Mental Health #3: How to Deal with Imposter Syndrome (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We are dropping a mini series focused on mental health. I talk about my own battle with anxiety, the effects social media has on our psyche and break down my own mental health routines. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week, we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to mis plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. In today's classic episode, originally published on March 1st, 2021, I talk about how I deal with imposter syndrome. 

So I went back and looked at recent Founder’s Journal episodes, and I've started to identify three major buckets. The first bucket is what I call the news-driven episode. For example, my episode on the rise of Clubhouse did well because it connected strategies for building two trending technologies like consumer social apps. The second bucket is what I call service content. Service content covers things like my process for productivity and these episodes do well because they solve a very clear problem for the listener and they leave my listener with actionable insights. Now, the third and final type of episode I put in the vulnerability bucket. Founder’s Journal listeners love to unlock their vulnerability through my own vulnerability. Basically when I share it gives people the feeling of their own permission to share. So for example, the episode where I talked about losing my dad when I was in college, it was no surprise that I got far more e-mails from that episode than any other Founder’s Journal episode ever while I'm going to continue to focus on all three of these buckets.

What imposter syndrome is

 I want to spend today talking about the third category vulnerability, and more specifically, one of my biggest anxieties as an entrepreneur. I am a fraud. I've gotten lucky. I'm not actually that good. All of these thoughts have nagged at me while building Morning Brew over the last five years since going full time. I've experienced persistent anxiety about my qualifications as a co-founder, the former CEO, and now the chairman of a growing media business. I chalked up these worries to my age being 28 years old. Plus my lack of experience, since before Morning Brew, I had no experience in media or in entrepreneurship. And for a while it seemed like another manifestation of my OCD that I suffer from. Basically I assumed any career anxieties that I had were Alex-specific anxieties. While all of these factors may play a part in the fears that I feel at some point in the entrepreneurial journey, I discovered that all of my feelings are wildly unoriginal. I am among the 70% of people that experienced something called imposter syndrome, which is this psychological phenomenon that was first published about in 1978 by two Georgia State professors. Imposter syndrome manifests in a host of contexts from relationship to career to life moments like first-time parenting and what ties all of these different contexts or examples together is the feeling of being successful due to luck rather than skill. And there's a fear that you will be outed as a fraud at some point in the near future. While putting a name to this thing didn't make imposter syndrome go away for me, it at least provided some sort of comfort, knowing that I am definitely not the only one dealing with this. So now I want to pull you into Morning Brew and share with you what imposter syndrome actually looks like in my world within our business. 

How imposter syndrome works

The first thing you need to know about imposter syndrome is it goes in waves. Some days I'm feeling really confident about the work that I'm doing and my ability to build a really big business and other days I'm feeling self-doubt and self-conscious. I tend to be self-critical. I find myself wondering why is it that I ended up in this successful position that's been afforded to me. There are a few specific thoughts that have continued to nag at me since starting Morning Brew and still nag at me to this day. 

Number one, it feels like there are a few specific things that I am really good at: public speaking relationship building, thinking of new ideas and creative ways to make business fun. But then it feels like the rest of things like operational prowess, being organized, project management, managing people, you know, things that are really important to running a business. I feel like those are things where I’m average at best. You could say we all have a few superpowers, but not being best in class at things that to me are required of a great CEO have fueled my feeling of imposter syndrome. It makes me feel like I don't actually deserve to be in the position that I was in a CEO and that I'm now in as executive chairman. 

Then there's always the recurring thought that comes up about, am I pulling my own weight? as someone who started a business as a co-founder, I constantly fear am I contributing equally to the relationship? I'll often catch myself wondering, am I doing what I should be doing? Am I doing the right thing by my co-founder? How am I sure that I'm not just dead weight, where the business is pulling me along? 

Another thought I have is all of this is just luck. I'll tell myself the following story over and over and over: the only lucky thing I didn't do create this janky PDF newsletter back in 2015, when I was a student at the University of Michigan, and this is what literally got the snowball rolling down the hill, but I have demonstrated no skill in keeping it rolling. So basically the last six years can be defined by one ounce of skill in 2015, followed by pure luck. That's the story that I've told myself for the last six years. 

Another common fear is this thought of being a one-trick pony. Basically the idea that Morning Brew is my only successful venture and it will only ever be my successful venture because this whole thing, like I said, has been built on a house of cards, driven by luck, by a tiny bit of skill in the beginning, so I won't have the skill in the future in my career to build something nearly as successful. 

And when I reflect on this, I try to figure out why is it that I feel so much anxiety? What, why is it that imposter syndrome has chosen to nag at me? And I think so much of it comes down to the amount of weight that I place in these thoughts. And I think I've placed so much weight on these thoughts, these stories that I tell myself, because so much of my identity in my young adult life and so much of my self-worth has been tied to Morning Brew. But here's the issue with my imposter syndrome and these waves of self doubt: There's the direct effect of feeling anxiety and feeling stressed from the stories I tell myself, but then there's the indirect effect of that self-doubt impacting the way that I work. You know, I've noticed at points in my career when I may be a 10 out of 10 on the imposter syndrome spectrum, there are things about how I work that also change.

The impacts of imposter syndrome

The first thing that happens is that from a personal life perspective, I lose any semblance of work-life balance. You know, I don't really believe in work-life balance in general, when you're building a company there isn't this clear delineation of church and state or work and personal life. But when I'm in the throes of imposter syndrome, I find myself having to work harder and harder to make up for this feeling that I don't have the right skills or talent to succeed. I started to believe the only way I'm going to develop these skills and deserve to be in the position that I'm in is spending more time working on them. And this has become kind of a tell for me and for my fiancee. You know, she couldn't specifically tell what I'm experiencing is imposter syndrome, but she absolutely does notice when my work time starts encroaching on our personal time. Whether she's seeing me on my phone while we're watching a TV show, or when we get into bed at night, I'll be on my computer, working through things. These are just the easiest tells about how my behavior changes as a function of my anxiety. The second major impact that imposter syndrome has on my behavior is it makes me lose appreciation for the entrepreneurial journey. I become so obsessed with these feelings of fraudulence that I can’t end up enjoying some of the best parts of building a business, which are the little wins along the way, right? Because I have these feelings that I didn't deserve it, that I don't have the right skills. That luck is what has gotten us here. And it ends up doling the experience and taking me out of the moment. The third thing that changes about my behavior because of this anxiety is it makes me lose confidence in the things I'm actually really good at because imposter syndrome doesn't just attack specific skills. It attacks your character, it attacks your identity, it attacks everything you believe makes you you. And when I feel like my entire identity is attacked, it will make me feel more anxious, not just about the things that I don't think I'm amazing at, but also the things that I'm really good at. So whether that's me leading meetings or speaking publicly on a podcast or selling big brands on why they should work with Morning Brew, my confidence in my areas of expertise end up decreasing as well.

How I work with imposter syndrome

So for me, one of the most important things was understanding first that I wasn't alone in feeling imposter syndrome, but also understanding how it actually impacts my quality of work. Because once I understood the huge impact that imposter syndrome had on me and my behavior in life and in work, it led me to making a way more concerted effort to work through it. In the early days of experiencing these feelings, I tried to fight them. I tried to talk back to them saying to myself, no, it hasn't been luck. It's been skill and maybe a little bit of luck that's gotten you here and you need luck in anything you do, but we wouldn't have gotten here without some combination of luck and skill. And in theory, it makes sense, right? To, to kind of fix the story and make it a healthier story.

But what I quickly realized is that by talking back to my anxiety, it actually made the waves of imposter syndrome and anxiety longer, and the feelings of fraudulence even more pronounced. But over time, I've learned how to work with imposter syndrome and listen to my specific language. I didn't say work through imposter syndrome because I don't believe imposter syndrome is going anywhere. I work with it by trying not to fight it. I'm trying to understand why I experience it and what things I can do to give it less power. So it doesn't impact the way in which I live and how you work through imposter syndrome. It looks different for everyone, but I want to share three reasons why I have experienced it myself.

The first is my competitive spirit. I am someone who played sports growing up. I went to a competitive private school and I grew up in a Wall Street family. My way of being is wanting to be great at everything. And while I know deep down that is impossible, I don't believe that has actually settled in, in reality. The second reason that I specifically experienced imposter syndrome is comparison. As much as I would like to think that I don't compare myself to others or care what others think about me, that would be lying. The fact that I use other founders and entrepreneurs as a reference for the skills that I need to build a business and the emotions that I need to have while growing a company, it perpetuates my feelings of fraudulence that are caused by the outside. And then the third thing that creates my imposter syndrome, and I would say most unique to me, is my OCD. I've had OCD since a young age. And for those of you that don't know what it is, OCD stands for obsessive compulsive disorder. It's this common mental illness in which I basically experience persistent and unwanted thoughts that trigger deep anxieties. So an example for you would be in the past, I experienced an obsession that I have a heart defect and that if I train or work out too hard, my heart will give out and I’ll die. When I think about my OCD and work through my, when I think about my OCD, it is completely a double-edged sword. It is a blessing and it is a curse. It gets my brain working in this frenetic and rapid way to make things happen in life, but it also taints my ability to experience things fully because of the crippling anxiety that I feel when I'm in the throes of an obsessive cycle. And what I've learned about all my manifestations of OCD, whether it's around health, relationships, or work, is that my unwanted thoughts latch on to things that are incredibly important to me and things that do not have clear yes and no answers. And it's why I've experienced imposter syndrome throughout my career. Morning Brew is one of the most important things in my life and whether or not my success there has come through luck or skill, it is simply a question that I can't answer. So once I understood why I experienced imposter syndrome, I then felt like I could come up with a game plan to cope with it by facing the very things that were causing it. 

So here's been my playbook for facing it head on. First, I have reframed my perception of this experience to be a good thing. As I mentioned, I'm competitive. I have constant concerns about not being skilled enough to be in the position that I'm in and the idea that it's being driven by luck rather than skill. That's really provoking to me. So an activity I've been doing is actually welcoming the anxiety, welcoming that imposter syndrome and telling myself it's fear of failure. That my fear of fraudulence is actually what drives me to get better. It's what propels me forward. And I've started to kind of become friends with imposter syndrome. I tell myself that this is actually Alex's biological tool that pushes me throughout life to never get complacent. Second I've normalized the experience by drawing comparisons to other really successful individuals that experience imposter syndrome as well. If external validation and comparison is an inevitable part of my psyche, like I said earlier, why not use it to my advantage? 

I am not alone

And the way I did that was by discovering all of these world-class people that suffer from imposter syndrome. I literally just ran a Google search on imposter syndrome and it was like successful businessperson, novelist, public speaker, one after the other, talking about their experience with imposter syndrome. Two quick examples for you. The first is Maya Angelou. After writing 11 books and winning dozens of awards, she said, and I quote, I've run a game on everybody and they're going to find me out. She is literally one of the most prolific and successful writers ever in the history of writing. And yet she felt imposter syndrome after dozens of successes. The second example is the CEO of Atlassian. Atlassian is super successful. It's a software company. It’'s publicly traded, did $1.6 billion in revenue last year. And it has 5,000 employees. The co-CEOs have been running the company since 2002. And one of them did this TED Talk where he talked about being in a board meeting on several occasions. He would be in a t-shirt I think in sandals, surrounded by all these other board members in suits. And in the meetings, he would just hear these acronyms that different board members would throw around. He would have no idea what they were. He would just jot them down in his notebook and he would go home and look them up on Wikipedia later. And he specifically described imposter syndrome, not as a fear of failure, but as a sensation of getting away with something and someone figuring it out. And I think that's exactly right to me. Imposter syndrome feels like waiting for someone to knock on your door and literally be like, Hey, you've actually been in the wrong role. You haven't done any of the things you said you would do, and we're going to need you to leave. 

And there's one last thing I do to navigate imposter syndrome. And that is, I talk back to it. One of the most powerful methods for working through OCD is called exposure therapy. It's a tactic where you expose yourself to the fear that you're experiencing in order to normalize it, basically desensitized the anxiety. So for example, let's say you had clean OCD. That's where you constantly feel like you're getting dirty anytime you touch something with your hands or your body. And it's a very common type of OCD, a form of exposure therapy would be you touching door handles and not washing your hands for 30 minutes after to try to normalize the experience of being dirty. In the context of imposter syndrome that looks like me writing a script that accepts the fear that I'm enduring. So the script could include a line like I've exclusively ended up where I am because of lock. I am dead weight and I've peaked in life and I will never do something nearly as impressive. Again, it sounds strange. It sounds provoking. But the idea is that if I repeat this enough times out loud to myself, it will allow me to sit with provoking thoughts of imposter syndrome without obsessing about them over and over in a way that impacts my ability to perform as a professional. 

I want to hear from you

And that, my friends, has been my experience with imposter syndrome. There was a ton to this episode, but if you take one thing, it is that the feelings of fraudulence or fear of luck over skill are incredibly normal to your career and to your life. Now I'd love to hear from you, have you experienced imposter syndrome before? Tell me about it and how have you tried to work through it? And even if you haven't experienced it, reach out to me and say, what's up. It makes my day to talk to Founder’s Journal listeners, and to learn more about you all. Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. And thank you so much for listening. I'll catch you next episode.