing as good a job as they thought
I was doing. But that did give me kind of
the confidence to go forward and do more interesting things
or things outside of the box because I felt like
I have more room. But anyway, I mean I realized
that sort of rambling. But I guess that leads us
to the point of having to remember that your point
(12:51):
of view, just like you said earlier about your boss,
and your point of view is not the same. Your
point of view of what you're doing is probably not
the same as the person who you think is judge
in you. Yeah, and that's one reason why she talks
a lot about finding your authentic self. And this is
something that we could even devote a whole podcast to
um And there's a lot of research and talks have
(13:14):
been given on this idea of the authentic self and
seeing and speaking your own truth. And that really has
to do with what you're talking about in terms of
recognizing that there is your point of view and there's
someone else's point of view, and that you know what
you have weaknesses and that's okay, but you also have
strengths as well, and sort of learning, I guess, to
(13:37):
accept who you are in the workplace and be authentic
about it rather than trying to hide behind some sort
of shell of perfection, because nobody is ever going to
be completely perfect. She even talks about us. Sandberg does
how there's a motto at Facebook which is better done
than perfect, and how at first she was like what,
(14:00):
how No, and how she's learned to kind of embrace that,
just sort of getting rid of this notion of perfectionism
and saying, let's just get it done. And one thing
that Sandberg talked about that I actually really enjoyed because
I was like, finally she speaking right to me directly
to Caroline Irvin, she says that instead of putting on
some kind of fake all work persona, I think we
(14:22):
benefit from expressing our truth talking about personal situations and
acknowledging that professional decisions are often emotionally driven. And well,
I'm not so sure about the like emotional part, although
I see what she's saying and I agree with her.
I I do struggle with like a work persona and
and a regular Caroline at home persona and figuring out
(14:44):
how to to merge them or have separate them. Well, no,
separate them because I can't. But she would say that,
of course you can't. That there's a if there's a
phrase that Sandberg is not a fan of its work
life balance because it's that mental reality that you have
a work life and that you have a home life,
and that the two should not inter sect. It's like
(15:05):
a separation of church and state kind of thing. Whereas, no,
I mean, obviously you don't want to take everything from
your home life into your work that the stresses from
there and vice versa. But it's it's gonna it's gonna
blend at some point. Yeah, it is unrealistic to think.
(15:26):
I mean, just think about like, you know, let's pick
on moms in the workplace. I mean, you know, they're
going to be issues, like your kid's gonna be sick,
or you have to pick somebody up from a practice
or something like. It's unrealistic to assume that your life
will never interfere with your work, just as your work
will never interfere with your life. These things do blend,
(15:46):
like you said, right, and I think circling back to
that idea of finding your authentic self, speaking your truth,
those are things that can be applied to both the
work realm and the non work um to maybe merge
those two identities into one so that you're not just
jumping back and forth, because that can also be exhausting. Yeah,
(16:10):
and also maybe a reason why we should just wear
power suits all the time. Shoulder pads give us power.
That's right. But she also talks about how, you know humor,
use humor too, because we get so bent out of
shape over all of these stressors that are going on,
(16:31):
not just in work but also in life, and it's
good to just not take ourselves so seriously all the time. Yeah,
I mean that that is something I do struggle with
as far. Not that I can't see the humor in things.
I definitely try to. But you know, when when a
project is stressing you out and you're having a nervous
(16:54):
breakdown or you know, I don't know, have to code
your car and cry. Not like that's ever happen to me. Um,
but it is important to remember that, like, Okay, you
have that other person's point of view, which is probably
going to be more lenient than your own crazy point
of view where you're like, you know, slaving over this
project and killing yourself over it, when really it's probably great.
(17:17):
So like to be able to step back and have
that sense of humor and be like, you know what,
like at the newspaper, for instance, I would be stressing
over designing and editing and getting it all done and
is this perfect? And oh my god, is this headline
the right point size and all that stuff, and then
you have to remember tomorrow morning it'll be lining bird cages.
That's what I always told myself to to stop myself
(17:37):
from freaking out. And I mean, and that's such a
good tool to bring into conflicts that might arise in
the workplace, Like it's such humor is such a perfect
deflector not just for the issues going on within you,
but also with that other person sitting across from the table,
because if you can share a laugh, then it's probably
gonna be a lot easier to hash things out well true.
(18:00):
And I mean also, you know, if you have already
the reputation of a hard worker and somebody who does
his or her best, then you know, maybe maybe you
can lighten up on yourself. Maybe there's a little room
to lighten up on yourself, because I mean, if people
think you're a slacker, then yeah, you probably do have
to bust your butt a little bit. But if you're
already a hard worker and people know that, then they're
(18:22):
not gonna, you know, they're not going to punish you
for doing your best. Do you think that maybe this
whole issue of the impostor syndrome and feeling like a
fraud and how do we deal with it, maybe it's
just a bit about taking a breath and relaxing. Do
you think maybe we're just like asking too much of
ourselves and just assuming that no one sees anything that
(18:46):
we do. It could be it could yeah, I mean
I do think we need to step back and realize that,
you know, our hard work is evident. You know, people
people would not rely on us if they didn't think
they could rely on us. Right, Well, I can tell
you that it definitely resonated with me reading that, because
(19:06):
I know that it's something that affects me, and I
know even more importantly in a way, that it's something
that does hold me back and I hate it. It's
like when I'm in yoga. For instance, I was in
yoga last night. It's time to do headstands. I've never
successfully done a headstand. You know why, Caroline, because I'm terrified.
I know that I probably won't break my neck, but
(19:26):
whenever I even approach getting up to the top and
I feel the ground going away from me, I'm scared,
and so I stopped trying. And I feel like it
is such an analog to these kinds of workplace things.
So you're feeling like a yoga fraud, even though you've
been doing yoga forever years. But to extend the yoga
(19:48):
metaphor in the same way that my teacher came over
and actually grabbed one of my legs, was like, come on,
we're gonna do this, and she stood there to be
my support person. Sandberg also says that there are institutional
supports that we need to put in place, recognizing that
this kind of imposter syndrome runs rampant. She writes, if
(20:09):
we want a world with greater equality, we need to
acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up.
We need institutions and individuals to notice and correct for
this behavior by encouraging, promoting, and championing more women. And
women have to learn to keep their hands up because
when they lower them, even managers with the best intentions
(20:29):
might not notice it. Yeah, so there are things that
need to be done on both sides. Well, let's be brave,
right and and don't be afraid to be your own advocate.
Absolutely So, now we want to hear from you. Does
this issue of the imposter syndrome of fear resonate with
you and is it something that you've been able to overcome?
(20:50):
Please let us know your thoughts. You can email us
moms have Discovery dot com, or we highly encourage you
to head over to our Facebook page Facebook dot com
slash stuff mom Never told you and share your experiences
with us and come back to us next Friday when
we'll be talking about unbalancing that's so called work life balance.
(21:13):
So we hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see
you next week for more on this and thousands of
other topics isn't how stuff works. Dot com
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