Blog entry by Temitope Osunrinde

Picture of Temitope Osunrinde
by Temitope Osunrinde - Thursday, 4 March 2021, 1:09 AM
Anyone in the world

I had one of my usual TV appearance opportunities and reached out to a teammate who I knew was in IT. For this TV segment, I needed guest speakers who could speak on a tech-related theme and knew he would be ideal.

When I broached the topic to him, he turned it down, citing anxieties around TV.

I was surprised.

Hitherto this conversation, I would have sworn that he spoke publicly for a living. He seemed so brilliant, articulate, coherent, and was a good conversationalist.

After that day, I thought about how the best people sometimes lack self-confidence and suffer from severe self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy and a sense of intellectual fraudulence. What makes us override our own success and competence with fear and trembling? What makes the most successful people unable to internalize their accomplishments? What makes them attribute their promotions or positions to luck or a mistake, instead of their competence and deep expertise? What makes the cerebral entrepreneurs and executives in EMBA 26 flounder under the weight of anxiety and fear in the Lagos Business School?

The culprit is imposter syndrome.

But like all mental syndromes, there’s a solution.

The tool I have learned to use from the Analysis of Business Problems course (ABP) is critical thinking. Critical thinking is a tool typically used to assess information quality and relevance and helps in making rational decisions. Critical thinking sieves through information by looking for evidence that supports a reasoning or validates a decision, and in the case of this syndrome, a thought.

The evidence is overwhelmingly in support of our decision to study at the Lagos Business School. You have gotten the admission to undertake a business education at unarguably the most reputable business school in Sub-Saharan Africa. You have several years’ experience in entrepreneurship or as an executive building scalable companies in Africa. You lead teams and create innovative products. You have built companies from scratch. You are well-established in your local communities. You did all these, not someone else.

You, yes, you.

If anyone can attend and succeed at the Lagos Business School, why not you?

I will leave excerpts of a poem by Marianne Williamson that has inspired me.

 

Our Deepest Fear

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness

That most frightens us.

 

We ask ourselves

Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

 

Your playing small

Does not serve the world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking

So that other people won't feel insecure around you.

 

We are all meant to shine,

As children do.

We were born to make manifest

The glory of God that is within us.

 

It's not just in some of us;

It's in everyone…”


PS: I have observed that Madam Zainab Alasa also wrote on the imposter syndrome. Guess we are united in the determination to overcome.