Growing Up at Work: How to Transform Personally, Evolve Professionally, and Lead Authentically

The following is an excerpt from Growing Up at Work: How to Transform Personally, Evolve Professionally, and Lead Authentically by Yael C. Sivi and Yosh C. Beier published May 25, 2021 and available everywhere books are sold.

Praise for Growing Up At Work

“A truly revolutionary book, transforming how we see personal and professional growth in the workplace. Growing Up at Work’s riveting stories are the ultimate guide to becoming more emotionally and socially mature, both at work and at home.”
— MARSHALL GOLDSMITH, the New York Times №1 bestselling
author of Triggers, Mojo, and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Chapter 1

I Feel Like an Imposter

Within two minutes of sitting down with me, Julia burst into tears.

“I don’t know if I’m right for this job. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I’m succeeding at this,” she said, looking at me intently, her body hunched over. “I’m afraid I’m not doing a very good job, and this isn’t going as well as I had hoped.”

She caught herself. “I’m so sorry I’m crying.”

This wasn’t the Julia I knew. I had first met her when she was a student in my leadership program. The kind of person who lights up a room, Julia was naturally full of energy, funny, and sweet. She managed to be simultaneously charming and authentic, a combination that led to her becoming a great favorite in class. She made friends easily.

After graduating from college, Julia, a white Jewish woman in her late twenties, got a job with a nonprofit educational advocacy organization and rose rapidly through the ranks. Academically gifted and driven, but not super-ambitious, she’d take an opportunity if it presented itself and felt right. A chance to move to New York? OK, I’ll do that. Move into a more senior position? OK, I’ll do that. She took things on mostly because they were there to be taken on and because she was a curious, bright person.

I offer all of my students a one-on-one coaching session as part of the leadership program I teach. Julia was one of the first to avail herself of this session, so here she was, this funny, bright, highly capable person — someone whom I knew was very smart based on my class — yet within two minutes of sitting down with me, she was in tears. She had been promoted consistently throughout her career and the only feedback she ever received was glowing, but her head was in her hands as she told me she was terrible at her job.

“I bet everyone at work is convinced I can’t do my job,” she said.

“They’re probably sorry they hired me. It’s only a matter of time before they figure out that I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

What was going on here? Where was she getting this message?

Imposter syndrome

“Imposter syndrome,” where you continually doubt your achievements and live with the fear of being exposed as a fraud, is a deeply familiar experience for many people I’ve worked with, including successful professionals and leaders, across all ages and industries.

With Julia, the impact of what she was going through wasn’t really visible on the surface. She was such a buoyant, effervescent personality that most of the people in her life were completely unaware of what was going on inside of her. But the pain and isolation were very real — affecting her mood, her relationships, her sleep.

My approach with Julia, as we’ll see throughout this book with other clients, was to “make the unconscious conscious,” which is to bring awareness to the beliefs, values, assumptions, and experiences that drive us. I sought to unpack the thinking that was leading to her suffering and hampering her development as a leader. I needed to hear exactly what Julia believed about herself. What was the story she was hearing in her head? Whose story was that? What was drowning out all of the positive feedback and leaving her instead with the terrible sense of being a failure?

A feeling can often be traced back to the thought that caused it. While some feelings seem to come from our gut, and those feelings may very well be based in trauma or pain from our past, our feelings often originate from a story we tell about ourselves — thoughts that we don’t even know we are thinking that give rise to negative feelings. For example: I’m telling myself that my coworkers think I’m lazy because I told them I couldn’t help out with a project. When I tell myself this story, I feel sad and ashamed.

There’s the thought, then boom! there’s the feeling. As Julia spoke, as we explored her thoughts, it quickly became obvious that there was more than one voice in the room — two in particular. There was the part of Julia that was suffering because she felt like she was an imposter, but this process all started because there was another part of Julia, an “inner critic” that was telling Julia over and over again that she wasn’t doing a good job. And that voice was informed by an imagined perception of how others viewed her. The voice of the receiver, the victim, was largely silent, taking in all of this abuse — it hadn’t been clear to Julia that she was actually berating herself.

The good news is that by simply identifying imposter syndrome as a common thought pattern, and by giving it a name, we can start to work with it.

“Do you recognize part of what’s going on here as a phenomenon called imposter syndrome?” I asked Julia. “Does that sound right to you?” Asking this question is the first step toward breaking down the sense of isolation that often comes with imposter syndrome. The belief that everyone else sees you as a fraud, combined with the idea that everyone else around you must know what they are doing, is a very unpleasant way of suffering and feeling alone.

“It could be. That’s really interesting,” she said, her blue eyes widening. We smiled at each other. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

Exploring the voices inside

To understand why we are suffering, it’s necessary to explore exactly what’s going on inside of us. With Julia, I wanted to hear the voice of her inner critic to know what it was saying and to understand the effect it was having on her. So I invited Julia to speak from that voice. What exactly was she telling herself ?

“You’re such a fake,” she spat, “you’re such a phony. Everyone knows you don’t know how to do this job, and it’s only a matter of time before you’re really found out by everyone.”

What was happening here, according to “Gestalt therapy,” is called an “interruption in contact,” which involves how early experiences mute or alter our natural needs and impulses. It essentially describes the different ways we unwittingly block our flow, our energy, our excitement, our love of life.

This interruption in contact was actually two interruptions in one. First off, Julia was “projecting,” whereby she was imagining the thoughts of her colleagues and that they had a negative set of perceptions of her. The second interruption here is called “retroflection.” This is where we attack ourselves, either in the way that others have attacked us or in the way we wish we could attack others, or to try to force ourselves to be a particular way in the world.

After hearing from the part of Julia that was creating the attack, I asked if she was aware that there was another part of her that was actually receiving this message. In essence, the receiver of the messages is our inner victim — the part that receives the inner attack.

“How does this part feel?” I asked. “And what, if anything, do you want to say in response?”

While she felt sad to hear these critical words about herself, she agreed with what the critic had to say.

“The critic is right. I really am not good my job, and everyone knows it.”

Take back your eyes and stand up to your inner critic

As we began our work together, I started by discussing the psychological process of “projection” with Julia. Many of us spend a lot of our mental energy projecting onto others as if they are a blank movie screen. We often tend to project our fears onto others — and sometimes we project our wishes, too. We don’t even realize we are projecting, and we also feel quite convinced that whatever we are projecting is accurate.

In Julia’s case, I wanted to start by helping her see this first distortion that was getting in her way: She was seeing herself through her imagination of what others thought of her and she didn’t even realize that this was what she was doing. Step one for Julia was to take back her eyes and realize that she was the one who was creating the voice in her head — no one else.

Once Julia realized that it was part of herself that was imagining the worst, we looked next at what she was doing with that information. She was attacking herself with it. So, just as you would coach a child being bullied on the playground, I began to fortify that victimized, quiescent part of Julia’s psyche. Standing up to your inner critic — something we also refer to as making peace with the bully — is about exchanging the voice of the victim with the voice of strength. I encourage my clients to get in touch with how they would respond if these mean things were being said to someone they cared about.

I began coaching Julia to defend herself by proxy, to think of it as defending someone else.

I asked Julia, “What would you say if this bully was talking to a friend of yours? How would you react?” The truth is that it’s much easier for us to stand up to a bully if they’re bullying somebody that we love.

“I would tell them to stop,” she said, without hesitation. “I would tell them that this was unacceptable, that this was not OK. That what they were saying wasn’t even true.”

Velcro and Teflon

It’s said that negative thoughts are like Velcro. They tend to stick. As human beings, we have a knack for believing, and ruminating on, negative thoughts about ourselves, and we feel bad as a result.

This was certainly true for Julia. She was in the habit of telling herself that she wasn’t good enough at her job, that she was an imposter, and as a result, she told herself that she was a failure. This thought pattern was on a loop in her head and had a “sticky” quality in her consciousness.

Meanwhile, positive thoughts tend to be like Teflon. They often don’t stick. Someone tells us we do something really well and we just think, yeah, well, I’m not so sure . . . We write them off.

The reality was that Julia was in receipt of plenty of positive feedback — there was no shortage of people telling her she was doing a great job, but she had trouble believing it.

Sometimes we have to borrow the confidence others have in us and see ourselves through their eyes. People often see in us what we can’t see in ourselves, and it can take deliberate effort to appreciate something positive about ourselves and to decide to be affected by it.

Julia began working on trying to be affected by the positivity around her and by the praise that her colleagues were expressing toward her. This took a lot of practice. It’s not easy to take a mental concept and turn it into something that’s lived in the body, to see that you have talents and gifts and to recognize that you can live them.

During one of our next sessions, Julia told me about a curriculum she was working on, and I used this opportunity to put my observations into play.

“Julia, that’s such an innovative way of putting theory into practice,” I said. “I find you so imaginative.”

“Thanks, but anyone could have done that,” she responded.

“Let’s pause,” I said. “What just happened? Did you notice you just brushed me off ? You just deflected that positive thing I shared about you being creative.”

She looked surprised. “Deflection” is a way in which we avoid a difficult experience or emotion and find a replacement for it.

“How familiar is that?” I asked.

“Quite familiar.”

“I wonder if I could say it again to you and instead of your just moving past it, I wonder if, as an experiment, you could just let yourself be affected by what I said,” I told her. “Just hear my compliment and feel my positive words.”

I repeated what I had previously said, and a few seconds passed.

“What was that like?” I asked.

“That was interesting,” she said. “I’m feeling some tingling in my stomach.”

“I noticed your shoulders relaxed, too.”

“That’s true,” she responded. “Yeah, I was touched by what you said.”

This took a lot of practice. It’s not easy to take a mental concept and turn it into something that’s lived in the body, to see that you have talents and gifts and to recognize that you can live them.

Over time, Julia could start to say, “I think I understand why I’ve been promoted.” She could begin to appreciate the things she liked about her job. She could chair a high-level meeting at the mayor’s office, and in her mind, she could hear the voice that used to do nothing but accept the criticism say, “I can do this, I’m good at this.”

Julia also started a journaling practice to support the coaching process. Journaling can also be really helpful in this process, as there’s only so much you can accomplish in a fifty-minute session every other week, and journaling accelerates self-inquiry. Instead of simply feeling bad, we can explore how the pain is being created in our psyche. We notice and track self-talk. You might think, I’ve no idea what I’m doing here, and instead of giving way instantly to the feeling that this can generate, you stop and label the thought: This is critical self-talk.

Techniques like these allowed Julia to separate herself from the story she was telling herself. With time, and with support in our sessions, she also practiced responding to her critical self-talk with compassion, love, reason, and balance.

“Yes, I am new to this role, and I am still learning, but that doesn’t make me any different than anyone else who’s new to a role,” she said. “I can see how much I am trying, and others do, too. Why not try to just trust in that a little more?”

Getting curios about the inner critic

In addition to helping Julia fortify her inner victim and learn to take in positive support, I worked with her to explore her inner critic and to encourage her to do the same. We started examining questions like: Where did this inner critic come from? When did it start? Why was she pushing herself in this particular way?

I also wondered if the voice of her inner critic reminded her of someone. In some cases — not so much with Julia — but frequently, the voice is the replica of a parent. The person is doing to themselves what was done to them.

One of the things that can be especially illuminating when we get curious about our inner critic is to better understand how old we were when this part of ourselves developed. While not an exact science, many clients have a sense of when this part of themselves emerged, and this was true for Julia as well.

As it turns out, Julia’s parents, as well as her teachers, gave her a lot of attention for being smart and successful at school. Her parents were never critical of her, she recalled.

“They thought that the sun revolved around me,” she said. “They told me I was the smartest, most talented kid, and I really came to believe that. My teachers gave me a ton of praise, too.”

“How do you think that impacted you?”

She thought a moment. “My identity until I was a young adult was really around being the A student,” she said, “being a good girl, being responsible.”

As a result, her inner voice reinforced this desire to win approval and retain her identity in the world as a smart person, a solid performer, and someone who was willing to take on any challenge. Gradually, it became more ruthless, holding her to higher and higher standards. This part of Julia didn’t take well to not knowing everything, and I took notice.

“That’s so interesting,” I said. “So, this voice didn’t come from your parents?”

“No.”

“And it didn’t come from your teachers?”

“No.”

“It seems like it came from inside of you.”

“Yeah, I guess it did.”

“Any sense of when it started?” I asked.

Julia paused, and her eyes welled up with tears.

“I think it was when I was a kid, probably eleven or twelve. It’s been with me a long time,” she said. She began to smile. “I don’t know why I’m getting so emotional about this right now.”

“I’m not sure, either,” I said, passing her a tissue. “Let’s look more closely at this.”

With reflection and through coaching, Julia came to realize that her inner critic, the part that was continually attacking her, was a child. That part of Julia understandably wanted approval, but she also had developed a simple equation that led to that sense of approval and safety. If she performed well and she felt completely confident, she concluded that she was lovable and safe.

In contrast, if Julia was less certain about herself, she was walking in uncharted territory and her inner critic responded with fear and self-attack. Her inner child didn’t know what to do with the fact that, indeed, adulthood, and professional life, includes many moments of not knowing, learning, even failure. These experiences enable us to grow, if we are open, but with an inner critic monitoring the situation all the time, they are also ripe for self-attack.

Addressing the empty chair

One of the ways in which I work as a coach is doing “experiments” with my clients, and a powerful Gestalt experiment is called the “empty chair,” where we speak either to a part of ourselves or to someone else. I’ve done it with clients both in person and via live video. In Julia’s case, I invited her to converse with her inner critic and to explore this part of herself.

I always have an empty chair in the office, so clients don’t usually think too much about it. Julia didn’t, either, until I asked her if she would mind if we did a little experiment. (If I’m working with a client during an online session, due to COVID-19 or not, I sometimes ask the client to set up an empty chair in their room to assist with our process.)

She looked at me quizzically, a bit fearful and intrigued all at once.

“The empty chair is here by design,” I explained. “In Gestalt-informed work, we believe that this chair can help us have conversations in the moment with either parts of ourselves or people in our lives, and we can just sort of see what emerges.”

I let her absorb this for a moment, then continued, “I’m wondering what it would be like for you and me to talk to this part of you. Would you be willing to do this experiment?”

“OK,” she said, and I could tell she was trying to be a good sport.

“Before you get up and try to feel this part of you, I’d like for you to look over at that empty chair and imagine your inner critic. What does this part of you look like? What do you see?”

Her eyes squinted, as if trying to focus on a distant image. Some people see it quickly; for others, it takes awhile.

“I see an eleven-year-old girl,” Julia said. “She has a stern look on her face, and her arms are crossed.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “How are you affected by her?”

“I’m kind of uncomfortable around her. She’s staring at me.”

“Now, would you be willing to get up and sit in her seat?”

Julia got up slowly and walked over to the chair. She hesitated for a second, then sat down.

“Just let yourself be affected by this,” I said.

“My stomach just sank,” she said. “I’m feeling kind of sad and angry over here.”

“OK, I know this part might be tricky. Can you imagine embodying this critic, who is actually not a separate person but a part of you? Can you look over at the other part of Julia and talk to her? What would you tell her?”

“I’m here to make sure that you’re doing your job correctly, and you’ve got to work hard,” Julia said. “If you don’t work hard, you’re not going to succeed, and I’m afraid people are going to think you’re a failure. You’ve got to be the best.”

“Those are pretty stark terms,” I said. “Very black and white.”

I invited her to return to her original chair.

“How are you feeling? What did you notice about her voice, and her words?” I asked.

“She speaks in such simple terms. She sees me like a child would.”

“What might you say to this inner critic?”

“You’re being too simplistic, and it’s not fair. Life isn’t like that, especially adult life,” Julia said, feeling emboldened. She sat up straighter in her chair. “I’m learning. I’m making mistakes. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

I cannot overstate the importance of ongoing awareness in this kind of transformation. Think of the psyche as a container. When you’re not aware of the inner critic, its voice can take over. But by noticing it, it doesn’t sound quite as loud or half as credible. Eckhart Tolle, a prominent spiritual teacher, puts it like this: “When you make your unconscious motivations conscious, you immediately see how absurd they are. Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”

Julia and I were able to confirm our hypothesis that the critic was a young part of Julia focused on protecting herself. With her increased awareness, she came to see that the part of her that created pain was also a part that deserved love and attention — ideally, from Julia herself as an adult.

The truth and the lie

One thing I’ve realized over the years is that there is both a truth and a lie at the heart of imposter syndrome. The lie — the inner critic’s continual assertion that we are a failure, a phony — we’ve already talked about. It’s usually a way of trying to keep ourselves safe that is based in fear, but in essence the lie we tell ourselves is this: We should already know everything and if we don’t, we’re a failure.

The truth is that none of us knows everything. We are all on a learning curve. This is particularly true when we take on a new role or are promoted into a position of authority. It is at this point that Julia was most vulnerable to the voice of her critic, because there were, of course, things that she needed to work on. For instance, she didn’t have a great deal of experience in operations, a new aspect of her role.

Julia also frequently had difficulty when it came to big decisions that affected other people. In one particular case, she needed to decide whether a certain academic subject should be made mandatory on the curriculum — a decision that she knew would affect thousands of kids. She was paralyzed by indecision. The anxiety this generated was exacerbated by one of her direct reports who saw what was happening and challenged her authority.

“I don’t know what to do right now. I’m so torn about whether to make this decision one way or the other. This is exactly what I meant by not knowing what I’m doing. A good leader would know how to make this decision,” Julia told me. “My staff member is so much more decisive than me, and she’s getting really annoyed by my lack of leadership on this, and I don’t blame her.”

We are at our most vulnerable at moments like these, since it is now more than ever that the critical voice carries a certain moral authority.

How do you separate the lie from the truth when they are so entangled?

The hallmark of the lie is that it is monolithic. It is nonspecific. You are a failure, a phony, a fraud. Everyone knows more than you.

The truth, by contrast, is more nuanced, more specific. Because of this, it’s far more amenable to specific solutions. We can distill what we want to learn and practice, what we want to refine in our new role, asking ourselves:

• Are there classes I need to take?
• Could I benefit from mentoring?
• Is there a professional development program I could access?

Is this what I want?

I’ve also come to see that imposter syndrome may sometimes speak to the fact that maybe this isn’t the best match between your interests and skills and what the job is asking of you, and there’s nothing wrong with considering this possibility — though ideally without self-attack. Experiencing imposter syndrome can be helpful in that it does sometimes force you to ask serious questions.

• Is this the right role for me?
• Am I enjoying this?
• Does it resonate with who I am and my natural strengths?
• If I’m not good at something, is it something I want to get better at?

These are legitimate questions, which demand reflection, and they are qualitatively different from the shrill voice of the inner critic, which seeks only to insist that you are putting one over on everyone.

It’s also true that sometimes a pinch of imposter syndrome can help us stay realistic and grounded — as kind of an antidote to arrogance. Realizing we don’t know everything can reveal humility — the foundation of all virtues, according to Confucius — and humility, in my opinion, is something every leader needs. Note, too, that the spur of imposter syndrome prompted Julia to look at her own growth, both professional and personal.

Growing into a sense of self-trust and self-confidence means that we also learn to lead from a place of deep connection to ourselves. We become authentic; we feel more like ourselves.

To get Julia to that place, we examined her decision-making skills and sought supports that broke the neurotic spiral, allowing her to move away from a place of shame and self-attack, and grow in the way that she needed. She began to trust her judgment without shame and started to inform big decisions that relied on data and consultation with others.

Dealing with imposter syndrome in this way allowed Julia to be more present, to break the connection with a mental narrative that was not real. This also enabled her to become a better coach and a better manager because she was that much more empathic to how some of her staff might be feeling in starting a new role.

The magic of the moment

Julia and I worked together for a year. Over that time, we saw a gradual reduction in her suffering. She became lighter, happier. She had less trouble sleeping.

There was more flow in her life, more joy, more confidence. She came to realize that her struggle with feeling like an imposter felt both personal and universal. She practiced regularly “taking back her eyes” to discern what she actually felt about herself and her work instead of imagining that others were thinking the worst. She caught herself as she was about to go on the self-attack, and she stopped it.

She also enjoyed additional promotions at work and discovered her capacity to recognize and accept the admiration of those around her. Near the end of our work, she was selected as one of the few industry leaders asked to address a prestigious conference on educational advocacy.

“I’m so excited about it,” she told me.

“Wow, that’s fabulous,” I said. “It feels to me you’re being recognized for the great work you’re doing.”

We smiled and laughed together, celebrating her accomplishments.

“No one thinks I’m a failure,” she said. And finally, she believed it.

Reflections

• Through whose “eyes” do I see myself ?
• What do I expect myself to know by now, and why?
• How would I know how to do this without learning it?
• How does it affect me when I tell myself I’m an imposter? Would I talk to anyone else like that?
• What would make me feel less like an imposter? What do I need to learn and practice to feel equipped for this role, this job, this challenge?
• What supportive words can I offer myself if I’m feeling scared or insecure?

Practices

• Distinguish your thoughts from your feelings. If you’re feeling bad, stop and investigate the story you’re telling yourself.
• Come back to the present. Name what you’re seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting. Get back into your body. Exercise or meditate, whatever it takes to get out of your head.
• If you become aware of your inner critic, practice becoming aware of your critical voice and also practice standing up to your critic. Journaling can be a great tool for this, and you can do it as if you’re writing dialogue between two different characters.
• Say kind words to yourself on a daily basis. Talk about what you appreciate about yourself. Practice talking to yourself the way you would talk to somebody you love. You can do this in a mirror, in a journal, or by looking at a picture of yourself at a younger age.

Experiments

• Branch out! Take a class or seek support or mentoring for something you don’t know how to do.
• Take five minutes to talk to yourself out loud about the things you appreciate about yourself. Write down how you feel afterward.