When you're an Imposter without the syndrome
Checking in on your integrity
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This piece was originally published on Facebook and Medium June 8, 2017, then updated on Nov 11, 2019, then today. This piece will be included in an overarching piece exploring the different faces of Imposter Syndrome.
At some point during your professional development and social media engagement journeys, you’ll reach a stage where you’ll feel like you’re in over your head and think Who do I think I am to be doing this work?
This might be a sign that you’re pushing against a ceiling and the effort required to break through will be accompanied by self-doubt and a super loud inner critic. The destabilising experience of learning something new that conflicts with a current belief or the process of developing a new skill is often accompanied by self-doubt, feeling fraudulent and thoughts of giving up, features of what’s known as Imposter Syndrome.
The message in the feeling of shame that surfaces alongside many other emotions is that you could be transitioning from one stage of learning to the next. WOOHOO!
You might be e prompted by your supporters to do some mindset work, working smarter, healing, yodelling…whatever helps you get through this tricky time where you feel like a fraud and you want to give in, but you know it’s not an option.
But with every trigger, there’s an element of truth.
What if you ARE being an Imposter?
What if you’ve been:
making claims publicly and in conversations of what you do or can do, but you’re not really there yet or have the evidence to support the claim.
dabbling in areas/practices beyond your capacity, skill and safe zone.
offering programs and services that you’d never tested out but assume because you know about them and you have somewhat related professional qualifications, you can teach them effectively.
providing a service with people who like you a lot and are loyal to you but have never provided a quality evaluation of the impact of or specific feedback about your work with them. You don’t actually know if your service is helpful and avoids making things worse.
calling yourself a mentor and guide yet not being mentored and guided on a regular basis to know if what you’re doing is helpful or harmful.
What about your approach to impression management? Does your self-promoting methods transmit a true representation of who you are, what you believe and your capabilities or are you following a formula that exaggerates some of your qualities and skills in the name of marketable Authenticity™?
Are you using terminology, therapy-speak and credible-sounding information in your promotional material to obscure your superficial knowledge as expertise?
What if feeling like an Imposter is an opportunity to check in on your integrity and humility so that you’re not overpromising, selling out, compromising your values and misrepresenting yourself in a way that could harm others and reinforce the imposter persona, the narcissistic ideal?
It’s an opportunity to critically reflect on the effect you have on others and make some adjustments to realign your offerings and practice with your moral principles and reality tested skillset. You are, after all, someone who values integrity, right?
It can also invite you to stop putting pressure on yourself to be amazing and recognise that you’re learning how to be someone who is in the process of learning rather than an ego inflated expert.
The prospect of being an Imposter is also the opportunity to lean on a few critical friends who help you explore your practices to determine if you’re compromising your integrity for audience capture. Or, they might be those friends who can tell you directly that you’ve lost your way and you’re in a position to listen and receive that feedback.
If I were to related this back to a role of Karpman’s Drama Triangle or the Liberating Triad, being an Imposter has a Persecutor vibe. When you’re able to check yourself and recognise that you might have violated your own principles out of desperation or acceptable yet questionable group norms, you can transition into a different role, The Facilitator, to support yourself to critically reflect on your practices and adjust your behaviour to realign with your priorities, values and moral principles. This is not only protective against future ventures into being an actual Imposter, it restores your integrity and enables you to hold a more accurate and realistic picture of yourself.
When you choose to confront your Imposter self, narcissistic leanings can be course corrected to restore compromised integrity.
Discuss below
What processes do you have in place to check in on your integrity?
How do you distinguish between being in a process of learning vs. being a fraud?
Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting and supporting my work,
Nathalie Martinek, PhD
The Narcissism Hacker
Hack narcissism and support my work
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There's "fake it 'til you make it", and then there's "fake it until you realize you should probably stop faking it."
I'm confident I've done a lot of both of these over the years.
Ah yes, so a pretender to the throne, in other words