Rebecca Minkoff's book, Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success, is out and the perfect companion as you spring into your next big move.
Imposter syndrome is real. And, out of all the bad patterns we can fall into, it is one of the most annoying, and it’s in- credibly hard to break.
When it comes to all things business, learning to trust my gut has not come easily. And it’s not that it comes naturally now, but I know to check in with myself more often. It’s become how I look at things: I do a gut check.
It was always much easier for me to trust my gut when it involved something creative, like deciding whether a new fabric or slightly odd color would create design magic or determining which shoe would finish a look at a photo shoot. But if it had to do with money, logistics, production, or technology, I just wanted someone else to make the decisions for me.
I didn’t have a formal design education. I didn’t go to business school. I never learned to speak corporate and always had to google terms like low-hanging fruit and COB. There’s a reason why movie villains are played by people with severe haircuts wearing serious suits and expensive shiny shoes and who talk about having “skin in the game”: they are intimidating as shit.
Whenever I would find myself in a meeting with high-powered magazine editors or high-strung investment bankers, I would have to fight the urge to crawl under the conference room table or—and this would have been worse than hiding under the table—to just smile and nod and listen to them talk and then cut the meeting short without moving any business forward. No matter how confident I was when I walked into the room, once I sat at that table, I started feeling like I had no idea what I was doing. When you don’t have the pedigree or the social circle or the jargon, it’s easy to feel like you’re out of your league. What- ever opinions or advice these people shared, I took as fact. They were the professionals. I was a scrappy bag maker.
On the creative side, things were easier—at least at the start. I designed what I wanted and what I thought my friends would want too. Then, as we grew, I became devoted to the message boards and the PurseForum, and I wanted to give the community what they wanted. On top of that, I really respected our account representatives at the showroom and took all of their feedback into consideration, as well as the feedback from the buyers. I wanted to know what our public relations department had to say about things and was always curious if they had spotted any trends bubbling up. And when the team spoke, I listened wholeheartedly. I wanted the collection to be as strong as possible and to make everybody happy.
Welp, you’ve heard it before, but I’ll say it again: you’re never going to make everyone happy. I have thousands of sample bags that never saw the light of day to prove it.
How did that happen? The creative stuff—knowing that a bag is good and perfect and right—was supposed to be the easy part for me. But those thousands of samples showed that I was get- ting it wrong. And I had to hold myself accountable. I accepted that I had gotten to this place, but I wasn’t exactly sure how. Eventually, I sat down to examine all of the decisions that had led me here. Were they all mine?
Not exactly.
That same uncomfortable feeling I had experienced in all of those conference rooms? It had sneaked its way into other aspects of my life: I was feeling a tiny version of it, small but still so powerful, all the time. I didn’t trust myself anymore.
It got to a point where I couldn’t make a single decision. I was way beyond decision fatigue and was into absolute decision avoidance. I felt like I had screwed up too many times. I would find myself faced with a problem, and then I’d turn over the decisionmaking power to someone else. I didn’t trust myself to come up with the answer. I believed that anyone but me would be better, would know what was right.
I wish I could go back into every one of those meetings and remind my baby business self that I was in the room for a rea- son. I wish I could remind her that the others in the room were the ones who had called her. I wish I could keep her from feeling like she had nothing going for her when she in fact was a successful designer who had built her company starting with a T-shirt. When you find yourself in a situation where you feel in over your head, remind yourself that you are there for a reason and that nobody belongs there more than you.
This state of decision avoidance was miserable. I was miserable. It felt like I was lost, like a pinball ricocheting inside an old arcade machine, smacking up against the rail and then bouncing clear in the other direction. New bag styles weren’t selling as we had anticipated they would. People weren’t into the clothes, and we couldn’t put a finger on why. I had incorporated so much input from so many different perspectives into the collection, and I thought for sure it would have paid off.
I do not regret my big messy failures. I regret that when I knew in my gut something was wrong, even when it was some- thing small, I didn’t have enough faith in myself to fight for what I knew was right. I regret the times that I trusted someone else or an outside entity more than I trusted myself. At the end of the day, these choices were in my control.
When you’re out of your league, or when you’re starting something completely new, of course you will want to look to others for guidance. It’s a good move. There will always be someone with more experience than you. Go to these people, seek them out, and listen when they answer your questions and tell you stories from back in the day. If you’re bad at finance, don’t just trust your gut. Find the expert and get all the details. Ask their opinion. But do so knowing you need to come to decisions on your own. Collect as much information as possible, ask as many experts for their insights as you can, and then synthesize the information so that your decisions are 100 percent your own. Once you have done your research, make the call. Allowing others to help you understand what factors to con- sider during the decision-making process still allows you to come to your own conclusions.
Taking responsibility for my decisions has allowed me to accept and learn from that ownership. There are times when I wish I had made different choices, but for the most part, when I have listened to my gut, I’ve felt like I was making the best decision based on the information and circumstances of the moment. It’s the situations when I have handed the decision-making power over to others or let people tell me what was best for me and my business that have left me wondering if things might have turned out another way.
Negative thinking gets the better of all of us sometimes. The more awareness we have when it comes to recognizing these thoughts as just thoughts and not necessarily as facts or truths, the better we will become at stopping them in their tracks. I ring the alarm when a negative thought creeps in, and I rein- force the opposite. When I’m feeling the effects of imposter syndrome and asking myself, "Who would be better equipped to make this decision?" I immediately change tack and tell myself, I am the only one who can make this decision. I know my company better than anyone.
The more attention you give a thought, the stronger it becomes. There are definitely more than a few calligraphic quotes on Instagram and Pinterest reminding us that “Where thought goes, energy flows.” (I’m sure you could find that maxim embroidered on a pillow on Etsy without trying very hard.) You’re the boss of your mind. Do you want to spend your time thinking that everything is falling apart, or would you rather tell yourself it’s going to work out?
Check in with yourself. Go with your gut.
Taken from Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success by Rebecca Minkoff. Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Minkoff. Used by permission of HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus, LLC. www.harpercollinsfocus.com/
