[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan we were talking the other day about the impostor syndrome and you had some really interesting things to say about it and I think it's a very relevant topic for high Achievers High performers they often kind of get somewhere and they're like how did I get here do I really belong and can you share your thinking about a what the Imposter syndrome is and then B kind of your interesting take on it yeah well first of all it's not something that I've particularly experienced I want to say that but it came up because I got hit by surprise with a question on another podcast and somebody said what's your explanation of the impostor syndrome and I've read about it you know and I understand it's a big deal in all sorts of areas where people can achieve a lot of public Fame you know usually it goes along with being known for or something and you get a lot of respect you get a lot of admiration and you have kind of like a celebrity status you know it could be World celebrity or national celebrity but just in the circles that are important to you you have celebrity status and people think that you're capable of great things simply because you've achieved something and the problem is you don't feel it at all and you feel that they are just looking at what they can see but they're not really seeing the turmoil that you're going through inside or the self-doubt that you have or the anxiety that you have and you're comparing the feelings of anxiety your negative feelings inside with their external praise positive praise and these Clash okay and you say well I'm not who they think I am so you know very quickly we have Concepts in strategic coach with deal with the experience of progress the experience of achievement I mean that's the mainline experience that we provide in strategic coach that you can actually create constant NeverEnding personal success into a system that's a function of teamwork that you have of the kind of organization that you can create and instead of being something unique or unusual it's something that's normal that you're always achieving and growing but I will say this I went back you know as a result of the question I said what I've noticed about something that when I start a project that at the other end as a big achievement it'll be both bigger and better in other words if we achieve this and usually it has to do with marketing it has to do with creativity it has to do with the production of some new thing in the world that moves us Salon what happens to motivate yourself to go that you imagine the feelings that you're going to have when the achievement takes place okay so you have to imagine them because they're not the feelings you have right now you're saying this is how I'm feeling right now but when I have this really big achievement then I'm going to feel this way and I'm going to feel really very very different then you have the achievement and other people people are now responding to you very differently than they were responding to you before but you notice that you feel exactly the same way as when you started and you say something's wrong something's wrong okay I can't be the person they're talking about because I don't feel that I am that person and that's I'm an impostor I'm Not Who other people think they are and I'll give you an example and it was very striking one it was a longterm term study done over 25 years after astronauts had gone to the Moon right okay and there were quite a number of them there was a dozen or so astronauts who went to the moon and they followed them after they got back and they found out that all of them had severe mental nervous mental troubles breakdowns addiction alcohol because you know I mean think about it being the first person who landed on the moon first human you know all this you know tens of thousands of wondering about the moon and we could actually stand on the moon we could be on the moon and there's this notion that the achievement is going to transform you as a human being right so you come back and you get a tick or tape parade down Madison Avenue in New York you're invited to the White House you meet the president of the United States and you're back in Houston you know which was the main base and you don't have a mission in front of you and you're going to NASA headquarters and your wife says now that you're around a little bit can you pick up some ground beef on the way home oh dear and the experience didn't do for you what you thought the experience was going to do okay I think part of the reason is you're seeing yourself as a lone individual at the start and you're seeing yourself as a lone individual at the end the other thing is you're imposing a present feeling on the future so you're actually being governed by a feeling you had in the past so you're not allowing yourself with the new capability the new opportunity that has resulted from the achievement you're not allowing yourself to develop new feelings for this new situation so you don't allow yourself to normalize yourself at a higher level of capability and opportunity so it just never feels normal and you're always worried that you're going to be found out right so one of the things I do is I never see any of my achievements as me okay I'm part of an achievement so I'm someone who has part of the code for the achievement and one it is I'm good at visualizing results in the future and putting measurements on the future you know and it's not so much how we're going to feel in the future but this is now going to be true this capability is now going to be true this kind of new organizational teamwork is going to be true and everything else so it's a whole series of measurements that don't really depend upon my feelings they depend upon what would now be possible practically you know it's practical and I get there and I say yep yep yep yep yep I mean we're just in a process of a book launch and we were thinking of within about a two and a half month period when we launched the new book we would get 50,000 sales and it now looks like it might be 150,000 sales and we got to the end of four weeks and we were already double our goal and I just sat there and I said man this is amazing now why was it that we did so much better than expectation and I start looking at the experience I said ah we did this right we did this right we did this right and then I say now knowing what we know already about a successful book launch how can we really take what kind of happened and make it sort of predictably it'll happen the next time so it'll be much bigger but people said well how you feeling about it and I said well I'm feeling terrific I have to tell you I'm kind of surprised a little bit I said I have to pinch myself here but I said you know it's a great book I mean it's the who not how book and I said there's something magical about this book and the thing is that it was done in collaboration with other people more and more I find and I'm just thinking about this now because you got me on this subject that what I'm feeling is the teamwork feeling right I'm feeling the collaboration feeling I'm not feeling my individual feeling okay I'm part of it I'm part of it you know but my greatest feeling is that I'm part of something four weeks later that's a lot bigger I was a part of four weeks ago you know and when you set the goal Dan it wasn't for the feeling of you know the initial goal whatever that was it's because you wanted a really particular result so I think it's interesting so no one wants to feel that imposter syndrome that degree of self-doubt is not fun and people can really they end up not to get too psychological they can end up sabotaging themselves you know questioning not stepping or striving out further because they're kind of scared it's not real so I think there's a lot of consequences to it so how can people shift this you know how can they look back and actually go oh okay I'm not an impostor everything I've done so far got me to this point how can they have more confidence this came up in a conversation actually with someone I'm really close to she goes oh I feel like a bit of an impostor and I was like hang on a second we were just talking about that so what advice would you give for how people can get out of that mindset or focusing on feelings instead of focusing on the result as you talked about yeah well you know I've touched on this and I really haven't developed the thought fully but I think it's just that partially I think maybe if I was 25 years younger I would not be having as fully enjoyable feeling about the achievement as I am right now so in order for myself to be increasingly excited about my future at age 76 it can't be about me it's got about me and teamwork me and collaboration with other people and we are achieving it and then I'm getting all the feedback from the other members of the team isn't this amazing and everything else and I'm enjoying their feelings I'm enjoying their feelings my feeling is that I did my part in a really good project and we created great teamwork and we've had a better than expected result and it's not a great thing isn't that a great thing to pull off as as a team so I think it's the seeing yourself as an isolated individual that's part of it if you're isolated at 20 and you're isolated at 70 you've had no difference of experience or feeling your entire life doesn't matter what you did during the 50 years from 20 to 70 you will have exactly the same feeling that my achievement isn't giving me any happiness and I think it's because that feeling you had it was about the feelings it wasn't about the achievements and the feelings haven't changed no achievements going to make any difference to your feelings about yourself so I don't have feeling goals no you don't you've got capability goals you've got teamwork goals you've got results goals and that's actually one of the things Dan you were saying you know haven't experiened the impostor syndrome but I realize one of the things you do extraordinarily often and well is you are incredibly articulate about the results that you're after so all of your ment and emotional energy goes into getting really really clear on what it is that you want to have happen and communicating that really powerfully I'm thinking of our brilliant tool the impact filter which is available in our cool little ambition series called the extraordinary impact filter but that's the starting point for you for every single result that you are committed to is you really get clear on the purpose the importance the ideal outcome best result if you do take action the worst result if you don't and then the success criteria that will ensure the best and prevent the worst from happening my sense is that really anchors you in the result not the feeling I suspect that for a lot of people it's actually they don't have as well formed and well thought out and well laid out goals and so the feeling part actually is a little distracting yeah but you anchor yourself so clearly and by the way that's also your communication tool for the teamwork which is pretty cool so that's kind of one of my Clues as to probably why you haven't gotten stuck in that trap well you know my feelings are my feelings you know but what I try to do is I try to keep my feelings up to dat in the sense that I'm not going to be requiring that when something new happens that I'm going to feel the way I felt sometime in the past I'm not going to judge my present activities by my past feelings my feelings are up to date you know I'm feeling something totally different four weeks after the book launch there are new feelings there are new feelings wow wow it's amazing you know and I share this with other people and you know I said NE oh you know well and Dan in our last podcast we talked about the Gap and the gain and so in terms of keeping your feelings current you know you really reflect on progress a lot and I think again without that kind of systematic process that you have for measuring your progress it might be more challenging to keep your feelings up to date so that's another piece of this puzzle it strikes me yeah I think these concepts are all part of a piece and that is our main medium for Human Experience is achievement over time or lack of achievement over time so one is be an achiever and not a non-achievers badly no I think we're all about achievement you know and I mean the achievements can take a million different form forms in Human Experience because people have a unique take on who they are they have a unique take on what their future is so it's going to produce a whole endless series of very unique experience but you're always going to be about this you're always going to be doing this so have a happy button installed I love it danam one last thought before we wrap up this conversation you've been talking about experience and that's another part of this you putting incredible value on your past experience and your past progress so again you're up todate with your increasing capabilities and teamwork and technology and it strikes me that that's another component of this is because you're always current with your feelings and with your progress so it's not a mystery it's not a surprise you know it's a delight but it's not like you feel like you're faking it because you've been very conscious and very aware can you just talk about your mindset about reflecting on your experience because again that's something not a lot of other people have yeah and as I'm thinking it through and I had some thoughts from the other day when I was challenged to say something useful about the impostor syndrome and I said you know my past is very alive and active and accessible so first of all there's nothing I'm trying to get away from right okay so I think the desire to get away from your past kills your past it deadens it it's not available it's not useful to you anymore any experience that you want to get away from it immediately becomes nonuseful to you okay and the other thing is each person's past happens only in their head right you know first of all I haven't a clue of the Endless dimensions of your past I just don't know I can ask you questions about it and everything else the only thing I can do is say oh how did you handle that I don't know what I'm asking about when I ask the question and it's all new to me when you do answer the question so I think your past is entirely your creation and they said what do you mean things didn't happen that way I said it's not about things happening that's how you interpreted right there's nothing about my past that I'm ashamed of there's nothing of my past you know I may not have thought through it completely but anytime I take a past experience and think it through and say well what did I learn there how did that experience actually do me good and all of a sudden it becomes a different experience and it becomes a different path and I can use that in the present as a building block for the future I can take things from the past update them bring them into the present and they become building blocks for the future so I don't worry about the future because I think I'm always going to be equipped with some thinking about past experiences that I'm going to equip myself with the capability of dealing the future is also created just as much as the past is so I've got this sense that it's all created you know and I think that that gives me a sense of ease well we don't know what we're going to do I say I guess we're gonna have to create it well and Dan this what you said really struck me because because you're so at ease with your past you're not worried about your future which means that you are not striving to to feel a different way in the future which is what imposter syndrome is right so because you've learned from your experience and even bad experiences well what people would call bad is for you just raw material for learning you know what a great question how did that experience do me good you can use that to transform a negative thing because it may have made you stronger it may have made you more resilient it may have taught you what never to do again but all of it is for your good is kind of your lens that you're looking and you know that you can make it useful so that's fascinating this is really interesting okay yeah very good and it's endless anytime you want to go back there you're going to find something interesting and new you're always going to be finding out new things about your past you know it's almost like it's part of your present your past is part of your present and your future is too yeah yeah so there's never anything you're trying to escape from nowhere other than today is where you're trying to get to you have goals and ideas but you're quite happy in the present yeah I think that's what everyone aspires to so thanks Den this is a really interesting conversation it ties in the Gap in the gain ties in using your experience but the whole thing about being current with your feelings and being current with your lessons from the past I think is really insightful thank you mhm thank you