Plot Twist: I'm Qualified: Working through Imposter Syndrome

Well, I'm pretty confident in saying is that we all have experienced imposter syndrome in one fashion or another and know what it looks like.

let's define it so that there is no confusion.

Imposter syndrome is this internal feeling that you aren't actually capable, knowledgeable, talented, or deserving as other people think you are.

It's this underlying fear that you don't actually belong and or aren't qualified enough to be somewhere and everyone is going to realize it.

From the outside, you can look totally calm, cool, cucumber, confident and collected and competent.

While internally, you're having a total crisis, an existential one, honestly.

It's not necessarily that you don't have the ability to do something.

It's that you don't trust your own ability.

This is something that happens to people far more often than I think we realize or take the time to actually acknowledge, especially in the horse world, which is obviously what we like to talk about around here.

What? Because there's always

somebody who's going to have more experience than you.

That's just the facts.

There's always going to be someone who's been riding longer.

There's going to be someone with another more reputable certification.

There's always going to be somebody who's one more, someone with a nicer horse, bigger following.

There's always going to be someone who seems like they have the answer to every question.

And if you're not careful, you can start using everybody else's experience as evidence against your own.

and we talk about this lots but social media doesn't help with it either you're constantly seeing people's accomplishments without really seeing the work and failures that went on behind the scenes to get those people there

right you know you see these successful trainers standing in the arena teaching their clinic and you don't see their first clinic that they taught where they were probably worried that people were even going to show up or maybe there was only two people who did You know, you just see that success there.

Or, for example, a successful service business, whether it's in the horse industry or not, you don't see the months where they were wondering if anybody was going to book with them or where they had very lean months.

you see the person winning that buckle.

You don't see the years where they were losing in the show pen and struggling.

And we look at ourselves in the middle of our own learning journey and we think, well, shit, clearly I'm not at that level.

And we're comparing our behind the scenes of the upfront knowledge we have to somebody else's finished product when we haven't seen their behind the scenes.

and