Imposter Syndrome in Thought Leadership | Rita Clifton

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Dealing with imposter syndrome in your thought leadership

An interview with Rita Clifton about feeling like an imposter and the tools you can use to find the courage to overcome it.

Today’s guest is Rita Clifton, the co-founder, and chairman of BrandCap. She has been called “The Brand Guru” by the Financial Times and is the author of a new book Love Your Imposter: Be Your Best Self, Flaws and All.

Rita is best known for her work on branding, so a book on imposter syndrome might seem like a departure. However, she shares why she wrote the book. Then, reveals the principles from branding she incorporated that can work in any aspect of your life.

We discuss moving the book to the next stage and creating a business around it.  We talk about what the goals might be and how things could play out. Afterwards, we consider how to scale it to reach more people than you ever could 1-on-1 or by webinars.

In addition, we discuss the change many have experience of working from home using video tools to communicate and how it has added a touch of humanization to a business that is dearly needed in today’s troubling times.

If you feel like you are just faking it in your job, you are not alone. Seventy percent of people feel that way at some point in their career and this might be the conversation you need to hear in order to start believing in yourself.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• Even the most successful professionals often feel like an imposter. Thought Leaders really need to come to understand themselves to overcome that feeling and help others.
• When taking your thought leadership from written to scale, you need to fully understand your content or the tools you build from it will fail.
• Often thought leaders will think of a brand as a logo, design, and packaging but it is the substance that lies beneath it all that is the most important part.

If you would like help developing content for your thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage. We can assist you with everything from book launch strategies, research, marketing, branding, sales, and more.

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Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership today. My guests from the other side of the pond, as they like to say, is Rita Clifton. She has been called the brand guru by the Financial Times and the doyenne of branding by campaign magazine. Her career has included being a vice chairman and strategy director at Suntory and Saatchi as the London CEO and chairman at the global brand consultancy Interbrand and as a co-founder of Brand Cap. She also has a new book out, which is kind of cool, which is Love Your Imposter, Be Your Best Self, flaws and all. And I can tell you from my many years doing what I’m doing, inevitably in eight out of ten relationships I have with a client, the imposter syndrome thing comes up and it’s usually, let me tell you a little secret. So I’m really, really interested to talk about that. So anyway, welcome aboard, Rita. Thanks for joining us.

Rita Clifton Thanks very much. And thanks very much for having me. To that imposter thing, as you say. I mean, it’s become so common that it just begins to feel like a syndrome of being human. You know, so 7% of people suffer from it, as you say. Sometimes they think it’s a secret. It’s just them that has it. But the more and more you go into this, the more you find that so many successful people who really should be enjoying their success are still big to themselves. Are they?

Peter Winick That’s the ironic part is, you know, well, how do I say this without. Well, I’ll just I’ll just say right. Stupid people never say, wow, Everyone around me must think I’m stupid. And then you’d be like, Of course they do. You’re an idiot, right? It’s usually the brightest and the most talented and the most accomplished. They go, Geez, I don’t feel good enough. I don’t feel good enough. And it’s how do we how do we get the stupid people to eat? Well, I guess then it wouldn’t be impostor syndrome. It would be truth syndrome.

Rita Clifton Well, I think that’s really interesting because I think what’s fundamentally important in any work that we do and also like a professional personally, first and foremost, for goodness sake, understand. And so.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Rita Clifton Understand what drives you straight. So what you need to do and so on. If you’re not careful, you get your personal stuff, which it can be dark or challenging or whatever. It sure people resisting that on all the people around you and that it can sometimes contaminate your relationships with your management team whatever. So it’s going to be important in my view anyway, to understand yourself. And this.

Peter Winick Is a great.

Rita Clifton Unnecessary cost to say, you know, it’s one of those things where, as you say, a lot of very accomplished, successful people talk about very close to people you’d never imagine, you know, Michelle Obama, Clinton, Tom Hanks, you know, you can’t move the subject talking about this. And of course, they all think they’re going to get fired any minute and they don’t want to be good enough or whatever. And then you go, do you know this is become a really useful drive for so many people to improve, to stretch.

Peter Winick So yeah, exactly.

Rita Clifton And I think you need to make friends with your friend or foe in Costa. I love you. I know why you’re there and you’re going to make me try harder and do more.

Peter Winick So let’s, let’s talk about the journey a little bit, because when I look at your sort of CV, it’s clearly branding, marketing, advertising at the highest levels. And that was a path that you did well. There’s a nonprofit piece to what you do in terms of boards that you’ve sat on, etc.. How did you how did you land on Imposter as a thing and then commit to writing a book and the thought leadership, because that seems a bit non-linear, which is fairly common as well.

Rita Clifton I was going to say human life, I think we can safely say is pretty non-linear anyway, isn’t it? You know, I think you get to an age and stage where you just begin to think I can help other people better by being honest about so much the stuff that we can maybe cure or hide or whatever day to day. And if there are two reasons why I wrote this book, I mean, number one is we must make business feel more human for some reasons in the digital world, if you’re not human on the inside, if you’re pretending to be true only on the outside, people will find you out with that screen speed. It will take your breath away. Another thing, of course, about being human is that actually business is got a problem. This is an image problem. You know, so many Hollywood villains, you know, alien.

Peter Winick But I guess I guess what I’m saying is, if someone just put your CV in front of me and said, she’s writing a book, what might it be titled? What would it be about? I’d probably put it in the branding. Martin Lindstrom, Consumer behavior. I you know, I would make an assumption and say, she’s clearly top of her game in that space. That’s probably what I would expect she would be writing about and what the market would want to hear from. This is a total departure, right? Because, you know, imposter syndrome. I mean, there are academics who study this or psychologists who study this. You know, usually not CEOs of world renowned ad agencies.

Rita Clifton Yeah, Well, how you should say that. I mean, I believe the view of some of the principals from brand building in the commercial sector, the broader sector, and apply them to yourself. And they can be really useful tools to give you more confidence to win with this imposter syndrome thing, because we have big feelings that could be common across any industry, any occupation. You know, actors, software, business leaders, people skills have it. And so therefore, you think what are going to be the tools and principles that I uniquely or personally can help with that will maybe be useful to people more broadly? And the tools that I’ve learned from brand strategy, from brand clarity about what you stand for, what drives you, what you really want. Secondly, coherence and make sure that shows up through everything you do your skills, your knowledge, your behavior. Yes, of course. Your personal presentation. Sure. And thirdly, it’s about leadership that’s leading your own brand, symbolizing, you know, what you want to be, but also renewing and refreshing, finding new things, staying nosey with very relevant current. These are relevant to all of us. Whether or not you were working in branding or in what industrial sectors or nonprofit or whatever, these are common principles.

Peter Winick So let me ask you this then. It sounds like on some level, the. The crossover from your career into this? You know, you might sum it up in this way or you might not write is old school personal branding is how you act, the exterior, how you present to the universe. Right? I am smart, I am funny, I am helpful and whatever. Right? But embracing or getting your head around the imposter syndrome piece is really the internal side of that.

Rita Clifton Yeah, I think it’s a really, really good point and a good insight. And frankly, I spend a lot of my career trying to stop people from thinking that branding is somehow just the name and the logo and the write on and packaging and so on.

Peter Winick Where the yellow suspenders or something.

Rita Clifton Exactly is what makes good branding work and has always made it work is the substance that lies beneath. You can’t fool people all the time if you’ve got a rubbish product. Yes. How lovely the, you know, the wrapping. It’s not going to work. And it’s the same with individuals. You know, we I think most of us anyway, can think of times and all working lives where we have been acting a part somehow circle a construct. I think I was doing that when I was chief executive. I thought that, you know, there was a way of being a chief executive, chewing concrete blocks of breakfast. And generally, you know, as I say, being CEO. Yeah, I think that the world has changed without me. We talk a bit more about that. You’ve got to be more human to have relationship. You have long term relationships with people and so on. So I think you can we often make mistake of acting apart, and that’s exactly sometimes from the commercial or the branding. It applies to yourself is the substance that lies beneath your skills or experience, your knowledge or drive. And clearly the visible bits need to do justice to that. The picture is just like saying you wouldn’t say to look fine, you’ve got a great product. They’re going to stick it on a shelf in a shabby old box and you’ve got to do justice, you know, a presentation how you communicate because that’s how you’re going to be long term successful and long term sustainable, valuable. So I don’t apologize for using branding tools. I think they can be really useful.

Peter Winick Fantastic. If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcasts, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com forward slash podcasts. So let’s switch for a moment and talk about the goals, the objectives, the underlying business models. So the book is just recently out a couple of months, right? So if we were to go in a time machine and fast forward to a year from now and it was successful beyond your wildest dreams, what does that mean? Because different people have a different measure of success as it relates to a book. It could be book sales, it could be impact. Like what does wild success mean for you relative to this book?

Rita Clifton Well, I think all the things you just mentioned, I’ll have those stories. How about that? So I think, you know, and also the reason why I wrote this book is because I felt I had to and I wanted to because all the stuff that I’ve learned over time and by the way, you know, I’m driving on the road in America. I’ve never been particularly good at taking my own advice and many things along the way. I’ve made mistakes. We all have. I’m sure that. But I think that being honest about stuff that we’ve got right, stuff that we got wrong, stuff that we’ve learned I’d like to share that almost is like a smorgasbord of, you know, tips and lessons and observations and things like that. And people can do their own pick a mix, but it sounds.

Peter Winick Like the driver was intrinsic. It wasn’t like I’m writing this book to sell a million copies so that I could become something else. It was more the intellectual curiosity, the forcing mechanism. So let’s talk about that, because some people. Some of the obvious gold book sales being influencing the conversation, etc. But other things that writing a book does. Or from my experience, talking to folks is, you know, it forces me to get my thinking clear. It forces me to research. It forces me to really get tight on what this, this this thing is gnawing at me. And it’s basically a research project that I get to put light on and share with others.

Rita Clifton That’s a great way of putting it gnawing at you. And this book has been gnawing at me for a lot of my late working life that I’ve been in any way senior on. I would be lying to say I looked at marketing as a real angle for doing something here. This came out of me, this book. This came out because I thought, you know, I want to help people. I spent a lot of my career recruiting, training, developing, you know, loving people that I work with. I wanted to see them be produced. And in my view, if you don’t want to see other people be brilliant, you haven’t got the right qualities. So everything that I have learned that I’ve found helpful to do that I wanted to pour into this book and to make it as honest as I could, because I think in that sense you can help.

Peter Winick People who could ultimately read the book you wish you would have had 25 years ago.

Rita Clifton What you know is so funny, you should say that I have had so much feedback from people who’ve read it. So whether it’s peers or people in middle management, 50 pairs who read it and said, I love this, why didn’t I have this when I was 25 years old? So they recognize some of the experiences and they’ve laughed with me on some of the things. Know, my husband, for example, did a spoof profile. I call a profile in national newspapers that talked about how senior executives cope with stress. And I think I even started to believe my own responses. That’s the profile. I thought, Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I believe that. My husband, who actually had to live with me when I was going through all of the CEO role and things like that, he wrote his own parody profile side by side. Hi, this is what it’s really like. And I thought, you know, that made me laugh. That’s something actually I thought was quite interesting to share with other people and that, as you know, that has resonated with people. So that honesty and some of those lessons I’m very proud of some of the feedback I’ve had for people to say, you know, I so got that. I got that. Yep. I love the fact they’re open and honest about it. And I’m making notes. I mean, some of the lovely stuff I’ve had feedback of people have made highlighted notes and Post-it notes with stuff that they want to use at a later date. So that makes me really happy. It makes me honestly feel quite emotional because doing something that generally helps people, I guess is something that, you know, most of us want to do. So know it’s a labor of love, this book and I hope. Yeah.

Peter Winick So let’s pivot from love to business. So what, if any, cause is the underlying business model, right? Because there’s some intrinsic and sort of evangelical, you know, I want to get the message out sort of thing. But is there or have you toyed with underlying business models in terms of scaling it, leveraging and monetizing it? In the good old days of pre-COVID, you might have gone out and the Speaker More like in the days when we left our house.

Rita Clifton Well, in the bad old days of Covid, we’re doing more of the, you know, Zoom calls. Yes. Since I’ve done lots of webcasts and workshops and deal with people virtually online. And actually, the great thing about that is that you can do them immediately. You can do them globally. There are some uses, you know, and in some weird way, this zoom world that we’ve been inhabiting has been quite humanizing. You know, you’ve got pets or children coming in, you know, you see in people’s living rooms, I’m sure rooms it I think in some ways that’s been quite useful. I think as far as I’m concerned on this book and the use of this book, you know, I’ve had so much feedback saying that was so useful, that was very practical, that was very honest. So I’m hoping that in a year’s time I’m going to be developing a business that actually helps people with coaching and with mentoring and with some very, very particular tools that I’ve used over the years that I’ve found really useful. So I’m going to be in a year’s time. I’m going to be helping many, many more people who are decent human beings who might have insecurities or imposter syndrome, whatever, to believe that they can run stuff and run it in a way that is human. This empathetic because frankly, the world needs quite a lot more of that right now.

Peter Winick So let’s talk about the tools for a minute, because I think what happens in many instances is the author, the thought leader gets overwhelmed. Right? So I created this. I wrote this. I need to get this out there. I need to speak about I think a lot about promote it. And it’s exhausting. Right? And there’s only so many people that you can touch in a day. Even that’s over more scalable think webinars and all that sort of stuff. So tools are amazing because if you could codify the content in such a way where you don’t need to. You know, we read it doesn’t need to be in the room or in the zoom for the ideas to move from person to person and go from 2D, which I would say is a book to 3D to smart people. Having a conversation is guided through tools to get them to experience things. So tell me about sort of the tool piece of this and why that’s such an important way to do.

Rita Clifton Well, I think what’s really interesting, particularly in knowledge based businesses, I’m sure you’ve come across as indeed I have people over time it was 30 smart consultants and essentially it becomes a cottage industry. So in my view, the big win, as you was saying, is actually when a business is making money while you sleep.

Peter Winick Yep.

Rita Clifton And on that basis, you need to create tools that can be scaled up, that can be industrialized and so on. And increasingly, that’s possible, as we know, because you can personalize tools, you can use a lot of technology and data in order to be able to do that. So that excites me and that excites me because you can get to a lot more people than any of us would ever be able to on webinars or one on ones or whatever. So I think the answer is an and not an either way.

Peter Winick Yeah. And to get to that end, and this I think is a key point. If you can’t sort of get it down, get the content down to the molecular level, if it’s so dependent on you and in some instances, if your content is just your life story, it really is dependent on you If you’re an Olympic swimmer or, you know, whatever. But once the content can stand on its own, I always say that that, you know, clients work with us, number one, to make them really relevant. And then number two, to make them totally irrelevant. And you can’t be irrelevant if the content is not strong.

Rita Clifton I think you’re absolutely right. But I think that the other thing we can all do is actually, I guess many of us, you know, website magpies, you know, in the stuff of life or working life, those we pick up tools or techniques, ways of doing stuff, etc.. And at some stage you can put those together with your own, you know, interpretation or whatever and just think like that. That principle is really important. Am I going to put that together with that principle? And then I’m going to yeah, and I’m going to.

Peter Winick I think that’s a really critical point because I think when people get both thought leaders and people on the other end on the buy side, get overwhelmed, is when a book promises this is the three steps to success, or the five things for communications are all you need to know about presentation skills. And I couldn’t agree more with you is that it’s up to the individual to say, that’s interesting. That’s a tool I’ll put in the toolbox. And it’s not the tool. The only tool is not the Swiss Army knife. But in conjunction with some other things that I’ve used that I like, that resonate with me that are valid. And then it’s up to me as a as an adult to say. Now would be a good time to use retouch tool and that would be a good time to use situational leadership. You know.

Rita Clifton Totally, totally online. You know, I can go up in times of obsessing courses for maybe 2 or 3 days and I get paying moments. You know those payments? Yep, yep. I’m going to do that. So it’s a silly example, you know, in communication and presentation, I was on the presentation skills course and I saw myself on video. I mean, it’s not the first. Horrifying. Yes. The first time by so many people. Well, you saw for the first time you think, why do I slap my hands in that way or why did my head go? Right. Right. Very, very revealing on the understanding itself, as we know. And on this course, what this guy said was steady eye contact. When you’re going towards steady eye contact, you need to counter the fall before you leave someone’s face and go to somebody else. Because actually, if you glance around the room, it looks as though you seeking approval or, you know, it seems completely obvious, but it’s not obvious until you know. And there are just some things again, paying moments where you think, actually that was helpful to me. And whenever I shared that with somebody else, they’d gone too. That made a huge difference. I’m picking some of these things up and then finding, as I say, your own unique combination that really helps you. That’s what I think is the tool. That’s what’s possible in the digital world with all the data that we got and the individualization possibilities.

Peter Winick And you have to be aware enough to go, There’s an awkward phase when you’re trying say that four second rule. When you’re so thinking about it, you’re like, my God, does this person think I’m staring at you? And it’s so conscious and awkward and funky and whatever. And then you do it enough and you’re not, you know, you realize you’re doing it anymore becomes the habit.

Rita Clifton Now, this is a really interesting thing. And that’s when people say one of the chapters in the book is called Why You Don’t Have to Fake It to Make it. The reason I feel so strongly about that is the minute you think about you thinking about a third party construct something over there and the.

Peter Winick Validation of that comes with that.

Rita Clifton Yeah, that was, you know, we can be who we are and learn some of these techniques that give you confidence to present, that give you the confidence from knowing the finance and the numbers. You’ve got to really beat yourself up to make sure you know this. You know this. And so there are tools that you can use. Absolutely. That will give you confidence, not fake the confidence. And I think that’s a really, really important distinction between those two. And I think that we all need to keep on talking about, you know, making the best of yourself. And I find that I find the general advice for yourself a bit in a bit concerning only that I think there are some certain aspects of ourselves that maybe we don’t necessarily want to parade out all the time. I think what I would.

Peter Winick Say be yourself, Asterix, unless you’re an ass or a jerk.

Rita Clifton Or otherwise, you yourself have your ID under control.

Peter Winick Yeah, exactly.

Rita Clifton There are a lot of people in the world, my business world and otherwise. Yeah, I’m going to be myself. I’m just going to say what I like. They’ve got their ID completely off.

Peter Winick Yeah, exactly.

Rita Clifton You’ve got to get the broader sense of you doing the best thing because frankly, the world needs the best of you and all the people to be human. Empathetic leaders, because that’s good for is good for organization. It’s good for saying a world that’s not going to get blown to smithereens.

Peter Winick And on that note, I will thank you for joining us today. That’s a great, great place to place the land. So thank you so much for your time. I wish you the best with the book. And thanks. Thanks for sharing your story with us.

Rita Clifton And so much great talking to you.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.