I often visit the website of Craig Harper, a really good mate of mine. Craig is a prolific author, television/radio personality, successful fitness studio owner and sensationally successful international speaker. I enjoy his posts because they’re to the point, insightful and often quite funny.
In one of his posts, “Feeling Like a Fake,” he begins by saying, “Put up your hand if you ever feel like a fraud. A fake? A phony? A pretender? Me too. Even in the middle of some (relative) success, I have often felt not ‘something’ enough. Not smart enough. Qualified enough. Experienced enough. Lean enough. Young enough. Old enough. Funny enough. Academic enough. In short; not good enough.”
This post resonated with many people and inspired a long string of comments from readers because we all feel this way at some point.
It reminded me of another recent conversation I had with a trainer — an Ivy League-educated, highly accomplished genius who conceded to me that many of her accomplishments in the past have been driven by the need to prove her worth to others, driven by the fear that she will be found out, that she is a fraud.
This is a bit perplexing. A fraud practices deceit and trickery. When we feel like a fraud, who is it exactly that we’re deceiving? Is it other people? If so, what are the terms of the agreement with them that we are violating? Do we even know? How can we as fitness professionals, or as people, know who we are if we spend our time guessing who we are supposed to be?
If our motives lead us to do more in order to be accepted or make our inequities inconspicuous, are we human beings or human doings?
The truth is that none of us are as good or bad as we think we are. We can’t be completely objective, and always either over- or underestimate ourselves.
If we feel like we are a fraud it must be because we feel we are violating some rule that we are pretending to live by.
But who makes these rules? If they’re our own, we have the right to change them if they’re no longer serving us. If they’re someone else’s rules, what makes those rules so important that we need to live by them? What if we don’t live by someone else’s rules? What does that make us? And what does it make the other person if he or she imposes conditions on our worth, whether implicitly or explicitly?
For every book written on the subject of unlimited power and unstoppable momentum, the truth is that, like all resources, our energy does have limits. Where our attention goes, energy flows. If we spend our energy proving, justifying and analyzing, we’ll soon exhaust the creativity that could be otherwise allocated to learning, caring, coaching and…creating.
We don’t need to feel like frauds if we understand that we can create our own rules, but that only works if we have the courage to live by them.
When we are honest about what we want, why we want it, and whether we are willing to stick to our own set of rules and ideals, we never need to feel like a fraud.
The only trick is getting clear on what those ideals are. Beyond that, when we let go of the need for acceptance, the need to be right, and the need for perfectionism, we are free to grab onto something far more valuable: our freedom to be who we choose to be.