Feel Like an Impostor? Keep Evolving Through Initiation.

Let’s settle something right from the start. Everyone feels like an impostor at some point in their lives. So, you are not alone and are in very good company. Feeling like an impostor shows you know deep down that you have work to do on yourself.

There is the idea that you are born with the seeds of greatness within and that life experience will break open those seeds and allow you to blossom. Yet, things don’t break open without friction, contact, or conflict. What seems right to me is that you get the experiences you get, as if they are specifically designed for your continued growth, allowing you to evolve into more of yourself.

Life is not a meritocracy, despite what some religious dogma preaches. We have been indoctrinated with the Puritanical notion that you are rewarded only when you work hard and are “good”. However, I know from my own experience this isn’t always true. You might know this, too. Think about the many good, hard-working people you know who are neither wealthy, nor powerful, nor beautiful. And what about those lazy, awful people who have wealth, power, and beauty. There’s not a direct connection. You can stop comparing yourself to others because everyone has their own life to navigate … their own path to walk.

And along your life path, you will run into challenges that are seemingly designed to heal things from childhood or to go deeper into yourself. These challenges can be thought of as “initiations”.

When you think of an “initiation”, one of the first things that may come to mind might be ceremonies or tasks required when joining a group. In ancient cultures, people went through formal initiation processes as they progressed from one stage of life to another. For example, the aboriginal “walkabout” was an initiatory process for a young man to go from childhood to adulthood. However, in today’s society, you may not have formal initiations to the degree that ancient cultures did. Instead, you go through psychological initiations many times throughout your life via challenging life circumstances that cause a you to connect more deeply to what's inside you.

Each time you experience a challenging initiatory circumstance, you are confronted with who you are by way of your reactions to the situations that reveal yourself to yourself. Got your heart broken? Lost a job or didn’t get a promotion? Experienced the death of a loved one? If you’re aware enough, you start to see these challenging circumstances as lessons about what’s inside you. Through what you learn during these experiences, you decide what to keep about yourself, what to change, and what to let go of in order to survive or prevail in the circumstance.

For example, you may have personal experience with losing out on a promotion even though you are intelligent and very experienced. Instead, your employer decided to hire an inexperienced person who lacks integrity for the position. As unbelievable as it may sound, that decision wasn’t necessarily about you. It was about many considerations weighed by your employer. And on a mythic or spiritual level, not being chosen for promotion can provide an initiation for you to learn more about yourself. And it can be a separate initiation for the person who got the promotion to learn more about themselves as they inhabit a position that provides situations that challenge them.

Thus, over time and many circumstances the aim is for you to “shed the skin” of your ego. The initiations you experience are like psychological resurrections in that you die to who you think you are many times throughout your lifetime. These “little deaths” allow you to mature and grow emotionally and psychologically, resulting in a bigger, more authentic life that reveals who you really are. Thus, you are constantly evolving and morphing, proving that life is about the journey - not the destination.

And along the way, you may feel like an impostor because you haven’t fully evolved into who you really are. When all is said and done, you’re only an impostor if you aren’t doing the inner reflection during these initiations that allows you to die to who you think you are so you can evolve into who you really meant to be.