Ego is at the Heart of Impostor Syndrome
Check yourself before you wreck yourself
Your worse enemy
“God, I feel so stupid and useless…I‘m not doing enough for our team’” I tiredly mutter to myself aloud, after hanging up from a Teams meeting, wondering when I’ll be laid off for underperforming. It is probably the third time such sentiment has left my lips this week. Not that I’ve specifically done anything stupid recently, but I just hadn’t felt as productive as I should be, or as I have been for the decade prior. Of course, they don’t know how good I was at previous employers; they’re accepting of my current performance…but for how long?
The dangerous part of negative thinking is that it has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy if left unchecked. A few months ago, my employer hosted a lunch and learn about impostor syndrome, and from it, I drew parallels with my own personal experiences with anxiety and depression. What do these have in common? Negative self-talk.
The problem with negative self-talk is that the amount of time and energy you waste on these thoughts will help reinforce them. As with general anxiety, the more you tell yourself something, the more you believe it. When your beliefs become a narrative, your everyday thoughts and fears can be picked up by the brain as danger, which…