personal development Archives - Page 12 of 16

Do You Ever Feel Like An Imposter?

I have seen a lot of articles and commentary of late on the subject of impostor syndrome and have been taking a look at it and thought that I would share some ideas around it.

If you have not come across the terms before let me firstly explain what it is! Do you ever find yourself feeling that you don’t really deserve credit for your achievements? You may have worked hard to achieve a goal in your life. You may be known as the “go to” person at work or away from work when achieving results matter. However, you have this deep rooted feeling of being a fake or impostor, and you find yourself constantly suffering the unrealistic fear that you will be “found out”, with dire consequences ensuing and your world will fall down around you?

This is what has come to be known as impostor or imposter syndrome and is also referred to as impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome. The term was developed by psychologists Dr. Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes. In their research they noticed that a significant number of high-achieving individuals would not give themselves credit for their achievements.

People who struggle with this have a persistent fear that one day they will be exposed to the world as a fraud, faker and impostor, when in almost every situation they worked for their achievements. If you find that you have a hard time giving yourself credit for the things you have achieved, then one or more of the following ideas may help you be more confident in your achievements.

Keep a Success File

Record every occasion where you helped someone succeed. Write down all of your successes, testimonials and achievements. Refer to them whenever you feel like a fraud.

Be Honest With Yourself

Sometimes spelling it out, calling your behaviour what it is, is all you need to get past it.

Failing Doesn’t Make You a Fake

The greatest achievements have come on the heels of failure. Failing or making a mistake does not make you a fraud or impostor.

You Have Something Important to Give to the World

When you feel like a fraud or impostor, you pull back and don’t try as hard. This is unfair to the world, which needs your unique presence and abilities.

Ask yourself this question. Do you want to lie on your deathbed, regretting things you did not do or attempt in your life? Believing that you are a fraud or fake can cause you to take less chances, which can lead to regret.

Someone once told me that the biggest challenge we face is that all of us at some point are simply trying to get through this thing called life, and at times we all find that we really don’t know what we’re doing. We just do our best and are always learning.

What Is Personal Empowerment?

We’ve all heard the word empowerment, but what does it really mean? Personal empowerment is about looking at who you are at the present time and becoming more aware of yourself.

The goal is to appreciate yourself and try to become your best self and live your best life. It is about taking stock of your good points and the areas in which you would like to improve. It is about goal setting in relation to the areas in which you would like to do better, and following through with those goals through practical action steps.

There are four main areas in which a person will usually seek to empower themselves:

Physical
Mental
Emotional
Spiritual

Over the next few posts I will be looking at each of these in turn, and offering easy ways to empower yourself.

But first, let’s look at some of the main principles behind personal empowerment.

Starting On The Path to Personal Empowerment

Personal empowerment involves developing the confidence and strength to set realistic goals and fulfill your potential. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and a range of skills that they use in everyday situations. However, many people remain unaware of, or undervalue, their true abilities and sell themselves short. They hold themselves back from leading their best life, or feel stuck – as if they have no control over what is happening to them.

Personal empowerment is all about overcoming obstacles and taking control of your life through positive action steps. The first step is developing self-awareness, an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. You can maximize the one, and minimize the other once you know how.

Personal empowerment and personal development are intertwined. For example, if you know you are disorganized, once you admit that fact, your logical next step will be to learn how to become better organized. Once you have set this goal, it will be time to follow through. Action steps to take might include:

Taking a course
Getting a coach
Hiring a helper
Getting an intern
Using organizational tools:
- Calendar
- Jotter
- Day planner
Buying organisational items:
- A filing cabinet
- File folders
- Archive boxes

…and so on.

It will also include setting and following through with a new routine, such as 15 minutes at the start and end of each day for organizing everything you will need in the morning, and tidying your desk at the end of each day.

If you are struggling with self-confidence, there are also a number of action steps you can take, though they will not be as physical, concrete and obvious as buying organisational items and turning your dustbin of a desk into a model of neatness.

Yet there are several steps to better self-confidence that have been proven to work. These include:

Maintaining a good appearance
Engaging in positive self-talk
Ignoring negative self-talk
Not taking what people say as criticism
Not taking criticism too much to heart
Putting yourself in situations that challenge you, such as public speaking
Learning from your mistakes
Not comparing yourself to others all the time and thinking you are falling short

…and so on.

In the next post I will take a look at how we set our goals to enable us to move forward and become empowered individuals.

Working Out Loud – Reflective Practice In Action

Reflecting on activities, events and projects in your can help you progress from complete beginner to a more skilled person who has learned from their experiences. It is also a useful tool for project teams and indeed whole organisations to adopt in order to improve their performance. It can very much be as Andy Lancaster recently mentioned in a Tweet something akin to “working out loud” as we reflect on our learning throughout a project or piece of work.

Here are some methods that you might want to consider.

Reflect Actively

Active reflection during an activity/project creates the opportunity for improving your performance as you start to spot gaps in your knowledge or things you tend to struggle with. “What should I do now?” is a common question when we are first starting on something. “What could I have done better?” is an example of the kind of question reflective practice raises. The answers you come up with can lead to a greater level of skill and confidence. They can also aid in problem solving and decision making to take a project forward.

Take Action

Taking action about what you find will lead to personal and professional growth and development. If you find any gaps in your knowledge, more studying, a course or webinar, or finding a good coach or mentor can all take your skills to the next level. Adjusting priorities and determining new lines of action within a project can lead to success in the delivery of the project.

Set Goals

Reflective practice can also help you set goals. In terms of your professional development/career will no longer feel like it is not within your control and that things just happen to you at work. Instead, you will be feel more in charge because you know what you want and don’t want. The goals you set with the help of your reflective practice will be like a road map to the destination of your choosing. Otherwise you might end up driving around with no clear direction or with a project going off target and not being delivered.

Achieving your Goals

Once you have defined your goals, it will be time to take the practical action needed to achieve them. For each action that is a stepping stone toward your goal, you can apply reflective practice to make sure you are on the right track.

The Best Ways to Reflect

how can you get started? Here’s an easy formula. You might find it helpful to create a worksheet on your computer and print out several copies. Fill them in and analyse your answers. Again these can be adapted for an individual or a group working together

What happened?
What was my role in the event?
How do I feel about what happened?
Who owns what happened?
What was the outcome of the event?
How was the outcome different or the same from what I expected to happen?
What could I have done better in this situation?
What actions can I take to help ensure a better outcome next time a similar situation crops up?

Answering these questions requires honesty, and the willingness to learn and grow. No one is expecting you to be perfect. However, most people will want to be the best they can be in their profession, so apply reflective practice and see what a difference it can make to you.

Discovering Those Learning Moments

Ever since my friend Ady Howes asked a question on Twitter under the hashtag #LoveCPD the role of reflection as part of our learning process has been very much at the forefront of my mind. It’s for that reason that I have interrupted my planned series of posts and want to reflect on reflective practice or discovering our learning moments.

Nowadays there is a great deal of emphasis placed on being our best self. Some of the techniques for accomplishing this are thousands of years old; they just have a new name. Reflective practice is the new term for the ancient process of trying to “know yourself” in order to transform your life through positive change.

The word reflective refers to reflection, or thinking about, certain areas of your life or events in your life and how they turned out. As the event is reflected upon, you are able to explore it in greater depth in order to learn lessons from your experience. As a result of what you learn, you can develop goals to improve your skills in that particular area and follow through with action steps to achieve your goals.

If you’ve been feeling “stuck” in your career or personal life, reflective practice could just be what you’re looking for to transform your life. Let’s look at how to get started.

Starting Reflective Practice

A good starting point is to keep a diary or journal. A small notebook that can be carried with you and/or a folder on your computer with various files you create can all help.

Next, it is important to understand the process of reflection in reflective practice. Reflection is an active process of observing your own experiences in order to evaluate how you were able to handle certain events or occurrences in your life. It is not intended to make you feel bad or beat yourself up over what did or didn’t happen. For each event you wish to explore, simply evaluate the situation in a calm manner to learn from it.

Some events will not require a great deal of analysis. Others might be worth digging deeper because you might spot a pattern or problem you weren’t aware of before.

Learning from Past Actions

A lot of us can be negative and pessimistic. Our negative self-talk tells us we are a “loser” or failure. Reflective practice can help transform you into a winner by cutting the cord of negativity and setting you on a path to personal transformation.

The secret of successful reflective practice is to learn how to look at your actions and experiences without being quick to judge them. It also means taking the time to examine them – rather than just rush to the next thing on your to-do list without learning any lessons from what you’ve said, accomplished, or tried to do.

Through examination, we learn more about ourselves, and in that process of learning, we open ourselves up to a range of new possibilities. Through learning from experience, we can become even more successful in our personal and professional lives.

Learning Moments

We’ve all done it. Repeated the same mistake at least twice. Had a “disaster” in terms of our work life or personal life, such as the loss of a job or the (bad) breakup of a relationship. When this happens, have you:

Stuck your head in the sand and just ignored what was happening?
Blamed others for what happened?
Or did you sit down to reflect on what happened to see what lessons you could learn from it?

Chances are that like many others, you’ve done 1 and 2 most of the time up until this point in your life. With reflective practice, it is time to begin doing #3 regularly.

You can start small and then work your way up to the bigger issues as and when you need to. You can start your journal with something that happened today in your work or personal life, and reflect on how it went.

For example, did you have to give a PowerPoint presentation at a meeting today? How did it go? Were you prepared? Were there any technical or other issues that cropped up? If so, how did you handle them?

Maybe you talked to a family member on the phone and things got a little out of hand. What happened? Were there any things you could have done or said differently?

We hate it when things don’t go well at work or we argue with the people we care about. Often, though, these are some of the best “learning moments” that can highlight areas of our life we need to work on in order to be our best self. Once you have evaluated the event, think about what lessons you’ve learned and how you can do better next time.

In relation to the presentation, it might be:

Get to the room earlier to set up better
Conduct a practice run using the equipment to avoid technical glitches
Make the lettering on the slides bigger so everyone at the back could also see clearly

In relation to the phone call with the family member:

Don’t mention topic X
Avoid the blame game
Change the subject if they start going on at you about Y or Z
Remind them you are an adult and while you appreciate their input and caring, you’ve already discussed the issue at least once and don’t need to again.

These are just a few examples. You should be able to come up with many of your own, relevant to your personal circumstances, once you start on the path of reflective practice.

In subsequent posts I will delve a little deeper into this.

Can You Be Too Perfect?

Having looked at fear of failure and success I want to now look at how being a perfectionist can stop you from achieving what you want.

Let’s start by understanding what perfectionism is not. Perfectionism is not the admirable quality of holding yourself to high standards. Rather, perfectionism is the fusion of high standards with your self-worth. A less-than-perfect performance damages a perfectionist’s self-worth in their opinion. The possibility that their performance will not be flawless is debilitating to them, and they can become paralyzed by the idea of doing something.

A perfectionist believes that they can never be good enough. They consider any mistake they make to be an indication of their value as a person and therefore no mistake is permissible. They seek to avoid shame and judgment by being perfect.

Successful professionals are typically not perfectionists, although they may be people who hold themselves and others to high standards. The hesitation and over-analysis that is common to perfectionists does not help them to advance in a profession.

What Perfectionism Looks Like

Perfectionists are often chronic procrastinators. They spend so much time preparing for a task that they never get to the task. The anxiety surrounding their fear of making a mistake is disempowering, so they often feel unable to proceed with their work.

Perfectionists may be aware that their perfectionism is a disadvantage to them, but they consider it the price they have to pay to be successful. Perfectionists hold others to high standards, too, and can be very critical of them. But even though they are quick to criticize, they have a hard time accepting criticism, which can stop them from moving on with their work.

Perfectionism is a big de-motivator. Perfectionists can be reluctant to try new things because they are afraid that they won’t be able to live up to their own standards when they do it. And, if they do try something new, they will often abandon it quickly. The mistakes that anyone is bound to make when learning a skill are so painful to perfectionists that they will quit before they gain mastery. As a consequence, they never enjoy practicing the skill, be it speaking a language, playing an instrument, or participating in a sport.

Because perfectionists are so risk-averse, they rarely are able to innovate or be creative. They have all-or-nothing thinking, and won’t do anything if they can’t devote themselves to it totally. They are often hiding the fact that they are imposters.

How to Overcome Perfectionism

Many of the ways of overcoming perfectionism have to do with recognizing that it is a hindrance, not a help, in achieving your goals. If your goal is to do an excellent job in a presentation for work, being obsessed with every little detail stands in your way rather than helping you.

If you are overwrought over things that are out of your control, you aren’t completing things that are in your control. If you are focused on past errors, you aren’t working on tasks that can actually move you toward your goals. So step back, look at the big picture, and put perfectionism in its place.

Another approach to overcoming perfectionism is to heal the parts of you that causes it. Perfectionists are weak on self-acceptance and self-compassion. To overcome perfectionism, learn to love yourself in all your imperfect glory. Honor the work that you do, even if it is less than perfect.

Honour your commitment to high standards, but don’t let your failure to meet them make you feel unworthy. Treat mistakes as lessons you can learn from. Let go of the personal hurt you feel over them. Be analytical about them, freeing yourself from the impact they have over your feelings of self-worth. Enjoy your successes and victories. Celebrate them. Let your successes, not your errors, define you to yourself.