Ever feel like you're just faking it, and one day, everyone will find out you’re not as capable as they think? What if I told you imposter syndrome isn’t just in your head—it’s in your body?

If self-doubt keeps holding you back, it’s not because you aren’t good enough—it’s because your nervous system perceives visibility and success as a threat.Today we cover: 

• Why imposter syndrome isn’t a personal flaw—it’s a physiological response.
• The four nervous system patterns that keep you stuck in self-doubt.
• Simple somatic exercises to rewire your confidence and create safety in sharing your gifts.

Recommended Episode:

194: Overcoming uncertain income with embodied safety

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This podcast explores the intersection of sales, money, and business success, offering entrepreneurial insights on overcoming the inner critic, burnout, and the unique challenges of ADHD and autoimmune conditions, while integrating polyvagal theory, Ayurveda, coaching, resilience, regulation, and trauma healing to support holistic growth and thriving in both life and business.

  📍 Okay, so I thought that I was completely immune to imposter syndrome, and that was for everyone else but me until I figured this out. Still had this feeling that I was doing something wrong, and I thought that people would like find out that I didn't actually know as much as I said that I would,

📍 In today's episode, we're gonna cover why this is not a personal flow. You haven't done anything wrong. This is a physiological response to you being a person with great dreams, the fall nervous system patterns that keep you stuck and in self-doubt. And then exactly how you were going to use your body to come back to confidence and create safety so that you can get shit done because you care about doing good things in the world.

I posted that reel about how it was like, oh, I wrote a book and I have You Don’t Think You Have Imposter Syndrome—But Your Burnout and Nervous System Say Otherwise massive imposter syndrome. I had so much trouble recognizing the fact that, you know, I'm this author and I still sometimes forget it, and people remind me.

I'm like, oh, yeah. Mm. It's, it's, it's amazing these things that occur, um, these sneaky little ways that our mind and our body. Has to try to keep us in the familiar and for familiar. If you're anything like me, is a place where, you know, you're always kind of like hustling and trying to make money 'cause you're worried that it's gonna run out.

Um, you're worried that nobody's gonna love you, so you subtly try to make everyone like you, and then you people please, or you work really hard, uh, you overthink and it feels uncomfortable, but your body is familiar with it. So it does these sneaky things to keep you there because it perceives your success as, as.

It is unsafe, right? Because if in the past people used to judge me 'cause I was different, now I want to go stand, um, speak on a stage, oh my God, that is extremely dangerous. If in the past I wasn't able to be in relationships with people without over giving and depleting my resources, then why would it want me to have more clients?

It doesn't trust that I won't overgive and deplete myself. So imposter syndrome is this very strategic little response that your body creates, and then the label that we've given it to make sure that you stay away from the things that your heart most desires and wants because it believes that it's a potential threat.

But your body hasn't been updated on how freaking powerful you are, and the fact that you can actually make the life that you want happen without depleting of all of your resources. It's just gonna take a lot of courage. Um, good discernment, a bit of sup, quite a bit of support and doing things differently.

So let's dive into how to recognize if you might have a version of imposter syndrome. And they're going to show up differently for everyone and even in different phases of your life. But you can probably say that it probably falls in between one of the following four nervous system responses or stress responses.

Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. So your body is always trying to keep you safe, and when it has a threat that it perceives, doesn't mean it's a real threat. It's always going to put you in one of these responses or a bit of a combination. Sometimes that's advanced. That's what we do inside of the academy.

We're keeping things really simple today so that you can apply them to your life. So the first one is fight. I recognize this in myself a lot of the time. Uh, it's the over compensation. You become a perfectionist. Different podcasts. I never thought I was a perfectionist, but turns out I can be, even though I'm really sloppy.

But it's like you wanna micromanage every detail and you want, it's like this feeling of like, I really want people to see me. You have to kind of prove yourself constantly. You can see it in others really easily, but you just do a lot and you're thinking of like, you have a really long to-do list. You end the day with a to-do list that was longer than it started.

You're looking to work really hard, um, to prove that you do know what you're doing. Maybe. Then we have flight, which is you guys are avoidant, you, and I've been there too. But it's that phase that you go into when you avoid stepping up. So you take a lot of courses, you tweak your offer for months. You focus a lot on the positioning and the messaging, and you're just like waiting until you're ready, which never actually happens.

That's how that story ends. But we're in this flight response and so you're probably really scattered, you're probably really busy, definitely you're doing a lot of things. Um, you're just not moving into the spaces that get you paid and get you to selling clients consistently and leave an impact in the world.

And we have freeze where you are, you're a thinker. But you also might feel numb. Sometimes you feel paralyzed when it's time to take action. You second guess your decisions. There's a lot of self-doubt happening. It's like you're moving through the motions, but not moving forward. And you're still up doing your life probably, but you're just like, it's like dense energy.

Then we have fawn, so you're undercharging, you're over giving and you're people pleasing. You're looking for validation from others instead of owning your own expertise. It's what you do when you're like, but will the market want this? Like, is this what people want? I really want you guys to tell me what I want.

And you also might let others take credit for your knowledge. Uh, you may have seen this happen in workplaces where you kinda like, oh, no, no, no, no. Like it wasn't, it wasn't really me. It was like somebody else. And you don't allow yourself to be recognized and you allow the bigger energies in the room to take up more space, and then you probably feel upset and frustrated and bitter when you see them taking up space and you're like, wait a second.

I wanted to do that. I am not saying this to say that you're doing anything wrong. I want you to just get curious about your body's way of dealing with a perceived threat because imposter syndrome I like, as I said, I didn't realize that I had it until I stepped into one of these. I think. I was with a friend and I was probably in the fight response.

I was probably just, I was kind of in fight and flight. I was really busy and I was like moving on to the next thing and I was also kind of waiting to be ready for, for something, which I don't know. It was this energy of like, I gotta prove now I wrote this book, I have to prove that I still know something.

I gotta do lots of things. I gotta like take advantage of the opportunity and not do what I actually want, which is. Not take advantage of the opportunity, just like read a, like hang out and chill. So the, my friend, she was like, you know that this sounds like imposter syndrome. And I was like, ah, it is. So it's really helpful sometimes to have somebody mirror that back to you, but then we've gotta shift it.

So here's the three favorite things that I've been enjoying to shift my imposter syndrome and the things that I would really recommend as a go-to practice to anyone that I would work with inside of the academy. Hmm. What we are not going to do is make yourself feel bad about having it, or try to convince yourself that you should be confident.

Forget about that. In fact, forget about the fact that we're even talking about imposter syndrome. Forget about any of it. We don't need to get rid of it. We actually love it, and there's a, there's a lot of wisdom in it. A lot of wisdom. What we're going to do instead. Is, learn to create safety in your nervous system today, and also learn to create safety in your nervous system with the goals that you have.

So let's start with today. You can begin, say, bringing safety into your life. Be by feeling the ground and the earth, and feeling in your body. I'm here, I'm grounded. And I really recommend that you do this regularly throughout the day. Just push your feet into the ground and just connect with the ground and say, okay, I'm here.

I'm safe, I'm capable. And actually, just see if you can like bring your awareness there. And I would really encourage you to connect a lot as what you can with the ground. So maybe your bare feet in the ground with your legs. So maybe like going for a walk doing some weightlifting. I've really gotten into that.

That's been really nice. And I have a client at the moment who's really enjoying working with the root chakra. So those of you who're familiar with yoga therapy and vedic medicine, we work with the energy of the lower body, which is the root chakra. And so you might do a root chakra meditation, but finding your path to safety, really anchoring into the things that make you feel safe today.

And it might be eating the same meal for lunch. If it makes you feel grounded and saying, okay, now what does that feeling in my body feel like? We do have a podcast episode on how to create embodied safety, which I will make sure that I link down in the show notes before we go any further. What else? The other thing that we'll be in the show notes is that we're hosting a masterclass on imposter syndrome inside of the academy that is happening in April, so it's happening very, very soon.

And yeah, it's gonna be like the art and the science of releasing imposter syndrome and signing clients straight away and charging what you're worth. Feeling good about it as you do it. So make sure that you, you can DM Me Academy or you can go to the show notes and have a look down there as to how to get information about whether or not you join us for the Foundations tier, which is like a hundred dollars a month, or if you wanna come into a deeper a one-on-one.

So that's number one anchoring into safety Recommendation Podcast episode. Link below, join us inside of the masterclass, and then we have number two, which is expanding your capacity, which is where we want to expand your body's capacity to see opportunity or dreams as low risk so that it doesn't.

Create this stress response. So let's just say that if you were to kind of do a practice of kind of, what am I afraid of? Like if I, if I was to really own my brilliance, what am I afraid would happen? What would be inconvenient? What would be really uncomfortable if you were maybe bullied when you were a kid?

You might be uncomfortable that people would see you and you would be more visible and then they would have opinions about you. And then. You. They might hurt your feelings. They might hurt you until your body created this protective mechanism, right? And so in that case, we're gonna find really small ways that you can be visible and we're gonna titrate into them.

You're gonna go into the visibility, the do in something, speak up at a meeting, post a short video. Stretch outta your comfort zone and then come back to that safety that you identified Really important to go and stretch and then come back to safety, and then do something else that's a little bit visible.

And then come back to safety. And we're developing your body's capacity to be with something that is difficult and then calm back to safety. And over time it will begin to notice, ah, I can do these hard things. And I can do these hard things, particularly in this place, and then it doesn't need to give you so many thoughts, feelings, and sensations of there's something wrong inside.

Those things begin to naturally slip away. The third one, my mind works really well and I can organize my thoughts. It might be an A DHD thing when I can organize them into what are different parts of me saying imposter syndrome would be a protective part of you. So instead of going into battle with it, we can ask, what, what are you protecting me from?

And when we acknowledge this part, like, I want you to like really sit in like that, like tenderness for it and appreciation. Babe. It's, it's like literally trying to protect you from death, like that is a beautiful thing to have in your body. You can use the practices and the prompts from Chapter 10 inside of my book, somatic Intelligence for Success.

Or you can just sit and you can say, imposter syndrome. What are you trying to protect me from and what do you need? Because your confidence isn't built through thinking or logic in it's, it's built through this experiencing of yourself, of a capable individual who can get through anything

before we wrap up. I will leave you like a little burn a little bonus. Close your eyes right now. Please don't do it. If you're drumming. Take a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. Actually do it, like actually do it. Just notice. Are you holding tension anywhere? Place a hand there. I'm doing it with you. I've got some tension in my back, so I'm straightening my back, pulling my shoulders back, putting my head, my feet on the ground.

I've spread my toes. I'm pushing them in to the ground. Breathe into this space. I'm safe. Even if I don't feel like it. I am right now.

You can add on. I'm allowed to be seen. My voice is valuable. I'm share. I'm here safe to share my gifts and I, I don't like using affirmations, trying to convince yourself something. So just find something that feels true of my feet are on the ground and I am not dying.

Remember, imposter syndrome is not a sign that you are not good enough or that you've done something wrong. It's a sign that you are expanding and growing and that your dreams and your visions go beyond what your body thinks is capable because they haven't happened yet. That's logical. You can make them happen, and you can teach your body to work alongside of you and with you.

Long April's workshop is on this. Called Overcoming imposter syndrome, the science, the Spirit, and the art of sharing your gifts. Love you guys. Bye.