You are an athlete! An athlete does things like, joins a CrossFit box, books personal training sessions to improve their skills, logs their results after each workout and sets goals with their coach. But how many of us feel like frauds when we refer to ourselves as athletes? If you feel this way, you may have something called Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome is the feeling that you are a fraud in some area of your life and that at any moment someone or something is going to expose you for the being a phoney! While it is common for both men and women in all areas of our lives, it can be a factor limiting you in reaching your goals.
For women, fitness is an area where Imposter Syndrome is particularly common. So much so, we often pre-empt any kind of exposure of our fraudulence by letting everyone know: “Oh, I’m not even aiming to get a pull-up or anything like that; I’m happy just to turn up.” Or “I don’t mind joining in on this competition, but I won’t do very well…”
The problem is this is not just a narrative we tell others; it’s the same narrative we tell ourselves.
Everyone has a story about themselves in their own minds. If, in that story, your character is an average, middle aged mum/dad/woman/man without much athletic potential, you will write yourself a story which suits that character. That character won’t be too worried about nutrition, they won’t bother logging results, because their results aren’t important enough to matter, and they won’t invest in extra skills courses or personal training because it just isn’t in their character’s nature to do that.
Rewriting that story in your head, so that you are the athlete you want to be, can be done, but it isn’t easy and it takes work.
In essence all you need to do is tell yourself, “I am a person who…” and finish this sentence with the character you would like to be: “I am a person who gets up at four am – even when its raining- to train at five” “I am a person who chooses a skill to develop and pursues this skill until I get it.”
BUT what happens when an even louder voice yells – “No you’re not! You’re a fake and a phoney! You are an Imposter!
The problem is that Imposter Syndrome starts right down at our core beliefs about ourselves and changing those core beliefs takes hard work. In order to change those core beliefs, we need to recognise our own success and achievements internally – The opposite of what we usually do!
The usual cycle of self-talk (which is what develops our core beliefs about ourselves) might go something like this – there is an external stimulus, like the coach says, “log your results after this workout.” You have some limiting beliefs about this, like, “I am always at the bottom of the leader board.” This belief then brings up some feelings for you like, “I feel embarrassed every time I am at the bottom of the leader board. I feel ashamed that I am always last.” The next part is crucial, though, you then attach an action to your feelings, you might decide to enter your results, or you might try to argue with your feelings and lose that argument…or… you might decide to feel the fear and do it anyway! Whichever action you take – you have learnt something about yourself and either cemented your core belief or begun to change it.
Now what you do next is essential to getting rid of your Imposter Syndrome. You have to celebrate your success, take it seriously and give it some thought. You may be able to celebrate where you are on the leader board, you may be able to celebrate your own improvement but you might have even gone backwards one or two reps since you last did that WOD. It actually doesn’t matter because, what you are celebrating is your success in taking yourself seriously as an athlete.
If you do these little things often enough and celebrate each time you take yourself seriously, you start to change your core belief about the kind of character you are. You will no longer think your personal goals are not worth the discussion, or that you are not serious enough to make personal training worth it.
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