Thank you so much. Appreciate that.So what we'll do, just to start this session off, if I could just ask if people could just drop into the chat and let me know what does impostor syndrome mean to you. So if you can just tell me what does that phrase mean to you personally. So if you can just let me know your thoughts on it. Because what we wanna do is shape this session and make it as useful and valuable to you as we possibly can. Thank you, Lauren. Brilliant. Yep. Keep it coming. The more suggestions we get, the more personalized I can tailor this session for you. So please go ahead and do share. I'll just give it another couple of seconds just to make sure that everybody can get the chat working for them. Amazing. Yeah.

So Lauren there is saying, not believing I truly have the skills or capabilities. I think I do. Yep. That's that's really important. And Lauren, I wonder if it's I think I do or if it's more I know I do. So that's maybe something we can look at in the session. Mandy, feeling like you don't really belong in the room. Yeah. A 100%. Absolutely. Simone, it is a hindrance for sure. Yeah. It it really is. And I know because this is something that I grappled with myself for many, many years. So, yeah, completely identify with that. And Rosie, thinking there's someone else who can do it better than I can. Yeah. That is such a common experience. Absolutely. So the other thing I'm just gonna quickly ask before we move on is can you just let me know briefly, what do you most want to get from this session today?

So, again, if you can just drop into chat, and I can see that we have another suggestion, Arthitha. I do hope I'm saying that correctly. Being in a space where others don't respect your knowledge and then you doubt yourself. I love that. That's something that we are absolutely gonna get into very shortly. And, Jana, circumstances in the environment in the workplace makes you feel incompetent. Yeah. Another really important point. And we are absolutely gonna get into all of this and more, in just a few moments. So thank you very much. And if you could just let me know, what do you most want to get from our time together? What is your goal at the end of this session? If I can really help you and you can go away with something of real value, what would that be? I'll just give you a second. Lauren, I love it.

Tips to rewire the thinking. Well, I think you're gonna get that and and maybe a whole lot more than what you bargained for because this is gonna be a little bit different, to what to what you usually hear, in this space. Brilliant. I can see that other people are liking that as well. Fantastic. Alrighty. So we will move on. So welcome, and I'm Rachel Dixon. I think I'd kind of briefly introduce myself. So impostor syndrome is one of the best funded misdiagnosis in professional life. And I mean that. So I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by it. So Clancy Nimes, the American clinical psychologists who first observed impostor syndrome, they never called it a syndrome. They noticed that there was a pattern in a specific group of people in a specific context, and then somewhere between the research and the self help industry, the observation became a diagnosis.

And now what is being framed as your diagnosis has become a multi billion dollar industry telling you that it's a problem that you need to fix. And that's that's what's brought us along to this session today. So briefly about me, I'm Rachel Vixen. I'm joining you from Scotland. You you might be able to tell that from my accent. So before we go too much further, can you just give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down and tell me, can you understand what I'm saying? Amazing. Amazing, Justin. Amazing, Lauren. Amazing Jo. Brill. Absolutely brilliant. And the reason I'm checking that is because when Scottish people get a little bit excited and a little bit passionate, we go fast.

And the way this topic tends to make women the problem, I get quite excited. So I'm glad that we've covered that off. Now, for those of you who are joining from outside of The UK, Mary Queen of Scots was a sixteenth century Scottish queen, and she was beheaded in 1587, broadly speaking, for being too much of a threat. We still use the phrase raising your head above the parapet. And what we mean by that is making yourself visible at a personal risk, and that was back in, 1587. So I want to ask all of you, how much has really changed for women since those days? I'm an ex lawyer. I'm an ex FTSE one hundred leader here in The UK, and I've had quite a few Mary Queen of Scots moments in my career, so this topic is absolutely not academic for me.

Competence that never quite dislodges the doubt, impossibly high standards, achievements that barely register, says yes to everyone, rarely herself, has read every book and it hasn't touched this. So if this is you, then you are a 100% in the right room and definitely stay with me for the session. Perfectionism, overthinking, fear of visibility, people pleasing, impostor syndrome, and burnout. The personal, development industry these things as a separate problem with a separate solution. And they offer a course for this, a framework for that, and that that's that's what you get. So that that's kind of the status quo that we see. Does that sound familiar to people? All of these different symptoms being treated as individual problems that you have to fix. Yeah. I think we're I I think I think we've we've hit on to something here. Brilliant. Just brilliant. Alright.

Well, I want to tell you, it's these six separate things I just showed you, they are not six separate problems. They all have one source, and that's what we're going to be looking at today through the lens of the impostor phenomenon. So most leadership development works on the top half of what you can see on this diagram here. They work on things like mindset, habits, environment, behavior, all the superficial sides of things. And that stuff is really important because it's how you show up in the in the outside world. And so that's the leader that the world gets to see. But the part that's left behind is the human that sits behind it.

So when we look on the bottom half of the diagram, you'll see things like identity, values, the beliefs, and also the patterns that that formed long before the leadership title, ever was formed. And that's where all of it lives. It's the and that's the layer that when we address what so often is missed, that's where things really start to change for you. So I call this work the human behind the leader, and it's what I do with the women that I work with, and that's what we're gonna be focusing on today. So we're gonna use this approach to guide a practical experience that we are all going to do together very, very shortly, and I am quite excited, to be able to to share it. And it's the first time that I've done this particular exercise with a group like this. So I'm I'm really looking forward to being able to do that.

So Pauline Clance and Susan Eymes back in 1978, And I've just skipped my I've skipped my nose and I've lost my place. Yeah. So following Clancy and Susanne is back in 1978. So they were observing high achieving women in workplaces. And those workplaces at the time, they were openly and structurally sexist. And they documented something really important. What they saw was a persistent sense of fraudulence. So that's what I heard back at the start when I asked people what they were experiencing, this idea of feeling like a fraud. That was a 100% what clans names identified in the research. And also that that sense of fraudulence existed alongside very clear evidence, of competence. And the reason that's important is they were observing female academics, female leaders, women who had a strong track record of performance and achievement behind them, and that was not enough to displace this sense of fraudulence.

So it was an observation that Clancy Nimes made about a group in a context. It was never a pathology, and it was never ever a medical diagnosis. So this is the environment here that the research was describing. You know, credentials being questioned, credit being taken when it when it wasn't earned by others, competence being presumed presumed absent until the women themselves had to prove it time and time again, emotions being used against them and their authority being spoken over.

And like you can see, obviously, financial implications there as well, not being fully recognized or value not being recognized than what they were being paid. So this is this is describing the environment back in the seventies when that original research was done. So what I'd like to do is just invite you now just to take a minute or two and just reflect on your own circumstances and what has genuinely changed in your experience. Are things different now, or does any of that still ring true in in what what what has happened to you in your working life? So I'll just give you a minute to have a think about that. Mandy, I can see. And absolutely, guys, pop it in the chat. Go ahead and pop it into the chat if there's anything you'd like to share on this. Are there any particular elements that you think are especially true these days?

Oh, yeah. I can see still the same. Yeah. Yeah. And I I left corporate, just over a year ago myself, and this was very much my own personal experience as well. So I can a 100% relate to what you're sharing. Yeah. Yeah. So just let that sink in. Yeah. And Jessica, I can see you're sharing a longer comment here. Maybe a generalization, but men seem to be praised for showing emotion at work, and sometimes it's still a weakness. Yeah, very much. Absolutely. And Amanda, in your roles competence is presumed absent until proven even with a lot of experience. Yeah, we see this time and time again. And I know from my work, I've worked with some seriously impressive women, you know, women who are leading global industries, are globally recognized leaders in their fields and they are still experiencing the things that that you're mentioning here, the things that are on this slide.

So yeah, just let that sink in and just take a moment just to really acknowledge what you personally are experiencing in your current reality because this is really important for the work that we're gonna do next. So just let it sink in. What are you currently experiencing? These barriers, these obstacles that other people just don't seem to face in the workplace. And I think the one thing that we can see from everything that we've seen in the comments here is that all of you are in really good company. Nobody is isolated in feeling the way they do. I think everybody here has experienced a version of what's on this slide. I've experienced it and I know the many, many women that I work with as well experience it too. I also see it in some of the men that I work with. Sometimes it takes a different form.

But, yeah, I would say particularly anybody, who's coming from a any kind of minority background, even first generation professionals as well, this absolutely can come up and does come up. Alright. So if there's one thing that I really would like for you to take from this session today and the time that we spend together, it's that you are not the problem. You are not the problem, and I don't care what the self help industry and the personal development industry and the leadership development industry has to say on this, you would not have the impostor phenomenon if it wasn't for the very real life experiences that you have had.

So I think it's just really important to take a second to properly acknowledge that and just let that sink in. Everything else that we touch on today is going to build on this premise. Yes, you might be experiencing some things that you don't want to be. Yes. You absolutely want to stand in your authority and and be confident in what you bring to the table, but there are some very real reasons that you feel the way you do. So your mind, your body, and your nervous system are not malfunctioning. They learned in environments where vigilance genuinely was warranted and they became very, good at vigilance, and that's what you're experiencing now. So the problem is that your system doesn't always update when the environment changes.

So you might be in a different environment now to what you were in in the past and can still be experiencing these feelings of being the impostor, these feelings of doubting your hard won capabilities. And you can have grown tremendously as a person in the years since, and you can still be experiencing this. So your system is doing what it was always meant to do, what it was designed brilliantly to do, and that is to keep you safe. So you're in a meeting and somebody questioned your recommendation. And before you've had a single conscious thought, your stomach has dropped, your throat has tightened, and your system has already responded. And that's not a weakness, that's protection. That is protection happening in real time. So this is what we see in terms of all the ordinary advice out there, what you've probably seen time and time again.

You see it on the you hear it on the podcast, you read it in the books, push through, you know, tell yourself that you can do it, you know, all of the the kind of positive cheerleading that we're that we're encouraged to do. And that absolutely works. It can be a really positive and helpful thing, but that's when you're learning a new skill. That's when you actually don't know what you're doing. You haven't acquired the skill yet, you know, you are just learning it. Then then it's absolutely fine to push through in those circumstances because everybody's everybody learns, everybody grows, and that never stops throughout life. Right? That's just part of the human experience. So so that's ordinary self doubt. But I've accidentally skipped ahead. Hang on. We'll go back. Yeah. Yeah. So so I had a notification pop up on my screen about joining another session, and I do not know how to switch it off. So apologies for that.

But yeah. So the idea is if you're pushing, you know, if you're if it's an ordinary type of self doubt self doubt about something new that you're doing, then absolutely push on through, give yourself some words of encouragement. But if you have the skill and the doubt is feeling like something older and it's feeling like something structural within you, then when you push through, it means that you're overriding yourself. And over the years, that all adds up. And at the same time, you know, we start to wonder why why are burnout rates so high? And you can you see time and time again, the conventional wisdom is override yourself, tell yourself you can do it, crack on and do it anyway. So what we're gonna do now, is a practical exercise together. So what I'm gonna do is just ask you to get comfortable.

This is a time for you to relax for a few minutes exactly where you are. Now, obviously, if you're driving or you're operating any kind of machinery, then you're not gonna be able to, fully take part in this because it is gonna, require you to relax and ideally, if you're comfortable to to close your eyes. So obviously, just be mindful of where you are and your own safety as we do this. But if you're just sitting in front of your computer, then absolutely take part in this. Otherwise, get the recording and do it later. So I'll just invite you now to just get comfortable where you are and if you'd like to, you can just go ahead and close your eyes down and just let your body settle exactly where you're sitting. And notice your feet heavy on the floor, and notice the effect of gravity on your body, noticing all the points of contact where your body meets where you're sitting and just notice how you are completely supported.

Notice how gravity holds you in place exactly where you are and that you are completely supported and completely safe where you are in this moment because this is your time. This is your time to take a few moments with yourself. I'm just gonna invite you now to take a couple of breaths together. So just go ahead and just take a nice deep breath in. Just let that breath flow all the way down, down, deep into your abdomen, And just notice how when you breathe out, the abdomen comes in again. You might even want to place a hand on your tummy and just feel that sensation as you breathe in and out. Just take a couple more breaths in your own time. You're doing really well. That's right.

And now I'm just going to ask you to bring to mind the last time that you felt doubt that didn't make sense at the time. So just think of a time when you had the skills, you had the experience, the track record, and still the doubt came up. Just let that scenario come to your mind now like a cinema screen. Just imagine that scene filling the cinema screen of your mind and just notice. And as that that visual came into your mind, just notice what happened in your body. What sensations did you physically feel? Did you feel something happen in your tummy? Maybe the chest or the throat? Just notice what that sensation was. There might have been a change in temperature. There might have been a change in pressure, in weight, lightness or heaviness there, any kind of sensation. So just notice.

And you might want to place a reassuring hand on that part of your body now. So if you'd like to do that, just go ahead and just sit with it for a few seconds. There's nothing to change. Just experience what's happening in your own body and quietly ask to yourself, what are you keeping me safe from? You don't need to force an answer, just listen. So in your own words now into yourself, just ask the part of you where you notice the change in sensation. Just ask, what are you keeping me safe from? Alright. You're all doing very, very well here. And I'm just gonna ask you now to just give your fingers a wiggle, give your toes a wiggle, and just bring yourself back into awareness.

So you can just open up your eyes when you're good and ready and just come back. That's great. And I'm just gonna ask, what did you notice? Did anybody notice anything during that exercise? If you noticed something and you'd like to share it, maybe you could just add a little comment to to let us know what you did notice. NS. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's very common. That's very, very common. Yeah. I didn't realize the reasons yeah. Like a soft wave breaking. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And and that's it. All of these emotions, we don't often get time to experience these things because it's almost like, you know, in the moment, you're just dealing with it. You're dealing with it and you're pushing on through, telling yourself you can do absolutely pent up emotions I wasn't even conscious of. Yeah. Yeah. That's it.

And that's exactly the purpose of doing that exercise is to to bring awareness to what is going on in your system. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So that was the point of it because all of that what you felt there is what's going on inside of you every single day. You know, this is what's going on in the background. So when people are telling you to just act confident anyway or to just do the thing, we just suppress those emotions more and more. And so that's really that was the purpose of doing what the exercise there was to allow you the space to be able to experience, what what goes on in you all the time. So that exercise that we did, very, very quick, very, very simple, something that you can revisit by yourself time and time again and you can dip in and out of these normal human emotions that you feel anytime you like.

And I'm just saying there, Ardita noticed a clenched jaw. That's very common. We also see it a lot in the shoulders. Sometimes it can be tension headaches. It can manifest in the shoulders as shoulder tension, the jaw. Sometimes it can be gastro digestive issues because the gut can get involved as well when we're feeling really pent up. So with what I just shared with you there, that's an exercise that you can return to whenever you like. And dip in a night off, you know, just a minute here, a couple of minutes there, and just experience what feels comfortable to you. But the key thing is is not suppressing that feeling, not overriding it.

The next time you get these sensations, the impostor sensations that are coming up, just feel the sensation, you know, go somewhere that is a safe space for you, you know, where where you can feel the sensation and not fight that urge to to override it immediately. You know, give it some breath, give it some space, and if it's genuine uncertainty that's coming up about a new skill, then use the standard tools, you know, I am learning, done is good enough, you know, all of that can help. But if there's something in your environment that genuinely isn't right, I know what the cost is of tolerating things that should never be tolerated at work. So don't talk yourself out of what you are accurately feeling and what you're accurately noticing. That's the key thing here. Is it a is it an impostor phenomenon or is your intelligence system actually telling you that something isn't right? And that that's a really important distinction that is is missed when we when we look at the self development conversations.

So what you just experienced there is what my clients describe as getting their thinking back. And it's not we don't do it through reframing. We don't do it through, strict set frameworks. We do it by giving your own system permission and space to be to be heard and not to be overridden. And the capacity that you experience today, that is always available to you. And you can you can do that anytime you choose to reach it. So headroom, it gives you something back that none of those mindset hacks can give you, and that is a choice. Because when you're not operating under the weight of constant vigilance, then you start to see clearly. And when you can see clearly, then it becomes a choice whether you change the environment that you're in. You may try to change the environment itself.

If it's not possible to change the environment that you're in, then you can choose to put yourself somewhere else entirely. And that's not the same thing as pushing through. So that that is agency. That's agency, and that agency is yours. So if you enjoyed, the session today, I work exclusively with senior women, and if this resonated with you, you can see my QR code up on screen there for LinkedIn. I would absolutely love to connect with you there and I'm going to be popping in and out of the networking sessions over the rest of today and tomorrow as well. So I really hope that I get to meet some of you there. It would be an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for joining me today. We have about nine minutes left. So if anybody has any questions, and I'm also gonna have a little look at the chat as well.

So what I'm gonna do, I'll have a little sip of my water cause I've been talking for quite a long time, and then I'm just gonna have a look through the chat and see if we have any questions, and I'm just gonna see what you've been sharing with me through the session. Justin, you worked with a Scottish manager for three years. Oh, wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. And I'm just having a look here to see what else we have. Agency is one of my most used words with my daughters and the girls I coach for lacrosse. Oh, brilliant. I just love that. It's so important. Alright. Amanda's got a question. Ah, that's a really interesting one. Do you know when it's time to look for a role in a new company versus pushing through? Well, this is one that I do coach clients on quite often, comes up a lot, something that I have felt my experience myself to. And in my experience, I would say that I held on too long in an environment that really wasn't the best for me, because I think as humans, we tend to be quite optimistic.

I think sometimes it's easy to overestimate, you know, when you're when you're an accomplished person, when you've achieved a lot, when you've worked hard, when you push yourself to to really be at the top of your game professionally, then you always do hard things. So sometimes it can be hard to know when to stop doing hard things and I think that's the real risk, Amanda. It's having that personal awareness around what is genuinely within your gift to control. You know? Are is the situation that you're experiencing? How likely is it to improve? And I think what's also quite telling as well is looking around at the other people that you respect in the organization. You know, when there are people who are maybe more senior to you, mentors, sponsors that you look up to, when you see those people, even trusted peers, when you see those people jumping ship, that is often a good time to question is this actually the, you know, the right environment.

And you know yourself, I think the exercise that we did, just experiencing what's going on in the body, I think that's a really good way to become aware of the effect that the environment is having on you. So being mindful of that as well. I think what's also important, and I think this is something that probably cost me quite a lot personally in terms of my own health, was pushing through even when the people who loved me and cared about me were saying, do you know what, Rachel? This is not the right place for you. You're not happy. You know, you're you're not in a good place. You need to do something about it. And I kept pushing through because I thought that I could change the environment. But when you're working in these big organizations, they are big ships to turn around. So things can change, but it can also take a very long time for that to happen. So being pragmatic about that as well.

So I hope I hope that helped Amanda. And I'm just having a relook here. It's almost as if quitting a bad situation is like giving up, as if I can always change the situation for the better. That's not always possible. How do I change that mindset? Yeah. And that and that's the thing. And it the mindset, again, is driven often by the same source as the impostor syndrome itself. So this is the thing where the self development industry makes you think that you're dealing with lots of different symptoms, you know, and and you solve them all in different ways. But usually, there there's one thing kind of at the source of that, you know, that that's driving you as a person. That so that that's really what's going on there.

So I think what can help I mean, obviously, with the source of it is is what gives you that lasting relief. But in terms of something that you could do kind of immediately, is just look at your role profile, you know, what are you what are the responsibilities that you are actually contracted to do in your job? So that's always a very pragmatic way because I think sometimes we want to save the world, and and sometimes we can have that amazing influence, but that's not always the reality. So sometimes it can just give a bit of a reality check to look at the role profile, what is it you're actually signed up to do in your job responsibilities, and then in terms of influencing that wider change, how far is that taking you from your day job? And that piece of advice just now about watching Who's Jumping Shit. Ian Ian was on to something. I like that. Great. And I would assume Mandy, there's a little bit of the devil you know, it keeps us in place as well. No guarantee that it's least we'll be better. Yeah.

And the thought of starting over and having to prove yourself all over can be paralyzing. Absolutely. And something that I've noticed as well, with the clients that I've worked with who've been in a kind of similar situation to to what we're talking about today, once we've actually worked through the source of what they've been experiencing, some of them have decided to stay in their workplace, some of them have actually gone on and got promotions, you know, from being pretty burnt out and then actually going on and getting promotions because they have changed their perspective so fundamentally.

Others have decided to go and do other things. It's a real mix. But I think the main thing is once you work on that, you're then able to make the choice that's right for you. And I think also when you when you're in that place of being able to do what's best for you and not feel guilty about that, then even if you go to the next place and it's it's still not a great environment, it doesn't have the same level of impact on you. I don't know. Has anybody heard that phrase, water off a duck's back? It might be a that might be a Scottish saying, but basically, the idea that whatever's going on, it just, you know, it just runs off you. You're not absorbing it anymore. So I'm just gonna check. We have two minutes left, so I probably have time for one more quick question.

So I'll just give you a chance. Any observations about the session that you wanna share? Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. It's been an absolute joy to have you. And if there's one thing you're gonna take with you from the session today, just let me know in chat before you leave. What are you gonna take with you? What will you take with you back into the rest of your day, the rest of your week? Become a duck. Very good, Amanda. I love that. Absolutely. And it's yeah. You're not alone. You're in very good company, the best company. Everyone's loving the duck comment. Well, listen, guys. It has been an absolute joy and a pleasure to be here with you today, and I hope that I get to see you through the rest of the conference.

This is my first time at this event, so I hope that I'm able to come back next year, And I would absolutely love to connect with you on LinkedIn and get to know you there as well. So thank you very much for taking the time with me today, and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you all. Thanks very much. Bye bye.