In this Friday edition of The Effective Statistician podcast, Alun Bedding tackles the pervasive issue of imposter syndrome. He shares his own experiences with self-doubt, offering listeners a transparent and relatable perspective on how these feelings can affect even accomplished professionals.
Drawing insights from Dr. Steve Peters’ The Chimp Paradox and other tools, Alun explains how our “inner chimp” drives insecurities and outlines actionable steps to regain control.
Key Points:
- Imposter Syndrome
- Personal Experience
- Self-Doubt
- Chimp Paradox (Dr. Steve Peters)
- Inner Chimp
- Confidence
- Slowing Down
- Reframing Negative Experiences
- Learning Opportunities
- Recognizing Strengths
- Building Confidence
- Growth Mindset
- Success Recognition
- Feedback as a Gift
- Managing Self-Doubt
- Actionable Strategies
- Empowerment
If you’ve ever struggled with imposter syndrome, this episode is a must-listen. Alun’s insights and practical strategies offer a refreshing approach to overcoming self-doubt and building confidence in your career.
Take a moment to pause, reflect, and recognize your strengths as you listen to this empowering conversation. Don’t keep this valuable advice to yourself—share the episode with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.
Subscribe to The Effective Statistician podcast for more helpful insights and be sure to spread the word to help others navigate their imposter syndrome with confidence.
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Alun Bedding
Executive and Team Coach | Leadership Consultant | Statistical Consultant
Alun is dedicated to helping professionals make significant shifts in their thinking on various topics. He understands that each individual is unique and tailors his approach to meet each person’s specific needs. Alun works with professionals at all stages of their careers, including neurodiverse ones.
He specializes in guiding new leaders through the challenges of their roles and believes that everyone has the potential to achieve their vision. Acting as a thinking partner, Alun empowers individuals to reach their goals.
The most common subjects Alun addresses include:
- Navigating the uncertainties of starting a new leadership position
- Managing career transitions
- Building confidence
- Prioritizing important tasks
- Enhancing teamwork
- Preparing for job applications and interviews
- Understanding the impact of climate change
With a background as a leader in statistics and the pharmaceutical industry, Alun brings firsthand experience to his coaching. He also works as a statistical consultant, focusing on early clinical development and pre-clinical drug discovery. His expertise lies in dose-finding, dose-escalation, adaptive designs, and Bayesian methods. Additionally, Alun supervises PhD students working on basket and platform trials.
If you’re ready to work with Alun and believe he can help you, contact him on LinkedIn or at alun@alunbeddingcoaching.com.

Transcript
Imposter Syndrome
Alun: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of the Effective Statistician. My name’s Alun Bedding and in these Friday episodes I’ll explore things that can help a statistician become more effective. What I will talk about today is imposter syndrome. I wonder, how my saying those words has made you feel?
Has it made you defensive? For example, you might say, I don’t have imposter syndrome. So why should I listen to this podcast? Or it’s made you feel like, aha, that is me. Maybe I can learn something here. And by the way, I’m not going to judge in any way whatsoever. I’m just going to be talking about my thoughts on how you can manage imposter syndrome.
So first of all, I want to confess that I’ve always struggled with imposter syndrome. I’ve often felt like I’m a statistician, that somebody else knows more than me. I’m a coach, that somebody can coach better than me. I’m a [00:01:00] leader, but somebody else can lead better than me. And is more confident than me.
And so on and so on. It’s part of my brain that’s telling me I’m not good enough. I’m not confident to do this particular piece of work. And professor Steve Peters in his fantastic book, The Chimp Paradox, talks about this as being the chimp part of your brain. Your brain is made up of several parts and it’s your chimp that’s actually now telling You’re not good enough and therefore affecting your confidence.
And bear in mind the chimp always acts faster than the human part of the brain. And in the book he talks about different measures which we can take to actually bring in that more human part of the brain. But what the chimp is doing in this sort of situation is constantly comparing to other things.
Because in the chimp’s world, The chimps world is a jungle and it’s dangerous. It’s still living in that jungle. And it’s [00:02:00] saying, if somebody is more confident or they assume that they’re better, then they might just, if you don’t assume they’re better, they might just turn around and say, yeah, I am better and I’m going to kill you.
Yeah. It sounds stupid, And it is, but that’s how the chimp part of the brain works. So how do we overcome this? And I mentioned that Dr. Professor Peters mentions a couple of techniques in his book. Here’s the thing I mentioned, comparing imposter syndrome comes from that comparison. X is better than me.
And what we’re doing is we’re allowing our chimp or the chimp part of our brain to take that control of our brain So what we need to do is slow down i’ve been talking quite fast up to this point Now i’m going to slow down the reason i’m slowing down is i’m catching myself and i’m saying okay What do I need to do to in to put in the human part [00:03:00] of my brain?
If we allow the chimp to take control and that becomes our automatic response What professor peters talks about is putting a gremlin into the computer part of our brain So that becomes this default response what I can do is if I take if I slow myself down Imagine maybe there’s a big pause button there.
Slow myself down and when I catch myself saying What do I lack that this person has? I then can bring in a so called autopilot which is my brain’s computer then saying If I feel like an imposter I need to stop and think I need to stop and think what do I have that means I deserve to be here That could be one way of doing it.
I’m not suggesting that’s the only way You need to come up with your own way of thinking about this often what I do It’s if I think [00:04:00] there’s going to be an imposter syndrome Occurring during a meeting or during a particular difficult coaching conversation I’ll prepare myself in advance To make sure that situation can be addressed and can be managed.
So imposter syndrome is there. It’s also very common It’s surprising how many people have imposter syndrome And probably they’re quite right to have impostor syndrome. It’s common among many leaders, especially as they take on higher responsibilities Because what they’re doing is they’re stepping outside of their comfort zone And once you’re outside of your comfort zone, that’s where the chimp kicks in it’s there to protect you But stepping outside of our comfort zone It’s good.
And that’s how we develop as a person. We step outside our comfort zone, but it does bring on those feelings of imposter syndrome. Most talented leaders feel like they don’t deserve to [00:05:00] be here. And I’ve heard this a number of times from a number of leaders. They feel that are qualified. They haven’t done this before, but yeah, all of those aspects.
Come into this thinking and that self doubt then can hinder their decision making. So if they’re now having self doubt about themselves, they might start to think I don’t really want to make that decision because it might make me look more of an imposter. It limits collaboration because people. If you’ve got imposter syndrome, you don’t want to collaborate with somebody just in case they might be better than you.
So leaders have to use techniques to really manage their imposter syndrome. You never may never get over it, but you need to manage it. And I recently wrote a LinkedIn post about a number of these things that can help with imposter syndrome. I mentioned about slowing down first. That to me Is the most important thing slow down Take a pause take a breath and then say think to yourself.
Why [00:06:00] am I getting this imposter syndrome? So with that pause the first thing you can do is reflect and get some clarity and have a safe space to explore what’s happening So for example, if you’ve been in a meeting and you’ve had this imposter syndrome You may want to take that outside of that meeting after that meeting and think to yourself What’s my limiting belief here and explore that limiting belief now, you can do this on your own You can do it with a colleague you can do with a trusted colleague.
You can do with a coach You could do with a mentor. I’m not suggesting The way you should do this i’m saying it might be useful to do this And through that reflection and taking that time to reflect you can uncover hidden sources of self doubt And then you can think about well, what are the strengths that are going to address this?
And you might be overlooking some strengths and that’s what’s leading to this self doubt So with this realization, you can then [00:07:00] explore ways of overcoming those limiting beliefs. Secondly, you could recognize the patterns of success that challenge your feelings of inadequacy. Comparing is a classic one, but what else could there be in this frame of reference? There is often a flexion on negative experiences. When we look back and we do a timeline exercise or something like that, We often think of the negative experiences. They tend to come to the fore because it is the chimp again that’s bringing those to the fore. But what about if we can reframe these experiences and ask the question, what have I learned from that experience?
All of a sudden you’ve turned that negative experience into a positive one. So I’d encourage you to look at Any negative experience as a learning exercise and take out the word failure. Don’t call it a failure. And if you think about what a failure, if you think about it’s a [00:08:00] failure, then why don’t you reframe fail as the first attempt in learning.
So reframe failure or negative experiences into something that could be positive. Lastly, you can expand your mindset. Think about your life and where you’ve already developed. What you’re doing here now is saying I haven’t got a fixed mindset. I don’t have what Carol Dweck calls the fixed mindset of what I was born with, but I have what she calls a growth mindset.
And we have growth mindsets all the way through our life. And think about how what we’ve learned so far. What else can we learn? What can we learn about ourselves? An exercise I use with people I coach is the following I asked them to write down the number of successives they’ve had in their life, which will match the amount of their age.
So for example, if a person is [00:09:00] 30 years old, they write down 30 successes from their lives. This can be any success. It doesn’t have to be work related. So for example, if you’ve passed an exam when you were 16, if you pass your O levels, GCEs, your A levels. They are a success class those as one success though.
You pass the load of exams. That’s one success yes, you could say i’ve passed 10 successes I would encourage you to term that as one success Another one could be you captain a sports team that won a single game list that’s a success You captained that team if you scored even better the more you list the more you start to see That you’re already a success You’re already a successor.
Why not take that further? There’s another version of this which is presented by Dr. Steve Bull, who did a lot of work with the British Olympic team. And it [00:10:00] involves looking at those successes as mountain peaks. So the mountain peaks are representative of what you’ve climbed and how you’ve climbed already.
If I get somebody to do this during a coaching session, I might ask the question, what are those words telling you? Or what are you learning from writing this list? Or as you see this list, what are you learning from that? What are you learning about yourself? I’ll also be looking at the person’s body language.
And I’ll comment on it, if there’s shifts in their thinking, or I think there’s shifts in their thinking, it might be related to what they’ve written. For example, if they pull a face when they write a cert, when they make a cert, I might say, what was that face? So it’s, again, it’s more about getting realizations.
The one thing this will show is that you are already okay. You are already a success. You are already fantastic. And in most cases, you are already brilliant. There is so much you are brilliant [00:11:00] in. And when you compare yourself to others, you don’t know their world. They are already brilliant in their world, but they might have lacks of lacking confidence in other things.
So what all this is doing is building that confidence. That confidence as it grows. It then decreases the imposter syndrome what you are doing is climbing from the so called ladder of perception You’re climbing that ladder from being Consciously incompetent in your head. You’re consciously incompetent to becoming consciously competent So the more consciously competent you become you can then step into The unconsciously being competent.
If you think about when you drive a car, if you’re a decent driver or you feel you’re a decent driver, you don’t have to think about being a good driver. You don’t have to feel about being good, being a good walker. You don’t have to feel about good, [00:12:00] being a good speaker. They are all things that become competent in what we do.
One other thing that can impact our imposter is feedback. If we get negative feedback, we all of a sudden assume that person doesn’t like me again Here’s the chimp coming in here that person doesn’t like me because they’ve given me bad feedback given I always assume it’s positive because it is that person’s point of view whether you like it or not It’s somebody else’s point of view, not your own, but feedback is a gift.
There is a, there’s an old saying that feedback is a gift and it is because it’s somebody else’s perception of you. If you want a bit more thoughts about feedback, go and look at something called the Jahari’s window, which talks about what somebody else knows and you don’t know. Feedback given positively or given is always positive.
It always is a thought of another person. So there you have [00:13:00] it. Imposter syndrome is real. Don’t ignore it, but don’t assume that you’re the only person having imposter syndrome I’ve lost count of the number of people i’ve coached who come to me with imposter syndrome Most people have it even if they don’t admit it.
Maybe some of those what those people who don’t admit it They’re not the only ones Might have stronger imposter syndrome because what they’re trying to do Is negate or take away the thought you might feel how they have imposter syndrome, but it is manageable Do things that build your confidence trust yourself to do these things and become more confident in your role So when you feel like your imposter syndrome is creeping in Stop pause step back think about what i’ve talked about in this podcast episode You And think about how good you really are.
You are a success. You are already brilliant Think about [00:14:00] that and think about that and how that then alleviates your imposter syndrome So i’m hoping this resonates with people if it has Please message me or message the podcast or put something on linkedin that says this is really Resonating with you and if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard today Please feel free to subscribe to the effective statistician podcast and subscribe to the newsletter One of the things as we move forward with these Friday episodes is I’m going to take topics and discuss them with guests similar to how Alexander does on the main podcast.
So if you’d like to be one of those guests, please email alexander@theeffectivestatistician. The link will be in the show notes. Thank you very much for listening.
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