Hypnotherapy for Impostor Syndrome
If you are just like the 70% of the population, you’ve probably felt that you don’t deserve success at times or felt that your achievements are due to luck. Yes, the impostor phenomenon is real and about 30% of high achievers actually experience these feelings as they struggle to succeed. So what is impostor syndrome and how can hypnotherapy help?
What is impostor syndrome?
Self-doubt and feeling unconfident at times are no strangers to the majority of us. However, impostor syndrome takes it up a notch and disturbs the overall success, leaving you feeling like a fraud or failure.
Interestingly, according to an article from Harvard Business Review, impostor syndrome usually affects highly achieving people who find it hard to accept their accomplishments. For example, many successful celebrities that you may know of such as Michelle Obama, Charlize Theron, or Viola Davis also reported feeling like this at times.
Anyone can experience impostor syndrome. According to healtline.com, simply put, impostor syndrome is a conflict between your self-perception and how others perceive you. This conflict leads to feeling like you don’t belong, you don’t deserve, or writing off your success with luck or coincidence.
Signs of impostor syndrome
Spotting impostor syndrome can be challenging as many of us sometimes have these negative thoughts. However, if you often find yourself struggling with one of these repetitive thoughts or inner self talk, you may be dealing with impostor syndrome:
“I am fake”
“It was luck”
“They are supporting me only because they are my friends”
“If I can do it, everybody else can do it”
If you hear one of these thoughts rumbling in your mind frequently or alternating, you may have to dig a bit deeper to understand your underlying beliefs.
Sometimes these feelings may be more subtle and you may find yourself explaining away your success every time you receive a compliment. An example could be when someone says “you lost a lot of weight”; your response is something like “it’s the dress, this dress makes me look skinny”.
Hypnosis for impostor syndrome
When we look at the studies about impostor syndrome, we see that impostor syndrome is highly correlated with low self-esteem, anxiety, and self-sabotage.
Hypnosis can help with self-esteem
Think of how you perceive yourself in daily life. Sometimes we even hear the negative self-talk going on for hours before gives us a break. Where do these thoughts and beliefs about self come from? The subconscious mind! The subconscious mind holds all of our beliefs and patterns about ourselves, our worth, and our deserving.
Our self-esteem starts building at a young age. As we socialize and start interacting with others, our beliefs about ourselves strengthen. What if you were criticized by your parents? What if you were discouraged from pursuing your strengths because of the beliefs of the people who raised you? These interruptions can result in a less than perfect self-image in the subconscious mind.
Hypnosis is one of the most effective tools to work on improving the subconscious self-image. During hypnosis, not only the beliefs of others can be released but also you can start re-establishing a positive way of being.
As a result, even at the most challenging times in life, you will have the courage to stay right behind your thoughts and beliefs. You will have that inner voice support “You got this!” rather than saying “You are a fraud”.
Hypnosis can help with anxiety
One of the things that fuel the impostor syndrome is anxiety. Whenever anxiety is involved in any situation, the negative power of the thoughts gets even stronger. And hypnosis can help with taking away that power from anxiety.
Hypnosis is already a calm and relaxed state by itself. Just by practicing hypnosis, you can start to differentiate destructive thoughts from reality. Under hypnosis, you can also learn healthy coping tools and how to break the pattern of negative thinking.
Everyone can doubt themselves at times but when it’s fueled with anxiety, these thoughts get out of control. Next time when you doubt yourself, it will be so much easier to release those doubtful thoughts rather than giving into them!
Hypnosis can help with self-acceptance
Probably the biggest mistake impostors make is resisting themselves, their talents, or their worth. Not only it’s hard for them to accept themselves with their weaknesses and strengths but also, they tend to reject their unique parts altogether. The problem is that resisting yourself creates more pressure and self-doubt in return.
As your subconscious self-image improves with the help of hypnosis, you will also start to embrace different parts of yourself. Some parts are going to be negative traits that need more work. And some parts will be the great things about you. Either way, these are the parts that make you who you are and that’s why you are special. Rather than resisting yourself, you can learn to embrace all of your parts with the help of hypnosis.