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Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the biggest imposter of them all? Michael Jordan once said that you have to expect things of yourself before you can do them. You have to believe. Confidence or the lack of it, it can make you or break you. It can slow you down, speed you up, or have you questioning something that you already know how to do. And that's the crazy thing about imposter syndrome. You can be the GOAT at what you do and still have a moment where you're sitting there thinking, I don't know what I'm doing. I've had those moments. And what I've learned is that before you start questioning yourself, you gotta figure out what you actually are struggling with. You might know exactly what you're doing. You just don't know where they keep the dag on steak knives. And I'm gonna explain that in a minute. I know you was like, where did that come from? Stick with me. I heard about this guy who has been working at a company for about eight months and he still felt like he didn't know enough. Then his boss asked him to present, to do a presentation, and he became so stressed. He was frustrated. He was worried about what he doesn't know and whether everybody else is gonna figure out that he doesn't know it. And I can relate to that. I work in operations, and my zone of genius is fixing business systems. Strategy is my specialty. Give me some raw data. Let me analyze what's happening, and I'm looking for the root cause. Where's the bottleneck? What's broken? What's not connecting? I know how to do all of that. I could do that with my eyes closed. But what can throw me off is walking into somebody else's environment and trying to figure out how they do it. And that's where I had to check myself. That's the difference between not knowing what you're doing and knowing what you're doing, but not knowing how the particular company operates. Those two things can feel exactly the same when you are sitting in the middle of the problem. And I'm gonna give you an example. In operations, somebody might come to you and say, We're not getting any sales. Okay, what does that mean? That's not really a problem statement. That's a symptom. Now I gotta start digging. Are customers seeing the product? Is it something unavailable? Is the information wrong? Did something change? Is there a technical issue? What does your data say? Half the job is figuring out what the person is actually trying to tell you. Now imagine doing that with data that is inconsistent, missing, labeled in some company specific language that you didn't even learn yet. I'm looking through everything. I'm trying to connect the dots. I know that there's an answer. I just can't find it. And that's when my mind started messing with me. This is a real situation, okay? My mind started playing tricks on me and it started saying things like, Why is this taking you so long? You should know this by now. And I'm thinking to myself, like, I should be able to figure this out. Then later, I find out that there's a tool that would have helped me get to the answer faster, but I didn't know that the tool existed. Nobody told me. Now wait a minute. I've been sitting here questioning my ability when part of the problem was that I didn't even know what resources were available to me. That's a completely different problem. And that reminded me of cooking in somebody else's kitchen. Now I can cook, but everything 10 minutes though. You put me in my own kitchen, I know where everything is. You put me in your kitchen, I don't know where nothing is. I need a steak knife. I open one drawer, nothing. Open up another, still can't find it. And at some point I'm irritated, so I grab the butter knife and try to make it work. I'm struggling, it's taking longer, probably making a mess. But does that mean I suddenly don't know how to cook? No. I don't know where you keep your knives. That's what navigating a new environment can feel like. You're using a mallet to drive a nail in the wall. You're not knowing that there's a hammer sitting in a drawer that nobody showed you. And if you're not careful, you will judge your ability based on how difficult it was to complete the test instead of asking whether you had what you needed to complete it. That's where confidence can start slipping. And you would think that the obvious answer is, well, ask for help. Sure. That is a solution. But let's talk about that. Asking for help is only useful when the person helping you actually helps you. And I've dealt with three types of people. You got the gatekeeper, the doer, and the rusher. The gatekeeper, you ask a question and they give you that look. You don't know that? No. That's why I'm asking you. We wouldn't be having this conversation if I knew that. Then you have the rusher. That's a person that will explain to you how to do something a mile a minute. They know exactly what they're doing. So they're clickety, clackety, talking at the same time. Go here, click on that, pull this up, then go back over there, save that, send this over here. Hold on. Wait. You lost me when you opened your mouth. And then you have the door. Oh my goodness. This person, you ask them to show you something. And then they grab the keyboard or they grab the pen or they do whatever it is and they do it for you. Click, click, click. Oh, there you go. Okay. What did you do? I didn't learn nothing. So now tomorrow I might have to come back and ask you to help me with the same problem because you did it for me. If you are a leader, a manager, or someone with experience, this is something that you have to pay attention to. When people constantly ask the same questions, don't automatically assume that they aren't listening to you or they don't know what they're doing. I mean, well, of course they don't know what they're doing, but look at how knowledge is being transferred. Did you actually teach them how to do it? Is the process documented? Is it clear? Can they find the information without coming back to you? These are important things that you need to consider. Do they know what tools exist? That's not just a coincidence issue. That's a performance issue. And at the same time, I can't put all of that on somebody else because I'm responsible for learning too. You're responsible for learning too. If you don't understand something, you ask. If I have a knowledge gap, I need to close it. If there's a tool available, I gotta learn how to use it. And if I made the mistake, I own it. What I'm not going to do is take one thing that I don't know and use it as evidence that I don't know anything. And that is where I had to change the conversation that I was having with myself. I remember finally solving one of those chaotic issues, right? That feeling afterward was like a sense of relief. And then I was sitting there thinking to myself, like, girl, you gave yourself a hard time for no reason. You figured it out. You could do it. Why did you give yourself such a hard time? And that's when I had to keep telling myself, I've got this. Not, oh, I know everything. No, I've got this. I know how to solve problems. I also know that there will be things that I haven't seen before, but I've got this. And both of those things can exist at the same time. There is a method that I use when I'm teaching my clients, and it's the gap method. Knowing versus doing. When you hit the gap, you don't immediately make it personal. You find out what's missing. Maybe you don't know the process, but that is okay. Maybe you need training. That's fine too. Maybe you need more practice. Okay, cool. And if the system's a mess, which is possible, you identify it. Then you fix what you can fix. Don't turn a problem with information, tools, or experiences into a problem with your identity. So if you're dealing with this right now, I want you to do a few things. First, you gotta figure out what you actually don't know. And I don't want you to say, I don't know what I'm doing. That's too broad. What don't you know? Maybe you understand the work, but then you don't know the system enough. And if that's the case, then that's what you say. Maybe you understand the system, but you don't know how to analyze the problem. And when you look at that, that's the gap that you're going to fill. Maybe nobody ever explained the process to you. Well, now, if that's your issue, you know what questions to ask. So what do you do in this moment if this is you? I want you to write down the things that's making you question yourself and then finish the sentence. What I actually need to know is, and I want you to get specific. The second thing is build yourself an SOS, a standard operating system. So whenever chaos hits the fan, I need somewhere to start. For me, that looks like intake, gathering requirements, audit available tools. If somebody tells me, oh, my sales are down, I'm not immediately running around trying to fix sales. I'm looking at what's happening, what do we know? What do I need? What tools do we have? So, what I want you to do in this situation is create a start, a checklist. This can be your basic starting point. And all of the problems that you deal with the most, you're gonna list them down on the on your checklist. And now what you're not doing is you're not relying on your emotions to tell you what to do next. Third, you saw that show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, right? You're gonna need to get your Who Wants to be a Millionaire lifeline. Remember to phone a friend in the in the show? You need one. And you might even need two. Find the person who knows their stuff and can actually explain it to you. And when you go to them, don't dump the whole problem on their lap. Tell them specifically, okay, here, here's what I'm working on. Here's what I've already checked. This is what I know. This is where I'm stuck. You got to do some of the work yourself too. So identify that person before you have your next problem. And the fourth thing is watch how you talk to yourself. This is the one that's on you. You can't keep saying, I'm stupid, I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I'm not qualified. I don't know enough. No one's gonna listen to me. Every time you hit something unfamiliar, you are speaking down to yourself. You're training your mind to distrust you. So stop that. And I want you to replace the general statements with the actual problems. And this is what that looks like. I haven't learned this yet. I need more information. I made a mistake here. Oh, I need help with this part. And then when you get to that point, now you can do something about it. Celebrate the small wins. Keep your evidence. You solve something difficult. Write it down. Celebrate it. Pat yourself on the back. You learned a new tool. Write it down. Celebrate it. Pat yourself on the back. You made a mistake, but you figured it out. That counts too. And I don't mean walk around applauding yourself for doing minute things like opening up an email. Okay, you were supposed to do that anyway. I'm talking about keeping track of your growth. When your confidence gets shaky, you have to have something stronger than your feelings. That's how you measure yourself. So before you go back to work, before you go back into the office, before you get in front of your team, take the problem that's been frustrating you and diagnose it and don't judge yourself. Diagnose the problem. Ask yourself the questions if is there some information missing? Do I need a new tool? What don't I understand about this? Who can I get to help me? Then make your move. If you need training, find a trainer. You need clarification, ask somebody. If you need a steak knife, like I did, don't use a butter knife. Go find a steak knife. Moreover, stop sitting there sawing away with the butter knife, getting mad at yourself. The goal isn't to prove that you know everything. The goal is to solve the problem and get to the results. So again, mirror mirror on the wall. Who's the biggest imposter of them all? Maybe you've been accusing yourself so quickly. You can be a you can be great at what you do and you can still need help. You can be experienced and you can still have more to learn. You can walk into a new room and not know where anything is, but that doesn't erase what you brought into the room with you. If there's a gap, close it. If there's weakness, work on it. Don't abandon yourself every time that you don't know something. Confidence is not knowing everything. It's knowing who you are while you're figuring out what you don't know. That's the connection. Who you are affects how you move. How you move affects what you execute. And execution affects your results. So this is what I want you to do in closing. Take one thing that's been having you question yourself and diagnose it. Figure out what's missing and decide what move you're going to take. Then I want you to go out and share this episode with somebody who's questioning themselves as well. They may not be in a poster at all. They might just be in somebody else's kitchen looking for that dag on knife.