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Anne and Heather, thank you so much for being here with us. I know you guys have a ton of books and you have a ton of experience, but this is where I want to start. I attended an event, and this event had female engineers. They work for the road industry. Two of the women are accomplished. They’re engineers. The one conversation that kept coming up is that they don’t feel that they belong. It’s that Imposter syndrome that keeps coming up over and over. I know that you have some good information on how women can deal with Imposter syndrome and some tools. In No Women Left Behind, we cater to women in the corporate world. I want to start there. If we can tackle that Imposter syndrome for these accomplished women that don’t feel that they belong. Thank you so much for having us, Rosie. I want to say that before I launch into my answer. I appreciate you having us on the show because your audience is so much in need of understanding and tackling the Imposter syndrome. It is a phenomenon where, while we’re seeking external approval and validation, we forget or can disconnect from who we are and our potential because we’re so busy trying to fit in and belong that we don’t realize that as professionals, we’ve already made it. We don’t need anybody’s stamp of approval. Our brain is wired to keep seeking it. We’ve already made it, but we keep on going because we’ve always done that. Our brain is wired in these patterns where, despite having grown, developed, and achieved how we feel internally, because of the messages our brain keeps sending us, keep us stuck in this place of not feeling good enough and doubting whether or not we fit in. Sometimes we have more confidence and more to offer than our peers. I have known that women, instead of working on confidence, they’re working on attaining more certifications, “Let’s get one more certificate. Let’s get one more degree.” Anne, what are some things that you recommend to your clients or some stories that you can share with us on how you have your clients overcome those feelings of not belonging and of not being good enough? We always talk to our clients about it from the perspective that it’s a developmental gap. It’s not so much that we’re going to overcome or get rid of it because it’s there and it’s something that we have to work our way through. There is a path that we take our clients through always. One of the first ones is to start to understand what we call your Imposter syndrome script. That’s what runs in our head that says, “I should have known. I should have been aware. I shouldn’t have done that,” or the feeling and that comment of, “I’m not good enough. This isn’t good enough. My work’s not good enough. They’re going to figure it out.” Whatever that is that keeps running through your brain, that track that keeps you stuck in the Imposter syndrome is the first place that we start, because I have to be aware of it, not then say, “When that comes up, I need to ignore it,” because our brain upholds a vacuum. What we have to do instead is replace these automatic negative thoughts that are in us because of our growth in development and emergences through childhood into adulthood and replace it with things that are realistic, supportive, positive, and being, “What do I need to say to myself that’s going to encourage me?” Instead of, “I should have known. I should have caught that mistake,” and all those shoulds that go through our brain, it’s, “Given what went on, there’s no way I possibly could have known.” That’s a realistic thought versus the automatic should have, judgmental, imposter, “There’s something wrong with you.” That’s one of the first actions that we have to ground ourselves in knowing and understanding. From my own perspective, because both Anne and I worked our way through the Imposter syndrome, which is part of the experience that we share with our clients, I can say I never have that, “I should have,” thought anymore, which was so prevalent for me in my 20s and my 30s just by becoming aware of it, starting to challenge that thought, and think about things in a more concrete and realistic way. For example, the one woman that I knew was probably late 40s because she was talking about having a teenager. She said, “I’m in a room of a lot of male engineers, and I’m generally the only female engineer. I feel like they don’t take me seriously or don’t respect my thought process.” I don’t think that’s a new concept. We’ve been fighting and combating the fact of we are trying to belong or to gain that respect. Heather, if you were talking to the woman that I was talking to and she’s like, “I’m an engineer and the other engineers don’t take me seriously, which makes me feel like I don’t belong,” what would you have said then to that woman at that moment? It’s a feeling she’s talking about. That’s her feeling. I would be asking for, “What is the evidence? What are the facts that are present?” “I feel like they don’t take me seriously because my thought process is different.” “How is it different? What evidence do you have that they’re not taking you seriously?” If you’re at the table, if you’ve been elevated, promoted, and have a track record of success, what’s the evidence? What is the actual issue? Is there discomfort that they present because they don’t know how to build the same relationship with a female colleague versus a male colleague? When we’re struggling with the Imposter syndrome, we’ll often personalize the actions of others as evidence that we’re not good enough or that there’s something wrong with us as opposed to looking at it and saying, “What is this about them?” The feeling I’m experiencing perhaps is that feeling legitimate from that perspective of, “Are there facts that are triggering this particular feeling? What’s the issue that I want to do something about? It is theirs and they need to own it. It’s got nothing to do with me.” When we're struggling with imposter syndrome, we'll often personalize the actions of others, making it evidence that we're not good enough or that there's something wrong with us. — Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard Click To Tweet Sometimes we see things that aren’t there. Like you said, we collect that evidence that is not there. Honestly, sometimes that happens with my husband and I when we’re talking about something and I was like, “You said this.” He goes, “I never said that. Where did you get that?” We need to pay attention to the evidence that we are collecting to support whatever thought. I always tell people, “Just because you have a thought doesn’t mean that it’s a right thought. It doesn’t mean that it’s an accurate thought.” It happens to my husband and me sometimes. He said something, I took it in, I interpreted it, and then changed it somehow in my head. He’s like, “I never said that.” I imagine that kind of the same thing happened. Once you are aware that you’re doing that, what’s your next step then to work on that? As Heather and I have worked with leaders for the past many decades, it is recognizing that most leaders are left-brain and they’re very functionally competent. They have risen to positions because of their functional competence where they fall behind in their development or more of those interpersonal skills. I say this in relationship to engineers because the majority of engineers are left-brain people. We need to be in order to do the tasks an engineer has to do. If you look at that pathway that they take in terms of developing their functional competence, and then feeling anxious on the interpersonal side, and then going and getting more functional competence, they’re not focusing on the right place to develop. To answer your question, those imposter feelings like, “I feel like a fraud,” is not a feeling. It’s an imposter feeling. “I feel like I’m not being respected.” Again, not a feeling. We have to pull back, look inside, and feel what we’re experiencing. In a scenario like that, an engineer might feel somewhat deflated or devalued because they’re not getting the recognition they need. Instead of saying something about them, it’s, “What would be my strategy for getting more recognition or asking for feedback in this scenario?” The focus of development needs to be on interpersonal, strengthening, and understanding, as Heather said, the Imposter syndrome scripts, the imposter feelings, and the lies the brain will tell us about what’s going on when they’re absolutely not true. I couldn’t have said it better myself as far as the lies that your brain tells you that is not true and the stories and the things that we make up in our head. Sometimes you have fights with somebody and you’re like, “I should have said this. I could have done that.” Heather, you said that you don’t should yourself anymore. You have life experience, you’ve been around someone that is in their early twenties that is just starting off in their career. They don’t have that life experience. We have that script that we want people to pay attention to. What are some actionable things that a twenty-something could do as far as paying attention to their thoughts? What does that awareness do and how can they improve that? If you think about some of the ones around the should, it is that perfectionism that is one of the symptoms of Imposter syndrome. Although, if you had approached me in my twenties and said, “You’re perfectionistic,” I would’ve said, “No, I’m not.” In reality, I was trying to keep everything controlled, contained, and perfect so that if everything was perfect, then no one would find out that I was a fraud. No one would see the reality that I’m dealing with internally. From that perspective, what I had to do, and this is what we talked to our clients about, is set out more realistic and objective standards. If perfectionism is my standard, that means I have to be all-knowing, superwoman, and a psychic because I had to anticipate. None of that’s realistic, so I had to set some realistic benchmarks. One of the first ones I started with was that it’s okay to have a typo in a presentation. A typo in my presentations could completely throw me off track. It would be the entire thing that I would obsess about as though the other 59.5 minutes of time involved in that presentation that everybody else was obsessing over the one typo. I had to learn in that process of trying to be more human. Part of that’s about our personality and how we develop our personality and recognizing through that lens of self-awareness of, “What is it that I need to develop in my personality in terms of my brain and my brain style that’s also going to help?” A lot of where my Imposter syndrome came up was because my relational function was much less developed compared with my other functions. Anything that was in that relational discourse or environment, I struggled a lot more with. That was where the feelings would get triggered, so I worked on developing that. We do the same thing with our clients where it’s understanding what that developmental gap is, how that’s tied to our personality or brain organization, and then what the path is for each one of us. A lot of it comes back to that bringing into the conversation in your brain more realistic objectives and more realistic standards. I will even say to myself, “To this day, as my client does not know what I had envisioned in my head versus what I delivered, then what I delivered is good enough.” It’s that notion of trying to create more realistic standards on which you’re judging essentially, evaluating yourself, because the ones that the Imposter syndrome puts in your head are not realistic and not possible. We’re always falling short as a result of it. The standards that the imposter syndrome puts in your head are not realistic. They're not possible. And so, we're always falling short as a result of it. — Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard Click To Tweet I’m a speaker, and I know you both do speaking as well. You’re right. You’re like, “I forgot to say whatever sentence.” When you think about it, the audience had no idea what you had to say and that you had something planned. In a way, we are allowing space for us to be human. I love that you said that. Not that men don’t suffer from perfectionism, but women have more of perfectionism. We have to be perfect. We have to do everything. We have to be superwomen. It’s impossible. It’s so interesting this Imposter syndrome. Now being aware of it and then understanding that script or that tape that’s running through your head is the first place to start. I was looking at some of your YouTube because you both have so much content. We’ll get into your story a little bit later. In one of the YouTube videos that I heard you speak on, you talked about confidence, competence, and capability. Those three words are so key because as you are stepping into your career from graduating from college, and then even mid-career level, that competence and capability is what helps you gain that confidence. How do those three go together in your opinion? It’s a great question to ask following what Heather was talking about in terms of reasonable expectations. When we’re graduating from university or college, we’re not thinking, “I’m in my early twenties and my brain isn’t even developed yet.” We’re saying, “I’m in my twenties. I should know.” Men and women who suffer from Imposter syndrome have this belief that’s running that they shouldn’t have to go out and get experience and build competence. They see, “I’m in my twenties. This is a destination. I’m an adult now. Now I should know, people expect me to know, and I need to be delivering on those external expectations.” That’s dehumanizing because we don’t look at it from that perspective of, “Now that I know and I’m coming to the workforce with everything that I know, I need this next decade to practice how to be an adult, how to take responsibility for myself, and how to get help in building confidence and competence in the workplace.” It is expecting people to be helpful and expecting employers to coach in a reasonable fashion, of course. If we don’t examine our beliefs, practice mindfulness, have a thought journal, write these thoughts down, write down what we believe, and challenge those beliefs, that can go a very long way in terms of allowing people to guide us developmentally as we go through the first years of our career. It is letting ourselves off the hook for trying to be all-knowing when we’re 22 or 23 and we’ve got such little experience. I know that you both have several books that you have co-written and then you have many other workbooks and things like that. If we had those twenty-something that are trying to dig into personal development, where would you point them to as far as identifying that script? At this point, they don’t know what they don’t know. When you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t know what resources to tap into. I know you have a lot of free stuff on YouTube, but what are some free resources that you could point us to that script? Imposter syndrome and lack of confidence always start with our thoughts and our mindfulness. Tell me a little bit about some of those resources. I know for sure on our YouTube channel we have a whole bunch all around the Imposter syndrome. There is there. We break it down into the different steps or elements that people have to work through starting through the script. It’s reflected in our book as well, Power Past the Imposter Syndrome. There are a couple of things along with understanding how the Imposter syndrome shows up with you because there are different personas. Depending on our personality, we’re going to use the personas a little bit differently or in different circumstances. It is being aware of how the imposter syndrome shows up in you because it’s different. That also carves out a little bit of a different developmental path. Here is the other place that we always tell people to start, especially folks in their twenties. For me and many of my clients, I remember that it’s grounding in getting to that place of accepting your uniqueness. We spend our childhood and our high school life trying to conform and fit into whatever environment we have been raised in, be it our home environment, school environment, or social context. When we’re in our twenties, we’re out of university, and we’re in the early stages of our working life, it’s our first real opportunity to think about, “Who am I actually and who am I meant to be?” Not, “Who am I adapted to be in order to fit in and to be successful in those environments?” It starts to give us permission to be unique, different, and who we actually are. If you’ve never done a personality assessment, we have the Striving Styles and Myers-Briggs. There are a ton of them that are out that are free. It is going on that journey of self-discovery of understanding, “What’s your personality? What are your preferences? How is your brain organized? What does that mean for you?” It’s interesting because I have a daughter. She’s been raised on this stuff, all about the Imposter syndrome, personality, your brain, and everything that Anna and I bring to the table. She has the same personality style as I do, but it’s so different for her because as a female, she’s a thinking preference individual, as am I. You never grow up as a child in high school feeling like you fit because your brain style’s different than the majority of the other women there or girls that are in that environment. For her, she’s openly talking about it. She understands it. It doesn’t have the same impact on her as it did on me because I didn’t get it. I was always like, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I not like these other girls? Why am I so different?” I then hit my twenties and I started to explore it, and I started working together. It was permission to be myself. Talk about the best gift of shifting you out of the Imposter syndrome track is to stop devaluing your own unique abilities and talents and those things that make you different. Instead, embracing them and using them to go back to that confidence. Our confidence comes from moving into that place of becoming who we’re meant to be, and not playing that role, not sticking out or hiding out under our Imposter syndrome personas. Those couple of things are valuable in your twenties as you start this journey. I love that, giving yourself permission to be different. With social media these days, especially with teenagers, that’s so hard because what does social media do? You compare yourself to everybody else, what they’re doing, and what they’re wearing. It’s so toxic if you are not aware of the fact that it’s okay for you to be you and you don’t have to be a perfect body size or perfect whatever. It’s so interesting. Does Imposter syndrome show up for your daughter at any given moment in her life? Absolutely. We can talk about why and where. It’s because of her life experience. Some of the things that she’s faced and she’s challenged in her relationship, we always talk about it with her father because her father, a traditional European male, boys are worthy and girls are not. Despite me being a successful, confident, and assertive female, the fact is her journey is to work through that particular situation. She had school experiences that were the same. The boys were treated differently. As a girl, “You want that? That’s not possible for a career.” Boys want to be hockey players? Sure, you can be a famous rich hockey player. She’s had this whole collection of experiences in her teenage years that we’re constantly framing for her that because she’s a girl, she’s not enough. Not from me, not from her experience in our family. The women are the matriarchs and the powerhouse, but it’s interesting. She’s caught in this dual world, and that’s her internal struggle. The difference is she talks about it. I didn’t have that going into my twenties. That was my point in bringing up that question because even though she grew up with different types of frameworks that you’ve taught her, that Imposter syndrome is always going to be coming back in and out of your head. Knowing about it, having the mindset recognition of that script, that’s what makes the bigger difference there. If I can add to that, it’s an absence of understanding in our society that the first part of our development is looking at the external world for validation of who we are. That’s where most people get stuck. That’s why most relationships are codependent. People don’t go into that next stage where they separate out because they are confident and strong enough in their internal world that they can say, “That’s the way they think about it,” or “That’s how they’re behaving. Not about me. This is my path, and I’m going to stay on my path. I don’t need that external validation.” We get attached to it. As with social media, we get addicted to what’s going on outside of ourselves. We get more disconnected from our actual authentic selves, our needs, and who we are as human beings. We spend a whole lifetime trying to be what other people want us to be and always feeling like a failure. That’s the Imposter syndrome right there. When we’ve abandoned ourselves, we don’t know how we feel because we’re so focused on what other people feel that we’re neglecting ourselves. We spend a whole lifetime trying to be what other people want us to be and always feeling like a failure. That's the imposter syndrome right there. — Anne Dranitsaris Ph.D Click To Tweet That’s so interesting, Anne, because I have seen that in my life. When I was younger, even back a few years ago, if I had a problem, I would call my posse. I have three sisters. I have my two best friends. I would collect facts. I would collect information. Over the last few years, I’m like, “Why do I do that?” I realize that I’m more of a researcher. I’m analytics, so I need to collect all the facts before I make a decision. Over the last handful of years, I’ve been thinking to myself, “If I have a problem, I have the solution. I don’t need to go and call my three sisters and call my two best friends.” Now, I’m like, “What do I think? What do I feel? What is it that is good for Rosie?” What I would do is collect all the facts, and then I would still do what I thought was my best solution. I was like, “Why do I need all this input?” It’s because of the way my brain works. Now that I know that, I don’t have to go out to get that external validation. Although it’s always nice to know that people support me, they don’t have to agree with me anymore. That’s okay. That’s the big piece there. It didn’t just happen. It’s with experience, with all the life issues that I’ve had with my work experience, that kind of thing, I’m now comfortable with who I am. Any other Imposter syndrome pops up for me every once in a while, but I know about it. I’m like, “It’s just a thought.” I push it off to the side and then I move on my merry way. It’s been a lot of personal development to get here. I want to shift the conversation a little bit. I know that you use, and it could be along the same lines, a neurological framework for understanding the drivers of the behavior. We’ve already talked about a few of those. Can you explain what those neurological frameworks are that you use for understanding those behavior drivers? A lot of people want to know. For me, once I understood how my brain works that I have to collect facts before I make a decision, that made a big difference. I know other people like salespeople, they know that they want to make a million dollars, but they have no idea how they’re going to do it. It’s completely different. Let’s talk a little bit about that neurological framework. Anne’s whole background is in personality type, using Carl Jung’s original theory of the four functions. We were big users of the Myers-Briggs with our clients, but what we found was it didn’t go far enough, just looking at personality type, which sorts us into, “What are your strengths? What are some of your blind spots?” The question that we always had was, “Why do I behave the way I do? Why do they?” We understand our personality, but there’s got to be something else that’s behind it. Even when we would give a client the path forward, even when we would show them the way, they would still choose other behavior. In the work that Anne was doing around personality type, it started to evolve and integrate more of that, thinking about it from an emotional driver perspective. She was able to identify the fact that for each one of the brain functions, depending on whether we use it internally or outerly, there was a specific hardwired, innate, psychological need that had to be met for us to feel satisfied and for us to feel like we were in on our path self-actualizing. More importantly, when this need was not being met, our behavior would shift in ways that were not productive for us, that were more self-protective. They were fear-based behaviors.
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What an insightful conversation with Anne and Heather. A few of the takeaways that I had were that we are okay and we need to accept our uniqueness. Ponder some questions. Ask yourself, “Who am I? Who am I meant to be?” Those insightful conversations will hone your confidence. When the Imposter syndrome pops up, you can think about it and be like, “There it is again.” In order to do that, we need to go on a journey of self-discovery so that we can figure out how our brain works and why we do the things that we do. That’s all a journey. It’s not going to be a once-and-done type of thing. Heather and Anne left us with two great tips. The first tip is, “What is your vision?” She says that we need our ambition to be stronger than our fear. It’s not just about goals. It’s about having a powerful vision and trying to understand what you want your experience to be like. Tip number two, she says, “You have to have a roadmap.” I’m a big advocate of this. I call it a focus strategy. So often, we have this idea and goal, but we don’t put it to paper. Time goes by and you don’t have a plan. Having that actionable focus strategy or that roadmap will get you from step 1 to step 2, and you move through your roadmap. Two incredible tips. This conversation was so good because many of us suffer from Imposter syndrome, but we just need to work with it and we need to be aware of it. As time goes on, it will appear less. If it does, you can recognize it, acknowledge it, and then just put it to the side. With that, remember to be brave, be bold, and take action.
Dr. Anne Dranitsaris & Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard (a mother-daughter team) wear many hats – Consultants, Executive Coaches, Trainers, Speakers and Authors – adapting their expertise and solutions to help clients discover and dismantle dysfunctions in their relationships at work, at home, in organizations and in leadership. As experts in human development and behavioral change, personal and organizational transformation, interpersonal dynamics and the achievement of potential, Anne and Heather have worked with thousands of individuals from around the world, been featured in dozens of publications, spoken at professional conferences, and written several series of books on personality type and the brain based on the Striving Styles® Personality System and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®. 
