![Paul Newman was the first to introduce me to The Impostor Syndrome [photo by Gary Bernstein]](http://johngradensblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/PaulNewman.jpg "Paul Newman")
In a TV interview I heard Paul Newman say, “I have always had this fear or feeling that one day, someone was going to push through the crowd, grab me by the arm and tell me, ‘It’s over. It was all a mistake. You are coming back to paint houses…’” When he said that, I instantly understood exactly what he meant. It’s an underlying fear that your good fortune is going to end and/or that someone is going to discover that you are unsure of yourself at times.
Psychologists call this the “Imposter Syndrome.” I am not a Psychologist, nor do I play one in this book. This book is about my personal experiences, obstacles and the strategies I’ve used and developed to overcome my self-doubt. I thought that once I built a successful business and was receiving international acclaim for my work in the martial arts, that the self-doubt would evaporate. Instead, my self-doubt returned with a new name, The Imposter Syndrome. The Imposter Syndrome is an anxiety that you feel you like a fraud. Regardless of what is going on around you, there is a nagging feeling people are going to find out that you are not as smart, good, successful, talented or anything else positive, as they think you are.
It’s a perpetual dread that you are to be found out or exposed as being inadequate. This creates an undercurrent of self-doubt that makes it hard to strive because the more you draw attention to yourself, the more you feel you are going to be unmasked.
You could call The Imposter Syndrome “Advanced Self-Doubt.” The imposter syndrome is mostly prevalent in successful, high achieving people. Most people aren’t terribly concerned about being exposed because they live a life that they perceive as low risk. High achievers risk on many different levels and when that risk pays off and the self-image doesn’t match the rewards of the achievement, the imposter syndrome takes root.
We see this all of the time in entertainers who work to get to the top and then, once they are there, destroy themselves with drugs and alcohol.
For me, a key realization regarding self-doubt and then later the impostor syndrome was that every successful person fakes it until they make it. No one has all of the answers right out of the gate. But, you have to get into the gate to get into the race.
In fact, one of my favorite programs is from the UK is a reality show called, “Faking It.” This show takes someone from one field or background and gives him or her 30-days to learn a new skill and then be able to convince experts in that field that they are legitimate.
For instance they took a classically trained, very conservative young woman and gave her a month to learn how to be a hard rock band’s lead singer. A minister was given the same time to become a used-car salesman and a chess champion was given the task of passing himself off as the coach of a rugby team, though he had never played the game or enjoyed sports at all.
In these shows, regardless of the success of the participant, you can understand how they would have self-doubts about their place and position. They have a fear they will be discovered as a fraud. The famous actor and I had that same feeling but in real life. Regardless of our individual level of success, there was this lingering self-doubt that caste a gray cloud on our clear blue futures.
Self-doubt has affected my patterns of thought since I was a kid. These patterns of thought naturally resulted in patterns of behavior that defined my life, both good and bad. This book is about how I overcame extreme self-doubt and plenty of negative programming.
Just remember, all the strategies I share with you have worked for me. I’m sure they will work for you. Essentially, this is a book that will help you to “train your brain.” That sounds simplistic, but in truth most of us are never taught how to think yet nothing is more important. To be sure, I’m still learning and making mistakes, but I’ve come along way and I’m sure I can help you accelerate your growth.
I know a lot has been written about self-confidence. Here is my perspective on self-doubt and self-confidence. Imagine that self-confidence is a positive number. The more confidence you have the higher the number. Imagine self-doubt as a negative number. The more you have, the further away you are from zero.
Here’s the good news. As your competence grows in any area, the faster you move from the negative numbers of doubt into the positive numbers of confidence. Here’s the reality. Most people stop trying soon after high school or college to “improve their numbers.” I don’t want that to happen to you because it could have happened easily to me.
To say that I was a quiet kid would be understating it to the extreme. I can recall going days without speaking to other kids at school. I was too shy and felt if I didn’t say anything, I wouldn’t be teased for saying something stupid. My parents, bless their hearts because they love me very much and I them, weren’t really teachers, they were screamers. If I did something wrong, more times than not, I would get screamed at. Do not pass go. The pattern was scream first and then ask questions later. After a while, you just learn to be quiet.
On the good side, the fear that I might be judged as being inadequate for the task or endeavor drove me to study, research and develop a true hunger for information and learning. I love to learn and as I entered any new field of endeavor I would invest time and money into learning how the best of the best made a success of it and then I would model those key behaviors and strategies.
There is no doubt that the martial arts has played a key role in me gaining the confidence to give myself a chance. From my first karate class on February 12, 1974, I knew I had found my calling. In that first class at age 13, I knew this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I’m still at it. I began teaching private lessons for $7 per hour in 1976. That was a great for a 16-year old at the time. I was hired on as a staff instructor for $5 per class in 1978 after earning my black belt.
As my competence in the martial arts improved, my confidence in many areas of life improved. If I could learn jump over two people and break three boards certainly, I could learn to drive a car. Again, competence leads to confidence.
In time, I was on my own teaching around the area at various community centers and halls. I even taught an accredited college course for a few years, which was ironic because I never graduated high school. I used to joke that I dropped out of high school so I could teach college.
I didn’t have to work many hours and I had Friday – Sunday off. As a young man, you don’t have many needs nor does anyone expect you to be well off. You could keep expenses low. So, I always had a little cash in my pocket. Being a champion karate instructor in my early 20s had all kinds of social benefits from meeting girls to being treated like a local celebrity.
However, my friends at the time were following a more traditional path. They were going to college and/or working at jobs they hated. They always seemed broke and had to put in horrendous hours to try to make any money. They were miserable at their jobs and I loved mine. They were broke, but I always had some cash to play with. They would tease me about getting a real job while envying my position.
Eventually, the contrast started to get to me. I was starting to feel guilty about this great life I was leading. I started to doubt that I deserved it. One weekend, I was in Gainesville to fight in a tournament and came up a day early to have lunch with a former girlfriend of mine.
Over a nice outdoor lunch, I described to her my situation and my growing feelings of self-doubt and guilt, “I work maybe three hours a day, Monday – Thursday. I make good enough money to get by. On the other hand, my friends are all working 40 or more hours and struggling. How can that be?” She looked me straight in the eyes and said, “John, I know you. You wouldn’t have it any other way.”
There are moments in your life that I call emotional thresholds. These are thresholds that once your break through them, you begin to destroy all self-doubt related to that area of your life. This was one of those moments for me. When she told me that, it was as though I was given permission to design the life that I wanted, rather than follow the path of a fresh rat in the race. While it didn’t entirely erase my self-doubt it gave me a surge of momentum in the right direction. That sense of getting permission to live life on my terms was a huge moment for me so let me share this with you right now. You, like me, have permission to create the life you want.
As a direct result of me crashing through that emotional threshold after that lunch with my friend, I have had a rewarding career in the martial arts. I say this because the martial arts is not an industry that produces a lot of millionaires or high-income earners. Martial arts schools are usually mom and pop labors of love.
One of my other mentors was an acclaimed plastic surgeon. He told me once that he was a millionaire by the age of 37. I made goal to do the same. I beat him by six months.
A key to this transformation was an understanding of the power of programming and self-image.
My friends and I, for the most part, all came from similar financial situations. Most of our families were lower middle class. “We can’t afford that” was a mantra in my home. I didn’t know any of my friends who had a parent who owned their own business.
Wealth building and entrepreneurship was like a foreign language in these families. Not necessarily because the parents were against it as much as they just didn’t know anything about designing a rewarding professional life. Though we were programmed to follow a traditional path of doing well in school in order to get a good job, 74% of millionaires are self-employed.
You rarely build wealth working for someone else. There’s a great line that I heard somewhere. A small business owner, puts his hand on his employees shoulder and points to big house on a hill and says, “You see that big beautiful home? If you work really hard, I can have that one day.”
I had two big problems with the traditional scenario. One, I hate getting up to an alarm clock. To this day, the only time I use an alarm clock is if I have to catch an airplane. The other problem I had with a traditional path is that I also hated the idea that one third of my life would be spent doing something I didn’t like. That didn’t make any sense to me. Ever since I was a little boy reading biographies of my sports heroes I wanted to either be an athlete or a teacher. The martial arts provided me with the perfect platform to combine those two passions.
However, in time the disparity between my life and my friends’ lives continued to grow especially when I started to really focus on creating wealth and success. Like a pot full of crabs in boiling water, if one tries to crawl out, the others will pull him back in. I had to selectively distance myself from my friends at certain times in order to focus on my future. Otherwise, they were going to pull me back into the pot.
While I knew nothing about business when I began teaching, I did know that I wanted to be the best teacher in the area.
A good friend of my instructor Walt Bone was Mike Anderson. Mike is an eccentric genius. Mike used to tell me all the time, “John, you’re a great teacher. You should open a school and make a lot of money.” As flattered as I was, I knew nothing about making money. I was sure I would embarrass myself trying.
Then, in 1984, Mike called to tell me that Joe Lewis was in town and he wanted me to meet him. To help you understand who Joe Lewis was, if you are a golfer, this would be like hearing Jack Nicholas is in town. Lewis and Chuck Norris were the biggest names in sport karate.
As a teen, Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali and Joe Lewis were my heroes. When my friends and I would play fight, one of us would be Bruce Lee and the other, a snarling Joe Lewis.
Mike wanted me to promote a Joe Lewis seminar, which I did. After the seminar, which was a success by everyone’s standards, I handed Joe $2,000 in cash and then told him he talks too much in his classes. (Sometimes I feel like have “truth turrets.”) The room froze. He looked at me and said, “No one has ever critiqued my teaching before…” I’m not sure if that meant, “thanks for the feedback” or “who the heck are you…” The next week I asked to spar with him. He again, stopped and told me point blank, “I don’t do that light contact stuff. I fight full contact.” I told him I trusted him not to hurt me and he didn’t. We trained hard and often for years following. The pinnacle for me was when he was interviewed by the top martial arts magazine and asked who was going to carry his torch and he named my brother and me.
Joe would meet me to spar wherever I was teaching that night. One night it would be a basketball court the next afternoon a college gym or a boxing club. At the same time, I was developing a strong following of students. Theses were mostly my college class students who became “karate addicts.” They would take my two-hour college class and then follow me to wherever I was teaching to take more classes.
Finally, Joe called me on the phone and told me, “John, you’ve got to give your students a home. A place they can take pride in and call their own. If they go off to college, they can look forward to coming home to their school.” That was my next “emotional threshold.” Despite my lack of business savvy, I understood exactly what he was saying. I literally lived in my instructors’ karate school at times. Most of the time I stayed all night to train, but sometimes I stayed there to escape from my home life. I had a strong emotional connection to the martial arts school as a refuge. The next day I started looking for a location for my school.
My goal with this book is to use my story to help you understand, on a deep level, how self-doubt, just like you and I have it, is common even among successful people. It’s not important whether you have self-doubt, because we all do. What is important is how you handle it. What I’m about to share with you is what I have done to break out of the prison of self-doubt. I realized that self-doubt is self-imposed and self-defeating but it’s as common as a few extra pounds in the waistline. I’m going to help you lose them.
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