Just having a journal of that stream of consciousness of your greatest insights and those low moments allow you to put those thoughts in that silly box this imposter thought is just as silly as how I thought it'd be a millionaire creating a sticker to block your webcam.

Welcome to the art of charm. I'm your host Jordan Harmager and today this episode is pretty special because it is the 10 year anniversary of the podcast.

So I'll be probably talking about that all year, but definitely this month and most certainly with this toolbox episode we got the whole gang together the AOC team the original AOC team Johnny, AJ and myself.

We're talking about a very apropos topics, speaking of a 10 year anniversary, which is imposter syndrome. Of course, this is something that a lot of high performer suffer from. You've heard about it from Navy SEALs, CEOs, brilliant scientists and researchers.

And I would be remiss. I would be lying to you actually if I said that we didn't also suffer from the same thing. So I can think of nothing more appropriate after doing this for 10 solid years to cover the topic of imposter syndrome, which is something that still creeps in even after a decade.

By the way, if you're new to the show, we'd love to send you some top episodes and the rest of the AOC toolbox where we discuss things like reading body language charismatic nonverbal communication, the science of attraction negotiation techniques networking influence mentorship persuasion and everything else that we teach here at the art of charm.

If you're in the United States, you can text the word charmed to 3 3 3 4 4 4 that's C H A R M E D to 3 3 3 4 4 4 everywhere else just hit up the art of charm.com and at the art of charm.com slash podcast. You can find the full show notes for this in all previous episodes of the show. All right. Here's the AOC team with a little bit of imposter syndrome. We got the remedy.

One topic that's come up a lot on shows with everybody from Navy seals to authors to academics and performers and Ted talkers is imposter syndrome and it's something that seems to be something that affects pretty much everybody, but almost disproportionately affects high performers of the exact type of people that listen to the show. So I wanted to have you guys come on and discuss this because I know you see this at boot camp all the time and it'd be great to talk about what imposter syndrome is why it's bad. How we do that.

So I think another part of it goes back to a topic that we've discussed here before, which is the Dunning Kruger effect where people in the lower end of the bell curve of intelligence are going to tend to beat their chest about things that they don't know about and tasks and activities that they've never done before and will rate themselves on a higher level where those on the higher end of the bell curve.

Know what they don't know are going to be uncomfortable doing things they've never done before they know that they're going to not be so good with those things that also lends itself to self doubt being very critical of yourself and I think that's what is a common with high performers.

So basically as high performers we know well I'm not going to get this right off the bat whereas somebody who's kind of more of a knucklehead will go this is so easy. I don't know why you have a problem with it and instead of comparing our levels of self awareness we just compare level of confidence which ends up misleading us as to how competence we might be at something.

Sure and if you don't have that much experience with life just being somebody a young guy because or that experience isn't there it's easy to get caught up in a negative self doubt loop and self criticizing yourself and buying into your own self doubt.

Yeah and I think one of the most shocking things for us has been the more that we've sort of opened up to people about this in our peer group the more common it really is and a lot of times we sort of lock these feelings of inadequacy in you know we withhold them we don't want to share them with others we view them as weakness and the syndrome we think just affects us so step number one is identifying what imposter syndrome is and calling it imposter syndrome if you get caught up in a self doubt loop.

You could also get caught up in flourish in a positive self talk loop so with that experience and certain habits can force it another manner so but we'll get there we'll have to talk about how we can work through this and things to help us be better with it.

It's an element of negative self talk that happens with especially with high performers what are these voices that I'm the only one that sort of slipped through the cracks I don't belong here look at everybody else there's no smart so capable what are their types of talk are we well the two psychologists that the coin this term Pauline clansons who's in I'm.

1978 said it's a feeling of phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement all of the reality is that you have accomplished things but you continually doubt your ability to achieve and believe inside that you are a phone or a fake sure and we can talk that up to cognitive distortions for the patterns.

Right so basically the same biases that affect us all in other areas are now affecting us in our self talk it seems like itself reinforcing because if we think I'm the only one here is the cracks I don't belong here and then when we do eventually start that activity we don't necessarily realize that maybe other people think the same thing we start to go look we start to be our own harshest critic which then takes us into this negative thought loop how can you be able to see it any other person dealing with that when the only tools that you have to deal with the world of your own senses.

Which always put you in the middle of whatever is going on so it's hard to see anyone else struggling with it we look out through our bubble we just see people doing their thing and they know what they're doing they have a put together and we're struggling inside and everyone has this feeling of wanting to make it look easy even though it takes a lot of effort of course no one wants to talk about the effort behind the scenes to be flawless to be perfect to get the 1600 on the SAT.

But behind the scenes are doing a lot of work they're practicing are trying to figure out these skills so because of that we see everyone else sort of effortlessly achieving and then internally we're like well we haven't achieved what they have achieved I'm not worthy of all these compliments testimonials are people saying that I'm the shit so that feeling of phoniness we lock inside we don't share with other people well there's another thing to that there's the randomness of things not working if you look at other people and what they have going on and if you see those problems

everywhere else around you then your own world starts to become very crippling because it comes collapsing on you so like even right now if we had to look at what is going on for us to be able to put this podcast together right now well there's an electric company somewhere just keeping the lights on there's these computers that are working if we see all these things that have to work for us to do this and see them for the little pieces that they are that they can all fall apart at any moment that our whole world starts falling apart we are geared towards the light of the world.

We're not too worried about those things so we can focus on the task and we shut all those other things else down.

The sense of not feeling that you're worth the accolades or achievements you've gained is fairly common in high achievers which is something that a lot of people don't talk about and just like all these other cognitive distortions we talk about on Friday in class that kind of blow the doors off of things we share these cognitive distortions we all do we all have these feelings.

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