Imposter Syndrome is the result of placing too much weight on a perceived distance between where you are and where you think you “should” be. I speak in terms of distance because I see Life as a journey of exploration and growth.
While having ambition is not a bad thing, it can become problematic if you add the symbolic element of Time:
I should have accomplished X by this date.
I should feel confident about my ability to deal with Y by now.
But here’s the thing: anything involving the word “should” is purely a construct of your mind and has nothing to do with reality. In fact, the concept of “should” can be detrimental because it implies and reinforces its opposite. The full implication of any sentence that contains “I should be […]” is “… but I’m not,” which carries a subtle whisper of, “… and never will be.”
One of the challenges that I’ve experienced has been that, whenever I would start feeling like I wasn’t living up to other people’s expectations or what I thought I “should” be, my focus would shift from Doing to Proving. Unfortunately, the more energy I’d pour into trying to prove that I was the person I wanted to be, the less energy I put into actually becoming that person, which ended up widening the gap even further.
So what can we do?
The good news is that there are ways of dealing with it. The first step is to identify the purpose of those “imposter” feelings: they help point out when you’ve fallen out of Flow.
See, when you’re immersed in simultaneously Being and Doing, you don’t have time for that imposter nonsense. Even if you notice that you’re not where or who you want to be, the fact that you’re in motion changes the underlying assumption to, “…but I will be.”
Therefore, the real question is not “How do I get rid of Imposter Syndrome?”
The real question is, “How do I increase my experience of Flow?”
The answer to that question opens up a whole new world of possibilities. I highly recommend starting with Steven Kotler’s work (https://www.stevenkotler.org/) and the Flow Genome Project (http://www.flowgenomeproject.com).
You’ve got this!