TCC Podcast #47: Overcoming Impostor Complex with Tanya Geisler

Do you struggle with impostor syndrome (or more accurately impostor complex)? Then you’re going to love this episode. Tanya Geisler stops by The Copywriter Club Podcast to talk with Rob and Kira all about why we struggle to believe in ourselves and our work. It’s an evolutionary behavior that’s designed to protect us, but in today’s modern world, often keeps us from doing our best and most important work. In this interview Tanya shares: •  the background on the “discovery” of impostor complex •  how it affects both men and women •  the three primary reasons we have impostor complex •  the 12 lies of the impostor complex •  the six behavioral traits we default to when we experience impostor complex Plus Tanya shares a simple “hack” for dealing with the impostor complex when it rears its ugly head. You’re going to want to listen to this one. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Tanya’s TED Talk Pauline Clance Suzanne Imes Secret Thoughts of Successful Women Neil Gaimon Amanda Palmer Meryl Streep Maya Angelou John Lennon Brene Brown Dunning Kruger Effect Liz Gilbert Chumba Wumba OpenSource.com Mean Girls Amy Cuddy Malcom Gladwell Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work. That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for Episode 47 as we chat with leadership coach Tanya Geisler about the Imposter Syndrome and owning your authority, working with a coach, amplifying your voice, and how copywriters can deal with the comparison trap. Rob: Hey, Tanya. Hey, Kira. Kira: You’re welcome. Tanya: That’s so much for having me. Real excited to be here. Rob: We’re excited to have you here. Kira: Yeah. Tanya, you were recommended from one of our club members, Helen, who said that all the conversations in our club right now are ... Well, not all of them, but a lot of them are around feeling like an imposter, a lot of self-doubt, especially because we have a lot of new copywriters in our club. This is what you talk about day in and day out. So we’re really grateful that you’re here to kind of just address this challenge that we all are facing head on, and hopefully we can help some copywriters along the way. Tanya: May it be so. Kira: A good place to start is with your story. You know what, especially as I’ve heard you, I’ve heard your name in the past, watched your TED video, checked out your website, and you’ve stepped into your starring role, but I always wonder, when did you do that, and was it easy for you? Were you always in a starring role? Could you tell us your story? Tanya: I want to laugh. The first thing I want to do is laugh. Yeah, it was so easy. No, not much about this has been easy at all. It’s been tons of self-doubt, tons of, “What do I know? Who am I?” I talk about there are 12 lies that the Imposter Complex wants us to believe. And I believed them for probably the first ... Even if I put a name, a number on this, I worry that it’s going to trigger people, but really and truly for probably the first four to five years of my work as a leadership coach I was really coming up against the Imposter Complex, like huge. And what I started to recognize was this through line that was inhibiting me from stepping into my starring role. That wasn’t the language that I would’ve had back then, but the through line that was inhibiting me from being the fullest expression of the kind of coach leader that I wanted to be was very similar to the same through lines that were riveting through the experience of my clients. When somebody named the Imposter Complex, I swear to you it was like I heard the angels sing. It was this like, “Oh, it has a name.” It just really dialed things down for me in terms of my self-doubt, and it really then dialed up my sense of purpose and what I was here to help others and help others heal in themselves. Kira: Can we start with what exactly the Imposter Complex is? Tanya: Yes. I always start with a history lesson. The Imposter Phenomenon is the term coin termed by a clinical psychologist, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes back in 1978. So they were working with high-functioning, high-achieving women, as it happened, and they noticed that with these women, in spite of consistent and irrefutable data to the contrary, these women seemed incapable of internalizing their success. It didn’t matter what they had done; they would attribute anything that they had done spectacularly well to luck, or fluke, or timing, or having deceived somebody into thinking that they were actually smarter or more capable that they actually are. Failures, on the other than, they were more than able to internalize. So something went wrong, “That was all my fault.” This was the consistent piece that they kept seeing in all these women that they were working with. They were high-functioning, like I said, high-achieving women with strong values in mastery, integrity, and excellence. So I always start there. If you’re experiencing the Imposter Complex, then you are high-functioning, high-achieving with strong values of integrity, mastery, and excellence. That’s always the really good news. The other thing I always want to say when I start talking about this is that you often hear Imposter Complex as synonymous with Imposter Syndrome. Syndrome is actually not correct because that denotes a clinical diagnosis, and this is not a clinical diagnosis. This is an experience. It’s a phenomenon, and it is a complex. Rob: Dr. Rob and Dr. Kira diagnosing your internalized failures, right? Tanya, you mentioned that this is a big deal for women. What about men? Do men also have the complex, and what are the differences? Tanya: Yes. The short answer is men absolutely experience it. Most of the data points to women so far because that’s where the research in a very substantial way is started. Valerie Young continued the research with her books, Secret Thoughts of Successful Women. So once again, men absolutely experience it, but there’s a couple more things to it. One is that it’s actually bioevolutionary in context. We experience it as a way of preventing evolution from happening too quickly. So it shows up on the precipice of something new. The way men and women tend to deal with something new is very different. We have lots of information that points to men needing to feel about 60% prepared to take on the next task, whereas women need to have a much higher level of assurance to feel like they’re going to be able to do the task. So men are more likely ... I’m really being mindful of the language here because I could see it’s so black and white as I say it in that way. But men tend to be more like, “Okay, I don’t know everything, but I’m still going to go for it,” whereas women, the way we are raised, the way we are taught, the way we are socialized and conditioned is very different, and there are six behavioral traits that are coping mechanism that are more unique to women in that it ... And women identify people, I should say, as well that really further entrenches us in this imposter complex experience. I also want to say too that it’s men. It’s women. It actually doesn’t discriminate. It wants to make sure that you feel separate from everyone else. So if the center of the universe in your industry is the white male, the further you are from that identification, the more you’re going to feel it. So as a woman of color, you’re going to feel it more. If you’re not able-bodied, if you’re of a different class, if you’re a different ... So all of these contributes, so there’s this real intersectional piece too that we really need to be mindful of. So we talk about men. We talk about women. But the farther you are from that epicenter of the universe, your industry, or the experience, the more you’re going to feel it. Does that make sense? Rob: Yeah, totally makes sense. We should note that when we generalize across a gender, we’re talking about 3.5 billion people. And so everybody obviously is going to have a different level of experience and feel this in different ways. Tanya: Certainly, and I think it’s important here just to touch on what those behavioral traits are because so much of it speaks to the different kinds of conditioning that we show up with. Again, though, I really want to hold sacred that men absolutely experience this, like huge. And the strategies that we’re going to talk about apply to absolutely everyone. That’s the other good news. Rob: Before we get to the lies and the coping mechanisms, I want to ask, because obviously this is a natural phenomenon, there’s got to be like a genetic reason that we feel this. It’s protective in some way, or it’s defensive. So it’s great that it’s natural, but we also need to recognize that while it may hold us back, it also helps us in some ways, right? Tanya: Yep. It keeps us safe, has for lots of years. So, yes, it’s evolutionary and contact. So our job... And thanks for bringing that in because this isn’t about cutting it off, shutting it down, never experiencing it forever and ever, amen. It’s actually a really important part of the ways in which we have achieved excellence. The way that we keep striving and the way we keep pushing our own edges,