Welcome to The Courage to Live a Big Life, the podcast where we explore the extraordinary power of our innate creativity and how it fuels our courage. I'm your host, Suzy DeVille, and I'm thrilled to be on this adventure with you. Get ready to challenge your limits and break free from the ordinary. It's time to summon the courage to live a big life. Let's go.

Hey everyone. Today I want to talk about one of the most icky and challenging places where we can get stuck. Impostor syndrome. Let's begin with understanding what it is and how it can show up in our lives. Impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern that can be In which we can doubt our accomplishments and have a persistent, almost internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.

And despite evidence of our competency and success, we can feel that we don't deserve those achievements. And we can attribute them to luck, timing, or some kind of fluke. This can give us feelings of anxiety. self doubt, and a lack of self confidence. I have been thinking and talking and writing and coaching around imposter syndrome for quite a while.

And I want to share some of the things that I have learned. First, let's talk about our wonderful brains. So we have this beautiful limbic system in our brains. And it is very much concerned about our survival. So it puts us almost in a perpetual fight or flight. Position because it reminds us almost on a loop that there's not enough or we're not enough.

Now this helped us during our time as early humans. and we no longer have a need for it, but yet it is a part of us. So it is important to just simply recognize it for what it is. And we can just begin to work with these limiting beliefs as a part of a daily practice. When we overcome and dissolve these limiting beliefs, it can connect us much more profoundly to our imagination, intuition, and ideation.

These brains of ours are wired for survival, certainty, and scarcity. We want to flip that switch over to creation and abundance. The second piece of the puzzle is it's important for us to understand the prevalent cultural messaging that we are surrounded by on a daily basis, and that is. That we have to work more, be more productive, and have a lot more discipline if we're going to be successful.

And that if we're going to have any kind of sense of value, we must achieve first. Now when you combine this with what's happening in our brain, of course, the message that we come away with is, I am not enough and that I don't have intrinsic self worth, that somehow outside of me there is value and I have to work relentlessly, tirelessly to grasp it.

When we do not feel an intrinsic sense of value, we will put ourselves onto the gerbil wheel of overachieving. Which of course fills us with this desire for perfectionism and control, which soon puts us on the slippery slope of burnout and overwhelm. When we're in this scarcity survival mode, We are cut off from our internal genius were separated from ourselves from our problem solving ability from what I call our creativity back channels.

It separates to from our wealth, our happiness, and our sense of freedom and joy. We don't trust ourselves. And we have a belief that the answers, the hows are all out there. They are not within us. Recently when I was out on a walk, something occurred to me. I believe I have figured out At least one of the missing components to unlocking and dissolving imposter syndrome.

I will be diving into my insights in the next episode, and I hope that you'll join me there.  Thank you for joining me today. I would love to hear your thoughts and stories. Please connect with me on social media and share your adventures. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please consider leaving a review.

Your feedback helps me reach more explorers like yourself. Remember, your innate creativity has the power to shape your reality. Embrace it and step into the world with the courage to live a big life. Here's to your inspiration with love.