Episode 33- Reframing Imposter Syndrome: From Self-Doubt to Aspiring Forward

Welcome to the Graceful Confidence Podcast. I'm your host, Lauren Debick, the founder of Life Coaching with Lauren, a female empowerment coach, an entrepreneur, empath, and a lover of the ego-friendly lifestyle.

My mission is to help women take control of their lives by teaching them how to increase their confidence in an authentic and genuine way so they can achieve both personal and professional goals. I will share ways to increase your confidence, tips on how to integrate grace into your life, as well as stories and advice from other experts on how we can better empower ourselves and those around us.

I will show you exactly how to use the power of confidence and grace to create an empowering and invigorating life that you are excited about waking up to every single day. Now, let's dive in. Hello, and thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of the Graceful Confidence Podcast. I am so excited about this episode. When we got done having our conversation, I told the guest RJ that I felt like this was a warm hug or a warm cup of coffee.

It soothed my soul and it made me feel so much better. So I really hope that you are able to take something away from this conversation that is beneficial and soul soothing to you as well. I had reached out to RJ because I know that he speaks on the topic of what I called previously to our conversation imposter syndrome.

He reframes it as imposter feelings, which you'll hear more of in the episode. And he is so well spoken on this topic and really did a good job at shifting the perspective about how I myself think about this topic and how I can better manage these feelings and what it really means. So I am so excited for you to listen to my conversation with RJ Jenkins.

RJ is an educator, higher education administrator, and institutional consultant specializing in organizational capacity development and cultural transition. As Director of Education for the Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration, RJ develops resources and programs that help thousands of veterans and active duty service members each year achieve success in the college classroom and the civilian workforce.

RJ also works closely with private and public institutions nationwide to build more inclusive professional cultures and foster better communication and greater resilience among individuals and teams. In Ocala, RJ serves on both the board of the Marion County Literacy Council and the Riley Arts Center. I hope you enjoy our conversation. RJ, thank you so much for being on this episode of the Graceful Confidence podcast. How are you today?

I'm doing great. It's my pleasure to be here, Lauren. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being here.

So RJ, I reached out because I am doing a presentation in January. And as I was starting to prepare it, starting to go through my notes, I was really experiencing some feelings of imposter syndrome. Like who am I to speak on this topic? The topic being motherhood and working and doing all of the things. And I'm like, well, you do that. That's who you are. So as I started to have these conversations with some friends, I realized that a lot of us are suffering

from this imposter syndrome, like thinking, who am I to do this? What is my value? And you were the first person that came to mind. And I thought, if I'm having these questions, if my friend group is having these questions, I think a lot of people could benefit from hearing the expert on imposter syndrome and how we can get through this, what is it, and answer all the questions about it.

So with that, how do you personally define imposter syndrome? Well, Lauren, first of all, I just want to say these conversations start with vulnerability. So you sort of coming out of the closet and admitting that you've been asked to give this talk and that you're feeling a certain amount of self-doubt or a little bit of insecurity around it, I think is where all of these conversations start. And it's also where we're sort of reframing this and re-imagining it begins as well.

There's no way for us to sort of put it on the table, look at it and think about it more productively if we're not having the conversation. I do, I have to tell you, I do think it's amazing that you as a mother of four children with two young twins who is also working full-time don't think that you're qualified to talk about working in motherhood. This is the sort of tricky thing about imposter syndrome, right? Is that it affects people who...

Have every reason to feel confident about the thing that they're doing. And yet it sort of pops up. Your question was, how do I define imposter syndrome? I'll tell you that for the remainder of the conversation, I'll be referring to it as either imposter phenomenon or imposter feelings. And the reason for that is I think that the syndrome language is sort of damaging. And we'll talk a little bit later about why that is.

But imposter phenomenon or imposter feelings are a sort of pervasive feeling of self-doubt or insecurity despite evidence that you are welcome, worthy, and deserving, right? And I think that the second piece of that is the important piece. There are all types of insecurity or self-doubt that are genuine and that make sense, right?

There are certain forms of self-doubt that just make sense. If someone were to ask me to get on a balance beam in five minutes and perform a routine, I would experience self-doubt because I haven't been on a balance beam since I was about four years old. If someone asked me to stand next to Ariana Grande on the set of Wicked and play the part of Elphaba, I would experience self-doubt, right?

Because I don't have that particular skill set, despite what I sound like in my car when I'm- I was going to say, I feel like you can sing pretty well and like you know those songs but i hear you so anyway i i think where where where imposter feelings are really interesting is that there's there's that self-doubt insecurity.

Feeling like you don't fully belong feeling out of place in your environment despite all kinds of evidence and data that suggests that in fact you should feel confident you should feel secure you are qualified, you do belong. And so it's a kind of cognitive dissonance that I think is really interesting. And I came to the work because I work with veterans of the United States Armed Forces who are pursuing a college degree.

I work with veterans across the United States who are pursuing college with their post-9-11 GI benefits, worked with that population for a very long time. And I saw in that population a lot of insecurity about whether or not they were cut out for college, whether or not they were worthy of a college degree, how is what I learned in the military going to help me in the college classroom? So I started seeing it over and over again. And that's really what sparked my interest in imposter feelings.

Have you ever experienced imposter feelings? Oh, Lord. I'm having them right now. Having them right. I think anytime, Lauren, anytime anyone, I mean, unless you're like a narcissist, I feel like anytime anyone ever approaches you and says, you know, you have expertise. I don't, I don't, I always have this little back formation of like, could, is that possible? I think you and I talked about this the other day, right? At what point does a person get to say that they have expertise in anything?

And I still sort of get an icky feeling about that word, despite the fact that I've now spent the better part of 15 years really thinking about this topic. I get it all the time. So yes, I have. And I think you're familiar. I did a TEDx talk last year here in Ocala about this topic. And it's sort of one of the ways that people have discovered that this is something that I think about.

And the story that I tell there that I'll retell here briefly is that I was raised in Sarasota, Florida, the child of a Long Island railroad worker and a cocktail waitress who met in Long Island and moved us to Florida when I was young. We grew up in a fairly rural community. I raised Nubian dairy goats for 4-H, grew radishes for the county fair. We had a really cool childhood in that way. But when I left high school, I got admitted to Columbia University in New York City.

I'm still not exactly sure how that happened either. But there they are again, the imposter feelings. And the first person I met there was a young woman named Ariana. And she asked me what I had done over my summer. And I told her that I had spent my summer taking care of my special needs baby sister, Olivia, so that both of my parents could work full time.

And then I asked her what she had done with her summer. And she told me that she had spent her summer traveling across Southeast Asia as a classically trained oboe player with the New York International Youth Philharmonic or whatever.

And I just remember very vividly in that moment feeling just like a complete fraud, feeling like I had absolutely no right to be where I was and asking myself, what right do I have talking to, let alone going to school with a classically trained oboe player who had spent the summer traveling the world sharing the gift of her talent? right? That feeling is that imposter phenomenon. Ariana was doing nothing wrong in that moment. She wasn't flexing on me. She wasn't trying to intimidate me.

She was simply describing her. Her experience and my experience were so unbelievably different that it was very difficult for me to not feel like I didn't belong in the conversation and by extension that I didn't belong in the setting. I didn't belong having the experience. I wasn't worthy of being in this place. And just to be clear, that was a me issue. Right, right. That was a me thing. It would have been different if Ariana had come at it and tried to intimidate me or make me feel unwelcome.

And I want to say that really like right up front here. When people in your world or when your environment is actively communicating to you implicitly or explicitly that you do not belong, and then you feel like you don't belong, that's not imposter feelings, right? That's just you having a healthy response to a toxic environment. Right. So I do just want to be clear that there are more and less inclusive spaces. There are more and less inclusive environments.

And I talk to folks all the time. I'll tell you, especially women in corporate America who say to me, how do I determine the difference between my own imposter feelings and an environment that's not welcoming? And very, very often what they're interpreting as imposter feelings is in fact them just picking up really clear signals from their environment that their opinion is not valued in the same way as other opinions.

So it's a little tricky to parse that out. Certainly for me in that first conversation with Ariana, she wasn't doing that to me, but my imposter feelings were getting the better of me. And it took me a really long time at Columbia and in other spaces to figure out how to to manage that. So let's talk a little bit about that for a minute.

How did you learn how to manage that and then taking that a step further when you do have these conversations with the veterans that you work with and other people that you have conversations with about this topic? How do we manage this? How do we work through it? Yeah. So I'll say a little thing and then a bigger thing.

The little thing I'll say is that I have never seen anyone make any real progress on thinking about this more productively if they weren't in conversation with supportive people in their life, right? So what I did is I had a professor in my first semester. And there's another sort of funny story. I remember that on the first day of classes at Columbia, my professor, my literature professor, his name was Michael Seidel. He was a Joyce scholar.

He asked the question, what did you think of the Iliad, which was the sort of epic poem that we had been assigned over the summer. And I was ready to answer the question. I had read it twice over the summer just to be sort of extra prepared for the conversation. And this young man next to me raised his hand and he proceeded in front of the whole class to take issue with the English translation of the Greek text that we had been assigned because he found the translation a little pedestrian.

And this kid from across the table was like, oh, thank God someone said it, right?

And I was thinking to myself like oh thank god someone's I I'm not even sure Lauren if I'm being totally honest I I'm not even sure I really had grasped that we were reading a translation of a I you know what I mean sure yeah I was ready to be like I like the book you know and so I I became very withdrawn in that class which is interesting because literature was my sort of the love of my academic life in high school he noticed

that I was pretty withdrawn the instructor did the instructor did. Yeah. He noticed and he invited me to his office hours and I just decided to be honest with him. So the first answer to your question is, I think the first step forward is vulnerability. And I know vulnerability is having a real renaissance at the moment. People are really starting to re-understand vulnerability thanks to the work of Brene Brown and others as a kind of superpower.

And I could have gone into that office and told him that nothing was wrong and that everything was fine. And instead, I just told him that I really felt like a person like me. Didn't deserve an opportunity like this. And he had the opportunity to share with me that he was from working class South Boston. And now he's sitting in front of the room as a professor at Columbia University. And all of a sudden, I felt seen, right?

All of a sudden, the person, the most important person in the room seemed to have more in common with me than with a lot of the other kids at the table, right? Because where imposter feelings come from, Lauren, is they come from a perception of difference between yourself and the majority of people around you. That's why we see higher rates of imposter feelings in women, in people of color, and especially in women of color.

It's why I see them in veterans who tend to be at least 10 years older than their peers in college settings. I hear this from male-identified public school teachers who are just in, especially in elementary school settings, right? Any place where you are and you can perceive a meaningful difference between yourself and the rest of the people around you, it starts to sort of ignite and spark these feelings. So that's answer number one.

Answer number two, I think is, and something I've been working really hard on, is trying to re-understand these feelings and talk a little bit about the way we talk about them. There's the feelings themselves, but then there's the way we talk about them in culture.

And the fact is, is that when you go onto the internet and you go into the Google machine and you try to learn about imposter feelings, what you are going to be told over and over again is that having imposter syndrome, which is what it is almost always going to be called, having imposter syndrome is your problem. Having imposter syndrome is a personal or moral failing that you need to work to correct.

Everywhere you look, you're going to see it described as something to be managed, mitigated, treated, or cured. And the self-help industry, right? And the podcast world and all of that stuff has really kind of grasped onto this thing because it's an easy way to convince people that they have a problem that they then need to solve, right? Sure. And we love offering people ways to solve it.

And I actually think as I've worked with folks who experience this stuff, including you right now, who's saying, I'm going to go do this thing and I'm kind of managing this. I think what you're managing is not so much the feelings, but the awareness of the way we talk about the feelings as something surely that must be bad that

we need to figure out or manage or treat. And you, I'm increasingly convinced, Lauren, that that way of thinking about it is a little bit of a gaslighting way to think about imposter feelings. Because what I've discovered in my work is that I have never, not one time ever, worked with a student or a colleague who's been experiencing imposter feelings who wasn't always already engaged in a moment of aspiration. A moment of striving. A moment of trying something new, taking a risk,

pushing themselves outside their comfort zones, right? So here you are, Lauren. You're being asked to give a presentation in a space that's new for you. That's an aspirational act. And so lo and behold, these imposter feelings start to pop up, right? And to me, what that's actually telling us is not that we're broken, but that we're aspiring.

And so for me, the other analogy I use is like when we go to the gym and we do something new or something difficult, and then we experience discomfort, we immediately interpret that discomfort as a sign of growth, as a sign that we're doing something right. But when we experience discomfort professionally, when we experience discomfort socially, we immediately assume that that is a bad discomfort and then we should avoid it or try to mitigate it.

But so to me, imagine a world in which you said, RJ, I'm going to go give this presentation and I'm having a little bit of, I'm just feeling a little uncomfortable or a little insecure. Imagine if instead of me saying to you, Lauren, oh, don't worry, that's imposter syndrome. You're fine. Imagine if I said to you, oh, that's awesome. That thing you're experiencing is called aspiration discomfort. You're experiencing aspiration discomfort or, oh my God, Lauren,

that is so cool. do you know what that is? That's striving fatigue. The thing you're experiencing is striving fatigue or, oh my God, Lauren, that is so cool. The fact that you're experiencing that feeling in the wake of this opportunity means that's called being awesome soreness, right? Or whatever you want to call it. And I just think, I really do think that that reframing,

is important because one, I think it's true. And I think it moves us away from this sort of pathologized narrative that when you experience discomfort as a product of aspiration, that you're somehow broken and you need to fix yourself.

But also, I think when we start talking about this thing in different ways, we actually mitigate the negative impacts that it has on us in a variety of ways. That's the longest answer in the world to the question you ask, but there you have it. I love that answer. That is such a strong analogy between the gym and professional settings. As someone who runs and trains and does things like that, you're absolutely right. We think about it in two very different ways when it's the same thing.

Just to push this a step further real quick, imagine for a moment, imagine you hired a personal trainer to make you stronger. And after three weeks of working with that personal trainer, you experienced no soreness. You experienced no physical discomfort as a result of the training regimen that that trainer puts you through. Lauren, how would you interpret that? If you felt no discomfort. I'm not doing anything.

Something's not right that's right that's right you'd feel cheated yeah essentially right you'd feel cheated okay and i think like that's like that's universally understood that like that would be a sign that something wasn't happening the way it was supposed to right so now i have students come to come to a university which is essentially a very expensive personal trainer for your brain, right? They get in there and after four or five, six weeks, they start experiencing discomfort.

And instead of saying, oh my God, it's working. They say, I should have never been here in the first place. They immediately interpret it somehow. In the gym, they interpret discomfort as growth. And in college, they interpret discomfort as proof that they don't belong there and that they should have never been there in the first place.

Or when we experience it professionally, when we get critical feedback at work, or when we don't achieve something professionally, it's like, why was I even doing this? I don't know how to get the gym mindset to extend into other realms of our experience, but I think we need to figure out how, because it's actually a very healthy mindset. And I think Americans uniquely, because we're such gym people, we just get, we get something at the gym that we're not getting in other parts of our life.

And, and, and a caveat that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as distress. Right? Let's be clear about that too, right? Like there is a type of discomfort after the gym that is not positive discomfort, right? It's not aspiration discomfort. It's an injury, right? Those are different. And it is possible to experience injury in other parts of our life as well. So what I'm not trying to do is spit out a toxic positivity thing, right?

Like we're not doing toxic positivity here. We're not saying that all discomfort is awesome. There are different types. But what I am saying is I think we need to lean into the notion that certain amounts of discomfort in other kinds of settings might be a sign that we're not messing up. It might be a sign that we're doing something right, not doing something wrong.

So digging into that concept even a little further, let's go beyond the imposter feeling. So does it come down to self-belief and confidence? Is that like the underlying foundation for it? I think self-belief and confidence are part of it. You know, what's hard about confidence, Lauren, is I challenge people all the time in my work to describe confidence without using the word confidence. It's actually very tricky, right? It's a really tricky thing.

Usually the way we describe confidence is by using a bunch of synonyms for confidence, right? And then we sort of like, we're like, I did it. Yes. I mean, that's the answer, part of the answer. I think another part of the answer is open and honest conversation and communication with people around you, right?

So we need to stop hiding from each other and build communities of practice around vulnerability openness honesty transparency as a way of doing business right i think i think there's a there's a lot of there are a lot of people hiding this stuff because they worry it will be viewed as a liability and i understand that because look at go on the internet and look right right so i think i think so part of it is having confidence part of it is being more vulnerable as a way of doing business.

I also think that we need to get really serious. And I think we've done a better job of this as a culture. I'm not exactly sure what the future holds in this way, but we have to be more comfortable holding individuals and entities, institutions, corporations, schools, higher education settings, workplaces, more responsible for being more integrative as cultures, being more inclusive. So much of what people experience as imposter feelings are, in fact.

Cultural facts at various institutions or various places that are in fact communicating to people that they're not particularly welcome, right? And again, those are two very different things. If you are in a fully inclusive, and I know, I mean, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole here. I know the word inclusive has become a little bit tricky politically. I mean it in the most neutral way possible, which is that,

everybody is welcome, that everyone is valuable. I don't mean it in a politically charged way. And maybe the better word is equitable. That seems to be a little bit more comfortable for people. But when our environments become more equitable, imposter feelings become less prevalent because people are not perceiving that they're different from the group. And I just think it's and that doesn't mean by the way that individual difference isn't a strength because of course it is.

But so yeah, I think yes, we need to have confidence. Yes, we need to believe in ourselves. Those are tricky skills too. I think I'm sure you've talked about this before, but like confidence, just like empathy, just like a whole myriad of other things. We're accustomed to thinking of them as qualities you either have or don't have. That person is empathetic. That person is confident.

I don't know that thinking about them as qualities that are innate or inherent is the right way to think about them. I think it's better to think about confidence as a skill, empathy as a skill.

So the other cool thing is that understanding that we can build these parts of ourselves and grow these skill sets, I think is empowering. Absolutely. And one of the things that I have talked about in previous episodes as it relates to confidence is being afraid and doing it anyway, which I think can come back to imposter feelings and the aspirational distress. So being scared and getting out there and doing it anyway, and then slowly that

builds up your confidence. And those feelings may always be there. But I do believe it's a skill set that can be built. Yeah. I mean, let me push it. I mean, let me throw Miracle Girl on it, right? Like being afraid and doing it anyway, or being afraid and doing it because you are. That's the reason, right? Put yourself in situations where you're, and you're right. I say this all the, see, this is the issue you've got, you've got me all amped up.

This is the issue of, if you Google after this episode, if you Google imposter syndrome or imposter phenomenon, you'll see an article from the American Psychological Association that says how to cure imposter syndrome, right? And it's the American Psychological Association. This isn't some weird blogger or something. That word cure, it's just so hard for me to express how problematic I find that word. Because first of all, it suggests all the thing it suggests about imposter feelings

and how negative they are that they require curing. Sure. But also the idea of a cure suggests that somehow once you manage it one time, then you're all set, right? And then you're done. And what I say to my veterans all the time, and my higher education professionals who are serving veterans, right? If you're living your life correctly, they will never go away. Imposter feelings will never go away, because they are a product of aspiration.

The only way you can cure, I have the cure, by the way, I don't know if I've ever told you that I have the cure to imposter feelings. It's never leaving your couch ever again. Don't do anything. Sit on the couch with the rescue beagles for the rest of your life. And then you will never, I mean, I promise you, you will never experience an imposter feeling ever again, because you will be the master of your environment.

And I do want to say here, like, that this is not, I'm not trying to wage a war against comfort. I'm not trying to wage a war against moments in our life where it's okay to just feel confident where we are and be where we are. I think, again, this is a little bit of a product of American thinking.

Like if we're not constantly aspiring that we're somehow failing by default that's a do you know what i mean oh i i am i know that that hits close to home rj yeah i know exactly what you mean yeah like this notion that somehow like if you know i ran a marathon i met a goal and now i'm not going to run another one makes us a failure because we're not continued right like we have to start being more selective about the places in our world where we're going to aspire

on purpose and the places in our world where we're going to retreat. Because the other thing is there are facts of our life that count as aspiration by default. Like you raising these twin babies. That's aspirational work. It happens to not be something you can make choices about day in and day out, right? It's pretty mandatory aspirational work. But so maybe for a period of time when we're raising two tiny twins, we don't necessarily have to be aspiring in every single other part of our life

on purpose, right? You know what I'm talking. It's all the things. What they say is you can have everything, but not all at the same time. Sure. That's right. That's right. There's different seasons for sure. I think that's right. And we have to... Maybe the last thing I'll say on this particular piece is I have started talking more and more, especially with higher education professionals who serve certain groups of students, the sort of corollary to imposter feelings.

And again, it's not a corrective or a curative because I don't think anything needs to be cured. I think these are, I mean, if you looked in my LinkedIn profile, right, I have the word imposter in my self-description. I'm tired of people running away from that word, but I do think that a really beautiful compliment to experiencing imposter feelings as part of aspirational work is also cultivating a practice of grace giving. We are terrible self grace givers.

We can bestow grace all over the planet. We can bestow it to our colleagues. We can bestow it to our students, to our children, to our spouses. And then we look in the mirror and all of a sudden the most grace giving person on the planet becomes the stingiest person you've ever met. When we're looking at the mirror at earth, like I'm getting a little, whatever, even talking about it. Like we are not good at giving ourselves grace.

And I find that people who experience imposter feelings are especially bad at it. And I don't know what that's about. Right. But we have incredibly high performance standards. We're hard on ourselves. We're hungry for feedback. We're trying to grow. And so somehow, the voice in our heads tends to be not super nice to us when we're talking to ourselves. And so I think there's got to be some of that too, right? There's just we've got to get better at giving ourselves some grace.

So for people like us who have these imposter feelings and we're hard on ourselves, when we are up against people who think they're the shit without any real evidence like how how do we handle that uh oh lauren i if it wasn't nine o'clock i'd i'd open a bottle of wine for this question how do people who who. Manage imposter feelings, how do we go up against, interact productively with, and compete with people who appear to be either confident or overconfident, right?

Yeah, I would argue overconfident or even egotistical or narcissistic about their abilities.

Yes, yes. And what's interesting about this is in my reframe of imposter feelings, I ultimately get to a place where I think about imposter feelings as a symptom of humility, right as a kind of humble leadership servant leadership so the question you're really asking is how does the humble person kind of stack up against the narcissist there you go yep and i'm going to tell you something like so here's the hard answer to the question uh most at least corporate settings

i've been in and many classroom settings i've been in the structures of those spaces provide perverse incentives to benefit the narcissist over the humble person, right?

I come up against when I do work with folks at JPMorgan Chase or at Amazon or at AAA or wherever these corporate settings or elite institutions of higher learning, people say to me all the time, I love this reframe and I appreciate that I can understand myself as a humble person rather than a broken person, but I'm still surrounded by people out here who are self-promotional.

Overconfident, feel not only that they don't belong, but feel entitled to be in every chair they're in, feel like every articulation that they make is the most important articulation in the room. Two things I would say about that. One is I, and please challenge me. I have never met a narcissist who wasn't actually just a walking overcompensation for their own imposter feelings.

100%. I would agree with that. Right? Like, I mean, barring some sort of real anomaly most narcissistic behavior most overconfidence especially in men is coming from a place of deep insecurity right the best defense is a good offense right so i i i find that i find that when you when you sort of understand that a lot of performative narcissism is just fear. It makes these people less threatening and a little easier to manage, negotiate, and even work with.

So much of what's difficult about narcissists is that you just don't want to make you so off-putting, right? Right. So I think it's important for us to keep in mind that a lot of that is not actually strength.

That's usually weakness the other thing i would say is and i i have this conversation, it feels like almost weekly with women in my life who are up against this in their workplaces or sometimes even in their homes in the workplace i think it's key to find allies and, And start to build a network of allyship around some of these issues, right? So figure out who in your organization, figure out who in your space sees what you're seeing, right?

Because I don't think that this thing can be taken on by individuals all the time. In fact, I don't know that that's the most productive way to do it. I think it really does take kind of change a little bit higher up. And it can only be done with allyship. Veterans need civilian allies. LGBTQ folks need straight allies. Women need men in their organizations to see them, and all that stuff. But I mean, is it tricky, Lauren? It's unbelievably tricky.

I don't know that I have beyond understanding that most narcissism is a projection and beyond understanding that you need allyship in order to start to create changes. It's a hard thing. And I see it a lot. I see it a lot. Well, I think those are two strong suggestions and strategies on how to start to have that conversation and think about it. You work a lot with leadership, leaders, aspiring leaders. So are these conversations that are happening with those different leadership groups?

So when you're talking about changes in corporate settings or in the home or different community organizations, because I agree, I think a lot of this does start from the leadership team. So is there hope that these conversations for.

Coming up against narcissists, but also the imposter feelings and doing things because you're afraid anyway, and giving people the opportunities to experience things that will make them more confident. Are those happening, those conversations? I think they are. I certainly have seen, I mean, I would say that we're in a, and we have been for a little while, at least in a non-cognitive skill revolution, a soft skill revolution, right?

Obviously, we've known about the power of soft skills for a long time. I don't even like calling them soft skills because there's nothing soft about relationship building. There's nothing soft about building genuine connections. There's nothing soft about working as a team. There's nothing soft about being able to navigate the social-emotional environment of your workplace or your home. So I even refer to them as kind of non-cognitive skills.

But I am seeing an unbelievable sort of, even in the last 10 years, I'd say, people who are recruiting people, people who are looking to attract and retain talent. I don't know if this just has to do with the way that technology has evolved. I don't know if it has something to do with COVID. It almost certainly does, right? But increasingly, there's this notion that sort of. Hard skills are actually easier to teach than soft skills, which, by the way, I would agree with.

I believe you can teach soft skills. I teach soft skills. I teach empathy as a skill. I teach about imposter feelings. I teach about growth mindset in the workplace. So I know you can teach them. I know they're harder to teach. So there's this really interesting thing happening, Lauren, where people are looking for social, emotional core competencies as sort of a sort of a basic job requirement and saying, we can teach you how to do the other stuff quite easily.

The fact that that's happening, I think is, is, is motivating these conversations that you and I are having to happen at a higher and higher level. So yes, I, yes, I think they're happening. Are they happening at the scale that I think we'd like? Perhaps not. But for a company like Amazon to call me on the phone to say, we want to start having some conversations about growth mindset in the workplace. I mean, that's crazy, right?

Like for JPMorgan Chase to call me on the phone and say, we want to start providing some skill building around imposter feelings. And that's an elite financial services firm, right? These folks are recruiting the very, very best there is. And they're saying they get here and they're suffering from imposter feelings. They don't feel like they belong here. And, you know, it's funny. I'm having this thought as I'm talking to you.

You can't teach resume writing or Excel or anything else effectively to a person who doesn't believe they deserve the opportunity. Yeah. Right? Like that thing is the foundation on which you build every other thing. So unless we can get people to a place where they feel worthy of the opportunity, unless we can, and I'll tell you, we all have the narcissist who comes to Thanksgiving who we don't want to sit next to.

And we all know who those people are. But this thing that you and I are talking about, Lauren, is much, much, much more prevalent. People who just really are wrestling with self-doubt around whatever it is they're doing, around the recent promotion that they just got, around the fact that they're navigating their job with a new child, around the fact that they're navigating children that aren't biologically theirs, right?

And trying to figure out how to be a parental figure to children that aren't biologically. It's not just at work, right? It's everywhere. Moving from one place to another and trying to figure out a new social circle, moving into a job. It's all over, right? So that's why I think this conversation is so central, because there's just almost not a single area of life where we're not up against the sort of headwinds of how we feel when things around us change.

And again, the Brene Browns of the world and people like you who are bringing these conversations to the fore and being loud and proud about the fact that things are difficult sometimes, I think it's helping for sure. I want to touch just briefly on the role you think technology, especially social media, plays in this topic. I would think, and I'm just making an educated guess, but I understand imposter feelings come from what we see, and I'm going to use myself as an example.

So when I see other people who are doing presentations or doing podcasts or doing these things, they're not coming at me saying, Lauren, you can't do it, but I'm looking at it going, well, who gives me the right to do this? So what role does technology and social media play? And does it come back to what we talked about at the beginning, where it's just reframing how we think about it and maybe saying, those people are doing it, so you can do it too, or something along those lines?

Yeah, yes. I mean, I don't know that I'm qualified to answer the question exactly. To your point, my educated guess, my instinct tells me that social media plays a massive role in sort of the cultivation of sort of population-wide imposter feelings, right? I was in LinkedIn almost 18 months ago. I was coming home from a series of business engagements, and I was on a flight, and I was crying in my seat because I missed my husband. I missed my dogs. I had not been home in a very long time.

I had spent several nights in a row sitting at hotel desks, eating takeout Chinese food in front of the Great British Bake Off for the fourth night in a row, working on PowerPoint slides. And I just felt disconnected from my life and I felt not happy. And then I pulled the plane window shade up and I looked out and of course it was this like breathtaking sunset over whatever the point of this is that I posted in LinkedIn how sad I was and how hard the last couple days had been and how it's okay.

Even though you're doing work you quote unquote love, and even though you're in a mission-driven role, and even though most of your LinkedIn profile is pictures of you here and pictures of you there, and you're making a difference here, and you're making an impact there. I was sitting on this plane and I was like, I am sad. And I was looking back over some social media analytics. It was the most popular post I posted that entire year was the post where I was not happy.

And so it just really struck me that, yes, because social media is a branding tool. It's not that I've seen a lot of really yucky takes on social media about how disingenuous it is and how... I mean, sure, I guess. But also, we're all out here trying to brand ourselves because we're trying to build opportunities and careers. It's a tool. We don't put a picture of ourselves waking up at 6 in the morning to go to the gym as our LinkedIn profile picture.

That's not what we do, right? It's not because we're disingenuous or because we're lying to ourselves and to everybody else. It's because we're trying to brand, right? And so, yes, I think it's huge. There's a ton of commentary and even research out there about how social media is actually really harming us a little bit psychologically because of this comparison urge we have.

And so what I try to do occasionally, and I've seen you do it too, is I try to be real every once in a while in between the branding exercises. And I have a friend from college who's pee your pants. She's so funny. She took a picture of her living room for Christmas. And of course, it's a disaster because she's got three kids. And she's like, while I'm looking at all of your beautiful holiday decorations, I just want you to take a look. And it was like someone, it was like a breath of fresh air.

It was the most, it was the coolest, funniest, realist thing that I had seen on social media the whole day. And I know, and I called her and I was like, you know, someone out there, someone out there was really helped. Like you, you helped someone feel like less of a disaster by just being honest over social media. So I think it can go both ways. I think if social media is in the right hands, we can actually break through on some of this too a little bit maybe.

I think you're absolutely right. And I have seen that with some of my posts. So yes, I'll post the nice family pictures and when we get to do awesome things. But this past week, I have two teething twins. It's been awful. And I did a post about that and the support and the feedback for being vulnerable. That feels special. It does.

Yeah, absolutely. I love it too when I see other people being real because I feel like sometimes we hide behind this veil of whatever, especially, especially, and these are conversations I'm having right now with other moms in my life around the holidays and all the responsibilities and things that we need to be doing. And, you know, behind social media, we're like, this sucks. Like, I don't want to move this elf. I don't want to do these things.

Yes. Yes. Let's all just get real and get rid of elf on the shelf. I think that's well and again it's like it's just so funny because i i um this is this is where here we are again with the grace giving right like like in most homes that i know women are the engine that fuels the entire holiday for the entire family and it's just an added responsibility to every other thing that nobody consented to, right? Like, it's wild the way that this just sort of happens.

And then instead of being annoyed about it or frustrated by it, a lot of women I know feel additional mom guilt over it because they see their friend from college whose elf on the shelf is taking a bubble bath or the elf on the shelf that's taking a hot air balloon ride across the frigging. And they're like, oh, I took my elf from this shelf and put them on this shelf. I'm a terrible mother, right? Like we've got to stop.

We've got to stop. Like Like, we've got to stop hating ourselves for not having the elf on the shelf do a bubble bath. But we also need to stop hating homegirl for having the bandwidth to do that. Right. Right. That's right, too. Right. It just we just got to like, there's just got to be some grace to her. There's got to be some grace to us. And again, I'm not I'm a I'm a I'm a gay man with no kids. So I'm out here talking about things I don't know anything about.

But the number of women who will say to me confidentially, I cannot wait until January or December 26th is very real. It's yeah. RJ, I cannot thank you enough. This conversation has felt like a warm cup of coffee and a warm hug and like therapy for me. And I just, I so, so appreciate your insight and the conversation and you going out there and saying these things and giving us all the, you used the word right earlier. You know, I feel like I don't have the right to be here.

I feel like now I have the right to have this conversation with more people. And that's where it starts is being able to say, you know, you don't have anything wrong with you. You don't have anything you need to cure. But instead, how about we celebrate the awesome work that you're doing and admit it's okay to be afraid. Do it anyway. You're going to be awesome. That's absolutely right. And if you're not awesome, that's great, too.

If I could leave everyone with just, you know, figure out a way today, a small way, a big way to give hope. You can give grace to everyone else. Find a way to give yourself a little bit of grace today. That, I think, is the kryptonite to these feelings being damaging rather than empowering. I'm so happy to have been here. Lauren, thanks for having me as a guest. And I'm happy to talk to you anytime about anything. Thank you, RJ. I appreciate it.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Graceful Confidence Podcast. If you know someone who could benefit from this episode, please share it with them and encourage them to like and follow the Graceful Confidence Podcast so you all know when new episodes are launching. Thanks so much, and we'll talk soon.