Loving Your Imposter

Transforming Your Inner Critic

Are you one of the millions of high-performing individuals who thinks you may be struggling under the weight of “imposter syndrome”? (A disorder labeled in 1978 by psychologists whose focus was on high performance leaders who “suffered” from chronic feels of self-doubt and feeling like a fraud.)

With everything going on around the world, not to mention personal challenges, it’s vital not to demonize or ‘diagnose’ natural cycles of doubt and uncertainty. The dangers of medicalizing the human condition are nothing short of a silent epidemic in American society. This dangerous trend pathologizes the core of human experience, categorizing everyday emotions and responses to trauma and life's challenges as disorders.

The Problem

Many of the characteristics associated with things like ‘imposter syndrome’ and the inner critic – self-doubt, performance anxiety, confusion, insecurity, uncertainty, etc. – are not only normal human reactions to high pressure situations, they’re also healthy coping mechanisms for harmonizing your inner view with outer circumstances. It’s your mind’s way of trying to make sense of your situation.

We live in a world where the increasing reliance on prescriptions for coping with normal human emotions and challenges is a direct correlation to the increase in unresolved mental and emotional struggles. Medicating an imbalance when you already possess the capacity to self-manage these circumstances further inhibits your ability to empower yourself to cope effectively and move forward successfully. Additionally, medication disrupts and breaks down your natural cycles and capacities for healing, growth, and evolution while causing additional physical and mental dis-ease.

It's a slippery slope into psychiatric over-diagnosis, overmedication, and a lifetime of pharmaceutical dependency. Worse still, it casts a shadow of shame and stigma over those who are simply navigating the ups and downs of life, making them feel like they're inherently broken. By medicalizing the human condition, we risk overlooking the valid roots of distress, all while the mental health industry thrives on our collective vulnerability.

The Discovery

Frontier sciences like epigenetics have proven you’re able to influence your genetic development simply with the strength of your beliefs and focused energy. You’re capable of shifting your physical, mental, and emotional patterns by re-establishing perceptions and beliefs that support your current circumstances and future goals.

Consider the significant fact that over 90% of who you are is subconscious, leaving less than 10% available conscious for daily living. Before you can successfully quiet your inner critic or transform your imposter into an ally, you must reveal the hidden beliefs that are driving your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and then update your outdated inner blueprint.

Every thought, feeling, and behavior is generated by a subconscious core belief. Even though those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors your struggle with may not support you now, a version of them did at some point decades ago.

It’s not about convincing yourself that you’re not an imposter or putting a spin on your inner criticisms. The very things that make you feel imposter-like are the same things that supported you decades ago in different circumstances and stages of your life. You are more than your hidden subconscious patterns allow you to be.

The Solution

The so-called inner critic or imposter is not actually your enemy, it’s the subconscious (outdated beliefs and blueprints) part of you battling the conscious part you. Because all your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (thousands per day) are generated by a subconscious belief, your psyche is silently giving you directions for how it thinks you need to survive, even if those thoughts, feelings, and actions are no longer relevant to who you are today. Your subconscious operates like “Groundhog Day”, as if your outer circumstances are the same as they were when the subconscious belief was established long ago.

Additionally, your current struggles are not necessarily an outcome of past trauma. Although linked to previous circumstances, struggles arrive from blocks created by your outdated beliefs, old blueprints for how best to survive in the world many years ago - and they worked back then. Trauma and/or non-traumatic, the way you survived 20, 30, or 40 years ago is not necessarily the best way for you, and who you are now, to survive and thrive today.

You already have the inner tools and intelligence for transforming outdated patterns and removing blocks. It’s all about liberating yourself from the chains of hidden messages and old beliefs.