Close your eyes and imagine a beautiful brightly-coloured lemon.
Look how bright it is. You may wish to smell it. Mmm…
Now, cut it into four pieces.
As you’re cutting it, you may notice that its juice is flowing out.
Take one of the four pieces that you just cut and bite into it.
Notice that sour taste as the lemon juice flows into your mouth.
As you were biting into the lemon, did your mouth start to produce more saliva?
In Western medicine when someone takes an anti-inflammatory drug, it’s no different to taking a drug to stop your mouth salivating when you bite into an imaginary lemon.
In Western medicine, we treat the symptom rather than the root cause.
But there is nothing wrong with the saliva in your mouth.
An internal experience can produce physical symptoms.
In Western medicine they say that 75-90% of chronic diseases is linked to stress and inflammation.
But what stress?
Are you even sure you know what the root cause of your stress is?
Loving you, Angelos
If you think it’s time to focus on the imaginary lemon rather than the saliva, subscribe below. 🙂
“It doesn’t matter! Practice gratitude! Gratitude works! Gratitude is the secret! You shouldn’t feel like that. You should be grateful for everything you have. It could be worse. Why are you not listening? Practice gratitude!!!”
This is the gratitude tyranny—and you are often the tyrant, right?
Here’s why it doesn’t work—and why it makes you feel worse:
By forcing yourself to feel grateful when in reality you’re feeling frustrated, angry, not good enough: you’re getting into a war with yourself.
This is the perfect recipe for emotional repression.
But think about it.
If those feelings are there, there is a reason.
Forcing gratitude is the same as letting your conscious mind fight your unconscious.
“No, you shouldn’t be feeling like that. I don’t want these feelings. Go away, here’s some gratitude and shut up”.
Of course, the unconscious is going to fight back. What else would you expect?
So, what should you do?
Let those negative feelings express themselves and wash out on their own.
And later you can still practice gratitude.
However, the first step is always non-judgmental curiosity and acceptance.
“You shouldn’t feel angry, guilty, or sad. Practice gratitude!”, they say.
And you repress your feelings and the anxiety and the racing thoughts kick in.
“You shouldn’t have these thoughts”, they say.
And you repress those thoughts, you get sick, you have all sorts of physical symptoms, and you go to the Internet and find the guru who says…
“You should meditate, do intermittent fasting, go keto, cut out starch and gluten and manage your stress”.
And you stop eating your mum’s food and your favourite Pret a Manger sandwich, and you buy a little Buddha to meditate together and you behave like the guru.
And there you are… more self-denial and alienation from your true self.
Ignore it? Run away from it? Pretend there is no problem?
The opposite.
Fully accept the part of you that believes you are not good enough.
Are you sure you want to feel good enough forever?
Impostor syndrome is a feeling.
Trying to solve impostor syndrome is the same as trying to solve disappointment, anger, or frustration.
Is this possible really?
And if it were possible, would you want that?
Midas’s daughter turned to gold.
Can you imagine always feeling positive feelings in your life?
Can you imagine always feeling good enough?
If your ancestors had managed to erase negative feelings forever, you wouldn’t be here today.
I don’t think human beings have achieved all that they have achieved by waking up every day and feeling good enough.
I don’t think a lion should always feel good enough. Otherwise, it would die.
When you welcome all your feelings
The lion in the picture will not be ashamed of himself or depressed after what happened to him.
It will simply go back to hunting the next day.
It will not go, “Oh, how embarrassing, I’m the king of the jungle, what will others think of me?”
The lion will not do all this meta-thinking.
When the buffalos move away, it will come down from the tree and stress recovery will start automatically when his survival brain sees there is no longer a threat.
We all have the capacity to feel good enough if we allow ourselves to feel not good enough.
When you allow yourself to feel anything, you let your body and mind do their magic and bring you back to homeostasis automatically.
As many times as you need.
You have two children inside you
One says, “You are good enough”.
The other says, “You are NOT good enough”.
One day the one child shouts louder than the other and vice versa.
And that’s OK.
You’ve been trying all your life to make the “not good enough” child shut up.
And all you’ve achieved is make that child shout louder.
If your strategy hasn’t worked, why not try the opposite?
Don’t try to kill the impostor child
Acknowledge the impostor child. Honour it. Accept it.
All it needs from you is acknowledgement.
That child loves you.
And it also wants others to love you too.
Starting with your parents.
And then their partners, friends, colleagues and everyone else.
It wants to make sure you are safe.
It doesn’t want you to take risks.
It wants to protect you from the “humiliation of failure”.
Well, it’s exaggerating, I know.
It doesn’t have to “create all this mess”, you’ll say.
But that child has a positive intention.
And I know it would be a step too far to ask you to love it.
And you don’t have to.
Just give it a voice. That’s all it needs from you.
And by the way, you may see that it may have even contributed to your success.
It may have pushed you to work harder and achieve things in your life.
Probably with some extra friction or frustration—but it worked.
How do I give the impostor child a voice?
By saying, “I hear you”.
By allowing it to shout if it needs to one day.
When it does, pause, listen and talk to it.
“I acknowledge you. I know you are here because you care about me. I’m not asking you to go away.”
Then go back to your work and allow it to interrupt you again if it needs to.
Do you know what will happen in the end?
It will go quiet.
It will let you do better work.
Because you’re no longer at war with it—and yourself.
You don’t win an argument by cutting someone off. You let them speak first. By cutting them off you only show that you are afraid of them.
Forgive yourself for not feeling good enough.
This is not a trick to fool the impostor child.
You can’t fool yourself.
My approach is to let go—to surrender.
You don’t have to prove to yourself or anyone else how good you are.
And when you genuinely practise letting go, you relax, your consciousness rises and you do better work—you become good enough by letting go of striving to be good enough.
And you may understand this consciously but you may still struggle to let go.
That’s OK too.
You let go of the frustration that may arise in an effort to let go.
This is real surrendering.
Enjoy being a top performer, an average performer and a low performer.
Do I mean you should give up?
No!
On the contrary, when you let go of striving to feel good enough, the bandwidth of your consciousness increases.
This way you can see why you are not good enough and how you can get better.
Because you’re not focusing on proving to others how good you are—you can use that precious energy to look at what you can improve.
You can enjoy living.
You can enjoy the pleasure that a human being takes in just being alive.
Think about it.
The imposter syndrome is expressed in relation to other people.
It’s how you perceive yourself in comparison to others.
What would happen to your performance if you stopped caring about how others perceive you?
You are transformed by what you accept—not by what you fight.
