The Lawyer Life Podcast

Defeat Impostor Syndrome with Simple Mindfulness Edits

• Autumn Noble • Season 1 • Episode 18

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When we believe we don't have what it takes or that we can't do something, it creates doubt and fear and those emotions always drive us to show up small and without confidence. Those types of actions create results that allow impostor syndrome to thrive.  When we believe we can't do it, we don't show up as our best and we don’t do our best. As a result, we create all sorts of evidence to support our impostor syndrome thinking. We create a self- fulfilling prophecy. 

 In this episode, we dig in to where impostor syndrome thoughts come from and how we can use one simple mindfulness trick to stop them for good.

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You are listening to the Lawyer Life podcast, episode No. 18: "How to Defeat Imposter Syndrome with Simple Mindfulness Edits." 

 

Welcome back, everyone, to the Lawyer Life Podcast. If you are an attorney seeking ways to find more time, be more productive, build your client base, set healthy boundaries, demystify business development, and authentically sell your services, you are in the right spot. If you're an attorney looking to make a change, maybe to a smaller firm or perhaps a larger firm, go in-house, do some adjunct work, start your own firm, or even leave law altogether, and you want to learn about all of those avenues from someone who's already done it, this place is for you.

 

My name is Autumn Noble, and I am the founder of the Lawyer Life Collective, where we focus not only on all of those things but ultimately on how to make your career as meaningful and fulfilling as possible. In the Lawyer Life Collective, we focus on your specific goals, we develop a plan, and we execute to put you back in the driver's seat of your career success. If one-on-one coaching is not your jam, group coaching, the Lady Lawyer Collective, is off and running. Check the show notes to find out more about how to join the next series, where we dig into the essential lawyering tools they never taught us in law school.

 

If you are new to the podcast, be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources or sign up for a free consultation with me to get a sense of what this coaching thing is all about. If you've been here all along, I'm so grateful for you and welcome back. In the last episode, we talked about finding fulfillment, and buried within some of the commentary from that episode, I hinted at mindfulness and specifically the way we think about things and how that drives our actions and the results that we create in our lives.

 

In thinking about fulfillment and finding your purpose, one of the roadblocks that I often witness is that we come to the practice of law with this belief that our job as lawyers should bring us some form of fulfillment and purpose. From that belief, we strive to climb the legal ladder and accumulate more and more legal accolades, but we ultimately find that none of those things provide us with the fulfillment and the purpose that we're seeking. As a result, this notion that our jobs as lawyers should be the source of fulfillment and purpose in our lives leads us on a wild goose chase where we only yield the opposite result, and it's just a chase towards emptiness that never really ends.

 

It is that belief alone that sets us up for this sort of repeated failure from the very beginning because that belief drives us to solve the wrong problem. It creates a framework where the job is the problem, and once we fix that part of our lives, fulfillment and purpose will come, and this might seem really straightforward, but at the crux of this cycle, it's just a simple belief. It's a story in our heads that we have told ourselves from the beginning, the belief that our job should provide fulfillment and purpose, and we carry that with us as if it were some universal truth that everyone in the world would agree with, but the fact of the matter is, it's simply a belief that many of us chose to carry with us on this journey. As a belief, it's just a choice that we are making again and again with our thinking and our energy.

 

As humans, we have the autonomy to change our beliefs and our thinking at any time, but often what we fail to recognize is actually where we are making choices with our energy and in the beliefs that we're choosing. We see a lot of our beliefs as purely factual, and we neglect to challenge them and take a hard look at the role they have in our life and the results that they're creating for us. A thoughtful examination of our beliefs is not only essential to that pursuit of purpose and fulfillment that we talked about in the last episode, but it's absolutely critical when it comes to dismantling imposter syndrome.

 

In our episode on people-pleasing, I touched briefly on the idea of imposter syndrome and how it impacts our ability to show up effectively in our legal career. For clarity's sake, in that episode, I talk about imposter syndrome as feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evidence of success. So as a result, imposters suffer from chronic self-doubt, a sense of intellectual fraudulence that overrides any feelings of success or external proof that they're not fraudulent and that they are competent.

 

Many attorneys come to me suffering from imposter syndrome in some shape or form, and there's this lingering belief that they don't really belong in this world. Maybe they're the first in their family to become attorneys or pursue a professional degree. Maybe they don't look like the people that they're surrounded by. But those facts and observations really fuel this idea that they aren't one of them and they're never going to fit in. And then underneath those beliefs are the worries: "I don't have what it takes," "They have something that I don't," "It's coming more naturally to them than it is to me." And all of those beliefs and all of those stories provide us with an out to give up on ourselves and quit before we even try because when we believe those things to be true and factual, it makes perfect sense that we're not finding the success that we want. It makes perfect sense that we would choose to leave law or seek a lesser role because all of those things are true. We just don't have what it takes. Those thinking systems and patterns completely set us up to play small and fail even before we begin.

 

This matters because in order to change our lives for the better or do anything out of your norm, we have to believe that it's possible. We have to believe in our ability to make it happen because when we believe in ourselves, those beliefs create emotions like hope, trust, and faith. Those are the kinds of emotions that will propel you to take action in alignment with your goals, no matter the goal. I mean, it could be simply "I want to go to the gym one day a week," "I want to read more books for leisure," "I want to work less," "I want to make partner." It doesn't matter what the goal is. The question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we believe that it's possible? Are we carrying around some stories in the background that try to convince us that whatever that goal is, we can't do it, it's not attainable? And then it's got all the reasons why.

 

So in contrast, when we believe that we don't have what it takes or that we can't do something, those beliefs in the background, they create emotions. They don't just sit there innocuously. They actually create vibrations in our body, and that shows up as doubt and fear. And those emotions will always drive us to play small and to show up without the confidence that we want to exude. Those actions, then from those emotions, are going to create all sorts of results that allow imposter syndrome to thrive because when we believe we can't do it, we don't show up as our best and we don't do our best. And so we, in turn, create all sorts of evidence to support the imposter syndrome thinking and the stories that we're telling ourselves that bolster the imposter syndrome. So we create the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where we don't believe we can do it, we feel terrible, we show up even worse, and now we have all sorts of evidence to prove all those crappy thoughts true. And imposter syndrome comes in and says, "Look, see? I told you." And around and around we go.

 

With imposter syndrome, it's a combination of feelings of inadequacy despite evidence of success. Those feelings create blinders where our belief that we aren't good enough or not one of them is going to overlook any evidence to the contrary. It's only going to focus on the results of our sort of half-ass actions that stem from those horrible feelings, from those horrible beliefs. "I can't make it," and "This isn't going to work." So with that foundation in mind, it becomes very clear that imposter syndrome and the feelings of imposter syndrome are all created by our beliefs about ourselves, our abilities, and the stories that we continually tell ourselves in the background. It's those habitual beliefs that create the issue of imposter syndrome. They're just thoughts and stories that we have chosen over and over and over again, and they just run on repeat in our head so much so that part of us believes that they are factual and they are true. Those thoughts, those habitual patterns, they create emotions, and those emotions drive actions, and those actions and inactions create our lives and everything that we have around us. And that's all there is to it. We choose imposter syndrome thoughts. Those thoughts create everything that we do or don't do, and those actions create the results. And oftentimes, when imposter syndrome is the one creating the thoughts and emotions, those results are not the ones that we really want because we don't show up.

 

One way you can think about this theory is to look around at everything that you have in your life and everything that you have created for yourself and ask, "Where did it come from and how was I able to create it?" As attorneys, it's really easy to look at our law school education as one of our greatest accomplishments, but have you ever thought back and really considered what were you thinking about yourself that got you through it? What did you believe about your ability to be a lawyer when you're sitting in those five-hour finals? I know for me, I never really gave a thought to whether or not I could be a lawyer. It never seemed to cross my mind. I just believed like, "Okay, this is what I'm going to do and I'm going to be a lawyer." And that's very simple. There weren't stories about how I couldn't make it, how I wasn't one of them. They were certainly not leading my actions during that time. I just focused on the task at hand and I knew I would figure it out. During those years, I was really fueled by beliefs founded in just pure audacity and blind faith, but it worked, and that's an important piece of information for us to consider when we look at how we created the things that we have. What were we believing? What were we feeling in those moments? What drove us to show up for ourselves?

 

Then we consider the opposite end of the spectrum, consider some of the times in our life when we have really struggled and times when you weren't showing up in a way that you were proud of or when you just gave up. And what were you believing about yourself during those times? For me, those experiences have been the most enlightening experiences in my life. I know that in my past, when I was living in an abusive relationship, there were years that I lost because of some of my own faulty beliefs. I believed that leaving a relationship was not an option, that that was equivalent to giving up. I believed that people would judge me and that they would probably be right in those judgments. I believed I'd never be able to get out and that relationships were supposed to be hard. I also believed that I was maybe just being dramatic, which was a judgment about myself that I had kind of picked up somewhere as a child, that I had a tendency to overreact and just be really dramatic. And those beliefs about myself and those judgments combined with my belief about how relationships were supposed to be hard, it kept me stuck and it kept me from taking action. And then you add to those ingrained thoughts and stories gaslighting and criticism that I was getting from my partner, and it just kind of fueled the fire that kept me in a place that I didn't want to be for much longer than I should have been.

 

But over time, I really started to realize, I did kind of my own mindfulness audit, and I recognized that there were a lot of stories, a lot of beliefs that I was choosing that were keeping me stuck in a really unhealthy situation. And it wasn't until I started to believe other things, that things started to change for me. I started to believe that I could figure it out, that maybe there would be something better waiting for me on the other side, and that the battle would be worth it. I started to believe that I deserved better and that maybe the horrible things that were being said about me weren't true and maybe I wasn't a dramatic person who was overreacting. I had to really change the way I was thinking about myself and my future and that relationship before I was able to take any action forward because those other sets of beliefs propelled me to not take action and they propelled me to accept a lot of things. But once I changed the story, once I reformed the music playing in the background of my head, I was able to take action in a different direction because it created different emotions for me to drive me forward.

 

I share this because whether it's an unhealthy relationship or a toxic job, our beliefs about ourselves and who we are and what we are capable of bubble below the surface in everything that we do and how we show up in every relationship. What we believe about ourselves and our abilities is often based upon our past experiences, what we were taught, what we learned about ourselves from events five, 10, 15, 30 years ago, things that people said to us maybe when we were kids and when we were growing up. Sometimes the things that we were taught, they really appear innocuous, but they can really sabotage our forward progress. For me, I was raised with the firm belief that relationships were supposed to be hard and any good partner has to stick through and fight through the hard times. That belief sounds lovely and very noble and honorable. It also made it very difficult for me to recognize when that might not be helpful and when there is a line that is crossed. And it made it really hard for me to explore the possibility of leaving any relationship.

 

Additionally, over the years, when I was a kid, I learned that being dramatic was a bad thing and that I had a tendency within myself to be dramatic and I needed to curtail that and avoid any disruption from the norm and really just try tough things out. I grew up on a farm with three brothers. It was sort of like rub some dirt in it and move on. And I think as a kid and as a woman, it made me really strong and really resilient. But that belief, those stories, were not helping me when it came to a situation where lines were being crossed. And so we do have some beliefs that I think can benefit us at certain times in our life, but in other scenarios and other times in our life, they actually hurt us and sabotage us. So for me, in order to make progress in my life, I needed to edit those beliefs and instead consider, maybe I'm not a dramatic person, and instead, if something is really upsetting me, it's probably worth paying really close attention to. I also choose to believe today that relationships are supposed to help you grow and that they should never break you down, and if that's the case, the relationship has no place in your life, and sometimes leaving is the most powerful and least dramatic thing that you can do for yourself.

 

The point is that the beliefs that we were taught as children and the beliefs that we have carried with us as young adults into adulthood, they don't have to continue to play in the background like quiet elevator music driving everything that we do in our lives today, unless we want to continue to choose them. Every belief we have in this very moment deserves an audit where we can question whether it's helping us or hindering us in our forward momentum. Just because something was true about you or for you years ago, it doesn't mean it has to remain true for you today. Our brains get really lazy. We develop these habitual beliefs, and if we want to start creating a different reality for ourselves, we have to start believing new things and taking new actions, and that's going to require us to start challenging and looking at some of those old beliefs and some of those old patterns.

 

And this really includes beliefs about who you are and what you're capable of because who you were and what you were capable of in the past has no bearing today whatsoever. You can choose to leave anything you want about yourself and what you're capable of. We're not constrained by our past experiences. Maybe you had a hard time keeping jobs, maybe you failed in the past to use your voice, maybe you got laughed out of the room the last time you asked for a raise, maybe you struggled with boundaries in the past. But so what? Why does any of that have any relevance today? All of those experiences we use as evidence to support these shitty beliefs that we have about ourselves today. We look to those experiences from years ago to justify our conclusions about who we are and what we're capable of. "I'm not good at asking for a raise," "I'm not good at boundaries," "I'm not good at saying no." We base all of those conclusions upon things that happened in the past, and it doesn't have to correlate. We don't have to look to the past to make conclusions about what we can do today. Instead, you can decide today, "I'm learning to be better about boundaries," "I'm learning to be more comfortable in interviews," "I'm learning how to be a good employee." All of those beliefs are available to you and will create wildly different results for you than the alternatives.

 

I can't keep a job, I'm not going to interview, I'm not good at boundaries. If you consider those thoughts and beliefs as two buckets of stories that you can tell yourself, the question really becomes: Which bucket is going to propel me in the direction that I actually want to go? But the problem is most of us don't even realize that there is a choice being made. We just kind of continue letting them run in the background, and so what I'm suggesting today is to start really getting clear about what you are believing, what is your elevator music, and what is it creating for you? Are there better options available?

 

Many of my clients set really big goals for themselves when they come to coaching, and then when they're faced with the challenge, their brain immediately offers them some of those deeply ingrained beliefs about themselves. "I don't have what it takes," "I'm not cut out for this," "I'm not smart enough." Imposter syndrome just swoops in and it starts to trash the party. We have so many beliefs like those rolling around in our brains, running automatically in the background, but that is why setting big goals is so essential because it's going to force those thoughts into the light. When you say, "I'm going to do something, I'm going to do something different, I'm going to change something," you're really asking your brain to offer you all of those imposter syndrome self-doubting stories that we have. Your brain is going to show up at the door and say, "Oh, in case you forgot, you've done this in the past and you failed miserably. I don't know if you remember that one time in 8th grade you tried to give a presentation and it was miserable." Right? Your brain is going to remind you of all of those stories that go along with not taking that action. And so that's going to put you in the perfect position to really look at the beliefs you have habitually chosen over the years and start conducting your own audit.

 

Because here's the thing about those stories and why it's important to confront them: If there weren't a part of us that believed in the veracity of those beliefs at least a little bit, they wouldn't stick around. There's a part of us that really buys into the truth of them, and that's why they stay. And that is why the work that we do in coaching, I think, is so essential because we start taking action to dismantle those neural pathways, to really understand why am I believing that? What is the evidence in my life that is supporting that belief and letting it take root in me? And how can I shift away from that? Because unless and until you can identify and address your negative beliefs about yourself, you will never be able to overcome imposter syndrome, and you'll never be able to truly appreciate anything that you accomplish.

This is why a lot of us achieve big things, but those accomplishments just never hit our radar. We never feel good about them for a long period of time because we do not have patterns of believing we can do it, we're good enough, we're worthy. Instead, we have all these other horrible patterns that will swoop in and just run automatically. We barely pause for a moment to recognize the achievement because we still don't believe we deserve it because we have stronger stories and patterns that we've played for a long time telling us we don't deserve it, we can't do it. And so even when we hit those achievements, it's momentary and the excitement and the success and the belief that we're good enough fades away and it really gives way to that more powerful pattern in the background. So what do we do with all this?

First and foremost, recognize that everything you have in your life today was created by a belief, a thought, a story that you told yourself. They created some emotions and actions in you, and that's it. You told yourself you could do something, you told yourself you're capable of something, you believed you could have this, that, or the other, and from that belief, you went out and did it, you went out and bought it, you went out and accomplished it because there were emotions behind it, faith, trust, excitement. Those beliefs created those emotions, which drove those actions and created everything you have.

You have to understand that pattern in order to truly understand imposter syndrome, but also how we start creating something different for ourselves. The second step in learning to believe new things about yourself is to recognize that those negative beliefs are there, that they are bad choices that we have made over and over again, and we start to identify them and get to the root of those thoughts driving our feelings of insecurity that are creating that imposter syndrome, and just start seeing them for what they are: options. But first, we have to find them.

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes the best way to identify our shitty elevator music is to set a big goal and start taking action toward it. It's going to put you on a collision course with those negative thoughts, with those limiting beliefs that create your imposter syndrome right out of the gate. Because once you have them, you can move on to the next steps, and that is really first and foremost giving yourself some grace for those thought errors. You're human, your brain is really good at creating neural pathways and buying into stories and running them habitually, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with you here. This is just what our brains do, and once we start seeing the terrible things that we tell ourselves on repeat, it's not a free pass to dive into another batch of negative self-talk. Negative thought patterns are normal. They're intended to keep you safe, so let's not beat ourselves up for having them.

Then, once we have our list and we're not beating ourselves up for it, we can force ourselves to really challenge those stories. We can recognize that they're opinions, they're stories we've told ourselves, they're just thoughts, they're optional, and we can choose something else on repeat until we create a new neural pathway and a new habitual way of thinking. We do this by pulling up those negative thoughts by the roots and asking, "You know, what if it weren't true? What else could be true instead? What if I was good enough? What if I could figure this out? What if I could do it?" And then see what your brain offers you and see if your brain brings you any better fodder to create new stories and new patterns for yourself.

Finally, once you've got this list of competing thoughts and considerations, choose one that does serve you and your goals. And you do this by looking at these alternative thoughts: "What if I could figure it out? Then what would I do? I can figure this out. I've done hard things before." And then you ask yourself, "If I believe that every day and practice believing it, what would I do? What actions would I take? How would I feel?" And then considering, do those actions and feelings get me closer to the goal? And that's how you know you pick one that's going to propel you in that direction that you want to go.

When we don't do this work of looking at that elevator music and bringing it forward and checking it out and challenging it, we will always be pushing forward while bringing kind of an energetic ball and chain with us. It's like running a marathon with cement boots, right? You'll make some forward progress, but it's going to be really painful and really hard. And so this work is so important because it allows your actions to be driven by energy that furthers the goal instead of this, "I'm moving forward, but my energy is really pulling me back." We can stop fighting ourselves and start getting on the same team and taking the same action forward.

To summarize, there is no biological predisposition for success. I truly believe that success is 99% a mental game. How we play that game is driven by our thoughts and emotions and the stories we tell ourselves and the resulting actions that come from them. When you tell yourself, "I'm not one of them," or let imposter syndrome whisper in your ear all day long, you set your brain on a mission to prove those thoughts true. It sets your mind on a collision course with everything you've ever done wrong and every area you have ever come up short. It proves to you without a doubt that you don't belong. You give your brain an assignment: "I don't belong, I'm not one of them," and it's going to get to work demonstrating the truth of that, and it's going to create emotion in you that's going to drive actions that just prove that true even more so.

But the beautiful thing about this is that imposter syndrome is something that we create for ourselves with our shitty habitual beliefs. That means that it's something that we can undo. We can choose other beliefs, and we can un-choose the beliefs that aren't serving us. That is what we do in coaching because once you change that patterning, a whole new world of possibilities will open up. If you are struggling with imposter syndrome and deprogramming your negative thinking, sign up for a free coaching consultation and learn about how we can accelerate this process for you. You owe it to yourself and your future success.

That is all for this week's topic. If you want to go more in-depth on this topic, check out the show notes for additional resources. And remember, the Lady Lawyer Collective is launching currently. The Lady Lawyer Collective is a group coaching program where we unpack the most critical skills needed as lawyers to create our own unique success, and we do it over the course of 7 weeks. In 7 weeks, you'll have all the tools you need to fully redesign your career and start living differently.

Next week on the podcast, we will tackle the impossible subject of how to deal with difficult people. Thank you so much for being here again with me this week. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us a review and a stellar rating on your podcast listening platform. And thank you to all of you who have already done so. And don't forget to check out our Etsy shop, where you can find some spicy and fun lawyer swag. And last but not least, thanks for listening and thanks for sharing with your friends.