Today, I wanted talk about something that has come up over and over again in my career, I’ve experienced it personally, everyone I know has gone through it.
It’s a thing every one of us is going through.
We feel like we are the only folks in the world that are having these thoughts. It comes goes a dozen times a day. Unfortunately, that’s just how the human brain works.
No, this isn’t what I would call a soul sucker or it’s the dream crusher, it’s the momentum killer.
And it’s really simple.
It’s the simple thought of… Do I deserve this?
Am I good enough for this?
Do I deserve to be where I am?
Should I be working with people this big this successful?
Can I even ask for this much?
In a nutshell, this common common thing that everyone experiences you’ve probably heard of, and it’s called imposter syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome? That’s a Good Thing!
Everyone has imposter syndrome. And it’s going to be more acute maybe for you who are coaches, consultants, service providers.
The reason why it’s more acute for you is actually a good thing.
It’s because you have integrity around what you do.
You see people who are hustlers or hood winkers or grifters or slime ball salesmen have snake oil potions, and this that and the other thing, they don’t have that little thing in the back of their head. They don’t have the little voice that tells them what if I don’t deserve this, what if I’m not good enough, they don’t have the little voice that says, I don’t deserve to be here. Or I don’t know what I’m doing. Or I’m not good enough, smart enough, experienced enough. They don’t have that. Because everyone they see around them. They’re just pray their marks for the next con.
We’ve all seen people like that.
The first thing I want to say is this:
If you have those feelings of being an imposter, good.
Good, because it means you have some integrity, you have some ethical or moral obligations that you need to meet that you need to feel comfortable with before you can make a sale. And that’s a great place to start.
So first and foremost, I want to congratulate you for sometimes feeling like an imposter.
But now I want to also point out this other side of it. That’s really important.
When I say everybody feels that way, you might go okay, hyperbole, right? I’m telling you, everyone feels that way.
An Imposter Syndrome Example
Let’s take back in the day when I was still working in my startup.
We did a lot of work with Google.
Every time Google would hire engineers, or folks like that they would fly them from anywhere in the country to Mountain View to the headquarters. They fly everyone in for an imposter syndrome session, like onboarding, which is just nuts to me.
I mean, you got to understand Google receives 10s of 1000s, maybe even hundreds of 1000s of applications per position. And what they found is that people that would be the eventual winner of that job, people that they would eventually hire would always arrive and they would now be faced with oh my god, am I good enough to be a Google?
New Googlers would ask, “Did I deserve to beat out 100,000 other people, why am I here? I don’t deserve this.” Or, “I don’t know everything I need to know to be here. I still feel like I’m learning on the job. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing?”
And they would be destined for failure.
They started putting these sessions in place because without fail, all of these incredibly bright increases incredibly talented, incredibly qualified people. Without fail, they all felt this thing.
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Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
Your peers feel this thing.
Your mentor, your mentors feel this thing.
I’m telling you at times I feel this thing and it’s completely natural.
But what I want you to be aware of, is that it is artificial. It’s smoke and mirrors.
The reality is this:
You do not need to be the world’s best coach to deserve to sell coaching, you do not need to be the world’s best service provider, or consultant in order to sell those services, or to provide consulting.
If that was the case, there would be like 12 businesses in the entire world, and everybody else would be working for them.
It’s not the case, it’s a market of opportunity.
The things that make us worth working with are varied and many. It could be anything from your ability to your personality, to the way you approach things, your systems, your processes, your abilities, to make connections and build relationships.
Business businesses, this beautiful fluid thing that can be whatever you make of it. And you are good enough, as long as you continue to develop. And as long as you continue to invest in your abilities, and into getting better.
I guarantee the only way, you will not be good enough, the only way you will be an imposter is if you never work on doing what you’re doing. And you never actually gain more experience more practical knowledge. And you only get that by doing the work.
So you’re playing this difficult game with yourself.
The game is you don’t trust yourself, always enough to think that you deserve to take on the bigger client, or to make the bigger sale or to make more money. But you might not ever get to the point where you feel confident that you do deserve all those things, until you’ve done it and proven to yourself that you deserve it.
This is a common fundamental thing with coaches, consultants, speakers, service provider businesses, nobody thinks that they deserve to double their price.
But…
The moment they do and they start selling at the new price, they’re amazed. And it becomes the new baseline. And now all of a sudden, they wouldn’t dream of selling for anything less. And those numbers that sat in their throat like a lump.
During sales conversations, they just fall off the tongue. They’re easy in the people that seem to always resist and avoid and, you know, evade doing deals with them at their old prices, all of a sudden the people around them, value them more, pay them more, appreciate their work more. And the person is no different.
You the coach, the consultant, the service provider, the speaker, you’ve not changed. You’re no better than you were when you charged 50% less. But your universe has changed your business has changed your your potential has changed.
This imposter syndrome, it steals from you. It’s a thief.
It removes your confidence and forces you to charge less than you need. And that forces you to have a business that’s not as profitable as it should be. And that forces you to sometimes have cashflow issues. And those cashflow issues sometimes make you wonder if you’re good at business at all. And that doubt that cycle starts over and over and over and it will lay you low.
But it does not have to.
It doesn’t have to when you realize that every other person feels the same way.
When millionaires stand in front of billionaires, they wonder and it will always be the same. If you have $100 million you will stand and hold your 100 million cheap next to somebody with $100 billion. If you have 1 million you will hold your million cheap next to someone with 20 and the $20 million person will stand and hold their wealth cheap next to the person with 100 and over and over and swings and roundabouts we all deal with these things.
But we cannot afford to lose our momentum.
We cannot afford to lose our enthusiasm for what we do.
Become Purpose Driven
If you are purpose driven, if you are here to create transformations and help other people, if you want to build a business that’s actually predictable, sustainable, profitable, then imposter syndrome cannot be the thing that you let lay you low.
If you are struggling with the mental side of your business, with the operations with the system’s, the processes, the marketing the sales, come to office hours.
Get your questions answered and find a community that will help support you all the way through as you become an authority and leader in your industry.
