Dr. Shadé Zahrai

So just my way of recap, we've just covered acceptance for everyone listening.

And acceptance is essentially when your self-esteem is shaky, you seek validation, you...

feel like you need to prove your worth, your sense of identity is attached to what you're producing or performing or achieving.

The next way that self-doubt can show up is not to do with the I'm not enough or I'm not worthy and entirely to do with the can I actually do this thing?

Do I have the skills and the ability to do it?

And what we see here is a lot of people will fall into imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome actually doesn't exist in the literature and the research as the term imposter syndrome.

It's called imposter phenomenon.

Now, just notice the difference between a syndrome and a phenomenon.

One of them is a behavioral phenomenon that was observed among a group of people.

The other one pathologizes it and makes it seem like there's something wrong with us.

So imposter syndrome was initially discovered in the 1970s.

where they were specifically looking at women.

So this was high achieving women, women who had just entered the workforce, women who had PhDs and a strong track record behind them.

And they felt like they didn't belong.

They felt like they were frauds.

They felt that they were undeserving of their success.

They felt that everyone else thought that they were smarter or more capable than they really were.

So there's two elements for the imposter phenomenon.

We'll move away from syndrome, imposter phenomenon.