Fighting Imposter Syndrome: This One Trick Made Everything Easier! (Ep.1)

Fighting Imposter Syndrome? You’re not alone. 

Studies show that 70% of people struggle with imposter syndrome at some point—especially high achievers who still feel like a fraud at work, even with major accomplishments. If you're constantly battling doubt, fighting imposter syndrome, and self-sabotage, it's time for a breakthrough.

In this episode of Daring Breakthroughs, host Jenn Landis—who went from Walmart to Wall Street—opens up about her own journey of feeling like a fraud, even while climbing to the C-suite. She shares a simple yet powerful mindset shift to help you overcome imposter syndrome, start unlocking mental strength, and take back your confidence.

We’ll talk psychology, perfectionism, and why it’s important to just be yourself. Whether you're dealing with feeling like a fraud at work, struggling with mental health awareness, or learning how to deal with self sabotage, this episode offers tools for your personal evolution.

You’ll also hear how inspiring ideas helped Jenn—and how they can help you too. Whether you feel like an imposter or want to support someone who does, you’ll leave with real tools and a renewed sense of self-worth.

🎯 It’s time to stop letting feeling like a fraud hold you back. You’re not alone—and you’re more qualified than you think.

💥 Don’t forget to LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, and SHARE it with someone who's ready to break through!

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⏰ Timecodes ⏰ 
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00:00 - Fighting Imposter Syndrome: The Shocking Statistic
 01:45 - My C-Suite Impostor Syndrome Story
 05:15 - The Surprising Origin of The Imposter Syndrome
 07:08 - Internal vs. External Causes (Perfectionism, Criticism & More)
 10:20 - The #1 Trick to Overcome Imposter Syndrome
 11:00 - How to Reframe Internal Pressures as "Definitions"
 14:30 - External Pressures as Invitations You Can Decline
 17:30 - Journaling, Affirmations, & Your "Conqueror Log"
 19:00 - The Power of a Supportive Community

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🔗 RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED:
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 ► Beat Impostor Syndrome with our Fill-in-the-Blank Affirmations: https://yourbreakthroughguide.com
 ► Order Jenn’s book, Break Up. Break In. Breakthrough!: https://www.jennlandis.com/book

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💡 ABOUT THE DARING BREAKTHROUGHS PODCAST
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*Daring Breakthroughs* is a podcast that celebrates stories of those who dared and offers strategies for those who will! Each week, we deliver practical strategies, inspiring stories, and motivational tips to help you gain confidence, get clear, and change your focus toward what truly matters. Hosted by Jenn Landis—author, speaker, C-Suite leader, and breakthrough strategist—this channel equips you with tools to reframe your mindset, build success habits, and achieve lasting professional growth.

⭐️ New episodes posted weekly.

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Ways to Work with Jenn
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🎤 Hire Jenn to Speak at your next event: https://www.jennlandis.com/speaking
✨ Get your breakthrough FASTER! Join The Breakthrough Club for Women:   https://www.jennlandis.com/membership

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Let’s Connect! 
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LinkedIn: ➡︎ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennlandis/
IG: ➡︎ http://instagram.com/ASKJENNLANDIS
X: ➡︎ http://x.com/askjennlandis
FB: ➡︎https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61567176982476

Transcript

0:00

Did you know that roughly 70% of people experience impostor syndrome and that women consistently report dealing with it more than men? I don't think this comes as any surprise to you, but I do have a question. So are you a fraud? Well, we're going to unpack that question and more in today's episode. Welcome to Daring Breakthroughs, the podcast that is obsessed with helping you build unstoppable confidence, gain crystal clarity, and create powerful networking connections that create a competitive edge. We are all about sharing practical strategies and inspiring stories from daring people who have achieved remarkable breakthroughs. I know that if you can see it, you can be it, because I navigated my own career from Walmart to Wall Street and my friend, you can too. I'm your host, Jenn Landis. We are starting a new series today, and for the next few episodes we're going to dive into various aspects of mental strength, and it just felt really appropriate to me to start with the elephant in the room. Impostor syndrome, because we're all dealing with it or we've dealt with it at some point in our careers. I am no stranger to impostor syndrome. The story that comes to mind immediately when I start thinking about impostor syndrome was the day that I found out the board had voted me in to my C-suite role in a publicly traded company. So while the board didn't actually have the responsibility of making that decision, they did have to sign off on the compensation package. So there was always a combined decision between the CEO and the board about C-suite positions. And I knew this as the HR leader who had helped countless other people ascend to the C-suite and to the executive ranks. I knew exactly everything that happened and how it could go wrong. And that day when the sitting, uh, chief HR officer and senior vice president came into the side room in which I was working, and told me, Jenn, high five. You got it. He was so surprised that I was so shocked. In fact, I think he even got a little irritated with me, and I know other people in my life got irritated with me. Like, how could you not expect to get the job? You were up for it. You knew you were up for it. You'd done years of preparation for it. Um, you knew it. Everybody knew you were shoo-in, but to me, I was not a shoo-in. To me, I knew all the ways that it could go wrong and all the ways that I wasn't yet ready, or in my own mind I wasn't yet ready. And honestly, in some ways I wasn't ready. And in other ways I was well prepared far more than just ready. And yet for me it really was a shock. I was scared to death they were gonna get into that boardroom and they were gonna realize, yeah, she's a fraud. She doesn't know what she's doing, or she's not the right person, or yeah, you know, no. Even though it was an unlikely scenario, I knew it was possible, and in my mind that possibility blew up and it completely warped my perspective. Since then, I've really paid attention to this idea of impostor syndrome, how it shows up in my own life and career, how it shows up in the people that I coach, mentor, and work with, and what we can do about it. And you do not have to be victim to impostor syndrome. There are ways we can work through it, and I have. A trick that will help you flip the script on your impostor syndrome. You do not have to accept a life and a career where you are constantly going against the grain and you are forcing yourself into situations because you don't have that internal belief that you can do what, quite frankly, you are able of doing, so we're gonna fix that today. The trick I'm gonna share is simple. And it works. It works so well and it's helped lots of people. So stick with me and we're going to, get to that trick. Before we get started on this discussion, I really wanna stop here. I am not a therapist and I am not trying to practice therapy here. If this is something that has a grip on you, There's a lot of wonderful cognitive behavioral therapy tools that can help you. And there are a lot of wise people with a heart, for helping, and I think there's incredible power knowing when you need to go seek external help. I've certainly done it. We all need help sometimes. So if you are one of those folks that needs help, please go get it. First I wanna talk a little bit about impostor syndrome. I think so many of us are familiar with the term, but we may not know where it came from, how it came to be. So let's spend just a minute looking at that. It actually was coined in 1978, uh, from a study by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes at Georgia State University in Atlanta and back in 1978 when they did this really groundbreaking work, they were studying women in professional settings. And interestingly enough, we are still, um, looking at that research and thinking about that research and more people have gone on. In fact, there's a meta-analysis of over a hundred different studies with more than 42,000 participants that looked at impostor syndrome and it's still here. I hate to say it, but we're still dealing with it, both men and women, and so impostor syndrome, what? What is it really? It's feeling like a fraud. It's anxiety about your ability to complete work or your competence level, how other people see you, view you. This is particularly true in underrepresented industries like the STEM fields where women aren't, um, as prevalent as men. I actually came from a company where we were only 26% female. It was largely engineering dominated and largely, um, field work. And so yeah, there weren't a lot of women in the company, and where there were quite a few women, it was usually in the corporate office where I was working. So it makes sense that when you're surrounded by people that are different than you, whether you are the only non-engineer in an engineering company, or you are a woman working with a bunch of men, or you're a man working with a bunch of women. Those are settings that are rife for you to feel like you don't belong or that you are a fraud. So let's look at what causes impostor syndrome. There are internal causes and there are external causes. Internal factors, big surprise, right? Perfectionism, fear of failure, low self-esteem. Um, attributing your success to luck rather than ability or hard work. It's this seed of doubt that I believe are often, um, self-protection mechanisms, or at least again they are for me. If I am the first one to say that I don't know what I'm doing or to, um, admit that maybe I'm not as strong in an area as I'd like to be, then it takes the sting out of someone else saying that about me. So it's almost a way to protect myself, if I'm harder on myself than anyone else is, then when I do hear criticism, it won't hurt as bad. At least I think that's the underlying belief. I don't know that actually holds true, but I think often those are the stories that we can tell ourselves. There's also external factors, right? I just mentioned one criticism. It goes across all of life in your workplace, culture, the environment, um, how competitive the workplace is. Do you feel supported? Is it an environment where people are constantly giving feedback to other people, but it's really criticism that is couched as feedback, right? Wink, wink. Unrealistic expectations. It's this dog-eat-dog kind of environment. Well, guess what? Impostor syndrome is gonna thrive in those kinds of settings. Also family environment, your upbringing. If you were brought up in a household that was overly critical or that had exceptionally high standards that you just felt like you couldn't meet, same thing from a societal perspective. If you're scrolling on social media, it is so easy to want to compare yourself to other people. And anytime you start comparing yourself to someone else, you're going to find yourself lacking, because someone is always going to be doing something different or perhaps better than you are. There's also people doing things not as well as you are, but we don't focus on those, do we? We focus on areas where we feel like we are lacking. So how do you overcome it, and what is this trick that I told you I had? Well, the best ways to overcome impostor syndrome are to attack it head-on. You have to reframe, catch those thoughts, which is really hard to do. So it takes some training and it takes some practice and some work, but you have to catch those feelings of inadequacy and the stories that you are telling yourself that all have a negative through-line, and you have to flip it. You have to purposefully choose to reframe it. The trick that I found that helps me reframe those negative thoughts and even negative comments and criticisms that I hear from other people about the work that I'm doing is to use different names. I mentioned a few moments ago that there are internal and external factors that come together to, uh, create that perfect storm that spawns impostor syndrome. And so, the internal factors, I think we can think of those as definitions or expectations. So let's go back to a few of them. We talked about perfectionism, um, and a fear of failure, and, uh, our internal confidence, self-esteem. We get to choose how we're going to apply the definition of failure to ourselves. Is failure not showing up and trying, or is failure not achieving a perfect outcome? Very often I find that these words that have an expectation attached to them. Words like failure or success, um, or even things like beauty. These words that have so many expectations attached to them. We tend to adopt them. We tend to adopt other people's expectations or definitions of those words. So what does success mean to you, and is that definition serving you? Because if that definition isn't serving you, my friend, you have an opportunity to change that definition. And I find myself doing this all the time. I'm in the process of starting a new business, and I'm in the process of launching new products and doing new things like this podcast, and I have an opportunity with every single one of those to decide, what does success look like? Is success making the pitch and learning by doing something for the first time, or is success nailing it on the first time and getting this incredible outcome that, quite frankly, is unrealistic? Well, I've chosen very intentionally to say success is showing up, doing what I said I was going to do, being as prepared as I reasonably can be, and leaving it all on the field. Did I do everything I could do in that instance, to make that pitch, to connect with that person, to deliver on that product, to nail the speech, to show up thinking more about the people I'm serving than myself in that moment? Did I do those things? If I did those, then it's a success. If I focused too much on an outcome that I don't actually own the ability to craft , and that's what I focus on, even if I get that outcome, I don't know that that's a success. So we get to choose how we define perfectionism and failure and success and confidence and self-esteem. And so my first trick is revisit your definitions. How are you defining those words? And then how are you living that out? What expectation are you putting on yourself, or others, for that matter? So when it comes to internal motivations, I call those our definitions, and we get an opportunity to rewrite the definition. The external factors, things like workplace culture, competitiveness, criticism, um, I've even experienced bullying at work, and I know many people sadly have. In those instances, I call those things invitations. They are invitations that people will give us to feel poorly about ourselves, to show up and adopt their definitions for our lives instead of our own. They invite us into a situation of pressure of feeling poorly about ourselves, particularly when it comes to impostor syndrome, right? They invite us through the way they treat us or through the way they interact with us or through the environments that they are perpetuating and creating. Those are all invitations, and my friend, you can choose not to accept their invitation, and you can do it with grace and poise. You can simply say, thank you so much, but I politely decline to feel badly about myself because of your perspective. And you don't even have to say it out loud. In fact, it's probably better if you don't. But inside your head you can say, okay, thank you for that. I politely decline. We are hardwired, in the American society at least, to do what we're asked. Like we, are asked a question, and our instinctive response is to answer that question. But even a question is a form of invitation. It is an invitation to engage, an invitation you don't have to accept. You get to choose whether you're going to engage or not. And so when we are faced with all of these external factors and the criticism and the workforce environment and pressure or the family pressure, we get to view those things as invitations that we can politely decline or we can accept in a limited fashion. So let's return to the question I posed at the beginning of this podcast. Are you a fraud? Well, my friend, odds are very, very good that no, you are not, and your feelings of being an impostor are just that. They're feelings. They're not grounded in truth and in fact. And so we have an opportunity to shift away from those feelings and to create space for ourselves. So when you start thinking about the internal pressures as definitions and the external pressures as invitations, all of a sudden you gain some distance between your emotions and what you're feeling and the things that are causing those feelings. And that little bit of space gives you a chance to flip the script. Now that you've gained a little bit of space, you can insert some tools to help you reframe, tools like journaling, like positive affirmations, um, like what I call a conqueror log. It's a log of all of the accomplishments, because let me tell you, friend, nothing proves your internal fears wrong faster, your feelings of being a fraud wrong faster, than success and proof that you can succeed. So when you start focusing on what you're doing right, on the things that you are doing that make you qualified, that make you absolutely the man or the woman for the job, when you start focusing on those things, you will see more of those things. When you start focusing on the positive affirmations that come with a self-belief and being nice to yourself the way you would to a friend you wanted to support, when you start doing those things and then you start really cementing it by journaling or by journaling verbally with a friend, all of a sudden you start gaining even more distance from those negative thoughts and feelings, and you create more space for you to decide how you're going to define what you're engaging with, and which invitations you will accept. And the last tool I think that is so incredibly important is to make sure you are part of a community that you love and that loves you back. A community that has your back and that is willing to leave you text messages and audio notes that say, "High five, girl, you freaking did it. That's amazing. I'm so proud of you." We all need that. So, with that said, I have put together some fill-in-the-blank positive affirmations to combat impostor syndrome, because I think we all need positive messaging, and that starts with us. That's our responsibility first and foremost, for us to provide that to ourselves. And we need that. And so, to help you out if it's helpful, um, I put together fill-in-the-blank affirmations for impostor syndrome, the link is in the show notes. In the next episode, we're going to explore even more fully how you can retrain your brain to create even more mental strength. You don't want to miss it. It's gonna be good. And we're gonna cap off this series with an incredible interview with one of my friends who is an extreme sportswoman and fear coach. And man, she nailed the interview. You really don't wanna miss it. So with that being said, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Daring Breakthroughs. Don't forget to check out the show notes for the free tools and the links related to this episode. And do me a favor, if you found this episode helpful, I invite you to review, to like, and to subscribe. I don't want you to miss the next one. And while you're at it, let's connect on social media. I would so love to hear from you. You can find me nearly everywhere with the handle Ask Jenn Landis. That's Jenn with two Ns. And if you need a speaker for your next event, hey, I'm your girl. Check out my website at J-E-N-N-L-A-N-D-I-S dot com(that's jennlandis.com) for all the ways we can work together. Until next time, share an insight you gained today with a friend, and then apply that insight by making one bold move. I dare you.