About the author

Yael C. Sivi is an executive coach and a Gestalt psychotherapist. Her expertise is helping people grow psychologically so they can lead with greater integrity and relate more authentically to others.

Additional authors

Yosh Beier

Trained as a physicist, consultant, mediator, and therapist, I speak both the language of human and organizational dynamics. As coach, I facilitate the development of teams and individual leaders – with a deep conviction that personal, professional, and organizational growth are deeply intertwined.

Yosh brings a highly inter-disciplinary background and combines analytical skill with a deep understanding of human behavior. Trained as scientist, consultant, mediator, and therapist, he speaks both the language of human and organizational dynamics. A German native who moved to New York in 2004, he has worked as an executive and leadership coach for 15+ years – and brings nearly 20 years of experience as a global organizational effectiveness consultant and high-performance team coach to his engagements.

Shifting from an academic career in theoretical physics to consulting, Yosh quickly realized that the main reasons projects succeeded or failed nearly always lied beyond matters of technical expertise or project management - and had all to do with human dynamics. Intrigued - and driven by a desire to better understand how to facilitate and support individual and interpersonal growth, Yosh trained to become a therapist at first, and subsequently a mediator, executive coach, and SCRUM Master.

He has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies and various nonprofit, governmental and non-governmental organizations. He is a managing partner and co-founder of Collaborative Coaching. Yosh has been the board chair of a Buddhist nonprofit organization and – among other things – headed the strategic planning committee.

In his work, Yosh utilizes principles & insights from humanistic psychology and adult development theory to support both personal growth, conscious collaboration, and conscious leadership - and shares his insights from hundreds of coaching assignments with his co-author Yael Sivi in their upcoming book Growing Up at Work.

I Feel Like An Imposter

Julia was what I would describe as a high achieving drifter. Academically gifted, ambitious, but not super-ambitious; if an opportunity presented itself and it felt right, she’d take it. After graduation, she got a job with a non-profit educational advocacy organization and rose rapidly through the ranks. There was not a lot of intentionality in her decision-making however. A chance to move to New York? Ok, I’ll do that. Move into a more senior position? Ok, I’ll do that. She took things on mostly because they were there to be taken on, and because she was a curious, bright person.

I offer all of my students a one-on-one coaching session as part of a leadership program I teach. Julia was one of the first to avail this session. A person who lights up a room, Julia was naturally full of energy, funny, and sweet; she managed to be simultaneously charming and authentic. That combination lead to her becoming a great favorite in class. She made friends easily.

So here is this funny, bright, highly capable person – someone whom I knew from class was very smart – yet within two minutes of sitting down with me, she’s in tears. She had been promoted consistently through her career, the only feedback she ever received was glowing, but as soon as I asked how she was doing, her head was in hands and she tells me that she’s terrible at her job. Not only that, but she’s telling me that everyone she works with knows she can’t do her job, and that it’s only a matter of time before she’s found out. What’s going on here? Where is she getting this message?

Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome, where you continually doubt your achievements and live with the fear of being exposed as a fraud, is a deeply familiar experience for many people I’ve worked with – including very successful professionals and leaders, across ages and industries.

The good news is that by simply identifying imposter syndrome as a common thought pattern, and by giving it a name, we can start to work with it . ‘Do you recognize part of what’s going on here as a phenomenon called imposter syndrome?’ I might ask. ‘Does that sound right to you?’

Asking this question is the first step towards breaking down the sense of isolation that often comes with imposter syndrome. The belief that everyone else sees you as a fraud, combined with the idea that everyone else around you must know what they are doing, is a very unpleasant way of suffering and feeling alone.

With Julia, the impact of what she was going through wasn’t really visible on the surface. She was such a buoyant, effervescent personality that most of the people in her life were completely unaware of what was going on inside of her. But the pain and isolation were very real – impacting her mood, her relationships, her sleep.

My approach with Julia, as we’ll see throughout this book with other clients, was to make the unconscious conscious, to unpack the thinking that was leading to her suffering and hampering her development as a leader. I needed to hear exactly what Julia believed about herself.  What was the story she was hearing in her head? Whose story was that? What was drowning out all of the positive feedback and leaving her instead with the terrible sense of being a failure?

A feeling can often be traced back to the thought that caused it. While some feelings seem to come from our “gut”, and those feelings may very well be based in trauma or pain from our past, often our feelings originate from a story we tell about ourselves – thoughts that we don’t even know we are thinking that give rise to negative feelings. For example: I’m telling myself that my coworkers think I’m lazy because I told them I couldn’t help out with a project. When I tell myself this story, I feel sad and ashamed. There’s the thought, then boom! there’s the feeling.

As Julia spoke, as we explored her thoughts, it quickly became obvious that there was more than one voice in the room – two in particular. There was the part of Julia that was suffering because she felt she was an imposter, but this process all started because there was another part of Julia, an “inner bully” or critic, that was telling Julia over and over again that she wasn’t doing a good job. The voice of the receiver, the victim, was largely silent, taking in all of this abuse – and it also hadn’t been clear to Julia that she was actually berating herself.

Exploring the Voices Inside

To understand why we are suffering, it’s necessary to explore exactly what’s going on inside of us. With Julia, I wanted to hear the voice of the bully, or her inner critic, to know what it was saying and to understand the effect it was having on her. So I invited Julia to speak from that voice. What exactly was she telling herself?

‘You’re such a fake,’ she spat, ‘you’re such a phony. Everyone knows you don’t know how to do this job, and it’s only a matter of time before you’re really found out by everyone.’

What’s happening here, according to gestalt psychotherapy, is called an ‘interruption in contact’. Interruptions in contact essentially describe the different ways we unwittingly block our flow, our energy, our excitement, our love of life. In particular, this interruption is a very specific and very common form called ‘retroflection’. This is where we attack ourselves either in a way in which others attacked us, or in which we wish we could attack others, or in order to try to force ourselves to be a particular way in the world.

After hearing from the part of herself that was creating the attack, I asked if Julia was aware that there was another part of herself that was actually receiving this message. In essence, the receiver of the messages is our inner “victim” – the part of us who is the recipient of the inner attack. I asked Julia how this other part of her felt, and what, if anything, she wanted to say in response.

Julia gave me a blank stare. She said that that while she felt sad to hear these critical words about herself, she also added that she agreed with what the critic had to say. She said indeed that the bully was “right” and that she really was not good at her job and everyone knew it.

Standing Up to the Bully

Just as you would coach a child being bullied in the playground, I began to fortify that victimized, quiescent part of Julia’s psyche. Standing up to the bully – something we also refer to as making peace with your inner attacker -  is about exchanging the voice of the victim with the voice of strength. When working with the inner bully, I encourage my clients to get in touch with how they would respond if these mean things were being said to someone they cared about.

I asked Julia, ‘What would you say if this bully was talking to a friend of yours? How would you react?’ The truth is that it’s much easier for us to stand up to a bully if they’re bullying somebody that we love.

‘I would tell them to stop,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘I would tell them that this was unacceptable, that this was not OK. That what they were saying wasn’t even true.’

So I began coaching Julia to defend herself by proxy, to think of it as defending someone else.

Velcro and Teflon

It’s said that negative thoughts are like Velcro. They tend to stick. As human beings, we have a knack for believing, and ruminating on, negative thoughts about ourselves, and we feel bad as a result.

This was certainly true for Julia. She was in the habit of telling herself that she wasn’t good enough at her job, that she was an imposter, and as a result, she told herself that she was a failure. This thought pattern was on a loop in her head, and had a “sticky” quality in her consciousness.

Meanwhile, positive thoughts tend to be like Teflon. They often don’t stick. Someone tells us we do something really well and we just think, yeah, well, I’m not so sure...We write them off.

The reality was that Julia was in receipt of plenty of positive feedback – there was no shortage of people telling her she was doing a great job, but she had trouble believing it.

Sometimes we have to borrow the confidence others have in us and see ourselves through their eyes. People often see in us what we can’t see in ourselves, and it can take deliberate effort to appreciate something positive about ourselves to decide to be affected by it.

Julia began working on trying to be affected by the positivity around her. This took a lot of practice. It’s not easy to take a mental concept and turn it into something that’s lived in the body, to see that you have talents and gifts and to recognize that you can live them.

Over time, Julia could start to say, ‘I think I understand why I’ve been promoted’. She could begin to appreciate the things she liked about her job. She could chair a high-level meeting at the mayor’s office and in her mind, she could hear the voice that used to do nothing but accept the criticism say, ‘I can do this, I’m good at this.’

Julia also started a journaling practice to support the coaching process. Journaling can also be really helpful in this process, as there’s only so much you can accomplish in a fifty minute session every other week, and journaling accelerates self-inquiry. Instead of simply feeling bad, we can explore how the pain is being created in our psyche. We notice and track self-talk. So you might think, I’ve no idea what I’m doing here, and instead of giving way instantly to the feeling that this can generate, you stop and label the thought. This is critical self-talk.

Techniques like these allowed Julia to separate herself from the story she was telling herself.  With time, and with support in our sessions, she also practiced responding to her critical self-talk with compassion, love, reason, and balance. ‘Yes, I am new to this role, and I am still learning, but that doesn’t make me any different than anyone else who’s new to a role. I can see how much I am trying, and others do too. Why not try to just trust in that a little more?’

Getting Curious About the Bully

In addition to fortifying the inner victim, and helping her take in positive support, part of the work I did with Julia involved getting curious about her inner bully, and encouraging her to do the same. We started exploring questions like: Where did this inner critic come from? When did it start? Why was she pushing herself in this particular way?

I was also curious if the voice of her inner bully reminded her of someone. In some cases – not so much with Julia – but frequently, the voice is really the replica of a parent. The person is doing to themselves what was done to them.

Julia’s parents never really pushed her in that way but they did give her a lot of attention, along with teachers, for being smart, and for being great at school. It seemed that this inner critic voice actually emerged from Julia’s desire to continue to win approval. This is how she found identity in the world; by being smart, by performing well and by saying ’yes’, by being willing to take on whatever challenge presented itself. Over time, it seems, a part of her developed to keep propelling her forward, but this part was kind of ruthless, and didn’t take well to not knowing.

One of the things that can be especially illuminating when we get curious about our inner critic is to better understand how old we were when this part of ourselves developed. While not always an exact science, many clients have a sense of when this part of themselves emerged, and this was true for Julia as well. She sensed that she was around 10 years old when she concluded that she needed to keep performing to “earn” the love and attention of those around her. What’s important to consider here is the consciousness of a 10-year-old child – in particular, the way a child at that age still sees things in a simplified way.

With reflection and through coaching, Julia came to realize that her inner critic, the part that was continually attacking herself was a child – the 10-year-old. That part of Juila understandably wanted approval, but she also had developed a simple equation that led to that sense of approval and safety. If she performed well, and she felt completely confident, she concluded that she was lovable and safe. In contrast, if Julia was less certain about herself, she was walking on unchartered territory and her inner critic went into fear and self-attack. Her inner 10-year-old didn’t know what to do with the fact that indeed, adulthood, and professional life, includes many moments of not knowing, learning, even failure. These experiences enable us to grow, if we are open, but with an inner critic monitoring the situation all the time, they also ripe for self-attack.

One of the ways in which I work as a gestalt coach is doing “experiments” with my clients, and a powerful gestalt experiment is called the “empty chair”, where we speak either to a part of ourselves or to someone else. In Julia’s case, I invited her to converse with her inner critic, and to get curious about this part of herself.

Julia asked the critic questions about when she came about and why. As a result, we were able to confirm our hypothesis that the critic was a young part of Julia focused on protecting herself. With this increased awareness, Julia could come to see that while this part of her had been creating pain, it was also a part of her that deserved love and attention – ideally best when the attention came from Julia herself, herself now an adult. Julia learned to do the sophisticated dance of standing up to her 10-year-old critic – telling her, “It’s okay, I got this. You are safe.” while also thanking her for looking out for herself, as she knew her intention was a good one.

The Truth and the Lie

One thing I’ve realized over the years is that there is both a truth and a lie at the heart of imposter syndrome. The lie – the bully’s continual assertion that we are a failure, a phony – we’ve already talked about. It’s usually a way of trying to keep ourselves safe that is based in fear, but in essence the lie we tell ourselves is we should already know everything and if we don’t we’re a failure.

The truth is that actually, none of us knows everything. We are all on a learning curve. This is particularly true when we take on a new role, or are promoted into a position of authority. It is at this point that Julia was most vulnerable to the voice of the bully, because there were – of course – things that she needed to work on. The truth was that she didn’t have a great deal of experience in operations.

In particular, Julia frequently had difficulty when it came to making big decisions that affected other people. In one particular case, she needed to decide whether or not a certain academic subject should be made mandatory on the curriculum – a decision which she knew would affect thousands of kids. She was paralyzed by indecision. The anxiety this generated was exacerbated by one of her direct reports who saw what was happening and challenged her authority.

We are at our most vulnerable at moments like these, since it is now more than ever that the critical voice carries a certain moral authority.

How do you separate the lie from the truth when they are so entangled?

The hallmark of the lie is that it is monolithic. It is non-specific. You are a failure, a phony, a fraud. Everyone knows more than you.

The truth, by contrast, is more nuanced, more specific. Because of this, it’s far more amenable to specific solutions. We can distill what we want to learn and practice, what we want to refine in our new role.

·      Are there classes I need to take?

·      Could I benefit from mentoring?

·      Is there a professional development program I could avail of?

With Julia, we used some of our coaching sessions to look at and support her decision making skills. Seeking those supports broke the neurotic spiral, allowing her to grow, to move away from a place of shame and self-attack, and allowed for her to grow in the way that she needed. Nothing was wrong with that, but she also wasn’t layering shame on top of the legitimate need she had to trust her judgment more and to inform big decisions with data and consult from others.

Is This What I Want?

I’ve also come to see that imposter syndrome may sometimes speak to the fact that maybe this isn’t the best match between your interests and skills and what the job is asking of you, and there’s nothing wrong with considering this possibility – though ideally without self-attack. Experiencing the imposter syndrome can be helpful in that it does sometimes force you to ask serious questions.

·      Is this the right role for me?

·      Am I enjoying this?

·      Does it resonate with who I am and my natural strenghts?

·      If this isn’t something I’m good at, is it something I want to get better at?

These are legitimate questions, which demand reflection, and they are qualitatively different from the shrill voice of the inner critic, who seeks only to insist that you are putting one over on everyone.

It’s also true that that sometimes a pinch of imposter syndrome can help us stay realistic and grounded – I suppose it’s kind of an antidote to arrogance. Realizing we don’t know everything can reveal humility - the foundation of all virtues, according to Confucious – and humility, in my opinion, is something every leader needs. Note too that it was the spur of imposter syndrome that prompted Julia to look at her own growth, both professional and personal. Growing into a sense of self-trust and self-confidence means that we also learn to lead from a place of deep connection to ourselves. We become authentic, we feel more like ourselves.

Dealing with imposter syndrome in this way allowed Julia to be more present, to break the connection with a mental narrative that was not real.  This also enabled her to become a better coach, and a better manager, because she was that much more empathic to how some of her staff might be feeling in starting a new role.

The Magic of the Moment

Julia and I worked together for six months. Over that time, we saw a gradual reduction in her suffering. She became lighter, happier. She had less trouble sleeping. There was more flow in her life, more joy, more confidence. She came to realize that her struggle with feeling like an imposter felt both personal and universal. Simply knowing just how prevalent it is in the workplace was tremendously helpful.

Nor would I underestimate the role of ongoing awareness in this transformation. Think of the psyche as a container. When you’re not aware of the inner critic, its voice can take over so much of that vessel. By noticing it, it doesn’t sound quite as loud, or half as credible.

Eckhart Tolle puts it like this: ‘When you make your unconscious motivations conscious, you immediately see how absurd they are. Awareness is the greatest agent for change.’

And following on from that, the counter voice emerges and is amplified. ‘Thank you for your opinion, I love you, but I think I’m doing just fine.’ The work Julia did reset the balance between these competing voices.

She enjoyed further promotion at work, and found a capacity to recognize and accept the admiration of those around her. Being sought out, being asked to be more visible; this is evidence that a mature perception will find hard to ignore. Near the end of our work, she was selected as one of the leaders asked to address a conference, and, during that address, she recalled feeling the magic of the moment; knowing she was doing something worthwhile and knowing that she was doing it well.

Questions for Reflection

•       What do I expect myself to know by now and why?

•       How would I know how to do this without learning it?

•       How does it affect me when I tell myself I’m an imposter? Would I talk to anyone else like that?

•       What would make me feel less like an imposter? What do I need to learn and practice to feel equipped for this role, this job, this challenge?

•       What supportive words can I offer myself if I’m feeling scared or insecure?

Practices

•       Distinguish your thoughts from your feelings. If you’re feeling bad, stop and investigate the story you’re telling yourself.

•       Come back to the present. Name what you’re seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting. Get back into your body. Exercise, meditate – whatever it takes to get out of your head.

•       Say kind words to yourself on a daily basis. Talk about what you appreciate about yourself. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to somebody you love.

Experiments

•       Branch out! Take a class, seek support or mentoring for something you don’t know how to do.

•       Take five minutes to talk to yourself out loud about the things you appreciate about yourself. Write down how you feel afterward

• Update #4 - Books printed + a request + our book website! April 16, 2021

  Hello friends,

  We are excited to share some news with you. The print run of Growing Up at Work is now complete and that means …

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• Update #3 - We're getting close! March 12, 2021

  Dear friends and supporters,

  It may seem like we went quiet, but a lot has happened in the past few months. We have gone through …

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• Update #2 - We have a publisher! Oct. 1, 2020

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  We hope this note finds you as well as possible, given many stressors in our midst. This has been one of the most surreal and …

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• Update #1 - Thank you for your support! June 19, 2020

  Hello!
  

  Our crowdfunding campaign for Growing Up at Work concluded yesterday, and we are delighted to report that we pre-sold 622 copies of the book. …

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