E3: Navigating Imposter Syndrome: Evidence-Based Strategies for Voice Actors

Imposter syndrome.

You've heard the term and I bet all of us have experienced it to one extent or another.

Today, that's what we're going to talk about.

We're going to find out what it is in the mind, what happens with the body, and some things we can do about it.

Hang on, because here we go.

Welcome back to the Cognitive Performer.

My name is Marco Ragazio and I'm so happy you've joined me here for episode three.

If you've been following along, we've been exploring how understanding your brain can help you perform better.

In our first episode, we talked about neuroplasticity, how your brain literally reshapes itself with practice.

Last time we dove into performance anxiety, why your body responds the way it does when the pressure's on, and how to work with those responses instead of fighting them.

Today, I want to talk about something that's probably affected most of us at some point in our life.

It's called imposter Syndrome.

It turns out there's some fascinating neuroscience behind why our brains do this to us.

By the end of today's episode, you'll understand exactly what's happening in your brain when that feeling hits, why they're so common in creative fields like ours, and most importantly, you'll have some research backed techniques to help you manage them.

Because here's the thing, understanding the science behind imposter syndrome doesn't just make it less scary, it actually gives you the tools to change how your brain responds to it.

So let's start with the basics.

What exactly is imposter syndrome?

Well, the technical definition is a persistent feeling of intellectual fraudulence despite external evidence of your competence.

Basically, it feels like you're faking it even when you're not.

This isn't some new concept either.

They studied high achieving women in academic settings and noticed a pattern.

Successful people consistently felt like they were fooling everyone around them.

Now, this statistic might surprise you.

What they found was that imposter feelings are incredibly common across different professions and experience levels.

The prevalence varied widely from 9% to 82% depending on the group studied, but it was consistently present across all demographics.

And of course, as always, I'll leave a link in the show notes if you'd like to check out that study.

Now, let's look into what's actually happening in your brain when imposter syndrome kicks in.

This is where it gets really interesting, because once you understand the neuroscience, you realize it's not a character flaw.

It's just how your brain is wired to respond to certain situations.

What they found was that when you're experiencing these feelings, your brain activates the same stress systems that would fire up if you were facing an actual physical threat.

Specifically, your brain activates what's called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.

Yeah, that's a mouthful, huh?

That's your body's main stress response system.

When this gets triggered, it releases stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine.

These chemicals help you deal with immediate danger, but when they're released because of imposter feelings, they.

They create some real problems for us as voice actors.

The cortisol affects your working memory, that mental workspace where you hold and manipulate information in real time.

It also creates physical tension, especially in your upper chest and throat area.

So imposter syndrome isn't just making you feel bad emotionally.

It's literally affecting your instrument.

Does this sound familiar?

It's the same fight or flight response I talked about in the last episode about performance anxiety.

Now that you understand what's happening in your body when imposter syndrome kicks in, let's dive into what's going on in your mind.

The psychological side of imposter syndrome is really fascinating.

And honestly, it's just as important as all the stress hormone stuff we just talked about, especially for us voice actors, where so much of our work is about emotional truth and interpretation.

So here's what's really interesting.

There's recent research by Picozy.

I think I pronounced her name right.

They discovered that imposter syndrome has a strong relationship with perfectionism, but not just any perfectionism.

They call it maladaptive perfectionism.

That's basically when you set these super high standards for yourself, and anything less than what you think is perfect feels like a total failure.

And, man, does that show up in voice acting.

You know that feeling when you're in the booth and you're thinking, that take was good, but not amazing, so it must be garbage.

Yeah.

That's this in action.

But here's where it gets really tricky for us.

When those imposter thoughts start creeping in, your brain starts doing this thing where it's constantly trying to gather evidence, but it's not looking for evidence that you're good at what you do.

It's looking for evidence that you're a fraud.

So you start noticing every little vocal wobble, every line reading that doesn't feel perfect, every pause that runs a bit long.

Your brain becomes like this detective, but it's only collecting evidence for the prosecution, right?

And then there's what researchers call attribution style, which is basically how you explain your successes and failures to yourself.

People with imposter feelings have this really unfair way of doing this.

When something goes well, like you book a great gig or nail a challenging character, you attribute it to luck or timing.

But when something doesn't go perfectly, you immediately blame it on your lack of talent.

We see this all the time in our industry.

Someone books a national commercial and instead of thinking, I'm skilled and I earned this, they think, wow, they must have been really desperate or I just got lucky.

But then they don't hear back on an audition and.

And immediately it's, I'm terrible at this.

So it's not just us, but it definitely shows up in a lot of creative fields.

And here's a perfect example of how sneaky these thoughts can be.

I'm literally here working on a script about imposter syndrome, and I caught myself repeating some content from the last episode.

But instead of thinking, oh, good, I caught that and I can fix it, that little voice in my head went, a real pro wouldn't have made this mistake in the first place.

You're just proving you don't know what you're doing.

You see how this works?

Even normal stuff like editing and revising gets turned into evidence that you're a fraud.

And can we talk about the comparison trap for a minute?

You know, the digital age has made this so much worse for everyone, and especially for us voice actors.

You're scrolling through social media, seeing everyone's booking announcements and awards, and you're comparing that to your Tuesday afternoon where you spent three hours on an audition and you're not even sure it was any good.

Everyone's showing their highlight reels while you're living the messy, uncertain day to day realities of building your career.

Here's another thing that's really specific to imposter syndrome.

It messes with your relationship to feedback.

When you're dealing with these feelings, positive feedback doesn't stick.

A director tells you you nail the session and your brain immediately goes, they're just being nice or some other garbage.

But any criticism, even constructive feedback, gets amplified and becomes proof that you don't belong.

And there's this weird thing that happens with success too.

You'd think that booking more work or getting better at your craft would make imposter feelings go away, right?

But sometimes it can actually make them worse.

For some people, the more successful they become, the more they feel like they're fooling people and the higher the stakes feel.

It's like you're waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder and say, okay, we figured it out.

You don't actually belong here.

This psychological dimension explains why just addressing the physical symptoms isn't enough.

Your brain is literally creating this narrative that you're not qualified.

And that narrative affects everything.

How you interpret feedback, how you prepare for sessions, how you show up in the booth.

That's why understanding these mental patterns is so important for us voice actors.

Okay, now let's talk about some evidence based interventions.

The great news is that there's solid recent research on interventions that actually work.

Lets start with cognitive behavioral therapy approaches or CBT.

They found that an eight week CBT program significantly improved mental health, self esteem and emotional regulation compared to a control group.

Participants showed significantly lower imposter scores and increased self evaluation ratings after just one workshop session.

What's particularly encouraging is that participants reported both immediate benefits and long term transfer of the skills they learned.

Now let's talk a bit about mindfulness approaches.

Specifically, they found that the non judging of inner experience aspect of mindfulness was the strongest predictor of reduced imposter syndrome for group interventions.

What they consistently found was that group approaches were particularly effective because they break the feeling of isolation that often comes with imposter syndro.

When you hear other professionals admit they sometimes feel like frauds too.

It normalizes the experience.

Now let me get specific about how this applies to our day to day work as voice actors.

There are some situations that are almost guaranteed to trigger imposter feelings in our industry.

First, audition rejection.

Without feedback.

When you don't hear back or you get a simple thanks, but we went with someone else, your brain fills in the blanks, usually with the worst possible explanation.

The research shows that uncertainty amplifies threat response, so your brain assumes the worst.

Then there's a subjective nature of casting decisions.

Unlike other professions where performance might be more objective, our work is often about whether our voice feels right for the project.

That subjectivity can make it hard to know where you stand, which feeds imposter syndrome.

Another big trigger is comparing your raw, unprocessed auditions to other people's polished demos.

It's like comparing your behind the scenes to their highlight reel.

Of course, you're going to come up short on that comparison.

Working in isolation is another challenge.

When you're alone in your booth most of the time, you don't get those casual conversations with colleagues that help normalize the ups and downs of business.

So what can you do?

First, develop your technical skills strategically.

If you're feeling like an imposter when it comes to commercial work, take a commercial class.

If character voices make you nervous, work with a coach who specializes in animation.

Building actual competence reduces anxiety.

That's backed by decades of research on self efficacy.

Second, document your progress over time.

Here's a record yourself.

Reading the same piece of copy every few months.

When imposter feelings hit, you can listen to your improvement over time.

That's objective evidence your brain can't argue with.

Third, build connections with other voice actors.

We hear this all the time.

Join professional groups, participate in online communities, attend workshops.

The research is clear that peer support significantly reduces imposter feelings.

Fourth, develop process oriented goals instead of outcome oriented goals instead of I need to book this audition.

Focus on I'm going to prepare thoroughly and deliver my best interpretation.

Research shows that process goals improve performance under evaluation conditions.

Finally, create a pre audition routine that counters imposter thoughts.

This might include reviewing your evidence file, doing some power poses, setting a process intention, and reminding yourself that you belong in this industry as much as anyone else.

Before we wrap up, let me highlight some key pieces of research that really illustrate what we've been talking about.

They analyzed 62 studies with over 14,000 participants from all kinds of professions.

What they found was fascinating.

Imposter syndrome was consistently found across different fields, different experience levels and different demographics.

But here's the key finding.

Imposter feelings didn't correlate with actual competence.

People experiencing imposter syndrome were just as capable as those who weren't.

They emphasize that despite how common and impactful imposter syndrome is, we're just beginning to understand the brain science behind it.

Their research points to chronic activation of stress systems, the same ones that would activate facing physical danger.

This explains why these feelings can be so intense and why they affect your physical performance.

One of my favorite recent studies comes from Para's team.

The key was breaking that sense of isolation.

When people realized they weren't the only ones experiencing these feelings, the imposter thoughts lost much of their power.

There's also the encouraging new research on specific interventions.

This ties back to what we talked about earlier regarding neuroplasticity and your ability to reshape how your brain responds to these situations.

All right, let's wrap this up.

Here's what I want you to remember from today's episode.

So if you're exper experiencing these feelings, you're definitely not alone.

It's not a character flaw or a sign that you don't belong in this industry.

It's a normal psychological response that's been studied extensively for over 40 years.

The Neurobiological research shows us that your brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do, trying to protect you from social rejection by activating stress systems.

The problem is it's using survival mechanisms that were designed for physical threats, not creative careers.

Understanding this takes away some of the power these feelings have over you.

The research is really clear that imposter feelings don't reflect your actual abilities.

And here's what I find most Just like neuroplasticity and anxiety management that we talked about in previous episodes, developing resilience against imposter syndrome is a skill that gets stronger with practice.

So here's your challenge for this month based on the research we've discussed.

Start an evidence file every day.

Write one thing down.

Could be a piece of positive feedback, a technical skill you used successfully, or even just the fact that you showed up and did the work.

The cognitive behavioral therapy research shows that systematically collecting evidence of your competence is one of the most effective ways to counter imposter thoughts Next month I'm changing things up a bit.

I'm doing a Q and A episode, so I put out a call to some VO friends for some ideas and things they'd like me to research and cover and they came through.

Man, they really did.

So next month I'll be reading their comments and questions and then giving some evidence based answers.

And I'm really looking forward to this because it's kind of like having a conversation with you guys.

Maybe someday I'll actually just have you on the podcast.

Thank you for joining me today on the Cognitive Performer.

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love it if you'd share it with a friend who might benefit from it.

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If you'd like to write me and ask questions or have an idea for a future episode, you can always email me@marcothecognitiveperformer.com thanks again and I'll catch you next time.