Feeling like an impostor as a new coach can lead to:
- Underselling your services and being overly “grateful” to your clients, “rescuing” your clients, doing most of the work in the coaching session and demonstrating loose boundaries around duration of coaching sessions or fees
- Putting off getting clients and instead collecting more and more qualifications until you feel you are “good enough” (often without having identified what “good enough” looks like for you)
So, how do we overcome the environmental factors which can give rise to impostor syndrome?
- Value all you are bringing to the profession from your previous work and life experiences. Becoming a coach is probably the culmination of years of professional and personal experience and did not just happen during your coach training program! Remember that everything you are and everything you did before led you to train as a coach
- Ask for testimonials and referrals from clients and organizations at the end of coaching assignments. If they are forthcoming and positive, decide to believe them
- Commit to continuing professional development (CPD) and Coaching Supervision. They both provide a disproportionately positive return on investment and help you maintain continuous learning and rigorous self-reflection. They provide a framework and space to enable you to gain necessary perspective on your work and to address the aspects of your own behaviors that might get in the way of your effectiveness as a coach
Finally, if you have even a pinch of impostor syndrome, give yourself permission to be on a learning curve. It is probably better to question your competence as a coach than to overestimate it. The opposite of impostor syndrome is the belief that you are much more competent than you are, leading to a refusal to acknowledge your limitations. So, instead, accept where you are and embrace the benefits of being a novice coach. You are probably full of enthusiasm and curiosity. You are likely to be in a state of not-knowing about your clients, which is a prerequisite to good coaching.
Repeat to yourself daily the wonderful words of Julie Starr, leading coach and author: “I am both enough and still capable of more.”
This article was originally published on ICF Coaching World.
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