In this episode, I am excited to have Neha Sampat on to talk about Imposter Syndrome: the mindset and culture that plagues lawyers.
Neha Sampat is CEO, founder, coach, and consultant at GenLead|BelongLab, where she focuses on building belonging and true inclusion. Through consulting, training, speaking, and writing, she helps organizations create peak-performance, inclusive teams by addressing hidden barriers to belonging, such as Imposter Syndrome and internalized bias, unconscious bias, and generational diversity. Through professional development coaching, she helps her individual clients develop job situations and leadership styles that engage their true and best selves.
Neha practiced law at both large and boutique law firms, and later joined law academia as dean of students and adjunct professor of law and leadership. She brings to her consulting and coaching practice her experience supporting and supervising thousands of diverse students and staff members and also successfully collaborating with stakeholders of various generations.
Topics Covered
- Neha kicks off the episode defining Imposter Syndrome, how to overcome and handle feelings of Imposter Syndrome, and how resilience and Imposter Syndrome/self-doubt are connected.
- How the professional creates a culture that feeds Imposter Syndrome, why lawyers are at increased risk for Imposter Syndrome, and how being a good lawyer isn’t about knowing all the answers, but rather knowing where to look for and find the answers.
- With the stakes and sense of perfectionism being so high for lawyers, Neha talks about what lawyers can do to reduce instead of feed Imposter Syndrome in themselves and in the profession.
Find out more on Neha at:
www.genlead.co
[email protected]
To stay informed on Neha’s programming and receive future discounts and free resources, sign up here.
Links mentioned:
“Individual Costs and Losses Resulting from My Self-Doubt” worksheet from Owning Your Value online course – This worksheet will help you assess the impact of your own self-doubt and Imposter Syndrome so that you can appropriately address it and notice significant positive outcomes in your career and life.
GenLead|BelongLab is thrilled to bring its top-rated “Owning Your Value – Lawyers Edition” workshop online to provide greater access to their transformative tools. If you are tired of the anxiety, paralysis and isolation that comes with self-doubt and are eager to feel more confident in your competence, this course is for you. Neha has generously offered a 15% discount to the first 15 listeners who register for the course! Use the discount code “RESILIENTLAWYERPODCAST” at checkout.
Questions? Comments? Email Jeena! [email protected]. You can also connect with Jeena on Twitter: @Jeena_Cho
For more information, visit: jeenacho.com
Order The Anxious Lawyer book — Available in hardcover, Kindle and Audible
Find Your Ease: Retreat for Lawyers
I’m creating a retreat that will provide a perfect gift of relaxation and rejuvenation with an intimate group of lawyers. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/VXfIXq
MINDFUL PAUSE: Bite-Sized Practices for Cultivating More Joy and Focus
31-day program. Spend just 6 minutes every day to practice mindfulness and meditation. Decrease stress/anxiety, increase focus and concentration. Interested? https://jeenacho.com/mindful-pause/
Transcript
Neha Sampat: [00:00:10] Being a good lawyer doesn’t mean having all the answers, it means knowing where to find the answers.
Intro: [00:00:18] Welcome to The Resilient Lawyer podcast. In this podcast, we have meaningful, in-depth conversations with lawyers, entrepreneurs, and change agents. We offer tools and strategies for creating a more joyful and satisfying life. And now your host, Jeena Cho.
Jeena Cho: [00:00:41] Hello my friends, thanks for joining me for another episode of The Resilient Lawyer podcast. In this episode I have Neha Sampat, who is the CEO, founder, coach, and consultant at GenLead Belong Lab, where she focuses on building belonging and true inclusion. Through consulting, training, speaking, and writing, she helps organizations create peak performance and inclusive teams by addressing hidden barriers to belonging, such as Imposter Syndrome, internalized bias, unconscious bias, and generational diversity. Through professional development coaching, she helps her individual clients develop job situations and leadership styles that engage their true and best selves.
[00:01:25] But before we get into the interview, if you haven’t listened to the last bonus episode please go check it out. I shared a short, six-minute guided meditation practice to help you let go of stress and anxiety. It’s a preview for my new course, Mindful Pause, which is just 31 days of six-minute practice daily. I know for so many of us, finding time is always a challenge. So I wanted to create a course that would be easily accessible for every busy lawyer. So head on over to JeenaCho.com, or you can also click on the show notes. And with that here’s Neha. Neha, welcome to the show.
Neha Sampat: [00:02:02] Jeena, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate all the work you do. I read your book, I’ve learned so much from you, and I really appreciate having you in my life; both my personal life and my professional life.
Jeena Cho: [00:02:16] Yeah and I’m just so delighted to have you on the show because we’re friends, and it’s always nice to invite friends on the show. Especially when they’re doing amazing work in the world. To get us started, can you just tell us a 30-second overview of who you are and what you do?
Neha Sampat: [00:02:36] You’re asking me to do 30 seconds, that is not my forte but I’ll give it a shot. Okay, so I am a lawyer by training but I’m a master of career transformation myself. So I practiced law out of law school, kind of just going with the flow, and then really exercising more agency over my career, realizing what my values were or what my causes were. And my cause is really education. So I used all of my education to then switch into the field of education, to do what felt like a better fit for me. So I practiced education law for a while, and then I was Dean of Students and an Adjunct Professor of Law and Leadership at a law school for ten years. And after that, I transformed my career into what I’m doing now, which is running my own inclusion leadership development, professional development business. And I am probably more aligned, values-wise, with regard to my work and my life.
[00:03:33] It’s funny, there’s like that blur between work and life has become more and more blurry. And in many ways, that tells me I’m doing the right thing. So I am loving what I’m doing, and I get to help other folks develop career situations in which they also sense that alignment; they have that alignment. And then I help organizations, through my consulting and training and workshopping and inclusion and belonging issues, create cultures where the folks that work there can really bring their true and best selves.
Jeena Cho: [00:04:03] So I know part of that work involves working with the Imposter Syndrome. To kind of get us oriented, what is Imposter Syndrome exactly?
Neha Sampat: [00:04:16] Imposter Syndrome is the feeling that you’re not cut out for the work you’re doing or the work you want to be doing, combined with the fear of being found out as feeling a fraud. And often these feelings of not being cut out for the work you’re doing, they’re not actually supported by objective facts. And so that’s the interesting part, that’s where I get to get in there and help my clients and my students, the folks I work with, really be lawyers and look at all of the facts and try to see what the whole picture provides. And Imposter Syndrome is an area of passion for me because I experienced it. It’s actually not uncommon at all for anyone to experience it, but particularly marginalized populations, women and minorities tend to experience it at a greater incidence because it’s a form of internalized bias. So for me, this has been a journey in my own life and in my own profession, and it’s become an area where because I’ve seen my own trajectory and my client’s trajectory in overcoming it through some of the tactics that I’ve developed, it’s become a growing area in my work.
Jeena Cho: [00:05:30] How did you become interested in this topic of Imposter Syndrome?
Neha Sampat: [00:05:36] I think really experiencing it myself. And you know, I really experienced it probably the first time it really tremendously negatively affected me was my first year of law school. I had always done well overall in schooling, up until I went to law school. I went straight from undergrad to law school, and I showed up at law school having really no community of people around me who could give me a real idea of what it meant to be a lawyer, or what it meant to be in law school. I didn’t have any family friends that had been to law school, whereas many of my classmates had not only had family members who were lawyers or family friends who were lawyers, but they had actually spent the prior summer working in a law office. And so I showed up to orientation and my classmates were speaking in what felt like a foreign language to me. They were using all this legal lingo and I had no idea what these terms meant, and it freaked me out. I really felt something was wrong with me, like why don’t I know what that means? Everyone else seems to know it. Something’s wrong with me. Why am I here? I don’t belong here, intellectually or competency-wise. That’s where I think Imposter Syndrome fits into my work, and the grander scheme of my work in building belonging. Imposter Syndrome is pretty much the feeling or the experience of not belonging, competency-wise.
[00:07:05] So when I was in my first year of law school, I felt like I was not smart enough to be there, that I was a fraud. That I somehow had been let in, but I was not cut out for this, and I struggled. And I totally did what I shouldn’t have done but what most people with Imposter Syndrome do, and I hid out. I literally hid out; I stayed in my apartment thinking, I’ve got to figure all this out by myself. Instead of actually asking my professors for help, admitting that I was struggling and that I was feeling doubtful of my ability. And so I didn’t actually know what Imposter Syndrome was. It was only probably a decade later that I heard this term Imposter Syndrome. And at that point, it had done a tremendous amount of damage. For me, I think it held me back from a lot of opportunities that led me to self-sabotage. Probably the worst thing is it created a tremendous amount of anxiety that I carried with me in isolation because I didn’t want people to know that I was feeling like I wasn’t cut out for this. So I was really isolated, and so I only realized that in retrospect. Once I realized that these feelings we’re called Imposter Syndrome, it was like this huge sigh of relief. I was like, this thing is so widely experienced that it’s actually called a syndrome. You mean, I’m not the only one feeling this way?! And I literally remember my body just kind of like, ahh relaxing. And that was a pivotal moment for me.
[00:08:37] And I didn’t realize at the time, it’s only with digging deeper into my past that I see that I actually did develop a skill set in law school to try to address my Imposter Syndrome that allowed me to move forward from it. But when I started to really understand what Imposter Syndrome was, maybe a decade later, then I could really dig even deeper to look at the research on what creates this self-doubt. And to really figure out even more effective tactics to address it, not just within myself but within the legal profession.
Jeena Cho: [00:09:12] I would imagine some of the listeners that go, “Oh yeah I have that. I have that thing, that nagging voice inside my head that’s constantly telling me I’m not good enough, smart enough, and unless you win absolutely everything you’re a terrible lawyer,” and on and on and on, that narrative that goes..
Neha Sampat: [00:09:32] Yeah it reinforces itself, that’s what’s so terrible about it. I probably had the seed of Imposter Syndrome when I was a kid and I did poorly in math. This is an example I give to a lot of my students, I did poorly in math probably on one or two tests when I was in elementary school. And the teacher said to my parents, “Oh Neha struggles in math.” And I was like oh my gosh, that means I’m just bad at math and I’m always going to be bad at math. And then every time I took a math test I remember feeling so anxious and nervous, because I was like, “Oh no it’s a test in math, and I’m terrible at math. I’m totally going to mess this up.” And you better believe that that anxiety then limits our ability to perform. So then of course, I probably didn’t do my best on those math tests. And then my outcome on the test reinforced that narrative that I’m terrible at math. So it’s like it just feeds itself.
Jeena Cho: [00:10:33] Yeah. So how do we break that cycle, once you sort of realize that thing that I’m doing is the Imposter or the inner critic, or whatever you want to call it. How do you begin to work with it?
Neha Sampat: [00:10:50] I think recognizing what it is is probably one of the hardest things to do, but one of the most impactful ways to actually address it. Because when you can accept that there is this thing called Imposter Syndrome and start to consider that it might be what underlies some of your self-doubts, that’s when you can start to dispel some of those voices in your head. And quite frankly, often those voices in our head are not our own voices. If we dig deep, we realize that they’re the voice of a teacher. Like for me, it was the voice of a teacher with regard to the math. Or it could be the voice of a parent. It could be the voice of a mentor, it could be the voice of a peer. There are all these different voices that internalize within our brains, kind of take root within our brains. These messages telling us we’re not good enough, and this is where it ties to the whole discrimination piece. You know, fairly innocuous comments, seemingly innocuous comments made to women, such as, “Oh can you take notes at this meeting?”
[00:12:01] Or, “Oh you got into law school during the Affirmative Action era.” Those sort of things, and it’s even in the tone in how those messages are delivered, those are biases that once they get pushed upon you enough, you start to internalize those biases. So that’s how these voices, sometimes voices of discrimination become Imposter Syndrome. And so when we can accept one, that it’s not our voice, I think that’s an important way to address it. Because if it’s not your voice, then what does your voice tell you about your ability? Right? Like, that’s not my voice, let me push that out of my head. Now, what do I know about my own abilities? And really start to take stock, looking at our past accomplishments. So one exercise I have folks do who are struggling with Imposter Syndrome is to think about the accomplishments in their lives of which they’re the most proud. And it doesn’t have to be a professional accomplishment, it can be a personal accomplishment. And to dig into that accomplishment. Why are they proud of that accomplishment? What are the skills and traits and experiences they have that led to that accomplishment?
[00:13:14] And then, just look at those skills. So then stop looking at the accomplishment for a moment, just look at those skills, those traits, and those experiences. And think about how they make you uniquely qualified in an area where you might actually be having Imposter Syndrome. Imposter Syndrome can manifest as the belief that.. like for me when I started my coaching business I had spent 10 years effectively serving as a coach (although it just wasn’t called a coach) for thousands of diverse law students. And I had a staff that I worked with. But when I joined the coaching profession more officially, when I started my own business and called myself a consultant and a coach, I didn’t have a “coaching certification”. And so sometimes I started to experience Imposter Syndrome. I remember I had a prospective client contact me, interested in talking to me about how I could help them as a coach. And this prospective client was in a different area of practice than what I had coached in the past, this was not a lawyer. And I started to feel that stress and anxiety I feel when I have Imposter Syndrome.
[00:14:34] So my familiarity, when I start to feel these feelings of anxiety when I start to go down a rabbit hole of research.. Which is what I did, I started researching this person’s industry. I was Google searching everything I could about this industry. I know now that when I start to go down that rabbit hole of research, that’s usually a sign of my Imposter Syndrome. So then I can start to start to address it and be like, is this belief that I’m not cut out to be this person’s coach accurate? And then I start to look at my skills, my traits, and experiences.
[00:15:11] So what I was doing was I was questioning my ability, because I hadn’t taken the traditional path to coaching, or what I saw was the traditional path to coaching. I didn’t have a coaching certificate, I had done something different. And instead of seeing myself as uniquely qualified to coach this person, I saw myself as not qualified. And so what I started to do was look at my past experience. I was like, well let me look at myself more objectively. What are some of my accomplishments in my past? Let me think about some of the students I worked with, let me think about why people feel impacted by me when I’ve worked with them and helped them develop professionally. And I started to then identify the unique skills, the unique experiences, and the unique traits that underlie my past accomplishments, that actually made me the perfect coach for this particular person. So it’s a little bit of a mindset shift.
[00:16:05] But I think reminding ourselves of our past accomplishments and what led to those, is important. Especially in a society where we’re told not to celebrate, particularly women. Minimize your accomplishments. Like when someone says great job, you say, “Oh no big deal.” But that’s not really the truth. Usually, it was a big deal. And if we can own those successes, we’re going to be able to think of them more naturally when we’re challenged professionally. When we’re challenged professionally, instead of thinking I don’t have the ability to do this I might think instead, no, of course, I have the ability to do this. In fact, I’m uniquely qualified to do this.
Jeena Cho: [00:16:49] Also, I think you don’t have to know everything there is to know about the thing that you have to do in order to be “qualified.” Like learning some of it as you go is perfectly fine. And I think there’s just often this sense like if I don’t know everything, every aspect of it inside out.. Like law practice. There’s no way you can possibly know everything there is to know about any area of law. You can learn and still be a good lawyer.
Neha Sampat: [00:17:25] Oh my goodness, you said it so well. I always say being a good lawyer doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means knowing where to find the answers. And I think the profession is set up in so many ways to lead us to have Imposter Syndrome, to lead us to have that mindset that we somehow have to have all the answers. Like the bar exam, the bar exam is a perfect example. We cram our heads full of everything we can cram into about all these different areas of law when really the practice of law is not really.. you’re not expected to know everything about everything in the law. You just have to know how to find it and how to use what you find. And so, unfortunately, there’s just a lot of these little things about the legal profession that just creates a culture that feeds Imposter Syndrome, instead of addressing it.
Jeena Cho: [00:18:21] Yeah. So what can lawyers do to reduce rather than feed their Imposter Syndrome?
Neha Sampat: [00:18:34] I think some of it is understanding why it’s such a profound issue in the legal profession because that allows us to change our behavior. So for example, in the law, we’re trained to be more skeptical when we could be trusting, and then we apply that skepticism to ourselves and to our own abilities and our accomplishments. And so if we can recognize that and be like, okay we’re trained in this way for this particular purpose, but we shouldn’t be then letting that mindset bleed into how we view ourselves. You know, we’re trained not to show our cards; we’re trained not to show vulnerability. Vulnerability equals weakness for lawyers. But if you can’t be vulnerable, you actually are going to have a really hard time acknowledging when you don’t know the answers, like you were mentioning. So if you can’t acknowledge when you don’t know the answers, you can’t seek out the help and get the answers. And then you can’t actually perform up to your ability, and then you start to again feed that Imposter Syndrome.
[00:19:37] And so you know, there are a number of other reasons. The perfectionism that really comes with the practice of law. The stakes are high, the stakes are super high for lawyers. We’re often representing clients whose lives are significantly impacted by the outcome of our work so that just adds to what is already a natural inclination to perfectionism. And that kind of holding yourself to an unrealistic ideal, and holding oneself to an unrealistic ideal is shown through data. And not just in the legal profession, but it is shown through data to tie to feelings of Imposter Syndrome. And so how can you get a more realistic, set a more realistic bar for yourself? I think that’s part of what you need to do.
[00:20:27] And I think this is where our profession bears some responsibility, to do a lot better. Because there are lawyers among us who have “arrived,” and those lawyers need to build the courage to share their stories of their past struggle with Imposter Syndrome, or even their current self-doubt. They need to share their failures, because we need to as a profession dispel this myth of the magically gifted and perfect lawyer. So then the lawyers who look up to those more senior lawyers can see that leadership in the law is attainable, and that a good lawyer isn’t (like you and I just talked about) one who magically has all the answers.
[00:21:08] You know there’s this great example of that outside of the legal profession. Professor Johannes Haushofer from Princeton a few years ago published this magical document that he called his CV Failures. I love it, it lists all the publications that rejected his work, all the jobs he didn’t get. And we need more of that in the legal profession, the leaders in our profession need to be able to let down the guards, show the younger lawyers what happens behind the curtain, share our missteps. The younger lawyers can see that there is not this expectation of perfection, what there is is an expectation of growth, of learning.
[00:21:59] There’s a confidence in the ability of our young lawyers to learn, and so I’m going to go on the record here and invite any lawyer listening to this podcast who wants to kind of go more public with their self-doubt to reach out to me. Because this would be a great project that I would like to really help make happen. And so professionally, there’s a lot of stuff we can do, like building affluency around what Imposter Syndrome is in law firms. Equipping the mentors, the practice group leaders, with an understanding of it. Because then these folks are going to be able to see symptoms, see the common signs of symptoms of Imposter Syndrome in their younger lawyers, and start to be able to address it. The problem is they’re not equipped to even see that there’s underlying Imposter Syndrome happening. What they see is the outcome; they see lawyer attrition, lawyer underperformance. They see lawyers experiencing a tremendous amount of anxiety, they see their diversity and inclusion metrics not improving. Underlying a lot of these outcomes is actually Imposter Syndrome. So if they’re equipped with the skill set to identify it and then the tactics to address it, we’re going to see a shift happen within the profession. And then one-on-one, if you’re looking within yourself as to what you can do to address your Imposter Syndrome, I provide workshops on that. I do live workshops equipping folks with tactics, actionable tactics they can take to bust their Imposter Syndrome.
[00:23:33] And these tactics come from tactics I’ve actually put into practice in my life, and I’ve worked with my coaching clients to put into practice. And they’re also based on aggregate social science research. And I just recently adapted the live workshop into an online course, so that way far more people have access to it and folks can engage with the learning more on their own schedule. So I just launched this online course called “Owning Your Value: Ten Tactics to Bust Your Self-Doubt, Step Into Your True Value, and be Your Best Self.” And it’s five weeks of tactics-focused approach to addressing Imposter Syndrome. Some of the things that are practical tips that I can just mention today for the listeners, one that really I think ties to Jeena you and your work, your very impactful work is adopting a mindfulness mindset. So one tactic I recommend folks try is shifting their mindset to one through which they can more objectively and accurately own their value, and that tactic is mindfulness meditation. So for me, some of the visualizations in guided meditation are the same principles that help me question my self-doubting thoughts, and help other folks question their self-doubting thoughts. Like that exercise or that visualization in meditation as seeing your thoughts as clouds passing in the sky and realizing that your thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. That they’re important data points, but that your thoughts and feelings do not define you. That came to me through my mindfulness meditation practice, and that was pivotal for me. I learned that I was actually holding on to some of my negative thoughts about myself, and the way I visualize that was there was a helium balloon that was my negative thought about myself. And it was tied to my wrist, and it was following me around and it was casting this shadow over me wherever I went.
[00:25:49] But when I started really building a practice of mindfulness meditation, I actually saw that the string of that balloon wasn’t tied around my wrist. I was actually just clutching to it super tightly, and I could instead just let it go and just watch it float away. So the visualizations themselves in mindfulness meditation I think really can help address Imposter Syndrome. I do the same thing with my failures; I see my failures as less permanent. I see them as data. So I harvest what I can learn from them, and then like that balloon, I just let go of that string. And I think just at the base, for me giving myself the time to focus on myself by committing to a regular meditation practice, that was a revolutionary act of investing in myself. I really had to say to myself, this is self-care. It’s not actually overindulgence, it’s not actually selfishness. This is a statement of my self-worth. And so by giving myself time to just kind of be quiet and be within myself, to really focus on my breath and treasure my breath, I started to appreciate myself in a whole new way. I appreciated my body and it’s capability, it’s strength. And it really actually boosted my self-confidence, my belief in my worth. So for me, meditation has been a very effective tactic. And bringing that mindfulness mindset to the rest of my life has been effective.
[00:27:40] You know, there are plenty of other ways. Like I don’t think there’s one formula that’s going to work for every single person in addressing their Imposter Syndrome. What I try to do is fill people’s toolboxes. So mindfulness meditation, give it a try people and see if it works for you! Values identification is another proven tactic in addressing Imposter Syndrome, so I have folks work through a values exercise by which they identify their core values. And data indicates that if you do such a values exercise right before you go into a situation in which you tend to experience self-doubt and Imposter Syndrome, you actually are going to experience less self-doubt and Imposter Syndrome. So that’s another tactic folks can use, is working through a values exercise. So those are a few examples.
Jeena Cho: [00:28:33] Yeah, yeah. Lots of really wonderful tips there, and often I find that if you just sort of become aware of some habitual pattern, that pattern loses its grip. Just like what you are suggesting of letting go of the balloons, we hold on very, very tightly to all of these habitual thoughts and behaviors. A lot of them we may have learned as kids and they were a good survival mechanism perhaps in the past (maybe, maybe not), but it’s no longer serving us. And that’s sometimes hard to even recognize, that that’s how you process different emotions or experiences. And we all have these default reactions.
Neha Sampat: [00:29:19] Yeah, absolutely. And I think you’re right, I think there’s so much wisdom in that; that we all have these. But so much of it is we forget that we’re capable of adapting, we forget that we’re capable of growing and learning and having more agency over how we view the world and how we view ourselves. So some of it is just a reminder of that and saying I’m going to prioritize this and I’m going to really examine my mindset. Growth mindset, that is another really important mindset shift that really can be very effective at busting Imposter Syndrome. You know, I was that fixed mindset person who thought, I’m bad at math, I’m always going to be bad at math, and that’s just who I am. And that’s actually not necessarily the truth, that was just something I held onto and I just I accepted as a truth. But growth mindset teaches us that our failures do not define us, our missteps or negative outcomes are just a snapshot of where we’re at on a particular day. And we need to learn from those missteps, and that learning from those mistakes is actually going to make us more successful the very next day.
Jeena Cho: [00:30:35] Right. Often I find that it’s helpful, especially when you’re having these thoughts, see if you can just add the word “yet.” So it might be like, I don’t know how to draft this motion or I don’t know anything about this particular area of law, but that’s not a permanent state. It’s just that you don’t know it “yet.” So just adding that word “yet” at the end is kind of like a nice way to shift your brain into thinking, I just don’t know the answers now but I can learn them. Or maybe you had a really bad day and you lost a hearing and it’s just recognizing I lost a hearing today, but that doesn’t mean you’ll lose every single hearing from this point forward, and that these things are temporary. Just reminding yourself of that is so helpful and important and difficult to do.
Neha Sampat: [00:31:37] Jeena, you are my kindred spirit. I’m laughing because I’m sitting in my office talking to you right now, and I am looking at the bulletin board up on my office wall and I have two comments or questions up there as reminders to myself. One of them is the question, “How have you surprised yourself?” And to me, that really allows me to recognize the areas where I can push beyond my boundaries of comfort and grow. And the second one literally says, “Not yet.” And I got that from Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset. And that is kind of a touchstone for me, particularly now as an entrepreneur.
[00:32:25] As you know, in entrepreneurship there’s so much uncertainty. You have to be willing to adapt and pivot and grow, and you can’t let your failures have a lasting grip on you. It’s okay to feel frustrated and to have emotions about things that don’t go the way we had planned. But what I’ve had to learn is that “not yet” part. Like maybe this didn’t go exactly how I envisioned this time.. well, not yet. So I’m just smiling because I’m like oh my goodness, there is a reason the world brought you and I together. So funny.
Jeena Cho: [00:33:05] Neha, for the folks out there that are interested in learning more about your work and your course, what’s the best place for them to do that?
Neha Sampat: [00:33:15] Folks can reach out to me directly via e-mail at [email protected]. My website is www.genlead.co. So that’s where folks can learn more about what I would do in my work, through my business, the coaching, the consulting, the diversity inclusion work, and there’s a whole page for that Owning Your Value online course as well. So that’s where they can get connected and express interest in the Owning Your Value online course. And I’m actually going to be having a cohort of that course this summer that’s going to be just for lawyers, so I’m going to be able to talk more about the unique aspects for the legal profession that really make Imposter Syndrome what I call the legal profession’s hidden epidemic, and how lawyers can capitalize on their lawyer training to address their Imposter Syndrome.
[00:34:15] How can you use your lawyering skills to actually more objectively and accurately view your value? So that course is going to be happening this summer, and I’m happy to give listeners of your podcast 15 % off discount for the first 15 who sign up for the course. So folks can find info on that on my website, and I always welcome folks to reach out to me. Whether you have your Imposter Syndrome stories you want to share or you want to get some insight if you just want to chat about this topic or any of the other topics on which I do work; generational inclusion, unconscious bias, belonging, work in general, and coaching. So absolutely feel free to reach out via LinkedIn, you can look me up. I’m also on Facebook, you can look up Belong Lab and I post regularly with articles or thoughts or my own writing, or other people’s wonderful writings such as yours Jeena. So it’s a great place to have regular reminders of a lot of what you and I’ve talked about today. One more thing, I’ll also make available one of the worksheets that I provide in the online course. It’s a worksheet to help folks identify the costs and losses of their Imposter Syndrome, to really see how it has taxed you and what opportunities you may not have taken advantage of. Because if we can identify those, we can really prioritize addressing Imposter Syndrome. And we can think about how our lives might actually be different if we can have a more objective and full view of our ability. So what I can do is provide listeners with that worksheet for free, I’m happy to provide it to you.
Jeena Cho: [00:36:06] Fantastic. Neha, thank you so much for sharing your time and your wisdom with me and the listeners. I really appreciate it.
Neha Sampat: [00:36:16] Jeena it is a pleasure. I always love talking to you, and I am a listener. I have read your book and it has been so pivotal for me, so this is a real honor and a gift to be guesting on your podcast today. Thank you so much.
Closing: [00:36:34] Thanks for joining us on The Resilient Lawyer podcast. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please tell a friend. It’s really the best way to grow the show. To leave us a review on iTunes, search for The Resilient Lawyer and give us your honest feedback. It goes a long way to help with our visibility when you do that, so we really appreciate it. As always, we’d love to hear from you. E-mail us at [email protected]. Thanks and look forward to seeing you next week.
