Moment 133: Behaviour Change Scientist Reveals A Simple Solution To Imposter Syndrome: Shahroo Izadi

00:00Imposter syndrome. How does one move past it? Oh, sit back. There's this word we use a lot in society at the moment, which is imposter syndrome. It's a really interesting concept. I mean, the word itself, the phrase itself is kind of loaded with a series of assumptions that I don't think are necessarily helpful. but you must in your practice deal with a lot of people that are showing signs of what we know as imposter syndrome what's your what's your take on it and really like how does one how does one move past it well this is a very new this is a hot take because it's through an observation the way that i come up with things is i spend as many hours as i can speaking to people human beings one after the other as many human beings as I can in different contexts and seeing how they are using these tools and what's working for them and what isn't and for imposter syndrome essentially not not being able to internalize your accomplishments feeling like a fraud which I've had um managing my binge eating and my anxiety differently helped me change my imposter syndrome for the better and I'm seeing why that is now I've just started well now that I'm so passionate about binge eating as a result of weight loss

01:28diets being a thing that goes with my generation um what I've noticed is that when people give themselves permission to find whatever they find difficult difficult whatever it is even if it's subjectively far more simple than all the things they're managing to do every day something extraordinary happens and that tends to have a really extraordinary impact because usually with the people I work with because I'm talking about like booze and other drugs and food and stuff there's a lot of shame and guilt associated with it so that extra bit we all we all find it difficult to acknowledge you know a lot of us find it difficult to say I was great at this and that's the end of the sentence without any caveats or and it could have been when it comes to acknowledging our say our professional accomplishments or academic accomplishments the people I work with a lot of the time feel so ashamed and guilty about this thing that that that still alludes them that that's the bit they'll be like yeah I got a pay rise but I still haven't sorted this out people don't know how I behave when no one's watching like that bit that's what drags people down it doesn't let them really really internalize and process their capacity

02:44because well for example I've written two books that's cool they've done well um writing books was not hard for me doing this this is way this is a you know being able to not stammer while I speak to you because I had the confidence to sit and breathe before I came in here rather than look at notes or only binge eaters will understand this but being able to start a binge and then bring it back as opposed to just starve myself for weeks or whatever I was doing before is a power and a trust in myself and an ability to close the gap between what I what I would tell other people to do and what I do and a sense of integrity when no one's watching that seeps into every area of my life.

03:33But the trick was to allow myself to find something incredibly difficult that other people thought was a no-brainer and not think that that meant I was stupid or weak, but just that's the way things have gone for me. I remember sitting with Marissa Peer and she said that she's never had a patient, whether they were a sports star or a successful millionaire or whatever, that believed they were enough in terms of her patience so the people that had come to her struggling with something at the root of it is that they they didn't believe they were enough in some capacity do you agree with that i think uh yeah i think self-worth self-worth is something that comes up a lot and if i come to you and you know it's clear that i have my self-worth is in the proverbial bin i just think i'm a fucking you know useless worthless don't deserve anything um what's the start of that process to get me to a better place like where do you what do you do with me so if you came to me it wouldn't be just the problem wouldn't be i have low self-worth it would be i want to change this behavior yeah and i want to change it i've been you know drinking too much alcohol smoking too much of that sniffing too much of this where would you start with me

04:55well we would get an honest baseline of where you're at now so that's why in the book we do like a snapshot letter without judgment totally private to just say like I think a lot of the time we create plans for who we want to be as opposed to who we are and we use this stuff to find ourselves and I think first of all you meet yourself and you get on board with who you meet and then I would help you to understand why you've come to be this way so in that first step getting you know getting to understand who I am and getting on board with who I meet that's through a snapshot letter yeah so it's essentially saying here we are today this is where I'm at this is where I've got to this is where I'm starting usually it's quite a fed up letter like something's got to change here we go but what it does is it sort of anchors the process and says, right, this is where we begin. And then what we start moving on to is the fact that you already know what to do. I believe that the people who buy my books already know what to do. And I believe that a lot of people feel really patronized when they're told what to do.

05:57They know what to do. And if they don't, they can Google it. They don't know why they're not doing it despite wanting to do it. So then we start thinking about closing the gap between the advice you'd give another person so I just say to people what would you like to be doing I don't give them an A or a B I would like to be running a marathon every day every you know every couple of months I'd like to be fit I'd like to be skinny I'd like to be a good partner I want to be perfect okay why why are you here why are we having this conversation because I'm not I'm drinking so much alcohol sniffing so many things and doing all the naughty things I shouldn't be doing and I can't stop myself but I know you're right I do know what I should be doing I just can't do it okay yeah and in the past when you've created plans to change yeah what have they looked like um I've basically thrown all of the alcohol at my house and everything that I could possibly sniff and I have emptied the fridge and put only vegetables in and I have um written it down on a piece of paper and then a week later I'm back to all of the naughty habits so what you've done is you've punished yourself you've put things in place yeah to say this has got bad yeah I need

07:19to create this environment and control and isolate yeah so that I don't do the bad thing Yeah. Did you establish what you're afraid you might have to experience if you change? Did you identify if you get there, what if it's not as good as you think? If you get there, will you have to do all the things that you've told people you're going to do when you get there? Is the process of getting there one that you're familiar with? No. All of that. What do you think you're going to have to get through?

07:44What are you going to have to prove? What triggers are you going to have to respond to differently? These are the things people don't talk about. what self-doubt are you gonna have to push against and disprove and update along the way it's it's not about thinking you're going to be able to focus on what's bad and also you should anticipate that in a week's time you're going to want to use you should put things in place what can i put in place to you know this is i found this really compelling in your book the because it's something i think about a lot you know we think of motivation as being this like constant people ask stupid questions like how do you stay motivated all the time which is again an assumption that people that are successful in whatever facet of their life are able to always feel a sense of motivation but um how does one prepare for that that dip that speed bump that you know the regression the relapse it's uh i think the best bet you have is the conversation you have with yourself when your plans don't go to plan and the i think first of all you prepare by yeah you can have the best plans in the world but you should assume that your plans will not go to plan and even with the best tools in the world you should assume that you're not able to preempt

08:49every single trigger every single challenge the way that you do it is you start to reframe challenge as an opportunity to voluntarily demonstrate your capacity you're like here we go I I'm off I'm off grid right now and all I've got is the advice I'd give another person and the conversation I have with myself that's going to turn into what I do with my hands well don't do and I think that if you really focus on making that conversation one that holds firmness and compassion together then that's the best thing you've got because what you're chasing there is to feel smart and calm and proud of yourself and you already know what you tell someone else so the more you do that and when you take that advice and you see the results obviously and it actually works the more you start doing it in other areas of your life and my my job is to make myself redundant to people as quickly as possible i think we should have been taught this at school we have to change habits our whole lives like why is life dragging us along and making us change them when we're all depleted and desperate um so yeah i would say it's the conversation you have with yourself and the conversation you have with yourself very often people people say to me like

10:02how how can i hold kindness and firmness at the same time right so how can i change habits which involves sitting in discomfort and craving and urges and still be kind to myself because being kind to myself means doing whatever I want whenever I want to do it and what I always tell them is it's kind of like if you let's say you have a kid and you read an article somewhere and realize that this treat you've been giving your kid at 11 a.m every day for the last year is actually not very it's really unhealthy so as of tomorrow you're not going to give the kid the treat you know you're not going to give the kid the treat the kid doesn't know yet kid wakes up tomorrow it's 11 o'clock you're not going to give them the treat what's what's the kid going to do want the treat and and what else cry kick off yeah yeah would you blame the kid for crying no you'd expect the kid to cry yeah it's used to something you wouldn't make its life miserable you'd make it as comfortable as possible. And you just repeat that in a row until it realizes that it's come out unscathed.

11:08Compassion. I know why you feel this way. Of course you feel this way. You deserve to feel this way. You scream all you want, babe. That doesn't mean I'm going to do what you want. That's the conversation you have with your body over and over again, where you hold compassion and firmness together until you've done it in a row until it's easy. That's my angle. And if I, does it, does it help to remove the, you know, the kid wants the candy or whatever, whatever the thing the kid was expecting in the morning does it help to remove it from the environment so if i take if it's you know i've struggled sometimes with like i had this like sweetie drawer in my house at one point and i i knew i didn't want to eat the sweets but when something would happen maybe it'd be late at night i feel a bit hungry maybe you know a bit stressed i'd end up in a drawer and so i always always wondered to myself would it just help to just remove the draw just like pour it in the bin i ultimately did um but i'm just wondering if those cues those triggers removing them completely is the answer i have this question all the time about abstinence and sobriety and whether you know again there are some people for whom it's easier

12:16my approach is very much more for the general population and so a lot of the time it's more you know we all sit in the middle and I want you to feel like you can have chocolate in your house and consume it and enjoy it and not feel powerless over it so at the core of my message is you decide what you do with your hands and any negotiation you have internally about it is a jumping off point and doesn't actually make you do anything and is an insight into how what you're telling yourself about the sugar and what it means and how you'll feel if you don't have it if you were trying to build up a streak and get some time under your belt yeah maybe but ultimately what I would recommend under those circumstances impose some friction give yourself some speed bumps to start thinking about whether you actually want to do it so for example if I want to if I'm working into the night uh writing which I love doing invariably at like 1am I start thinking about Deliveroo and about 3am I regret it strongly same so with that in mind I don't just delete deliveroo card details are out addresses out it's not because i don't trust myself it's because i want to put in moments where i think ah remember you didn't want to do this

13:26do you remember why you didn't want to do this make it harder for myself to do the thing that i don't want to be doing and easier for myself to do the thing that i do like back in the day when i used to hate exercise i used to go to sleep in my gym kit so there was just one less thing to do um so that's like removing friction versus adding it exactly so i would if i were you i'd impose friction first like put that draw somewhere else and then when you go looking in another place start thinking to yourself god why is that draw it disrupts the autopilot that's what's something i've struggled with i i do a lot of like late night eating and then i always regret it in the morning because you wake up feeling bad and especially if you've eaten just before you fall asleep the body hasn't really had a chance to digest it sometimes you get like some I don't know reflux whatever they call it and I've always wondered how to stop myself doing that when I have when I have the urge how do I break that habit I guess what's the friction that I can add don't be hungry at that time true that's you know what sometimes I get really deep in the weeds about binge eating and policy around it and obesity and how we've got to take down all the

14:35diets and everything and sometimes I forget to say stuff like don't be hungry that helps you know like there's so many like deep psychological stuff and we all have our own complex relationship with food and stuff and that's what's really difficult about talking about food is because it is all the good things too it really is and much like with alcohol and other drugs when people people who struggle and feel powerless around it feel really misunderstood because they hate it by that point it's the bane of their life it's all they think about all day have I been good have I been bad what am I going to have was that okay conflicting nutritional advice like it's got out of hand