Harold Hillman - The Impostor Syndrome: Becoming an Authentic Leader

I know what it is like to feel like an impostor. I have lived that experience a few times in my life, during the early years and well into adulthood. My stories are your stories. All of our impostor stories give rise to a powerful insight about the importance of finding and being our authentic selves.

This book is written for anyone who is currently wearing the impostors mask, and is dedicated to everyone in the world who has ever worried that being yourself is simply not good enough.

Above all else, always remember that there has only ever been, and will always only be, one you.

All successful executives have employed their personal ambition to advance their careers and influence. By itself, ambition is a motivating emotion or a personal attribute. Ambitious people have a history of pushing themselves to their learning edge and taking on big challenges, knowing that the stakes are high, inadvertently setting up their experience of Impostor Syndrome.

Ambition is an interesting word. In Latin, the original verb was ambire, to go around a circuit, usually meant for soliciting favour or votes. A driving force was ambition, or a desire for something. The ambitus is the circuit, edge or periphery. A person who has ambition is driven by a personal desire to ask others to support her/his advancement.

When paired with avarice, ambition mutates into greed. Greed has been a part of recorded history since biblical times, and has thrived since the 1980s the decade of greed. Peter Koestenbaum, published philosopher and mentor, explains that this avaricious expression of ambition feeds on other people, takes away in order to get, offends, breeds envy, and leads to isolation from the world. People seem to have a limited tolerance for unbridled greed, and eventually respond with policies and practices (including violence) to control such ambitious people. Unfortunately, significant if not irreparable damage has been done. This book isnt interested in this type of ambition.

Pair ambition with aspiration and greatness can happen. Servant leadership can emerge. Aspiration is the driving force behind a personal vision, a desire to create something good or better, a longing for perfection. Koestenbaum sees this strain of ambition as an ongoing dissatisfaction with what is and an insatiable appetite for realizing potentials that, by definition, can never be fulfilled. Servant leaders envision a better future for their organisation, neighbourhood or society, and believe they can bring people and circumstances together to create that desired future. Servant leaders engage their own ambition to inspire and guide the collective aspiration of the people they serve. All are served well and benefit.

Ambition can be channelled by two governors: integrity and self-awareness . Integrity means adherence to a moral code or ethics. Moral codes are determined by families, tribes, religious groups, societies, or any social organising force, such as armies and gangs. If ambitious leaders believe they should not lie, cheat, steal or covet, their behaviours will be channelled away from those choices. If ambitious leaders believe the end result justifies the means, their behaviours will reflect a diversity of methodologies and techniques for achieving their goals regardless of collateral damage. Finding ones moral code requires deep reflection on lessons learned from others, difficult choices made in the course of becoming an adult, and strategies employed to advance in ones career. Being ethical requires knowing the lines of integrity that are firm, not to be crossed.