Going back to the imposter phenomenon article I wrote about a couple days ago:
Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes are two psychologists who first coined, defined, and publicized the idea of imposter phenomenon, which later grew in the public mind into imposter syndrome.
What can you do if you want to get rid of those feelings of being a fake? The Internet is full of advice. Here’s what Clance and Imes themselves found to work in their clinical practices:
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Clance has seen clients healed not by success but by the kind of resonance she found with Imes. Bolstered and sustained by group therapy with other women — it’s easier to believe other women aren’t impostors — they can then bring this recognition of others’ delusion back to themselves.
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In other words, if you feel like a fake, and you don’t want to feel like a fake no more, then the answer is not to push on even harder. The answer is— well, let me get into the marketing and business advice now.
Last week, I went to a meetup in Seville hosted by Sean D’Souza. The meetup lasted for three hours and lots of ideas came up. At the end of it all, I decided to take just four of those many ideas and remember them. One of those four is exactly that Clance and Imes realization, but applied to your business.
If you have a problem in your business, says Sean, don’t work on fixing it. Instead, work on fixing somebody else’s business.
This isn’t a matter of being altruistic, or of “serving” others as a means to getting what you want.
It’s simply a fact of human psychology: There are different pathways in our brains that go into thinking about ourselves and what belongs to us, and thinking about others and their stuff. We know this because some unlucky bastard in 19th-century America got a metal stake driven through his eye socket, taking out a large chunk of his brain. He lived on without seeming harm. But he became terrible at making decisions in his own life — all while still being able to give perfectly sane advice to others.
It also works without the metal stake in your eye socket.
Like Clance and Imes found, so has Sean D’Souza found – it’s easier to see what other businesses could do better — and then bring this recognition of others’ opportunities back to your own business.
So try that.
And now, since I’ve already referred to two topics I’ve written about over the past week, let me end with a third such topic:
Three days ago, I ran a little poll in this newsletter. I asked readers which of three group coaching/workshops they might be most interested in.
The results are in. And the winner, both in terms of the total number of votes, and in terms of being most in line with what I want to do with this newsletter, is a group coaching/workshop on email copywriting.
I’m not offering this group coaching/workshop yet. I also haven’t decided when I will.
But if this is something you are interested in, then the only way to get in, once I do offer it, is to be on my email list. To do that, click here and sign up.