Can’t shake the feeling that you are just not qualified as you compare yourself to other coaches?

I think everyone in the fitness industry has been there at one point or another.

Even though you are getting clients results, the imposter syndrome creeps in and you start to feel like a failure.

I was going through a course with Tom Bilyeu. The Co-founder of Quest Nutrition and the Co-founder and CEO of Impact theory.

And he may have had the most eloquent definition of imposter syndrome that I’ve ever heard. 

 

Imposter syndrome – Feelings of inadequate inadequacy that persists despite evidence success. 

 

So when you’re clearly doing well on something, but you still feel like you’re not enough. Uh, and why do we feel that way?

Why do we have those feelings that even though we’re getting our clients results or even though the business is headed in a good direction, All metrics point that we are doing well, but we internally feel like we’re not enough?

I really think it comes down to our perspective around how we’re executing day to day and our process within that.

A lot of people feel like once I “make it” or once I become an expert that I’m never going to have any failure. And that you are never going to have any feelings that I’m not doing well. 

That one you reach a certain level, all the bad things just go away.

And I think that’s the wrong perspective entirely. 

When you have this fear of failure, even when you are executing a really high level –  you’re going to constantly feel like you’re not enough. 

For most coaches, this fear is not rooted in what would actually happen if you “failed” but rather you’re afraid of what other people will think when you fail. 

It  becomes this like double-edged sword of with every step in the direction of success, you just feel more and more pressure not to screw it up. 

You start to create stories in your head that you, that you lucked into this, that you weren’t qualified for it. The list goes on…

So how do we change this?

 

I think we need to change our perspective on failure and perspective around what other people think in order to relinquish the fear and relinquish the power of imposter syndrome.

 

Let’s start by redefining failure. Failure is no more than figuring out what works and what does not. 

 

Simon Sinek put it best when he called business and infinite game. Finite games are ones that you can win or lose. Think chess, checkers, or  sports games where there’s a definitive end to the game.

There are points on the scoreboard and whoever has the most points at the end of the game will be the Victor and whoever doesn’t have most points is the loser. 

Business however is not a finite game but an infinite one – you can only “lose” the game of business, if you stop playing.

Or if you quit. 

Once you change the way you look at business from finite to infinite – the view of “failure.” then changes as well.

Failure just becomes a data point to test if our hypothesis was correct or incorrect.

 

Turns business into the scientific method

• We have our hypothesis, what we think is going to happen
• We then test that
• If the test produces a good result, awesome! -> That confirms the hypothesis
• If not, you just go back and create a new hypothesis or edit your hypothesis
• Then reate another experiment to see if it works.

 

When you start to view failure as a lens of information, then you really hold all the power of this. 

Because the more information you have in business, the more you can inform your strategy. This actually gives you a leg up on your competition.

But if you look at failure, like I did the wrong thing and therefore I am inadequate for doing so, you are putting pressure on yourself that doesn’t need to be there. 

 

Shift The Way You Think About Others

Once you change your view on failure, the next thing is the perspective of – What other people think. 

These feelings of inadequacy often pop up when you compare yourself to others, and it’s not even comparing yourself to others in the sense of looking at where they are at vs. where you are.

It’s, you’re comparing yourself to this internal judgment that you think they harbor against you or you harbor because of them.

 

When the real truth is the majority of people don’t care about you. 

 

And I say that the most loving way possible, but the majority of people are so consumed by their own thoughts about themselves, that they likely have very little time to think about you or what you are doing enough to judge it.

If you can start to accept that fact – it’s an incredibly freeing!

If the only person’s like opinion of you that matters is your own and you really can’t fail because failure is just learning what works and what does not…

You then start to free yourself from being inadequate because you are the one that controls how you feel and you can’t fail because in doing so you acquire more information. 

So how do you do this in practice? 

The big call to action here is start to look at areas in your life where you feel you’re having imposter syndrome and ask yourself: Is this tied to if you’re a failure or is this tied to what I think people were thinking about?

Then as you run through these ask yourself each time:

• Does that make sense?
• Does this serve the ultimate goal you’re trying to do?
• Is this worth putting your mission in jeopardy and potentially dropping out of the game of business?

To further solidify this – I want you to look at a recent failure or a recent thing that didn’t go your way and ask yourself:

• Did I extract the learnings from that to be better? 
• Did I reapply that scientific method of looking at my hypothesis, looking at the experiment, looking at the results, or did I just chalk that up as not being good enough?

Then take that scenario and reframe it so that you can create positive momentum from it:

• What were the learnings from that?
• How can you apply that to the next step? 

I know this is incredibly pervasive problem for coaches and entrepreneurs, but the real truth is, as the definition says, these are feelings of inadequacy.

Inadequacy that persists despite evidence success.

You can’t be bad and have imposter syndrome. 

 

So anytime you feel imposter syndrome ask yourself:

• Am I afraid of the result?
• Am I afraid of failing?
• If so, what could I learn if I fail and how can I apply that to me forward? 
• And then ask if that’s not it, am I afraid of other people’s judgment and beliefs?

 

Once you identify the root cause, you can then apply the tools in this article to fix it.

So go out, create more success, create more momentum and start to apply these two things to crush imposter syndrome and serve your clients at a higher level.