So I feel like this is a topic that I see come up a lot in my “Ask Claire” and story Q&A’s but also it’s a topic that I see covered constantly on podcasts, other influencers Q&A’s etc. That being said, it was something that I wanted to touch on today. Earlier this year, I was listening to a podcast where this topic was covered and it gave a really unique perspective on how to handle imposter syndrome so I wanted to share that. I found it really helpful so if any of you are struggling with imposter syndrome I hope it helps you too!

Steven Bartlett is someone who I’ve become more familiar with over the last year or so and I really think he shares some great insights and perspectives (through his Instagram, his podcast, or interviews he’s done). Earlier this year, he was on an episode of Grace Beverley’s podcast Working Hard, Hardly Working where he talked about how he approaches imposter syndrome and I wanted to touch on that today. I highly recommend listening to the whole episode as it really focuses the ways in which you can build your confidence and that is another question that is asked frequently (and I understand that imposter syndrome is part of that). But for this post, I just wanted to attempt to summarize the perspective Steven gave regarding imposter syndrome. His approach really helped me see imposter syndrome is a totally different way.

He was asked if he ever struggles with imposter syndrome and how he works through it, and his response was really interesting (but made so much sense). He essentially said that he doesn’t struggle with imposter syndrome because he is always (intentionally) pushing himself to operate outside of his comfort zone. Therefore, if he’s not struggling with imposter syndrome to some extent then he isn’t challenging himself enough. What I took away from this was that instead of us feeling like imposters when we feel out of our depth or out of our area of comfort, instead we should just acknowledge that it’s a feeling of uncomfortableness because we are challenging ourselves; it is where we are meant to be. If we weren’t feeling that way, we wouldn’t be growing and we wouldn’t be pushing ourselves to be better. When struggling with imposter syndrome, we have this feeling of “I don’t deserve to be here”, “I don’t know what I’m doing”, “I’m way out of my league”. But that was Steven’s point. If you’re not feeling that way then are you really pushing yourself? Are you really trying to move forward to be the best version of you?

Now I’m not say that you have to feel this great sense of uncomfortableness at all times, but the point is, feeling like an “imposter” isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a place where we could all probably strive to be more often. Anyway, hearing this perspective really helped me redefine what I would normally classify as the feeling of “imposter syndrome” so hopefully this helped you with that as well!