Arm Yourself Against Gaslighting and Imposter Syndrome

On a freezing December night in Georgia, my girlfriends and I had the conversation women have when they’re done pretending – we talked about how we struggle to own our hard work.

One woman who’s in the middle of divorce proceedings, told us she’s been reflecting on her power moves – leaving corporate, starting her own business, and, now, leaving her marriage.

Everyone at the table joined the conversation, admitting that they, too, minimize what we’ve accomplished. At work. At home. Everywhere.

Why do we do this? Because we’ve been trained to make ourselves smaller. Because talking about the hard things we’ve accomplished feels like bragging. Because our work is seldom acknowledged or celebrated, we stopped doing it for ourselves.

Smash open the tiny boxes.

We put our victories and stories in tiny boxes so we can ignore them. Then we forget them. And it works.

Our dinner made this clear: When we refuse to acknowledge and celebrate our work, it’s easier for people to gaslight us and for us to fall victim to imposter syndrome.

Here’s how it works – gaslighting feeds Imposter Syndrome. Those conversations where you’re ignored and told you weren’t ignored? Obvious gaslighting. When those convos lead you to question your reality, Imposter Syndrome flourishes.

Gaslighting also strips you of your agency – which is the whole point! It reinforces the agenda that you’re the “other” and powerless. When your sense of agency is systematically stripped from you, it’s natural to feel like an impostor. Don’t fall into that trap.

Do this instead.

Strengthen Your Foundation – A Practice

Start a practice of regularly building your foundation. Acknowledge the hard things you’ve done and own them. Celebrate them. Reload them in your frontal cortex so you remember them quicker.

Here’s the practice:

Write down two hard things you’ve done.
Then jot down an anecdote or tiny snippet about the situation – why you did the thing anyway, how it felt as you went through it.
Finally, write about how you feel about it now. Do not skip this step!

Put pen to paper. Use bullets. Do it quickly – a brain dump. The act of writing this reinforces that we know how to exercise agency over our lives and work, that we both survive and flourish when we do hard things. And, most importantly, we claim the power of our agency, our actions, and our successes.

Want to really nail this practice? Share it with someone you trust. When you tell your story out loud, they will reflect your power back to you. As a client described it:

It was like having an empowering mirror held up to me. It was a version of me that I had been afraid to look at, and, honestly, wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

Acknowledge the sheer mass of your accomplishments.

The ultimate effect of the practice? A stronger foundation – a foundation built from your experiences, earned wisdom, and instincts.

These foundations are the solid ground we stand on when the next hard thing shows up.

Each time we acknowledge and celebrate our hard work, we add to its mass. Over time, we feel it and call on it to accomplish that next thing.

The sheer mass of our foundation keeps us steady. It helps us sort out the reality of a situation and apply personal agency to how we handle it. Plus, it reminds us that we’ve done hard things – unimaginably hard things – over and over in our lives.

That mass is about the magnitude of what we’ve risked and accomplished.

It’s about the number of times we’ve shown up and done the hard thing, regardless of how worried we were about actually accomplishing it.

The mass of the foundation we’ve built for ourselves is what we stand on every day.