Moment 133: Behaviour Change Scientist Reveals A Simple Solution To Imposter Syndrome: Shahroo Izadi

In this moment, behavioural change specialist Shahroo Izadi discusses how to overcome imposter syndrome. Shahroo defines imposter syndrome as not being able to internalise your accomplishments, so that even the most successful people never feel as if they are enough. This is all linked to low self-worth, shame and guilt, coming from not being able to give yourself permission to accept that what others made find easy you find difficult. As you will need to change habits your whole life, Shahroo believes that you need to change the conversations you have with yourself, feeling smart, calm and proud of yourself so that you can reframe challenges to opportunities for showing your capacity. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/z27Z2VhodEb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Shahroo - https://www.shahrooizadi.co.uk https://www.instagram.com/shahroo_izadi/?hl=en Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  Imposter syndrome, how does one move past it?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Oh, sit back.

• 0:08Steven Bartlett?

  There's this word we use a lot in society at the moment, which is Imposter syndrome. It's a really interesting concept. I mean, the word itself, the phrase itself is kind of loaded with a series of assumptions that I don't think are necessarily helpful, but you must, in your practice, deal with a lot of people that are showing signs of what we know as Imposter syndrome. What's your, what's your take on it? And really like, how does one, how does one move past it?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Well, this is a very new, this is a hot take because it's through an observation. The way that I come up with things is I spend as many hours as I can speaking to people, human beings, one after the other, as many human beings as I can in different contexts, and seeing how they are using these tools and what's working for them and what isn't. And for Imposter syndrome, essentially not, not being able to internalize

• 1:05Speaker 01

  your accomplishments, feeling like a fraud, which I've had.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Managing my binge eating and my anxiety differently

• 1:16Speaker 01

  helped me change my Imposter syndrome for the better. And I'm seeing why that is now. I've just started to work, well, now that I'm so passionate about binge eating as a result of weight loss diets being a thing that goes with my generation.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  What I've noticed is that when people give themselves permission to find whatever they find difficult, difficult, whatever it is, even if it's subjectively far more simple than all the things they're managing to do every day, something extraordinary happens.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  And that tends to have a really extraordinary impact because usually with the people I work with, because I'm talking about like booze and other drugs and food and stuff. There's a lot of shame and guilt associated with it. So that extra bit, we all, we all find it difficult to acknowledge, you know, a lot of us find it difficult to say, I was great at this. And that's the end of the sentence without any caveats or, and it could have been da, da, da.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  When it comes to acknowledging our, say, our professional accomplishments or academic accomplishments, the people I work with a lot of the time feel so ashamed and guilty about this thing that that still eludes them. That's, that's the bit. They'll be like, yeah, I got a pay rise, but I still haven't sorted this out. People don't know how I behave when no one's watching. And like, that bit, that's what drags people down. It doesn't let them really, really internalize and process their capacity. Because, well, for example, I've written two books. That's cool. They've done well. Writing books was not hard for me. Doing this, this is way, this is, you know,

• 2:58Speaker 01

  being able to not stammer while I speak to you. Because I had the confidence to sit and breathe before I came in here rather than look at notes. Or only binge eaters will understand this, but being able to start a binge and then bring it back, as opposed to just starve myself for weeks or whatever I was doing before, is a power and a trust in myself and an ability to close the gap between what I, what I would tell other people to do and what I do. And a sense of integrity when no one's watching, that seeps into every area of my life. But the trick was to allow myself to find something incredibly difficult that other people

• 3:40Speaker 01

  thought was a no brainer and not think that that meant I was stupid or weak, but just that's the way things have gone for me.

• 3:47Steven Bartlett?

  I, I remember sitting with Marisa Pia and she said that she's never had a patient, whether they were a sports star or a, you know, successful millionaire, whatever,

• 3:59Steven Bartlett?

  that believed they were enough in terms of her patients. So the people that had come to her struggling with something, at the root of it is that they, they didn't believe they were enough in some capacity. Do you agree with that?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, I think self-worth. Self-worth is something that comes up a lot.

• 4:20Steven Bartlett?

  And if I come to you and, you know, it's clear that I have my self-worth is in the proverbial bin. I just think I'm a fucking, you know, useless, worthless, don't deserve anything.

• 4:34Steven Bartlett?

  What's the start of that process to get me to a better place? Like, what do you do with me?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  So if you came to me, it wouldn't be just, the problem wouldn't be, I have low self-worth. It would be, I want to change this behaviour.

• 4:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and I want to change it. I've been, you know, drinking too much alcohol, smoking too much of that, sniffing too much of this.

• 4:53Steven Bartlett?

  Where would you start with me?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Well, we would get an honest baseline of where you're at now. So that's why in the book, we do like a snapshot letter, without judgment, totally private. To just say like, I think a lot of the time, we create plans for who we want to be as opposed to who we are. And we use this stuff to find ourselves. And I think first of all, you meet yourself and you get on board with who you meet.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And then I would help you to understand why you've come to be this way.

• 5:20Steven Bartlett?

  So in that first step, getting, you know, getting to understand who I am and getting on board with who I meet. That's through a snapshot letter?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's essentially saying, here we are today, this is where I'm at. This is where I've got to, this is where I'm starting. Usually it's quite a fed up letter, like something's got to change, here we go. But what it does is it sort of anchors the process and says, right, this is where we begin. And then when we start moving on to is the fact that you already know what to do. I believe that the people who buy my books already know what to do. And I believe that a lot of people feel really patronized when they're told what to do. They know what to do. And if they don't, they can Google it. They don't know why they're not doing it, despite wanting to do it. So then we start thinking about closing the gap between the advice you'd give another person. So I just say to people, what would you like to be doing?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I don't give them an A or a B.

• 6:14Steven Bartlett?

  I would like to be running a marathon every, you know, every couple of months. I'd like to be fit, I'd like to be skinny, I'd like to be a good partner, I want to be perfect.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Why are you here? Why are we having this conversation?

• 6:31Steven Bartlett?

  Because I'm not. I'm drinking so much alcohol, sniffing so many things and doing all the naughty things I shouldn't be doing and I can't stop myself. But I know, you're right, I do know what I should be doing. I just can't do it.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And in the past, when you've created plans to change?

• 6:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  What have they looked like?

• 6:52Steven Bartlett?

  I've basically thrown all of the alcohol out my house and everything that I could possibly sniff. And I have emptied the fridge and put only vegetables in. And I have written it down on a piece of paper. And then a week later, I'm back to all of the naughty habits.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  So what you've done is you've punished yourself, you've put things in place.

• 7:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  To say this has got bad.

• 7:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  I need to create this environment and control and isolate.

• 7:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  So that I don't do the bad thing.

• 7:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Did you establish why, what you're afraid you might have to experience if you change? Did you identify if you get there, what if it's not as good as you think? If you get there, will you have to do all the things that you've told people you're going to do when you get there? Is the process of getting there one that you're familiar with?

• 7:41Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  All of that, what do you think you're going to have to get through? What are you going to have to prove? What do you, what triggers you're going to have to respond to differently? These are the things people don't talk about. What self doubt are you going to have to push against and disprove and update along the way? It's, it's not about thinking you're going to be able to focus on what's bad. And also you should anticipate that in a week's time, you're going to want to use. You should put things in place.

• 8:05Steven Bartlett?

  What can I put in place to, you know, this is, I found this really compelling in your book, the, because it's something I think about a lot. You know, we think of motivation as being this like constant, people ask stupid questions like, how do you stay motivated all the time, which is again, is an assumption that people that are successful in whatever facet of their life are able to always feel a sense of motivation. But how does one prepare for that, that dip? That speed bump, that, you know, the regression, the relapse?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  It's, I think the best bet you have is the conversation you have with yourself when your plans don't go to plan. And I think first of all, you prepare by, yeah, you can have the best plans in the world, but you should assume that your plans will not go to plan. And even with the best tools in the world, you should assume that you're not able to preempt every single trigger, every single challenge. The way that you do it is you start to reframe challenge as an opportunity to voluntarily demonstrate your capacity. You're like, here we go. I am off grid right now. And all I've got is the advice I'd give another person and the conversation I have with myself that's going to turn into what I do with my hands, or don't do.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And I think that if you really focus on making that conversation, one that holds firmness and compassion together, then that's the best thing you've got. Because what you're chasing there is to feel smart and calm and proud of yourself. And you already know what you tell someone else. So the more you do that, and the more you take that advice, and you see the results, obviously, and it actually works, the more you start doing it in other areas of your life. And my job is to make myself redundant to people as quickly as possible. I think we should have been taught this at school. We have to change habits our whole lives. Like, why is life dragging us along and making us change them when we're all depleted and desperate? So yeah, I would say it's the conversation you have with yourself.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  And the conversation you have with yourself, very often, people say to me, like, how can I hold kindness and firmness at the same time, right? So how can I change habits which involve sitting in discomfort and craving and urges and still be kind to myself? Because being kind to myself means doing whatever I want, whenever I want to do it. And what I always tell them is, it's kind of like if you, let's say you have a kid and you read an article somewhere and realized that this treat you've been giving your kid at 11 a.m. every day for the last year is actually not very, it's really unhealthy. So as of tomorrow, you're not going to give the kid the treat. You know you're not going to give the kid the treat. The kid doesn't know yet. Kid wakes up tomorrow, it's 11 o'clock, you're not going to give them the treat.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  What's the kid going to do? Want the treat. And what else? Cry. Kick off, yeah? Yeah. Would you blame the kid for crying?

• 10:52Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  You'd expect the kid to cry.

• 10:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  It's used to something.

• 10:57Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  You wouldn't make its life miserable. You'd make it as comfortable as possible. And you just repeat that in a row. Until it realizes that it's come out unscathed. Compassion. I know why you feel this way. Of course you feel this way. You deserve to feel this way. You scream all you want, babe. That doesn't mean I'm gonna do what you want. That's the conversation you have with your body over and over again, where you hold compassion and firmness together until you've done it in a row, until it's easy. That's my angle.

• 11:25Steven Bartlett?

  And if I, does it, does it help to remove the, you know, the kid wants the candy? Or whatever, whatever the thing the kid was expecting in the morning. Does it help to remove it from the environment? So if I, if it's, you know, I've struggled sometimes with like, I had this like sweetie drawer in my house at one point. And I, I knew I didn't want to eat the sweets. But when something would happen, maybe it'd be late at night, I feel a bit hungry, maybe, you know, a bit stressed. I'd end up in the drawer. And so I always, always wondered to myself, would it just help to just remove the drawer? Just like pour it in the bin? I ultimately did. Um, but I'm just wondering if those cues, those triggers, removing them completely is the answer.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I have this question all the time about abstinence and sobriety and whether, you know, again, there are some people for whom it's easier. My approach is very much more for the general population. And so a lot of the time it's more, you know, we all sit in the middle. And I want you to feel like you can have chocolate in your house. And consume it and enjoy it and not feel powerless over it. So at the core of my message is you decide what you do with your hands. And any negotiation you have internally about it is a jumping off point and doesn't actually make you do anything. And is an insight into how, what you're telling yourself about the sugar and what it means and how you'll feel if you don't have it.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  If you were trying to build up a streak and get some time under your belt, yeah, maybe. But ultimately, what I would recommend under those circumstances, impose some friction. Give yourself some speed bumps to start thinking about whether you actually want to do it. So for example, if I want to, if I'm working into the night, writing, which I love doing, invariably at like 1am, I start thinking about Deliveroo. And about 3am, I regret it strongly.

• 13:12Steven Bartlett?

  Same.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  So with that in mind, I don't just delete Deliveroo. Car details are out, address is out. It's not because I don't trust myself.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  It's because I want to put in moments where I think, ah, remember you didn't want to do this? Do you remember why you didn't want to do this? Make it harder for myself to do the thing that I don't want to be doing. And easier for myself to do the thing that I do. Like back in the day when I used to hate exercise, I used to go to sleep in my gym kit. So there was just one less thing to do.

• 13:44Steven Bartlett?

  So that's like removing friction versus adding it.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I would, if I were you, I'd impose friction first, like put that drawer somewhere else. And then when you go looking in another place, start thinking to yourself, God, why is that drawer? It disrupts the autopilot.

• 14:02Steven Bartlett?

  That's what's something I struggled with. I do a lot of like late night eating. And then I always regret it in the morning because you wake up feeling bad. And especially if you've eaten just before you fall asleep. The body hasn't really had a chance to digest it. Sometimes you get like some, I don't know, reflux, whatever they call it. And I've always wondered how to stop myself doing that when I have, when I have the urge. How do I break that habit? I guess, what's the friction that I can add?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Don't be hungry at that time.

• 14:27Steven Bartlett?

  True.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  That's, do you know what? Sometimes I get really deep in the weeds about binge eating and policy around it and obesity and how we've got to take down all the diets and everything. And sometimes I forget to say stuff like, don't be hungry. That helps, you know? Like, there's so many like deep psychological stuff and we all have our own complex relationship with food and stuff. And that's what's really difficult about talking about food. Is because it is all the good things too. It really is. And much like with alcohol and other drugs, when people who struggle and feel powerless around it feel really misunderstood. Because they hate it by that point. It's the bane of their life. It's all they think about all day. Have I been good? Have I been bad? What am I gonna have? Was that okay? Conflicting nutritional advice, like,

• 15:13Speaker 01

  it's go out of hand.