This week’s Monday Mantra is for confidence. It can help us realise our abilities, and have confidence in our ability to achieve our goals, and it can also help us overcome Imposter Syndrome.
I’ve been speaking to people about Imposter Syndrome quite a lot recently. I used to experience it a lot when people would put me forward as someone who knows about … whatever the thing they were talking about. I’ve felt it throughout my life. As a teacher, I was head of department as a newly qualified teacher and had teachers with decades of experience looking to me for answers. I knew my stuff, but that doesn’t stop your brain telling you something else. During my last teaching role, I was asked to teach a group of European teachers how to hold meditation sessions with pupils. I’d been doing it myself my entire career, but being asked to teach other people how to do it made me feel totally inadequate to the task. I did it, because I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity, and it went brilliantly, but I didn’t get over the feeling that I wasn’t the right person for the job.
But those were over a decade ago. A couple of months ago, it hit my again, square in the face. I had been asked to do a talk and a workshop at the Mansfield Mind, Body & Spirit Show, and I had to write the introductions for both. One is a talk about the book I co-wrote. Although all of us who wrote a chapter were told we should call ourselves authors – published authors – even bestselling authors! – now, my head still tells me that I wrote a chapter, I didn’t write a whole book, so I’m not really an author, am I? I’m getting better at telling that thought where to go.
But the one that really got me was writing the introduction for the mantra workshop I’ll be leading. I’ve been using mantra as healing modality for nearly 20 years, so I started by saying “Industry expert, Mahala Gehna …” and then I stopped dead. Industry expert? Who am I kidding? Who do I think I am calling myself an expert? I had to sit with that for a while. I couldn’t finish the sentence I’d started but something was stopping me deleting it and starting again. In the end I gave myself a good talking to. I’ve been at this nearly 20 years, I know what I’m doing. I have a good following of people who come to me for my expertise in mantra therapy. I have Hindus come to me for treatment, and follow me on YouTube, for my mantras. So, after telling myself off for doubting myself, I finished that sentence, and the description “Industry expert” stayed where it was. But I still have split thoughts about it. Part of me says I am an expert and I should be blowing my trumpet on this. Another, very vocal part, still tells me I can’t call myself an expert because there are others out there, somewhere in the world, who know more than me. Well, of course there are. But I’m not calling myself “the expert”, just “an expert”, and at some point in the future, I am going to finally be OK with that!
And so on to this week’s mantra, which I’ve been using with some clients recently who were experiencing Imposter Syndrome and a lack of confidence in their abilities. It’s just three short words, but can be a bit of a tongue twister.
Eim Hrim Klim
eem h-reem -kleem
I radiate confidence and strength