Show notes
In this episode, I am excited to have Neha Sampat on to talk about Imposter Syndrome: the mindset and culture that plagues lawyers. Neha Sampat is CEO, founder, coach, and consultant at GenLead|BelongLab, where she focuses on building belonging and true inclusion. Through consulting, training, speaking, and writing, she helps organizations create peak-performance, inclusive teams by addressing hidden barriers to belonging, such as Imposter Syndrome and internalized bias, unconscious bias, and generational diversity. Through professional development coaching, she helps her individual clients develop job situations and leadership styles that engage their true and best selves. Neha practiced law at both large and boutique law firms, and later joined law academia as dean of students and adjunct professor of law and leadership. She brings to her consulting and coaching practice her experience supporting and supervising thousands of diverse students and staff members and also successfully collaborating with stakeholders of various generations. Topics Covered Neha kicks off the episode defining Imposter Syndrome, how to overcome and handle feelings of Imposter Syndrome, and how resilience and Imposter Syndrome/self-doubt are connected. How the professional creates a culture that feeds Imposter Syndrome, why lawyers are at increased risk for Imposter Syndrome, and how being a good lawyer isn't about knowing all the answers, but rather knowing where to look for and find the answers. With the stakes and sense of perfectionism being so high for lawyers, Neha talks about what lawyers can do to reduce instead of feed Imposter Syndrome in themselves and in the profession. Find out more on Neha at: www.genlead.co neha@genlead.co To stay informed on Neha's programming and receive future discounts and free resources, sign up here. Links mentioned: www.facebook.com/belonglab "Individual Costs and Losses Resulting from My Self-Doubt" worksheet from Owning Your Value online course - This worksheet will help you assess the impact of your own self-doubt and Imposter Syndrome so that you can appropriately address it and notice significant positive outcomes in your career and life. GenLead|BelongLab is thrilled to bring its top-rated "Owning Your Value - Lawyers Edition" workshop online to provide greater access to their transformative tools. If you are tired of the anxiety, paralysis and isolation that comes with self-doubt and are eager to feel more confident in your competence, this course is for you. Neha has generously offered a 15% discount to the first 15 listeners who register for the course! Use the discount code "RESILIENTLAWYERPODCAST" at checkout. Questions? Comments? Email Jeena! hello@jeenacho.com. You can also connect with Jeena on Twitter: @Jeena_Cho For more information, visit: jeenacho.com Order The Anxious Lawyer book — Available in hardcover, Kindle and Audible Find Your Ease: Retreat for Lawyers I’m creating a retreat that will provide a perfect gift of relaxation and rejuvenation with an intimate group of lawyers. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/VXfIXq MINDFUL PAUSE: Bite-Sized Practices for Cultivating More Joy and Focus 31-day program. Spend just 6 minutes every day to practice mindfulness and meditation. Decrease stress/anxiety, increase focus and concentration. Interested? http://jeenacho.com/mindful-pause/ Transcript Neha Sampat: [00:00:10] Being a good lawyer doesn't mean having all the answers, it means knowing where to find the answers. Intro: [00:00:18] Welcome to The Resilient Lawyer podcast. In this podcast, we have meaningful, in-depth conversations with lawyers, entrepreneurs, and change agents. We offer tools and strategies for creating a more joyful and satisfying life. And now your host, Jeena Cho. Jeena Cho: [00:00:41] Hello my friends, thanks for joining me for another episode of The Resilient Lawyer podcast. In this episode I have Neha Sampat, who is the CEO, founder, coach, and consultant at GenLead Belong Lab, where she focuses on building belonging and true inclusion. Through consulting, training, speaking, and writing, she helps organizations create peak performance and inclusive teams by addressing hidden barriers to belonging, such as Imposter Syndrome, internalized bias, unconscious bias, and generational diversity. Through professional development coaching, she helps her individual clients develop job situations and leadership styles that engage their true and best selves. [00:01:25] But before we get into the interview, if you haven't listened to the last bonus episode please go check it out. I shared a short, six-minute guided meditation practice to help you let go of stress and anxiety. It's a preview for my new course, Mindful Pause, which is just 31 days of six-minute practice daily. I know for so many of us, finding time is always a challenge. So I wanted to create a course that would be easily accessible for every busy lawyer. So head on over to JeenaCho.com, or you can also click on the show notes. And with that here's Neha. Neha, welcome to the show. Neha Sampat: [00:02:02] Jeena, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate all the work you do. I read your book, I've learned so much from you, and I really appreciate having you in my life; both my personal life and my professional life. Jeena Cho: [00:02:16] Yeah and I'm just so delighted to have you on the show because we're friends, and it's always nice to invite friends on the show. Especially when they're doing amazing work in the world. To get us started, can you just tell us a 30-second overview of who you are and what you do? Neha Sampat: [00:02:36] You're asking me to do 30 seconds, that is not my forte but I'll give it a shot. Okay, so I am a lawyer by training but I'm a master of career transformation myself. So I practiced law out of law school, kind of just going with the flow, and then really exercising more agency over my career, realizing what my values were or what my causes were. And my cause is really education. So I used all of my education to then switch into the field of education, to do what felt like a better fit for me. So I practiced education law for a while, and then I was Dean of Students and an Adjunct Professor of Law and Leadership at a law school for ten years. And after that, I transformed my career into what I'm doing now, which is running my own inclusion leadership development, professional development business. And I am probably more aligned, values-wise, with regard to my work and my life. [00:03:33] It's funny, there's like that blur between work and life has become more and more blurry. And in many ways, that tells me I'm doing the right thing. So I am loving what I'm doing, and I get to help other folks develop career situations in which they also sense that alignment; they have that alignment. And then I help organizations, through my consulting and training and workshopping and inclusion and belonging issues, create cultures where the folks that work there can really bring their true and best selves. Jeena Cho: [00:04:03] So I know part of that work involves working with the Imposter Syndrome. To kind of get us oriented, what is Imposter Syndrome exactly? Neha Sampat: [00:04:16] Imposter Syndrome is the feeling that you're not cut out for the work you're doing or the work you want to be doing, combined with the fear of being found out as feeling a fraud. And often these feelings of not being cut out for the work you're doing, they're not actually supported by objective facts. And so that's the interesting part, that's where I get to get in there and help my clients and my students, the folks I work with, really be lawyers and look at all of the facts and try to see what the whole picture provides. And Imposter Syndrome is an area of passion for me because I experienced it. It's actually not uncommon at all for anyone to experience it, but particularly marginalized populations, women and minorities tend to experience it at a greater incidence because it's a form of internalized bias. So for me, this has been a journey in my own life and in my own profession, and it's become an area where because I've seen my own trajectory and my client's trajectory in overcoming it through some of the tactics that I've developed, it's become a growing area in my work. Jeena Cho: [00:05:30] How did you become interested in this topic of Imposter Syndrome? Neha Sampat: [00:05:36] I think really experiencing it myself. And you know, I really experienced it probably the first time it really tremendously negatively affected me was my first year of law school. I had always done well overall in schooling, up until I went to law school. I went straight from undergrad to law school, and I showed up at law school having really no community of people around me who could give me a real idea of what it meant to be a lawyer, or what it meant to be in law school. I didn't have any family friends that had been to law school, whereas many of my classmates had not only had family members who were lawyers or family friends who were lawyers, but they had actually spent the prior summer working in a law office. And so I showed up to orientation and my classmates were speaking in what felt like a foreign language to me. They were using all this legal lingo and I had no idea what these terms meant, and it freaked me out. I really felt something was wrong with me, like why don't I know what that means? Everyone else seems to know it. Something's wrong with me. Why am I here? I don't belong here, intellectually or competency-wise. That's where I think Imposter Syndrome fits into my work, and the grander scheme of my work in building belonging. Imposter Syndrome is pretty much the feeling or the experience of not belonging, competency-wise. [00:07:05] So when I was in my first year of law school, I felt like I was not smart enough to be there, that I was a fraud. That I somehow had been let in, but I was not cut out for this, and I struggled. And I totally did what I shouldn't have done but what most people with Imposter Syndrome do, and I hid out. I literally hid out; I stayed in my apartment thinking, I've got to figure all this out by myself. Instead of actually asking my professors for help, admitting that I was struggling and that I was feeling doubtful of my ability. And so I didn't actually know what Imposter Syndrome was. It was only probably a decade later that I heard this term Imposter Syndrome. And at that point, it had done a tremendous amount of damage. For me, I think it held me back from a lot of opportunities that led me to self-sabotage. Probably the worst thing is it created a tremendous amount of anxiety that I carried with me in isolation because I didn't want people to know that I was feeling like I wasn't cut out for this. So I was really isolated, and so I only realized that in retrospect. Once I realized that these feelings we're called Imposter Syndrome, it was like this huge sigh of relief. I was like, this thing is so widely experienced that it's actually called a syndrome. You mean, I'm not the only one feeling this way?! And I literally remember my body just kind of like, ahh relaxing. And that was a pivotal moment for me. [00:08:37] And I didn't realize at the time, it's only with digging deeper into my past that I see that I actually did develop a skill set in law school to try to address my Imposter Syndrome that allowed me to move forward from it. But when I started to really understand what Imposter Syndrome was, maybe a decade later, then I could really dig even deeper to look at the research on what creates this self-doubt. And to really figure out even more effective tactics to address it, not just within myself but within the legal profession. Jeena Cho: [00:09:12] I would imagine some of the listeners that go, "Oh yeah I have that. I have that thing, that nagging voice inside my head that's constantly telling me I'm not good enough, smart enough, and unless you win absolutely everything you're a terrible lawyer," and on and on and on, that narrative that goes.. Neha Sampat: [00:09:32] Yeah it reinforces itself, that's what's so terrible about it. I probably had the seed of Imposter Syndrome when I was a kid and I did poorly in math. This is an example I give to a lot of my students, I did poorly in math probably on one or two tests when I was in elementary school. And the teacher said to my parents, "Oh Neha struggles in math." And I was like oh my gosh, that means I'm just bad at math and I'm always going to be bad at math. And then every time I took a math test I remember feeling so anxious and nervous, because I was like, "Oh no it's a test in math, and I'm terrible at math. I'm totally going to mess this up." And you better believe that that anxiety then limits our ability to perform. So then of course, I probably didn't do my best on those math tests. And then my outcome on the test reinforced that narrative that I'm terrible at math. So it's like it just feeds itself. Jeena Cho: [00:10:33] Yeah. So how do we break that cycle, once you sort of realize that thing that I'm doing is the Imposter or the inner critic, or whatever you want to call it. How do you begin to work with it? Neha Sampat: [00:10:50] I think recognizing what it is is probably one of the hardest things to do, but one of the most impactful ways to actually address it. Because when you can accept that there is this thing called Imposter Syndrome and start to consider that it might be what underlies some of your self-doubts, that's when you can start to dispel some of those voices in your head. And quite frankly, often those voices in our head are not our own voices. If we dig deep, we realize that they're the voice of a teacher. Like for me, it was the voice of a teacher with regard to the math. Or it could be the voice of a parent. It could be the voice of a mentor, it could be the voice of a peer. There are all these different voices that internalize within our brains, kind of take root within our brains. These messages telling us we're not good enough, and this is where it ties to the whole discrimination piece. You know, fairly innocuous comments, seemingly innocuous comments made to women, such as, "Oh can you take notes at this meeting?" [00:12:01] Or, "Oh you got into law school during the Affirmative Action era." Those sort of things, and it's even in the tone in how those messages are delivered, those are biases that once they get pushed upon you enough, you start to internalize those biases. So that's how these voices, sometimes voices of discrimination become Imposter Syndrome. And so when we can accept one, that it's not our voice, I think that's an important way to address it. Because if it's not your voice, then what does your voice tell you about your ability? Right? Like, that's not my voice, let me push that out of my head. Now, what do I know about my own abilities? And really start to take stock, looking at our past accomplishments. So one exercise I have folks do who are struggling with Imposter Syndrome is to think about the accomplishments in their lives of which they're the most proud. And it doesn't have to be a professional accomplishment, it can be a personal accomplishment. And to dig into that accomplishment. Why are they proud of that accomplishment? What are the skills and traits and experiences they have that led to that accomplishment? [00:13:14] And then, just look at those skills. So then…
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