6. How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Cultivate Confident Leadership
Do you ever feel like a fraud, despite your accomplishments? That nagging voice in your head telling you that you're not good enough is called imposter syndrome, it’s an automatic reaction, and it's holding you back from reaching your full potential. Sure, confidence isn't something you're born with, but if you do the work, it’s a skill that can be cultivated and developed quicker than you think.
It's time to stop questioning yourself and start owning your success. This episode is all about challenging your limiting beliefs and embracing a growth mindset, reframing critical feedback, advocating for yourself, and trusting in your abilities as a leader.
Tune in this week for a deep dive into the topic of imposter syndrome and to explore how it manifests in your life as a woman leader. You’ll learn how to uncover the automatic reactions that trigger self-doubt and learn practical strategies to intercept these thoughts before they derail our progress. By understanding the root causes of imposter syndrome, we can start to build a solid foundation of self-confidence.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How imposter syndrome manifests as an automatic reaction rooted in fear.
Why women are more likely to experience imposter syndrome than men.
The importance of intercepting negative self-talk and reframing your thoughts before they hold you back.
How to embrace mistakes as learning opportunities and use them to build confidence.
Strategies for advocating for yourself and communicating your value to your organization.
The power of seeking and receiving feedback with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
Why cultivating confidence is an ongoing process that will up-level as you move through your career.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Ever feel like you don't belong? Like at any moment someone's going to figure out you're not as capable as they think. That's imposter syndrome talking and it's holding you back. But here's the thing, confidence isn't something you magically have. It's something you can create. In this episode, we'll break down how imposter syndrome is actually an automatic reaction and how you can intercept it before it stops you. It's time to stop doubting yourself and start owning your success.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
I wanna dive into today's topic, but stay tuned because I'm going to give you a podcast launch update, and I'll also be announcing the lucky winners of the launch giveaway towards the end of the episode.
Welcome, listeners. Today's podcast topic is one on imposter syndrome. This is a term that I hear a lot of women leaders that I connect with, coach, that are in my community talk about. This is the thing that keeps them awake at night sometimes. This is the behavior that they feel like is really holding them back from showing up fully with their full potential, making the impact that they want to make. And they talk about it like it is almost like a disease, like this is something that is wrong with me. I feel this imposter syndrome creeping in and it takes hold of me.
And I want to share an example just to make it feel much more real and I want you to notice yourself in it. Imagine that your boss came to you and said, "I want you to apply for this role. I'm creating a new role on my team. I think you would be fantastic for it. And I want you to take a look at the job description, have a think about it, but I would strongly recommend you and I want you to apply and interview for it."
And so then you go and you're excited and you feel grateful that your boss is thinking about you in this way and you're excited for this challenge. Then you go and you look at the job description and you look at what it entails and you see that there are things in the job description that you have never done before. And there are requirements in the job description that you kind of question your level or your years of service or experience.
And you start feeling this sinking feeling in your body and you start feeling maybe butterflies in your stomach, you feel like a twisting or knots in your stomach and your brain starts offering you a lot of evidence that this role is beyond you. This role is too much for you. You might not be good enough for this role. You might not have the capability. Even though your boss believes that you do, you start questioning yourself and you notice that you're spinning out.
Well this happens to a lot of people. I have to say that I've been on both sides of it. I've been the boss who has shared with their direct report, hey I'm creating this job for you. This is the job description. I've been on that side of it, and I've seen my direct report, who was a woman, look at the job description and be like, I don't know if I could do this.
And there's a big stat out there that most people know, but I think it's important to share, which is that most oftentimes women do not apply for jobs unless they have 100% of the qualifications. Whereas men typically apply when they have 60% and that is a big gap. That is a 40% gap of women basically choosing to not go for it because they feel like they don't have 100% of the qualifications.
And so I bring this up because this feeling confident in ourselves and our ability and our capability oftentimes is what keeps women from taking a risk, from moving forward, from applying for that role that they know that they can stretch into. And I wanted to share that I am with you all. I have done this to myself in the past.
I had a CEO, he wanted to create a new role, he thought I would be perfect for it, I was going to have to interview for it, it was going to be a highly coveted role. I remember being super excited, like, this is my time, I'm ready for it. And I had that same feeling when I looked at the job description.
I went to somebody to talk to, it was actually the head of HR at the time, and he was such a great friend of mine. And I remember telling him, I don't know if this is right for me. And he was like, don't do this. Don't do this to yourself. And he's like, listen, you are perfect for this role.
Don't worry. Don't listen to any of these thoughts. And it helped me really snap out of it. But I was so grateful to have him because obviously he's so close to the situation. And it just helped me to slow down and remind myself of who I am, what I'm capable of. And also there was just a humbleness to it that like, I was like, I know that stat. I know that stat where women question themselves and when they don't feel like a hundred percent that they have all of the experience, all of the qualities, all of the things, they question themselves.
And so, you know, in my process, I, you know, actually felt, wow, even though I know what's happening to me, I still have that same emotions and I still will have that same reaction. And so I often like to tell women that if this happens to you, nothing has gone wrong, right? This might just be a natural part of your process as you're learning how to cultivate confidence.
And the part of the imposter syndrome, It's not so much to see it as something terrible, but you might want to see it more as an automatic reaction that could happen because you are feeling fear. And if you know that it's an automatic reaction, The more you can slow yourself down and see it as that and share it with people, the less power it has over you, the less you'll be stuck in feeling like you're an imposter.
And the more you'll actually just feel connected with yourself, like, oh, I get it, I see what happens here. And this is really what happens when I coach clients over time. They're starting to notice their reactions to things. They're starting to notice their thinking. And they're starting to notice some of the emotions that they have that may cause them historically to spin out.
And this way of intercepting ourselves is super powerful. This is what cultivating confidence is all about. I talk about it like a muscle, right? If you're gonna go to the gym and you're gonna try working out, it could feel really uncomfortable. You could even hurt yourself. A lot of people do weight training and they don't know the proper way to ramp up. And for me, I've actually been using a personal trainer and I see the difference. I see why it is so helpful to be guided through the process.
I see my confidence building and I also see where I am uncomfortable and where I'm building a muscle over time. So I like to share with my women leaders that this is really the process of cultivating confidence. It's not like somehow you 100% feel confident in yourself all the time, you are going to be questioning yourself, you're going to have lots of thoughts potentially, you're going to maybe feel like you're breaking some rules if you're making some mistakes, or not holding yourself to this crazy standard that you're used to.
And what you will start noticing is that you're building this confidence in yourself that it's okay to make mistakes, I can fix mistakes, and that this imposter syndrome or these negative thoughts that come up to slow us down are just part of the way that we've historically reacted to things. But we have a choice. You have a choice to not attach to that thought, right?
Just like with my direct report, she, of course, went ahead and applied for the role and got the role. And so she didn't allow all of those negative thoughts to keep her from doing her job. Yeah, she had more bumps in the road and we were stretching her in this new role, so she was making more mistakes, but the biggest thing was not making those mistakes mean something about herself or her confidence. It was just more embracing that this is a learning process.
And I did the same. I went for that role, and I interviewed, and there was a lot of competition. People really wanted that role. But my thought and belief the whole time, after I kind of went through my initial crisis of, I can't do it, was, I'm the best person for this role. And I kept bringing my brain back to that over and over again.
I talked and thought about the experience I have. I thought about what I could learn. I thought about how I could make an impact and truly why I was the best person for that role in terms of my leadership abilities and knowing all the players and being able to influence very quickly. So even though my mind would offer me, oh, you don't really know that. Oh, they're making you do a 90-day plan. Are you going to do it right?
So my brain was still offering me that, but I kept bringing it back to, I got this, I can do it, let's keep focusing, let's keep bringing myself back to how I am capable of this, even with those thoughts, right? And so I like to share this with people because confidence is one of those things that sometimes people think, right, these are some of the myths about confidence, that you're just born with it, right, especially if you're a female leader and you're seeing a bunch of male leaders, they just kind of seem super entitled, they take the mic and they say the thing and they seem so charismatic and as if they were born to do that, right?
And then when they get to the mic, right, when my female leaders do that, they're like, oh, this feels weird. I'm not used to being in the spotlight. And then guess what? They haven't seen a lot of women be in the spotlights. Most of the women that I coach are in highly male-dominated spaces, so they're the only one, right? So they also haven't had a lot of examples of how other women leaders do it.
And so without that in our brains, right, we oftentimes, especially if we're feeling fear, we may be using more of our survival brain and narrowing in on threats. Threats of being the only person there that's done this before, threats of being afraid that you don't sound and look like the same people.
You know, one of the things that really kept me from accelerating quickly and owning my ambition was this fear that I would have to be even more masculine, like I would have to be even more of a man to take on this next level role. And as a woman, I wasn't really sure this is who I wanted to become. You know, of course, I had my own career ambitions, but I just didn't know how to do it without fully being even more cut off from my emotions, which is what my mind was giving me in terms of how to show up as a leader, because a lot of the leaders that I saw were very assertive, very logical, very focused on getting the job done, and they weren't as emotional, as nurturing, as fun, right?
I mean, of course I had lots of different leaders, but the ones that I saw at that top level, in my mind, I made it mean I have to be this way. But that's not the reality. The reality was there's a lot of different ways, but our perspective is narrow because there's just not as many women leaders. And this is where women need to do their part to create a community and to also understand that the way we could be thinking about leadership is very narrow because of what the examples that we actually have out in the world.
And this is really where the mindset piece comes into cultivating confidence. That confidence is something that we can cultivate within ourselves and it could look and feel different for us being an authentic female leader than a man, right? It could look different for different people. And oftentimes when we try to fit ourselves in someone else's mold, that's when we start questioning ourselves. That's when we start wondering, are we losing ourselves in this or are we consciously doing it?
So I always like to explain, building and cultivating confidence is really having lots of different tools in your tool belt, but trusting yourself as you are learning these skills, just like a baby learns how to walk, right? You're going to make some mistakes and you're gonna learn from them, right? When the baby falls down, they know how to balance themselves better.
But oftentimes, women feel like they have to be perfect, like everything needs to be in a perfect bow before they can show up with their idea, before they can apply for that job, before they can actually say what they're ambitious about because they're fearful that people might question them.
So one of the things that I see holding a lot of women back is this thought that they have to somehow be perfect at it. That's how confidence is built. And so a lot of women, you know, there are studies about this, like women get so many degrees, they get so many extra certificates, and oftentimes their purpose of getting these things is to feel more confident. But the reality is they're on this constant wheel of getting, getting, getting more things, and hoping that internally they start feeling more confident in themselves and their ability.
What I like to offer the women that I coach is that understanding yourself, being able to navigate your mindset and your emotions is going to be an investment in yourself that can amplify so many other investments that you've made in your education. By being able to slow down, notice your imposter syndrome thinking or thoughts or your perfectionist thoughts, this is going to be enabling you to not waste a lot of energy feeling exhausted in trying to manage your emotions or your thought process around this.
Instead, what I teach my clients is to embrace that this process of cultivating confidence in yourself is really about learning how to be aware of those thoughts, take control by actively inviting other people's perspectives, and also starting to give yourself evidence that you're capable of overcoming challenges and capable of learning. And it also requires the ability to embrace fear.
Fear or excitement is there's kind of you know two-sided area is really about being able to embrace a new emotion that might feel scary, discomfort, but knowing that you are building a muscle and cultivating this confidence internally. And nobody can ever take that away from you by really being able to intercept yourself when you start feeling not so confident and being able to notice, wow, that's the thought I'm having about myself in this moment. And then choosing to consciously move towards another thought, right?
So I'll give you an example of this. I have a client who was just noticing herself in these meetings where she was like, I know the answer to this. I want to say it. But in my mind, I was just noticing I want to put it into a PowerPoint, I want to get other case studies, I want to be able to prove it to people. And so she was noticing herself having this pattern where she wanted to make it perfect before she shared it with everyone.
And then what she also noticed was another colleague, her male colleague, had actually the same idea, but instead of going through this thought process that he needs to put it on paper, he needs to make it look pretty, he needs to socialize it, he just went for sharing the idea. And she was pretty amazed by that. She was like, he just went and said what the idea was, it was half-baked, and he got people interested and there was next steps and actions.
And so for her, instead of looking at that and making her wrong or inferior about it, she actually took that example and said, I'm going to try that out. I'm going to test out moving forward, trusting myself, embracing that fear, and going for help. And so it actually was super impactful for her because her company was going through lots of changes. There was a big disruption to the business and people needed to act quickly.
And she was pretty relatively new to the organization. So she was noticing herself wanting to hold back. But she also said, I have years of sales experience. I can help these people. They need my help. And so instead of holding back, she shared her thoughts with her leadership team, even senior leaders, and people started thanking her for sharing her experience, and people started taking her ideas and testing them out.
And she started just feeling more and more confident in herself and noticing that her putting the brakes on herself was not her moving forward. It was more of this idea that you know I have to get it perfect and that's where that imposter syndrome comes in and takes control and really slows us down.
Instead, you can choose to embrace the idea that you're cultivating confidence as you're doing it. You know, you are in control of how you feel about yourself. You can notice and intercept that negative thinking and also be compassionate to yourself about it, right? Like, hey, I get it. This is a scary world. There's lots of things that are happening and you don't want to be somebody who is shooting from the hip, but the more you are able to trust yourself and move forward, and even if you're making mistakes, that you're able to correct those mistakes, that's the most important thing.
Because then you're not going to be somebody who's constantly fearful of making mistakes. You'll be somebody who is excited about learning and growing and focused on cultivating their internal confidence. So instead of trying to please everyone and having their joy over your work products give you confidence, you're going to give yourself that confidence. You're going to give yourself that permission to be confident because you are learning that skill of cultivating confidence and trusting yourself.
And I wanna share how important this is. These are the stats around confidence and how they're really holding women back. I mean, this is really how we as women hold ourselves back.
And again, it is with compassion and understanding that we understand these stats, but I think it is also highly important to be able to see how they're playing out and how this confidence gap, this imposter syndrome, is really holding women from taking on bigger roles and able to have other opportunities open to them. So one of the studies talks about leadership ambition. Only about 25% of women feel confident pursuing leadership roles versus 41% of men.
And then there's this other study that I think is so important because it's about women advocating for themselves. So this is around self-evaluations. Women rate their performance 33% lower than reality, while men rate themselves 30% higher. That is an over 60% difference of how women and men evaluate themselves at work, right? So it makes sense that if women and men have such a big differential, when people are going to look for promotions and that next step, right? It's oftentimes men that's gonna get that because they are rating themselves higher.
But I also see this in a lot of the women that I coach, right, I push them to rate themselves higher, and this is where they can start stretching their mindset and how they think and see themselves. If you know you're a woman who historically doesn't embrace advocating for themselves, who oftentimes waters down their performance and is not fully going for it in their evaluations, this is where you want to notice this about yourself and push yourself.
A lot of the women leaders that I coach around self-evaluations, we're pushing ourselves to get to more of that reality and even beyond that reality, but to see what could be true from it. You know, we want women to start stretching themselves and seeing themselves the way other people see them. Oftentimes women will tell me, I wish I felt as confident in myself as the leaders that I serve feel in me or that my direct reports they feel so confident in me that I'm always confident.
And what I tell them is that this is your opportunity. When you notice a big gap of how people see you versus how you see yourself, this is an indicator that there is work to be done internally in you. And this work can be done. This again is a muscle, how you talk to yourself, how you see yourself, and how you are able to see your future self, right?
This is all related to how you feel about yourself and that differential of how other people feel about you. So that differential of how other people see you versus how you see yourself is really an opportunity. That opportunity could be higher paying jobs. That opportunity could be more strategic type work. That opportunity could be other career advancement opportunities that you are not putting yourself into because you are not seeing yourself the way that other people see you.
And this is something that is totally work-on-able, right? Totally figure-out-able. And I like to share that with people because sometimes they think it's just something they were born with, which is not true. This cultivating confidence and feeling confident in yourself is something that you could be working on. Finding evidence for that. Really questioning yourself in a grounded, discerning way, and not just attaching to those thoughts that are offering you that you're not good enough, that you can't do it, that you need to do more, that you need to get another certification.
You can stop yourself and say, listen, I hear these thoughts, they are full of fear, and I know that I have everything I need to do this job. I can learn. I'm happy to grow. I'm curious. I have a growth mindset, right? This is just a different pattern of talking to ourselves and holding ourselves to that higher vision of ourselves versus allowing sort of that survival brain of ours that oftentimes is looking out for threats and wants us to stay small, if we're using that part of our brain and allowing that part of our thinking to take hold, then it is going to feel really hard. It's going to feel like imposter syndrome is taking hold.
And so another stat that I want to share, which relates to those self-evaluations too, right, Is promotions. Women are 14% less likely to be promoted, even with equivalent qualifications and performance. So again, this is another place where with that equivalent qualifications and performance, women are also holding themselves back because they are not either putting themselves out there or evaluating themselves accurately or maybe not even sharing with people what they want, you know, how they want to grow.
A lot of the women that I also coach, right, oftentimes feel kind of just lucky in a role. You know, oh, I got lucky. Somebody's going to find out about me, right?
So instead of really going to school on how they created the position that they're at, where they're at, how they've actually made accomplishments, their brain keeps feeding them these lies that they are somehow going to be found out, that somehow the luck's going to run out, right? So what I'm really offering you here is to be discerning about your thought process and to acknowledge that as a woman leader in a world where there's mostly men leaders, we may have stronger thoughts and feelings about ourselves that are causing us to want to slow down. And the more we understand this, the less power it has over us when it comes up.
I just had a situation recently where somebody asked me to do a big introduction. And I remember just in a moment being like, "oh, I can't do this. I haven't done this in a while. This is weird. People are going to judge me." And then I just kind of like told myself like, "hey, Yann, listen, you've done this before. You're totally capable of doing this." And so instead of going down the rabbit hole of how I can't do this, I just thought, What matters to me? What is my vision here? How do I want people to feel? How do I want to feel sharing my vision and speaking up? And that just helps me feel confident in that moment. You know, I was able to switch because I was able to interrupt my thought patterns.
There's another stat that I think is highly important, especially for women who are getting a lot of critical feedback on their personal style, which oftentimes impacts their confidence. I wanna let the women out there know you are 1.4 times more likely going to get more critical feedback on the way you show up versus men. And I wanna share that we need to be discerning about that feedback, because oftentimes what I see with women is they are told to be tougher and more aggressive and to hold people accountable. And then what happens oftentimes is they go and do that, and then somehow, somewhere, somebody gets offended, and they're given the feedback is, "you need to tone down. You need to have a softer message."
And a lot of times women start feeling super not confident in themselves because they're making that feedback mean they're bad or wrong, and then they feel confused because they're like, I got this feedback, I tried to correct it, and now I'm getting this feedback. What can I actually trust or listen into? And so this confusion and this vagueness in your brain can cause you to, again, question yourself, feel uncertain, feel unclear.
And one of the things I really help women do to unpack this is to dive into what this feedback is and who it's coming from. This is something that men don't have to deal with, and it can feel annoying, but the more you see it as a part of the system where there's just a lot more men who may have certain interactions with women, that we just need to be as women leaders more discerning over what we're hearing.
So let me share with you a couple of examples and you just noticed yourself I had a client who was told by their CEO like you need to show up tougher You need to be more direct and so she went and did that she had a presentation She was like I didn't hold back. I was tough. I shared the feedback. I went into it. And then after the meeting, her CEO came to her and said, never do that again. That was a terrible meeting. And then she thought, this is terrible. I'm not doing a good job. I must be, you know, failing at this, I need to just leave this organization. So that was her thought pattern.
Whereas, if you have more of this cultivating confidence growth mindset, what you could do, right? And this is the way that I would coach her, but I want you to notice yourself in this too. The way that I coached her is that was really good information that he offered. You know, what was that about that he was so threatened by the way you showed up. And number one, good thing for going for it, making a mistake, embracing that mistake. But notice what you made that mistake mean. And notice that this could be a learning opportunity.
Instead of going on the defensive and going and noticing your mind also giving you all these thoughts that you're not doing it right, you could ask him questions, right? Drop into curiosity.
"Hey, listen, I can see that you're not happy about the way I presented, but I'm trying to figure this out, and I want you to tell me more about what your perception was or how did that come off? What was that about?" And when I talked to her more about it, we realized that she didn't socialize it with him ahead of time, so it was a strong message. And there were other things in it, right? We wanted to unpack that.
I also asked her, how would you feel if your direct report was presenting something and they didn't, you know, review it with you and then you felt really threatened by that message to other people because it's a representative of you and you didn't know all of the details.
So I just want to give you that example because there's a way that instead of going to those thoughts that I'm bad or wrong, you could actually push yourself, even if the feedback feels critical and harsh, you push yourself to say, "Great, I'm learning about this. Tell me more. Explain this to me. You know, I'm trying to figure this out." Because sometimes those pieces of information, those are really important data to know. And that critical feedback, you just want to be aware of those dynamics that are coming up, right?
Another example, I was sharing with one of my clients who was telling me, "You know, I was really trying to get a deadline done. And so I was very quick in some of my emails. And another senior leader came to me and said, 'What was the tone of that email? Like, should I read anything into it?'" And she immediately felt a little bit scared and thought that she did something wrong.
But instead of closing in on herself, apologizing for something she didn't even know what she was doing wrong, she picked up the phone and called him. And she said, "Hey, listen, I saw your email. I see that you didn't like the tone of my message, and I just want to share with you more context about it. And I also want to hear from you what you thought my tone meant." So she shared, "Hey, I was running super fast. We had a big deadline in London. Sorry, I should have given you more context."
I think that might have helped you see that, you know, even though I was very short in my messaging, things needed to be done quickly. But I want to hear what you have to say." And he actually just said, I just felt like you're super bossy, you're not asking me any questions, and you're just telling me what to do.
And that was where she could say, okay, I totally can see that. And you're right, I was that way. And next time I will give you more context, but I feel strongly that I needed to be really direct because there was a quick deadline that needed to be turned around, but I will share that with you in the future.
So do you see how she just like explained that in a way that she was still holding herself as grounded and as a leader and she didn't apologize for the way that she came across, but she was super open to hearing what he had to say and also open to sharing what she could have done better, right?
There's a way that sometimes as women we want to go and apologize, we want to make everything right, but we're also undermining ourselves because we're like, we have a job to be done. And sometimes women are like, I have to get this job done and I need to go super quick and people and sometimes men and other women expect you as a woman leader to be kind and nurturing and all these things which are great but sometimes we can't be all of those things when we have a tough deadline.
But the more we embrace feedback in a way where we're curious and learning, not just about ourselves, but the system that we play in, right, the more we're able to, again, build confidence in ourselves and not feel scared about making mistakes. That making mistakes is part of the learning process and part of cultivating that confidence and not only understanding yourself better but the people around you.
So I want you to think about this as really a muscle for yourself. How do I contend you and how do I build this muscle inside myself, right? So you've got this automatic response, which is that imposter syndrome and maybe it's perfectionism. And I'm going to share an episode with you on the top 10 what I call confident killers, and two of those are things that I've mentioned in here, one being perfectionism, another being imposter syndrome, right?
But what we are really focusing on in this episode is how to intercept that pattern, those automatic reactions that they have a positive intent. Typically, the positive intent is to keep us safe and small because there's a part of us that just wants that safety. And that's really where our limbic system and survival brain is. But the other parts of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, is really all about expansion, learning, and growing, and taking on challenges. And it can actually help modulate that fear when we have a big understanding and a bigger perspective of the world and ourselves in the world
So the more that you're able to be curious about yourself, and the more you're able to lean into that discomfort of pushing yourself and seeing confidence not as something you either have or don't have, but something that you can cultivate over time, a muscle that you continue stretching and building. This is where unwavering, unshakable confidence actually comes from.
And I always tell my clients, listen, it doesn't mean you're not gonna have feelings. It doesn't mean you're not going to feel unsure of yourself. It just means that you are going to be increasingly able to intercept yourself and shorten that period of questioning yourself and more focused on being curious about you and your environment, which in itself is going to be a better use of time. And for you to embrace that process is really how you build confidence in yourself.
All right, So I would love to hear what you think about this episode, what you're taking away, how you're doing cultivating that confidence muscle in yourself and how you're interrupting your own thoughts. Okay. So share with me all of those things.
Next week I have a really powerful episode for you around leadership presence. I want to talk to you about how emotions and how your showing up with your energy is impacting your leadership presence and how you could be using that to your advantage. All right, I will see you next week. Take care. Bye.
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Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
I wanna dive into today's topic, but stay tuned because I'm going to give you a podcast launch update, and I'll also be announcing the lucky winners of the launch giveaway towards the end of the episode.
Welcome, listeners. Today's podcast topic is one on imposter syndrome. This is a term that I hear a lot of women leaders that I connect with, coach, that are in my community talk about. This is the thing that keeps them awake at night sometimes. This is the behavior that they feel like is really holding them back from showing up fully with their full potential, making the impact that they want to make. And they talk about it like it is almost like a disease, like this is something that is wrong with me. I feel this imposter syndrome creeping in and it takes hold of me.
And I want to share an example just to make it feel much more real and I want you to notice yourself in it. Imagine that your boss came to you and said, "I want you to apply for this role. I'm creating a new role on my team. I think you would be fantastic for it. And I want you to take a look at the job description, have a think about it, but I would strongly recommend you and I want you to apply and interview for it."
And so then you go and you're excited and you feel grateful that your boss is thinking about you in this way and you're excited for this challenge. Then you go and you look at the job description and you look at what it entails and you see that there are things in the job description that you have never done before. And there are requirements in the job description that you kind of question your level or your years of service or experience.
And you start feeling this sinking feeling in your body and you start feeling maybe butterflies in your stomach, you feel like a twisting or knots in your stomach and your brain starts offering you a lot of evidence that this role is beyond you. This role is too much for you. You might not be good enough for this role. You might not have the capability. Even though your boss believes that you do, you start questioning yourself and you notice that you're spinning out.
Well this happens to a lot of people. I have to say that I've been on both sides of it. I've been the boss who has shared with their direct report, hey I'm creating this job for you. This is the job description. I've been on that side of it, and I've seen my direct report, who was a woman, look at the job description and be like, I don't know if I could do this.
And there's a big stat out there that most people know, but I think it's important to share, which is that most oftentimes women do not apply for jobs unless they have 100% of the qualifications. Whereas men typically apply when they have 60% and that is a big gap. That is a 40% gap of women basically choosing to not go for it because they feel like they don't have 100% of the qualifications.
And so I bring this up because this feeling confident in ourselves and our ability and our capability oftentimes is what keeps women from taking a risk, from moving forward, from applying for that role that they know that they can stretch into. And I wanted to share that I am with you all. I have done this to myself in the past.
I had a CEO, he wanted to create a new role, he thought I would be perfect for it, I was going to have to interview for it, it was going to be a highly coveted role. I remember being super excited, like, this is my time, I'm ready for it. And I had that same feeling when I looked at the job description.
I went to somebody to talk to, it was actually the head of HR at the time, and he was such a great friend of mine. And I remember telling him, I don't know if this is right for me. And he was like, don't do this. Don't do this to yourself. And he's like, listen, you are perfect for this role.
Don't worry. Don't listen to any of these thoughts. And it helped me really snap out of it. But I was so grateful to have him because obviously he's so close to the situation. And it just helped me to slow down and remind myself of who I am, what I'm capable of. And also there was just a humbleness to it that like, I was like, I know that stat. I know that stat where women question themselves and when they don't feel like a hundred percent that they have all of the experience, all of the qualities, all of the things, they question themselves.
And so, you know, in my process, I, you know, actually felt, wow, even though I know what's happening to me, I still have that same emotions and I still will have that same reaction. And so I often like to tell women that if this happens to you, nothing has gone wrong, right? This might just be a natural part of your process as you're learning how to cultivate confidence.
And the part of the imposter syndrome, It's not so much to see it as something terrible, but you might want to see it more as an automatic reaction that could happen because you are feeling fear. And if you know that it's an automatic reaction, The more you can slow yourself down and see it as that and share it with people, the less power it has over you, the less you'll be stuck in feeling like you're an imposter.
And the more you'll actually just feel connected with yourself, like, oh, I get it, I see what happens here. And this is really what happens when I coach clients over time. They're starting to notice their reactions to things. They're starting to notice their thinking. And they're starting to notice some of the emotions that they have that may cause them historically to spin out.
And this way of intercepting ourselves is super powerful. This is what cultivating confidence is all about. I talk about it like a muscle, right? If you're gonna go to the gym and you're gonna try working out, it could feel really uncomfortable. You could even hurt yourself. A lot of people do weight training and they don't know the proper way to ramp up. And for me, I've actually been using a personal trainer and I see the difference. I see why it is so helpful to be guided through the process.
I see my confidence building and I also see where I am uncomfortable and where I'm building a muscle over time. So I like to share with my women leaders that this is really the process of cultivating confidence. It's not like somehow you 100% feel confident in yourself all the time, you are going to be questioning yourself, you're going to have lots of thoughts potentially, you're going to maybe feel like you're breaking some rules if you're making some mistakes, or not holding yourself to this crazy standard that you're used to.
And what you will start noticing is that you're building this confidence in yourself that it's okay to make mistakes, I can fix mistakes, and that this imposter syndrome or these negative thoughts that come up to slow us down are just part of the way that we've historically reacted to things. But we have a choice. You have a choice to not attach to that thought, right?
Just like with my direct report, she, of course, went ahead and applied for the role and got the role. And so she didn't allow all of those negative thoughts to keep her from doing her job. Yeah, she had more bumps in the road and we were stretching her in this new role, so she was making more mistakes, but the biggest thing was not making those mistakes mean something about herself or her confidence. It was just more embracing that this is a learning process.
And I did the same. I went for that role, and I interviewed, and there was a lot of competition. People really wanted that role. But my thought and belief the whole time, after I kind of went through my initial crisis of, I can't do it, was, I'm the best person for this role. And I kept bringing my brain back to that over and over again.
I talked and thought about the experience I have. I thought about what I could learn. I thought about how I could make an impact and truly why I was the best person for that role in terms of my leadership abilities and knowing all the players and being able to influence very quickly. So even though my mind would offer me, oh, you don't really know that. Oh, they're making you do a 90-day plan. Are you going to do it right?
So my brain was still offering me that, but I kept bringing it back to, I got this, I can do it, let's keep focusing, let's keep bringing myself back to how I am capable of this, even with those thoughts, right? And so I like to share this with people because confidence is one of those things that sometimes people think, right, these are some of the myths about confidence, that you're just born with it, right, especially if you're a female leader and you're seeing a bunch of male leaders, they just kind of seem super entitled, they take the mic and they say the thing and they seem so charismatic and as if they were born to do that, right?
And then when they get to the mic, right, when my female leaders do that, they're like, oh, this feels weird. I'm not used to being in the spotlight. And then guess what? They haven't seen a lot of women be in the spotlights. Most of the women that I coach are in highly male-dominated spaces, so they're the only one, right? So they also haven't had a lot of examples of how other women leaders do it.
And so without that in our brains, right, we oftentimes, especially if we're feeling fear, we may be using more of our survival brain and narrowing in on threats. Threats of being the only person there that's done this before, threats of being afraid that you don't sound and look like the same people.
You know, one of the things that really kept me from accelerating quickly and owning my ambition was this fear that I would have to be even more masculine, like I would have to be even more of a man to take on this next level role. And as a woman, I wasn't really sure this is who I wanted to become. You know, of course, I had my own career ambitions, but I just didn't know how to do it without fully being even more cut off from my emotions, which is what my mind was giving me in terms of how to show up as a leader, because a lot of the leaders that I saw were very assertive, very logical, very focused on getting the job done, and they weren't as emotional, as nurturing, as fun, right?
I mean, of course I had lots of different leaders, but the ones that I saw at that top level, in my mind, I made it mean I have to be this way. But that's not the reality. The reality was there's a lot of different ways, but our perspective is narrow because there's just not as many women leaders. And this is where women need to do their part to create a community and to also understand that the way we could be thinking about leadership is very narrow because of what the examples that we actually have out in the world.
And this is really where the mindset piece comes into cultivating confidence. That confidence is something that we can cultivate within ourselves and it could look and feel different for us being an authentic female leader than a man, right? It could look different for different people. And oftentimes when we try to fit ourselves in someone else's mold, that's when we start questioning ourselves. That's when we start wondering, are we losing ourselves in this or are we consciously doing it?
So I always like to explain, building and cultivating confidence is really having lots of different tools in your tool belt, but trusting yourself as you are learning these skills, just like a baby learns how to walk, right? You're going to make some mistakes and you're gonna learn from them, right? When the baby falls down, they know how to balance themselves better.
But oftentimes, women feel like they have to be perfect, like everything needs to be in a perfect bow before they can show up with their idea, before they can apply for that job, before they can actually say what they're ambitious about because they're fearful that people might question them.
So one of the things that I see holding a lot of women back is this thought that they have to somehow be perfect at it. That's how confidence is built. And so a lot of women, you know, there are studies about this, like women get so many degrees, they get so many extra certificates, and oftentimes their purpose of getting these things is to feel more confident. But the reality is they're on this constant wheel of getting, getting, getting more things, and hoping that internally they start feeling more confident in themselves and their ability.
What I like to offer the women that I coach is that understanding yourself, being able to navigate your mindset and your emotions is going to be an investment in yourself that can amplify so many other investments that you've made in your education. By being able to slow down, notice your imposter syndrome thinking or thoughts or your perfectionist thoughts, this is going to be enabling you to not waste a lot of energy feeling exhausted in trying to manage your emotions or your thought process around this.
Instead, what I teach my clients is to embrace that this process of cultivating confidence in yourself is really about learning how to be aware of those thoughts, take control by actively inviting other people's perspectives, and also starting to give yourself evidence that you're capable of overcoming challenges and capable of learning. And it also requires the ability to embrace fear.
Fear or excitement is there's kind of you know two-sided area is really about being able to embrace a new emotion that might feel scary, discomfort, but knowing that you are building a muscle and cultivating this confidence internally. And nobody can ever take that away from you by really being able to intercept yourself when you start feeling not so confident and being able to notice, wow, that's the thought I'm having about myself in this moment. And then choosing to consciously move towards another thought, right?
So I'll give you an example of this. I have a client who was just noticing herself in these meetings where she was like, I know the answer to this. I want to say it. But in my mind, I was just noticing I want to put it into a PowerPoint, I want to get other case studies, I want to be able to prove it to people. And so she was noticing herself having this pattern where she wanted to make it perfect before she shared it with everyone.
And then what she also noticed was another colleague, her male colleague, had actually the same idea, but instead of going through this thought process that he needs to put it on paper, he needs to make it look pretty, he needs to socialize it, he just went for sharing the idea. And she was pretty amazed by that. She was like, he just went and said what the idea was, it was half-baked, and he got people interested and there was next steps and actions.
And so for her, instead of looking at that and making her wrong or inferior about it, she actually took that example and said, I'm going to try that out. I'm going to test out moving forward, trusting myself, embracing that fear, and going for help. And so it actually was super impactful for her because her company was going through lots of changes. There was a big disruption to the business and people needed to act quickly.
And she was pretty relatively new to the organization. So she was noticing herself wanting to hold back. But she also said, I have years of sales experience. I can help these people. They need my help. And so instead of holding back, she shared her thoughts with her leadership team, even senior leaders, and people started thanking her for sharing her experience, and people started taking her ideas and testing them out.
And she started just feeling more and more confident in herself and noticing that her putting the brakes on herself was not her moving forward. It was more of this idea that you know I have to get it perfect and that's where that imposter syndrome comes in and takes control and really slows us down.
Instead, you can choose to embrace the idea that you're cultivating confidence as you're doing it. You know, you are in control of how you feel about yourself. You can notice and intercept that negative thinking and also be compassionate to yourself about it, right? Like, hey, I get it. This is a scary world. There's lots of things that are happening and you don't want to be somebody who is shooting from the hip, but the more you are able to trust yourself and move forward, and even if you're making mistakes, that you're able to correct those mistakes, that's the most important thing.
Because then you're not going to be somebody who's constantly fearful of making mistakes. You'll be somebody who is excited about learning and growing and focused on cultivating their internal confidence. So instead of trying to please everyone and having their joy over your work products give you confidence, you're going to give yourself that confidence. You're going to give yourself that permission to be confident because you are learning that skill of cultivating confidence and trusting yourself.
And I wanna share how important this is. These are the stats around confidence and how they're really holding women back. I mean, this is really how we as women hold ourselves back.
And again, it is with compassion and understanding that we understand these stats, but I think it is also highly important to be able to see how they're playing out and how this confidence gap, this imposter syndrome, is really holding women from taking on bigger roles and able to have other opportunities open to them. So one of the studies talks about leadership ambition. Only about 25% of women feel confident pursuing leadership roles versus 41% of men.
And then there's this other study that I think is so important because it's about women advocating for themselves. So this is around self-evaluations. Women rate their performance 33% lower than reality, while men rate themselves 30% higher. That is an over 60% difference of how women and men evaluate themselves at work, right? So it makes sense that if women and men have such a big differential, when people are going to look for promotions and that next step, right? It's oftentimes men that's gonna get that because they are rating themselves higher.
But I also see this in a lot of the women that I coach, right, I push them to rate themselves higher, and this is where they can start stretching their mindset and how they think and see themselves. If you know you're a woman who historically doesn't embrace advocating for themselves, who oftentimes waters down their performance and is not fully going for it in their evaluations, this is where you want to notice this about yourself and push yourself.
A lot of the women leaders that I coach around self-evaluations, we're pushing ourselves to get to more of that reality and even beyond that reality, but to see what could be true from it. You know, we want women to start stretching themselves and seeing themselves the way other people see them. Oftentimes women will tell me, I wish I felt as confident in myself as the leaders that I serve feel in me or that my direct reports they feel so confident in me that I'm always confident.
And what I tell them is that this is your opportunity. When you notice a big gap of how people see you versus how you see yourself, this is an indicator that there is work to be done internally in you. And this work can be done. This again is a muscle, how you talk to yourself, how you see yourself, and how you are able to see your future self, right?
This is all related to how you feel about yourself and that differential of how other people feel about you. So that differential of how other people see you versus how you see yourself is really an opportunity. That opportunity could be higher paying jobs. That opportunity could be more strategic type work. That opportunity could be other career advancement opportunities that you are not putting yourself into because you are not seeing yourself the way that other people see you.
And this is something that is totally work-on-able, right? Totally figure-out-able. And I like to share that with people because sometimes they think it's just something they were born with, which is not true. This cultivating confidence and feeling confident in yourself is something that you could be working on. Finding evidence for that. Really questioning yourself in a grounded, discerning way, and not just attaching to those thoughts that are offering you that you're not good enough, that you can't do it, that you need to do more, that you need to get another certification.
You can stop yourself and say, listen, I hear these thoughts, they are full of fear, and I know that I have everything I need to do this job. I can learn. I'm happy to grow. I'm curious. I have a growth mindset, right? This is just a different pattern of talking to ourselves and holding ourselves to that higher vision of ourselves versus allowing sort of that survival brain of ours that oftentimes is looking out for threats and wants us to stay small, if we're using that part of our brain and allowing that part of our thinking to take hold, then it is going to feel really hard. It's going to feel like imposter syndrome is taking hold.
And so another stat that I want to share, which relates to those self-evaluations too, right, Is promotions. Women are 14% less likely to be promoted, even with equivalent qualifications and performance. So again, this is another place where with that equivalent qualifications and performance, women are also holding themselves back because they are not either putting themselves out there or evaluating themselves accurately or maybe not even sharing with people what they want, you know, how they want to grow.
A lot of the women that I also coach, right, oftentimes feel kind of just lucky in a role. You know, oh, I got lucky. Somebody's going to find out about me, right?
So instead of really going to school on how they created the position that they're at, where they're at, how they've actually made accomplishments, their brain keeps feeding them these lies that they are somehow going to be found out, that somehow the luck's going to run out, right? So what I'm really offering you here is to be discerning about your thought process and to acknowledge that as a woman leader in a world where there's mostly men leaders, we may have stronger thoughts and feelings about ourselves that are causing us to want to slow down. And the more we understand this, the less power it has over us when it comes up.
I just had a situation recently where somebody asked me to do a big introduction. And I remember just in a moment being like, "oh, I can't do this. I haven't done this in a while. This is weird. People are going to judge me." And then I just kind of like told myself like, "hey, Yann, listen, you've done this before. You're totally capable of doing this." And so instead of going down the rabbit hole of how I can't do this, I just thought, What matters to me? What is my vision here? How do I want people to feel? How do I want to feel sharing my vision and speaking up? And that just helps me feel confident in that moment. You know, I was able to switch because I was able to interrupt my thought patterns.
There's another stat that I think is highly important, especially for women who are getting a lot of critical feedback on their personal style, which oftentimes impacts their confidence. I wanna let the women out there know you are 1.4 times more likely going to get more critical feedback on the way you show up versus men. And I wanna share that we need to be discerning about that feedback, because oftentimes what I see with women is they are told to be tougher and more aggressive and to hold people accountable. And then what happens oftentimes is they go and do that, and then somehow, somewhere, somebody gets offended, and they're given the feedback is, "you need to tone down. You need to have a softer message."
And a lot of times women start feeling super not confident in themselves because they're making that feedback mean they're bad or wrong, and then they feel confused because they're like, I got this feedback, I tried to correct it, and now I'm getting this feedback. What can I actually trust or listen into? And so this confusion and this vagueness in your brain can cause you to, again, question yourself, feel uncertain, feel unclear.
And one of the things I really help women do to unpack this is to dive into what this feedback is and who it's coming from. This is something that men don't have to deal with, and it can feel annoying, but the more you see it as a part of the system where there's just a lot more men who may have certain interactions with women, that we just need to be as women leaders more discerning over what we're hearing.
So let me share with you a couple of examples and you just noticed yourself I had a client who was told by their CEO like you need to show up tougher You need to be more direct and so she went and did that she had a presentation She was like I didn't hold back. I was tough. I shared the feedback. I went into it. And then after the meeting, her CEO came to her and said, never do that again. That was a terrible meeting. And then she thought, this is terrible. I'm not doing a good job. I must be, you know, failing at this, I need to just leave this organization. So that was her thought pattern.
Whereas, if you have more of this cultivating confidence growth mindset, what you could do, right? And this is the way that I would coach her, but I want you to notice yourself in this too. The way that I coached her is that was really good information that he offered. You know, what was that about that he was so threatened by the way you showed up. And number one, good thing for going for it, making a mistake, embracing that mistake. But notice what you made that mistake mean. And notice that this could be a learning opportunity.
Instead of going on the defensive and going and noticing your mind also giving you all these thoughts that you're not doing it right, you could ask him questions, right? Drop into curiosity.
"Hey, listen, I can see that you're not happy about the way I presented, but I'm trying to figure this out, and I want you to tell me more about what your perception was or how did that come off? What was that about?" And when I talked to her more about it, we realized that she didn't socialize it with him ahead of time, so it was a strong message. And there were other things in it, right? We wanted to unpack that.
I also asked her, how would you feel if your direct report was presenting something and they didn't, you know, review it with you and then you felt really threatened by that message to other people because it's a representative of you and you didn't know all of the details.
So I just want to give you that example because there's a way that instead of going to those thoughts that I'm bad or wrong, you could actually push yourself, even if the feedback feels critical and harsh, you push yourself to say, "Great, I'm learning about this. Tell me more. Explain this to me. You know, I'm trying to figure this out." Because sometimes those pieces of information, those are really important data to know. And that critical feedback, you just want to be aware of those dynamics that are coming up, right?
Another example, I was sharing with one of my clients who was telling me, "You know, I was really trying to get a deadline done. And so I was very quick in some of my emails. And another senior leader came to me and said, 'What was the tone of that email? Like, should I read anything into it?'" And she immediately felt a little bit scared and thought that she did something wrong.
But instead of closing in on herself, apologizing for something she didn't even know what she was doing wrong, she picked up the phone and called him. And she said, "Hey, listen, I saw your email. I see that you didn't like the tone of my message, and I just want to share with you more context about it. And I also want to hear from you what you thought my tone meant." So she shared, "Hey, I was running super fast. We had a big deadline in London. Sorry, I should have given you more context."
I think that might have helped you see that, you know, even though I was very short in my messaging, things needed to be done quickly. But I want to hear what you have to say." And he actually just said, I just felt like you're super bossy, you're not asking me any questions, and you're just telling me what to do.
And that was where she could say, okay, I totally can see that. And you're right, I was that way. And next time I will give you more context, but I feel strongly that I needed to be really direct because there was a quick deadline that needed to be turned around, but I will share that with you in the future.
So do you see how she just like explained that in a way that she was still holding herself as grounded and as a leader and she didn't apologize for the way that she came across, but she was super open to hearing what he had to say and also open to sharing what she could have done better, right?
There's a way that sometimes as women we want to go and apologize, we want to make everything right, but we're also undermining ourselves because we're like, we have a job to be done. And sometimes women are like, I have to get this job done and I need to go super quick and people and sometimes men and other women expect you as a woman leader to be kind and nurturing and all these things which are great but sometimes we can't be all of those things when we have a tough deadline.
But the more we embrace feedback in a way where we're curious and learning, not just about ourselves, but the system that we play in, right, the more we're able to, again, build confidence in ourselves and not feel scared about making mistakes. That making mistakes is part of the learning process and part of cultivating that confidence and not only understanding yourself better but the people around you.
So I want you to think about this as really a muscle for yourself. How do I contend you and how do I build this muscle inside myself, right? So you've got this automatic response, which is that imposter syndrome and maybe it's perfectionism. And I'm going to share an episode with you on the top 10 what I call confident killers, and two of those are things that I've mentioned in here, one being perfectionism, another being imposter syndrome, right?
But what we are really focusing on in this episode is how to intercept that pattern, those automatic reactions that they have a positive intent. Typically, the positive intent is to keep us safe and small because there's a part of us that just wants that safety. And that's really where our limbic system and survival brain is. But the other parts of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, is really all about expansion, learning, and growing, and taking on challenges. And it can actually help modulate that fear when we have a big understanding and a bigger perspective of the world and ourselves in the world
So the more that you're able to be curious about yourself, and the more you're able to lean into that discomfort of pushing yourself and seeing confidence not as something you either have or don't have, but something that you can cultivate over time, a muscle that you continue stretching and building. This is where unwavering, unshakable confidence actually comes from.
And I always tell my clients, listen, it doesn't mean you're not gonna have feelings. It doesn't mean you're not going to feel unsure of yourself. It just means that you are going to be increasingly able to intercept yourself and shorten that period of questioning yourself and more focused on being curious about you and your environment, which in itself is going to be a better use of time. And for you to embrace that process is really how you build confidence in yourself.
All right, So I would love to hear what you think about this episode, what you're taking away, how you're doing cultivating that confidence muscle in yourself and how you're interrupting your own thoughts. Okay. So share with me all of those things.
Next week I have a really powerful episode for you around leadership presence. I want to talk to you about how emotions and how your showing up with your energy is impacting your leadership presence and how you could be using that to your advantage. All right, I will see you next week. Take care. Bye.
I want to take a moment to extend a heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you for the incredible support you've shown for the launch of the Balance Leader podcast. I'm thrilled to share that we've made it into the top 50 of the business management category on Apple Podcasts. This milestone wouldn't have been possible without you, the amazing listeners.
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As we move forward, I'm excited to continue bringing you insightful conversations and empowering strategies that will help you in your leadership journey. If you haven't already, make sure to follow so you don't miss any upcoming episodes.
And thank you once again for being part of this community. Your support means the world to me, and together we're rewriting the rules of leadership.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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