STOP saying “Imposter Syndrome” –say this instead

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Okay. I dare you… to stop saying imposter syndrome.

Today, I'm gonna challenge you with an idea that maybe just maybe imposter syndrome as we know it, as we feel it when say that about ourselves, we're feeling that, ––might not be real.

I know, right?

You're like, ' Yes, it is. I felt that too!'

And you're right. I felt it. I felt it at every new turn, every new thing that I've ever done in my business.

But what I have learned in the past week, which was mind-blowing for me, is that maybe just, maybe it's not actually imposter syndrome that I'm feeling.

Let me explain, but first, before I do that, if we haven't met.

My name is Katelyn. I run Launch the Damn Thing!™️. I am a Squarespace web designer and educator because I love to teach people all of the things and tools and tech and mindset tips that I have learned over the past several years.

And if you're not new here, welcome back. I am so glad you came back because today's episode is going to be really special.

Is Imposter Syndrome "Real?"

Is imposter syndrome real? Technically speaking, it's a real feeling that we are feeling, but we're calling it the wrong thing.

I think so. I did not come up with this on my own. I have to give credit where credit is due.

Last week I was listening to the Mel Robbins podcast and I love her podcast, but I don't get to listen as much as I would like to because her episodes tend to be on the lengthy side. This particular one was about two hours long.

It is worth every minute though, so you can play it in the background while you're doing something mindless, so you actually pay attention to what she is saying.

But at 1 hour and 47 minutes in, some viewer of her audience called in or they played a clip of her and she was saying that she's scared to move forward because she has imposter syndrome, and we've all been there.

We've all experienced what that feels like.

And so the clip ends. Mel gets back on screen and she says, 'can we all just stop saying imposter syndrome?'

––I was like **RECORD SCRATCH** 😳👀
‘I like where this is going, where is this going go?’

Basically, her point was that "imposter" is implying that we are doing something that we are not actually doing, which is not the case.

So when I first started being a web designer, I had imposter syndrome about calling myself a web designer, but I wasn't actually an imposter. I was designing websites.

So Mel says, when you're new to something, you're a beginner. That's literally it. You're a beginner.

You're a student.

You are learning.

You're not faking it.

You're not pretending to be something that you're not actually doing!

What to say INSTEAD

So let's stop calling ourselves an imposter! Let's call ourselves a student.

The difference is when you call yourself an imposter, you are saying, I am doing something or saying I'm going to do something that I'm not actually going to do.

Or I'm saying that I'm good at something that I'm not actually good at.

Or you're basically saying you're a conman, or I'm a conman an imposter. That's not the way we need to think about ourselves.

If you think about it like, 'so-and-so is an imposter because he is pretending to be doctor, he doesn't a medical license.' Like that's bad. That's not what we're doing. No.

That's like a negative mindset to be in, right? Because you're, it's almost like putting a pre limitation on a thing.

Whereas, if you switch gears and you say, I am a web designer. I'm learning to be a web designer. I'm a student.

That implies you're jumping in, you're figuring it out, and you're chipping away at something.

And I like that a lot better. That's a positive light to put this in.

Listen to Mel Robbin's episode!

I shared this in a group and people are responding to it like hot cakes. So I thought this is a great thing put out there into ether where it's not limited to just group and everybody can benefit.

And hopefully, you can go listen to the whole podcast episode. I will link that below the video, so you can go check it out for yourself. Definitely worth a listen. She interviews Amy Porterfield, there's also a bunch of mindset hacks about manifestation and stuff like that.

Leaning into "Woo-Woo?"

One thing I will note. Is that over the years, so I started my business in 2015. I didn't go full-time until 2020. Just imagine that. And I've been full-time in my business ever since.

Along those eight years, I have learned that the more successful business owners tend to be, the longer they're in business, it's almost like an unspoken rule that we become more "woo-woo."

I've never been a "woo-woo" type of person myself, but I will say I'm leaning into that more and more because I'm noticing that parts of that seem to be true.

A lot of our success in our business is rooted in where our mind is. And I understand that from a logical perspective because if we are talking about how successful we want to be, how we want to do a thing, but we're too scared to do it.

You see where I'm going with this? Like our actions are based on our thoughts are focused. So if our thoughts are focused around imposter syndrome, and our thoughts are focused around, I can't because a list excuses, which I've also had...

Story-time - My biggest barrier to entry

When I first started my business, we lived in a rural area where we were severely limited on our internet options.

We had dial up, and I am not kidding. I had two different houses we lived in, which were 7 to 20 miles outside of town. So I mean, not like an hour outside of anything, like 20 minutes outside of anything. Dial up was one option, was not really an option, and the other was satellite internet.

Which was decent in speed, but it had a data cap and the kind of data cap you would expect from a cell phone service, which is not, does not work for an entire household and for just my husband and I, we would eat through that very quickly if we were not careful. That meant absolutely no streaming, no Netflix, no Hulu, no HBO Max.

None of that stuff. We actually had to buy the satellite TV package with it so that we could have TV if we wanted it.

No streaming, no video calls with clients, no recording video and uploading it to YouTube. And if family came over, God forbid, we would eat through it in like an hour because our data cap on that plan was literally like 5 or 10 gigabytes per month for everybody.

We luckily found a business plan that went up to a whopping 30 gigabytes per month. But it wasn't until we got into a house that actually could have high speed cable internet, when my business started to expand.

So that was a really valid excuse for me because I felt like there was a lot of barriers to being an online entrepreneur when I couldn't do video or video streaming.

Even buying a course where the episodes and lessons were all in video, even that was tough. I'd have to string it out over a long period time so that I didn't eat through all of my data, just watching the lessons.

Negativity closes our awareness

So we all have very real excuses, but if we focus on the negative, I wholeheartedly believe that prevents us from seeing opportunities, ways that we can explore and expand and grow.

It prevents us from possibly taking action or becoming the type of person that would take the action to be more successful because we were not open to that path.

It all starts in our mind

So that's my long way of saying entrepreneurs in this day and age, like the more successful you get when you start going from like freelance side hustle into stage two of your business, which is like you're aiming now for like the six-figure mark or whatever.

I feel like there's definitely an unspoken rule that's like we're all expected to be more "woo-woo" or, or not that we're expected to, but we all just naturally become more "woo-woo" because there's just so much to consider. We have so many decisions to make and we have to become this other type of person in order to see all of these available things. For us to decide which path to take.

What kind of person do I need to be in order to start a YouTube channel? Like I'm an introvert. I've never wanted to be the center of attention, and here I am, literally putting myself in that position and it actually doesn't bother me anymore. It used to.

So I think, in order to be in a place where we're okay to make those decisions, ––being on YouTube has actually found me additional clients. Blogging every week found me nearly all of my clients for years.

And so I continue to do that because it tends to be a positive thing, but I had to step outside of my comfort zone in order to start doing those things.

I do feel imposter syndrome at every stage of growth in my business because I am becoming a student again. Right?

Just because you grow out of imposter syndrome once, doesn't mean you'll never feel it again. You just feel it again for a different reason.

But I want us to stop calling it imposter syndrome.

I am with you, Mel. I 100% believe that this is something that we should stop saying, because she's absolutely right.

We are not faking it till we make it. We are not pretending to be something that we're not. I actively design websites. I design my own, I design websites for clients.

I design stuff in VIP Days, like I've been a designer for like 20 years now!

So it's ridiculous for me to say I have imposter syndrome about anything, because if I am starting to do something where I start to feel that feeling, whatever we're gonna call it, It's because I'm becoming a student. I'm picking up an additional skill. I'm becoming good at that additional skill, right?

So I want to challenge you to stop calling it imposter syndrome.

Stop, stop, stop. That's not what it is.

Not knowing “enough"

I won't say that it's not real. It's a very real feeling that we're experiencing, but I think that is more around the fear of the unknown. If we're stepping into a space that we're uncomfortable in, we maybe feel guilty for charging for it because we don't feel good enough.

So the second part of this is that ultimately that feeling is boiling down to a belief of we don't "know enough," which is accurate.

Right? That's why we're scared.

We don't know "enough" yet.

When I first started feeling imposter syndrome about doing websites, it was because I knew I didn't know enough yet, but I was still doing it.

I was still doing it, and I was learning along the way, and I was getting better along the way. I still learn things with every new project.

And I love that about this industry; that I will never know "enough" because that means I'm always learning.

So if you look at it from that perspective, you're not talking about, uh, "I don't know enough. I can't be enough, I can't charge enough. No one will want to hire me."

You're gonna push that feeling onto other people. They're going to feel that from you. You're going to radiate a lack of confidence and potentially even the fear.

That is absolutely going to translate into people being in return, afraid to hire you because you don't appear confident in what you do.

I'm just gonna put that out there and you're like, whoa, okay. Uh, cuz that's how I felt when I finally realized that.

So I just want to reiterate to you the feeling of fear that we get that we're calling imposter syndrome. It's based most likely in the fact you know that you don't know enough.

The Opposite of Imposter Syndrome isn't “better"

And I just want to tell you that, that's actually a really good thing because you recognize that you need to learn more.

The very fact that you are not arrogantly sitting there saying, " I know everything that there is to know about this topic, and I don't need to know anymore."

That's, that's, I won't say that that's a wrong way to behave, but it's not an admirable behavior. I think that we can always learn, in any industry, in any topic.

My husband is notorious know--, like just knowing facts. He's like a walking encyclopedia. And so I have learned over the years when I have just a spark of a question, 'why is it that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.'

And I'll ask him, and most of the time he knows the answers. Sometimes he'll just look at me and say like, 'I don't know. Why would you think I know that?' And it's like, 'because you know everything.'

But the point is that no, he doesn't know everything. He just reads a lot. He's interested and curious.

And I think that becoming curious ourselves and recognizing the fact that there will always be stuff to learn, especially in an online business. Especially in a tech-based business like being a web designer, there will always be new things because there are always going to be new tech trends. New design trends. Your audience is going to pivot and evolve as you pivot and evolve in your own business.

Who you wanna work with might change, your industry or your niche might change. You might pivot from actually service-based business to product-based business or education-based business. There are changes all the time.

So just because you learn a thing doesn't mean like that's it. There's no more to do. This is all I will ever do and all I will ever be good at.

No!

You'll either get tired of the thing or you'll want to expand, do more things. You'll hire a team, you'll expand your business, you'll change your audience.

There's always this awesome ebb and flow. And if you're the type of person that loves learning, this is like an excellent industry for you to be in because it is always going to require you to learn.

So I think that it's a really good thing if you're sitting there thinking, I don't know enough.

Because that recognizes that you are not an arrogant person. You are not ignoring the fact that there is more to learn. There will always be more to learn.

And that means you're open to learning! Right?

If you're saying, I, I know everything that I need to know. ––In fact, my mom might kill me for saying this on YouTube, but she was a director of education at her company for a while and she was training when she announced her retirement, she was training this person who came to her and they literally told her (their boss), ' I don't know why I know so much, but I just do.'

Like, can you imagine? I mean, who has the balls to say something like that? She was serious. She wasn't joking.

So if you're that person, you're not open to learning more because you think you know it all already that's not a desirable character trait, I'm sorry to say.

You're doing good!

So I think that if you're even worried about this topic in general, you're doing good. There's more to learn and you know it. There's more to learn and you can do it.

So my challenge to you is to stop saying imposter syndrome and also go check out that podcast, the link below this video and put it on while you're doing laundry, or put it on while you're doing dishes or like something where you can actually hear what she's saying because there are some great, fantastic, golden nuggets in that episode that really spoke to me and made me share today's thought with you.

So that's it. That's all I have to say.

I hope this was helpful for you. If so, make sure you like subscribe because that allows me to keep bringing you awesome content and I will see you in the next video.