Impostor Syndrome Event – Yvonne Pritchard
Recently Global Resourcing presented a Vimeo event, ‘Tackling Imposter Syndrome’, hosted by renowned Transformational Coach, Yvonne Pritchard. The event followed on from our blog on Imposter Syndrome (IS), and looked at the causes of IS, as well as how to deal with it. Here we look at some of the issues discussed by Yvonne and learn more about her work in helping people to combat IS.
Tackling Imposter Syndrome
Yvonne began by introducing herself to Global Resourcing’s virtual audience and telling them a little about her background and experience. After a BSC in Social Sciences from the University of Roehampton, Yvonne began a long and successful career in sales and marketing for a variety of blue-chip electronic companies including Sony, Samsung and SMART Technologies.
In 2019 she gave up her corporate career to focus on what was important to her – her family and herself – and found her true passion; to help people achieve the best version of themselves. To accomplish this she embarked on a voyage of personal development, self-reflection and goal setting. As well as undertaking a series of training courses which would result in her becoming a practitioner of, among other skills, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).
NLP is a process whereby we can better understand how we organise our thinking, feeling, language and behaviour to develop both personally and in our career. NLP uses a technique which examines how we form a unique ‘mental map’ of the world based on and as a result of the way we perceive and filter information and how that can affect our perception of ourselves.
Yvonne explained that the mind is split between the conscious and the unconscious, with the unconscious mind being the more active part of brain function – it’s what keeps us breathing when we’re asleep and what pumps the blood to our brain – in other words what keeps us alive – and it never stops working. It’s responsible for storing all our memories, emotions and beliefs and it’s also responsible for those ‘gut’ feelings, that intuition, those off-the-cuff remarks that spring into our heads unbidden, which try to tell us something. Yvonne suggests thinking of the unconscious brain as a filing cabinet where all of our emotions and beliefs as well as actions such as brushing our teeth or simply how to walk, are stored, ready to be accessed by our conscious brain whenever we need them. However, if we also store something bad there, we have a problem.
It's the ‘bad’ items stored in our brain which can go on to sabotage our minds and rule our future – whether that’s overthinking past interviews where we didn’t get the job, so we convince ourselves that the next interview will also be a failure. When it is, we believe the negative thoughts we have about ourselves because they’re written in our ‘interview’ file in our unconscious mind, and we’ve flung open the door of this file and are devouring its contents.
The good news is that we can unlearn these behaviours and destructive thoughts which Yvonne calls ‘Mind Monkeys’. Once we have control of these Mind Monkeys and learn how to shut down their loud and aggressive voices we can start to appreciate ourselves, our abilities, our talents and capabilities, and come to believe the positive rather than the negative.
Yvonne’s strategies for overcoming IS involve recognising its symptoms, then working through a series of zones, pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone, through the fear zone, into a learning zone and onwards to a growth zone. Only then, she suggests, will we achieve happiness, fulfilment and self-belief.
Yvonne’s presentation was followed by a Q&A during which several thoughtful and relevant questions were put to her, and which provided the answers the attendees were looking for and more.
If you’d like more information about the range of coaching packages that Yvonne offers you can contact here via her website Beeleve. She’s also on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.