How To Deal With Imposter Syndrome

imposter syndrome what does that mean to you generally speak when i ask this question the whole room lights up so because very rarely do i meet any creative person who has a level of self-awareness that they don't suffer some form of imposter syndrome but imposter syndrome is this is that i fear that people will after some time discover i know nothing i provide no value and i'm talentless meryl streep said that she's like one day i fear that people are gonna just get really bored of me and realize i have no talent meryl streep the most nominated actress of all time most creative people are creative because they're very in touch with their emotions and they're very vulnerable especially actors and actresses that's where their power comes from so they suffer from imposter syndrome that vulnerability that you tap into as part of your creativity is what leads you to this path of the dark side the whole imposter syndrome and i think the imposter syndrome has this lifelong fear of being discovered that you're not as good as that other people give you credit for so here's the thing if we allow ourself to look at ourselves through the lens of our ego we're gonna say like we should be at this level like i am from you know i am a senior i should be at this level and i and we tell ourselves the story that we're supposed to be somewhere other than where we are and it starts to push the two images of ourselves apart the true self and this created self right and i've talked about this before almost everybody in this room already sees your true self like i don't have to tell you guys like i'm a five foot asian guy because i am i'm not to tell you i don't have any hair because i don't but in my mind i'm like well i'm six foot two i'm very like debonair no i just don't think that of myself so grounding yourself in your true authentic self and embracing the learner mindset of saying i don't know things i'm just here to learn and maybe the work i do is good or not good i don't really care i'm only interested in growth so what's happening marshall rosenthal or something like that marshall he wrote this book called non-violent communication there's an excellent three-hour workshop lecture i swear to you must watch this lecture from beginning to end i can't believe it's free kind of thing he's passed away but he talks about non-violent communication that it's very difficult for us as human beings to look at something objectively as an observer we always have to throw our opinion in there judge we always have to measure and assign value right so what i mean by that this is my work that's a pretty objective statement this work is complete or incomplete now there's a little bit of measurement in there but it's not horrible this is my really good complete work well now we've gone on the other side and we're using violent language because we're imposing our opinion on this work and it reflects on us if we can just say this is my work and it's a time stamp and as to where i'm at today in my life am i learning how could that be an imposter thing that you have to fight with if the other person walks in the room and says i should be better than i am this should be really good and when it's not the two sides of you are in conflict and you become this disassociated self and it becomes very complicated not only are you busy trying to maintain an image of yourself that doesn't exist to try to impress people to tell yourself the story that you're better than you are that's a lot of your energy mental space and your creative energy being consumed by this so i personally think one of my personal biggest breakthroughs in public speaking was just to say to myself i'm here for the other person i'm not here to prove to me or to you that i'm an incredible speaker i'm the smartest person i've got the best slides or the coolest transitions once i let go of that projected image of who i thought i wanted to be it became a lot easier for me to get on stage and look at hundreds of people and not feel like i want to cry and run off stage because those are very much the true feelings it's a shift in mindset to say you know what if i focus the lens on myself everything i look at magnifies from my skin the pores on my nose or or the freckle i have or whatever it is but if i invert that lens and i just am neutrally observing myself in this community in this audience then it becomes a lot easier for me to deal with so if you come from a place where you're really grounded like from the earth grounded and you don't have a high opinion of yourself and you readily admit to people like tyler said i don't know i'm here to learn obviously i wouldn't be here if i didn't want to learn i'm going to keep myself grounded in that way to allow my true self to just to be present and not to worry about this other imagined version of myself that nobody sees anyways for a lot a long part of my life i have suffered from ambassador syndrome so i know this emotion very well and i've developed some mental

tricks to get over it and i'm trying to share those ideas with you okay i also know this is that we all have some kind of core skill they're not always related to what we're studying right now like some of you guys can be amazing bakers or skateboarding people or or gymnasts or whatever it is but in the design world you suck let's just admit it you suck and you're terrible and when you're exposed into like new spaces you feel very vulnerable and i get pulled into those waters myself there are times when i've gone to certain party uh and functions and i just felt like i'm like look at all these people they've done all these things and who the hell invited me somebody made a mistake somebody sent me back home right now and it's because i had this skill over here and then they brought me over here and threw me like well i don't know what to do i'm drowning here but over time as i get older i start to learn like you know what remember who you are remember that it's just not you in the lens of what you're doing today but all of you bring all of that and you have to learn to find that core and remember when that imposter syndrome is yelling inside your head that voice to say you're not worthy you're not good enough you don't belong here you don't deserve this opportunity go back to that core have a conversation with yourself because you bring a lot to the conversation yeah it's just this constant oscillation between your taste and your skill and the overlap right so in the beginning you're in a freshman and you're going to school your taste might be higher than your skill most likely and then you start like getting this foundational work and you start to learn about typography and lettering and composition a lot of sudden your skill surpasses your taste and then you start to get exposed to the next tier or two or three above where you're at you're like oh i suck again it's just constant movement through that i would like to just get rid of that other part because it can be emotionally draining it could make you go into states of depression anxiety and you know it'll just shut you down because those negative emotions will kind of kill your creativity i'd like to just look at it like i'm on this roller coaster called life and sometimes i have more skill than less but no matter what if i look back to where i started it's way more than that so use that as a reference point now people often compare themselves and comparison is the thief of joy they compare themselves to a future imagined self or to other people who are far superior to them notice this very few people will say like yeah i i'd like to be like gary vaynerchuk when he was year one and you watch those videos like oh that's terrible or marquez brownlee and you're like that kid was rough they only compare themselves to the best version most up-to-date version of people and they forget that everybody sucked at one point everybody was a beginner at one point so first of all let's just get rid of that comparison thing and if you have to compare yourself today to the person you were just a few years ago or two months ago that's your marker okay like if you could swim from shore to a mile marker that's fantastic and then when you can swim to the second mile marker that's even more amazing and just look how far you've come from shore don't look at it from where you'd like to go when you compare look backwards not forwards because that could be dehabilitating i don't want that for you okay hey everyone ricky here i'm one of the content directors here at the future if you enjoyed today's video leave a comment down below with a time stamp letting me know which was the best part there are gonna be some other videos that are gonna pop up right here that you also might enjoy and if you can do what everyone asks you to do which is to like the video and subscribe to the channel it honestly does go a long way in our mission here to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love head to thefuture. com to learn more thanks for watching and your continued support and we will see you guys in the next video