Common Unseen Internal Battle That Derails Leaders
At times, I feel disconnected from my True Self in order to ‘Play The Game’ at work…
Every day, as you enter the office and greet your colleagues they ask you “How are you?” and naturally you blurt out your automatic answer “I’m fine, thank you. How are you?” without even thinking about it. But you know that it’s not always true.
Some days you really feel awful, but you just ‘play the game’ and fake it. That may seem trivial and not a big deal, but it often doesn’t stop there and it may actually go much deeper…
There are other occasions when you ‘play the game’ in front of your colleagues at work because you are afraid of revealing your truth.
In order to be responsive to various demands from customers, co-workers, and upper management, you may find yourself behaving in ways that are not consistent with your ‘true self’ and you start to feel fake – like an impostor.
In many walks of life, there are high achievers who believe that they are complete fakes. Often, they are extremely successful leaders. Despite their staggering achievements, however, these people subjectively sense that they are frauds.
It is the flip side of giftedness and causes many talented, hardworking, and capable leaders – both men and women who have achieved great things – to believe that they don’t deserve their success.
‘Bluffing’ their way through life (as they see it), they are haunted by the constant fear of exposure.
With every success, they think, “I was lucky this time, fooling everyone, but will my luck hold? When will people discover that I’m not up to the job?”
‘Neurotic imposters’ as psychologists call them, proliferate in today’s organisations and can be found at all levels of an organisation.
Promotion from middle management to senior management is a tricky time because an executive must negotiate the difficult switch from being a specialist to becoming a generalist. But neurotic imposters face their greatest challenges when they are promoted from senior management to CEO.
How does neurotic imposture get out of hand?
The trigger is often perfectionism.
- Setting excessively high, unrealistic goals and then experiencing self-defeating thoughts and behaviours when you can’t reach those goals.
- Having a strong belief that you are currently not good enough, but that you could do better if only you worked harder.
For this reason, perfectionism often turns neurotic imposters into workaholics.
Fearing discovery of their ‘fraudulence’, they burden themselves with too much work to compensate for their lack of self-esteem and identity. Neurotic imposters are also quite creative at destroying their own successful careers. It’s as if they want to be discovered. Perhaps assisting in their own unmasking is a proactive way of coping with their anxiety; maybe it offers a sense of relief.
The basic reason we put on a mask is that we associate a deep vulnerability with being authentic. We feel that if we stand true to who we are, we may be taken advantage of, or we will appear weak and will be ridiculed.
People commonly take up the mask of a ‘role-based persona’ through a need to fit into a defined role.
Feeling fake may result from:
- The neurotic imposture.
- Trying to manage many overwhelming, confusing and troubling emotions.
- Putting on a face, a smile, a disposition that others find amusing or comforting.
- The unbearable fear of hurting others and then being rejected.
To some extent, of course, we are all imposters. We play roles on the stage of life; presenting a public self that differs from the private self we share with intimates and morphing both selves as circumstances demand.
One reason the feeling of being an imposter is so widespread is that society places enormous pressure on people to stifle their real selves. You’re probably familiar with the expression ‘fake it until you make it’.
Whenever you take on a mask and identify yourself with it, subconsciously you feel incongruent or conflicted with yourself. It doesn’t matter what type of mask you are wearing – you can be wearing a ‘positive’ mask or a ‘negative’ one – but deep down inside you know you’re not true to yourself and it doesn’t feel good.
Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse for terminally ill patients wrote about the five recurring themes that haunted many of the people she cared for. She found that the number one regret of the dying was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Other surveys about peoples’ regrets before they die revealed similar wishes such as, “I wish I’d cared less about what other people think” and “I wish I had lived my own life rather than how society taught me to live.”
People wish they had been more authentic and lived true to who they were. They wish they had felt no need to prove themselves and had just been their true selves.
- Are you living true to yourself?
- How do you feel when you have to fake it and ‘play the game’ at work to fit in?
- Are you feeling foreign in your own skin? Why do we feel the need to fake it in the first place?
We act certain ways to have the approval of others because we have a strong need to belong and we fear rejection and criticism. This is deeply rooted in our animal survival instinct. You can put on a happy face, and to some degree, that will change your mood. But, during those times when you take away distractions and you have to sit alone with yourself, feeling like an imposter will make you feel like you’re crawling out of your own skin.
So… Are you ready to break through the neurotic imposture?
Let me share with you 3 tips to start the journey to back to your authentic self:
- Focus on progress, not perfection. Strive for continuous improvement instead of perfection and measure your progress as you go.
- Nothing happens by mistakes. What got you where you are is not an accident. Take the time to reflect on your journey, and you’ll realise sooner or later (but hopefully sooner) that you made it happen. It wasn’t given to you! You did work for it.
- Stop comparing yourself to others. Comparing yourself to others is unfair and it’s definitely not helping. Make a commitment to yourself today to stop comparing from now on!
Breaking through the mask and letting your true authenticity shine forth confidently is within your reach and is what authentic leadership is all about.
In Nutshell:
Feeling like an impostor is more common than you think. It happens at every level of organisation. However, it doesn’t have to continue. With the right strategies, mindset, and the right coach to guide you through, you too can break free from feeling an imposter, feel at home in your own skin, and be confident that the best gift you have to offer is to live authentically.
So, if you’re asking yourself “When can I stop feeling like a fake?” Well, now is a good time to do something about it!
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