Ep. 1 – Naomi Osaka: The Icon and the Impostor
COMPOSURE authors Kate Purmal and Lee Epting join host Drew Tweedy in a conversation that starts with Naomi Osaka, but dives into so much more. At its core, this episode explores the depths of Impostor Syndrome — what it is, where it comes from, and who is most prone to it.
Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for clarity.
Read How a Superstar Athlete can Feel Like an Impostor — The COMPOSURE Blog ➞
Drew Tweedy: Hey everyone, it’s Drew, host of The COMPOSURE Podcast. Thanks for joining for our very first episode. I’m excited to jump into this conversation for a lot of reasons, but especially because we’re gonna be discussing the intersection between sports and mental health, two things I love thinking and talking about. The inspiration behind this episode is none other than the tennis superstar, Naomi Osaka.
Osaka is a four-time Grand Slam champion, was named the Associated Press’ Athlete of the Year in 2020, and is the very first Asian woman to be ranked Number One in the world. And Osaka has been all over the news in recent months, for reasons that have to do with both her life on the court and her life off the court.
Earlier this year, Osaka withdrew from the French Open to prioritize her mental well-being. It was a move that inspired so much adoration, but, unfortunately, a lot of criticism, as well. A couple months later, she opened up on Twitter, reflecting on her experience and sharing that she struggles with Impostor Syndrome. Osaka’s openness about her mental and emotional well-being has sparked a conversation that resonates with so many people around the world. It’s timely and it’s necessary. Which brings us to our conversation today.
Osaka’s story connects so profoundly with the work behind COMPOSURE, and we’re grateful to be able to follow her lead and continue the dialogue… right here on our podcast! This first episode is going to be wonderfully wide-ranging, but before we dive in, I want to start right from the beginning. We’re going to be talking a lot about Impostor Syndrome today, and this concept might not be familiar to everybody listening. So, what is Impostor Syndrome, anyway?
Kate Purmal: Impostor Syndrome is the state in which an individual’s perception of their own competence is different from how others perceive them. They perceive themselves to be less competent, less capable than others perceive them to be. And we’ve identified five “fingerprint” behaviors that are associated with Impostor Syndrome. (We offer a free online assessment that measures how susceptible you are to Impostor Behaviors.)
Let me go through each of them one at a time. The first is a lack of confidence. That’s a lack of perception in your ability to do something or to rise to a challenge. The next one is perfectionism, that’s really striving to attain unattainable ideals and/or overpreparation and overwork. The third one is what we call depressed entitlement, which is feeling like you’re not deserving of the things that others in your environment may feel deserving to. A classic example of that is I’m a female engineer, the only female engineer in my company, and for some reason, unconsciously even, I don’t feel as worthy of a promotion or increase in compensation as my male counterparts, because I happen to be one of the “onlys.” The fourth one is feeling like a fraud. That is feeling as though you aren’t deserving of the success you’ve achieved. So you got lucky or somebody missed something, and you really have found your way to a place you don’t deserve to be at. And the final one is one that’s pretty tough and pretty relevant to our discussion today, which is rejection sensitivity. That is a fear of being criticised or judged by others. It’s having a really external focus of the world and being very sensitive to, and triggered by, what others say about you or what they think about you.
What we know is that Impostor Syndrome affects more than 70% of the female executive population, and it’s believed to affect almost all of us, male or female, at at least one point in our careers. Additionally, it can be triggered situationally. So some people report feeling very confident and not experiencing Impostor Syndrome, except when they step into a new environment or they’re giving a high-pressure presentation, or they’re going for a promotion or they’re interviewing. So you don’t have to be thinking about having it all the time, but which situations or dynamics bring up those feelings — and that’s what’s really relevant.
DT: So, to stay on this macro level here, before we dive into Osaka herself, you touched on this a little bit in terms of the intersection between identity and Impostor Behaviors. It’s pretty central to your work that people of certain identities, especially those from underrepresented groups, are susceptible to Impostor Behaviors in ways that are important for us to discuss here. So this idea of “I don’t know how I got here” or “I don’t feel deserving of being here” or “I don’t feel worthy of my success,” how and why is that feeling especially prevalent and especially acute for members of “out groups,” and particularly women of color?
KP: It’s interesting, Lee and I have both had the experience in our careers of being the “only” in the room all the time. I was a software engineer and I was one of only 3 to 5 in my classes in college and then almost always the only one in the room. And that only got more acute as I rose in the ranks and became a senior executive. And that sense of being an only, and particularly the sense of not having anyone else around who looks like you and does what you do, it created this dynamic for me that I didn't even know that it was possible to rise to the levels I rose to. I never set out to do it. There was no one I knew who, or maybe a couple who were super exceptional, who had come before me who made it to these ranks. So there’s this perception that in order to get there you have to be super exceptional. And, at the end of the day you’re thinking, hey, wait, I’m just me… I’m not that exceptional.
Lee Epting: I think that brings up this other factoid that we often use. For men, they will go out and put their hat in the ring when they meet only 60% of the qualifications for a job. Whereas women will not put their hat in the ring unless they meet 100% of the qualities required for anything they’re pursuing. That really calls up the issue that there isn’t anyone for them to look to as people who are the same as them that they could aspire to. Men will often look around and say, well, if Joe’s doing it, then of course I could do it. Whereas if a woman is looking to meet 100% of qualifications for something she’s never achieved or done in her life, it’s unlikely she’s gonna throw her hat in the ring for the next big thing she’s gonna do.
KP: And it’s only more acute for people of color. There’s a lot that sits at the bottom of this that has to do with the fear of rejection or failure. All of us experience when we’re striving for something, but we know from our research that happens to be more acute for people of color and for the non-majorities, the “others” in the room, because they feel acutely aware of having more pressure and people being more critical and having to perform better, right? Because they’re representative of their entire group and they have immense pressure to perform. So, you know, you take what Lee and I experienced as women in the workplace and you add on top of that a woman of color who is underrepresented even more, and it’s just the pressure and the stakes are so high. It’s really crushing, which is what we’re seeing with someone like Naomi Osaka.
DT: She presents a particularly interesting example for us to discuss here, because in so many different contexts, performance and success are really hard to measure. So when you’re in the workplace and someone gets promoted over you, most of the time it’s not as though there are super clear measures of someone’s success. But with sports, it’s a little bit different. Naomi Osaka has been ranked literally number one in her field in the entire world. She has won Grand Slam titles. There are these very clear indicators of immense success. So I think the big question here is, even with all these factors in play that we've been talking about, for someone of Osaka’s talent and stature and accomplishments, how is it even possible that she could feel like an impostor?
KP: You know, this relates to some of our research. We’ve found that people who are gifted as children often experience Impostor Syndrome more acutely than others. The reason is because they are set up in the beginning to get attention, love, and adoration out of being exceptional. And so then they become dependent on that attention, love and adoration and they start to equate their self-worth with what they do, not who they are. And then that just exacerbates as they go and achieve more and more and more success. And what happens is they become afraid to fail. What does it mean to fail? They’re gonna be knocked off their pedestal.
And I think this is what we’re seeing with Naomi Osaka’s discussion around press conferences. Here she is, she’s such an extraordinarily accomplished young woman who is being held to a standard of perfection that’s impossible to meet. And she’s holding herself to that standard as well. And when she doesn’t meet that standard she has to go meet the press. I mean, imagine. Imagine how extraordinarily difficult that would be. I can’t fathom it. This early achievement sets people up to feel as though they have to sustain it, and it becomes what motivates them, to continue to avoid failing or losing and ensure that they’re successful. It’s like this hamster wheel they get on, and it’s exhausting.
DT: It’s so humanizing, too, when we see people of Osaka’s stature come out and be so open about their struggles with their own self-doubt, their own feelings of being an impostor. I want to dive a little bit more into that connection between the physical body and Impostor Syndrome, and how that affects performance. There’s tons of research out there — a couple books of note are The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk and My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem — and the whole theory is that a lot of the triggers and traumas we hold are actually stored in our bodies, and COMPOSURE deals with a lot of this work and has some somatic exercises where we can actually use our bodies to help heal some of that trauma. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about what your theories are on that, what your research says about the importance of recognizing that connection between the physical body and these internal beliefs.
KP: This is really core to our work, and I want to credit our co-author Joshua Isaac Smith, who is an expert in PTSD and Trauma Therapy. It was really a convergence of my experience, executive coaching, and neuro linguistic programming, with his work in the somatic trauma therapy world that created the work that we’re doing now. What he recognized is that people tend to be up in their heads. We talk to people all the time about something going on in their work and they’re telling us stories, and then we stop them for a second and take a time out. We say, okay, drop down into your body and tell me where you feel it. Where’s that sensation?
There’s something really magical that happens, because suddenly they become aware that they’re actually having a physical sensation in their body. And maybe it’s that their chest is tight or maybe they have a rock in their stomach or they feel like their throat is constrained and they can’t talk. These are clues to us of what’s going on. And in fact, then, if you’re able to stay with it — and this is what Joshua has taught us — and breathe through it and experience it, rather than push through it or ignore it, you can take this energy, this trapped traumatic energy in our body, and we can move it. And that’s absolutely core to freeing you from being reactive to the things around you in your environment.
LE: This morning we were working with a client, and the story we heard really resonates with me here, because this client was entirely overwhelmed when we started this session. It’s due to the fact that she’s working extraordinarily long hours and is being asked to deliver and re-deliver and re-deliver on certain things in the business, and she’s very frustrated by the requests that are coming from upper management.
When we put her through an exercise that we like to call the three-chair exercise, where we get people to not only sit in their own chair but also sit in the chair of the other person, as well as a third, more important chair, which is the chair of the higher good, or the higher perspective, it allowed her to step into the other person’s perspective and to approach things with more empathy. Empathy for the other person, as well as empathy for oneself.
And what we realized through that exercise was that our client was showing up really upset and tired, and when we had her go into her body, she felt that in her stomach, as well as in her hands. She tends to use her hands to gesticulate when she talks, so it was interesting that the feeling was coming in her hands. When we asked her to really breathe into that, what we found was that it was frustration, yes, but underlying the frustration was anger. And just that simple understanding and acknowledgment from herself, understanding that she’s angry about the situation, allowed her to understand that she might want to take a different approach when she goes into that meeting so she can not show up angry, but rather step into her own body and release some of that anger and consider a different approach for how she might want to take on that difficult conversation.
KP: Lee, that’s such a great example because even that mere act of going into her body, feeling those sensations, and acknowledging the frustration and anger below it, and naming it, calmed her whole system down.
LE: She shifted.
KP: She completely shifted. And it was almost like she was like, okay, I get it, that’s how I’m feeling. Now I’m gonna figure out how to approach the situation. So it’s really just this thing of going in and being present with what you’re feeling and acknowledging it.
LE: And I would say that at the same time when she stepped into the other chair of the individual she was angry with, it was very interesting when she was sort of breathing through his lungs and looking through his eyes, she could also feel tension and anxiety in his body. Because he was anticipating a challenging discussion. Simply by noticing that and taking that on she was able to formulate an approach that would put him at ease as well. It’s so valuable to be able to step out of your own body and at the same time be in tune with what’s going on in your own body. That mere example there allowed her to change her entire approach to how she’s going to go into this discussion.
KP: And just one thing to note: We think of discussions as what we say, but what we’re seeing with our clients is that more than 55% of what happens in a discussion is the energy that you bring to the table. So she realized that if she’s showing up with frustration and anger, that’s what he’s picking up on. And he is reacting to that, and then she’s reacting back to it. So it triggers reactions across the board, and it’s not even conscious, right? It’s actually our bodies and their bodies reacting to each other at a very, very primal level. And it’s really important to be aware of that, that so much of our presence is energetic. And so much of what we’re reacting to is also that way.
DT: I think this discussion really gets to the root of what makes COMPOSURE so powerful, is that your work not only educates people about the triggers behind Impostor Behaviors, but it gives them tools to start to resolve those triggers and those behaviors, to then be able to transform into a better, higher, more successful, more self-confident version of themselves.
Where I think this discussion gets really interesting in the context of Naomi Osaka is that in her recent note on Twitter and in her comments when she pulled out of the French Open, she gave some context into how she was feeling. And, especially in this note she shared on Twitter, she started to give some advice to people. Fairly or unfairly, people turn to the people who are willing to talk about these issues and their own experience for help in actually navigating a lot of it. So I want to talk a little bit about what Osaka said in that note. She made a couple important points. The first was to celebrate yourself and praise your small wins, and the second was the importance of not valuing yourself on other people’s standards. So I want to take that lens and sort of expand on what you two were talking about with different things that you can do in terms of recognizing your own Impostor Behaviors and starting to resolve them. So how does what Osaka has said and advised other people to do, how does that align with the work in COMPOSURE?
KP: That’s so important. What she said is right on the money… but it’s really hard to do. It’s easy to say “celebrate wins and don’t be concerned about what other people say,” but because we’re beings that are born with safety patterning, this being worried about what other people say and not celebrating your wins comes from a place of wanting to be safe from the world. There’s a lot of patterning involved in that that’s hard to undo. So one of the most important things to understand — and I’m sure this is where Osaka is coming from — is that there’s a difference between you and them, the rest of the world. There’s me, and then there’s the rest of the world and their opinions about me.
We call this personal boundaries. Where do I end and where does someone else begin? When people are easily triggered, when they suffer from rejection sensitivity, fear of failure, any of these things, what’s generally going on is they have ill-defined or almost non-existent boundaries. So their perception of themselves is almost the same as the external perception about them. They’re really vulnerable because they’re seeking approval to validate themselves from the outside world when they do good things, and they generally get a lot of good feedback, but that’s also why they have these patterns of perfectionism and overwork and overpreparation. The minute they get even the slightest bit of criticism, it’s devastating because they internalize that and make it about who they are. It goes from “I am good, I am smart,” to “oh no, I’ve made a mistake, I didn’t know the answer to that question,” and that becomes a feeling about themselves that has to do with their self-worth.
Part of this work that has to do with personal boundaries is to actually separate out “What do I really believe to be true about myself? How do I really feel about myself?” When we work with our clients, even if they’re going into high pressure situations that they’re really nervous about, what they’re actually nervous about is getting a question they can’t answer or have someone criticize what they’re doing. But when we talk to them about what they really feel internally, they’ll say “well, I really know my stuff and I'm really good at what I do. Me and my team, we spent a lot of time preparing this presentation, and I’m really proud of it.” And it’s important that they maintain that perspective while also being open to receiving outside questions and input, but this thing about personal boundaries allows them to keep those comments from just being immediately internalized and reacted to. It allows them to be met with curiosity, or even reject it.
You know, sometimes there’s someone in the room who’s got it out for you and they’re gonna say something, and you don’t have to take it in. Knowing, really taking stock of what you know to be true about yourself and acknowledging that there will be things from the outside that you don't control… deciding how you want to react to those is really critical. That is a much more resilient, grounded, calm place, because you’re less vulnerable.
LE: Another thing that comes to mind with that, specifically related to Naomi Osaka’s comments is when I read “celebrate yourself,” I really heard that as “be compassionate to yourself.” You know, when we celebrate ourselves it’s really about self compassion. It’s about being kind to ourselves when we don’t meet expectations. Not only our expectations, but the expectations of others.
And when I read, “you shouldn’t value yourself based on other people’s standards,” it’s really about core values. What are your core values? What do you know to be true about yourself, and what are you not willing to give up under any circumstance? And that way, when you do enter into that arena where you’re in a public environment such as Osaka is with the press and media, the question comes up around, you know, why did you lose? For her it is, well, how do I want to take that question? Is that question coming from a good place, or is it coming from a place that’s trying to trick me or I may not really know what I want to say there? This is to say, if I choose to take that in, if I’ve got my boundaries up, and I choose to take that question in, my response could be, “because I’m human.” And that would be good enough.
DT: It sounds like what you’re both saying is that Osaka is right on the money with what she’s saying, but in order to get to the place where you have these boundaries and you’re not valuing yourself based on other people’s standards… there’s a lot of work that goes into that first.
KP: Yeah, I would say there’s a lot of self-awareness that needs to be developed in order to get there. And I hesitate to use the word “work” because many people that do this “work” find it to be really freeing and liberating and joyous. And sometimes it’s just ah-ha moments, it’s realizing things you already know to be true, uncovering who you really are. So, yes, there’s a process, and that’s what our book is all about, is taking you through that process, and the most critical thing is that when you move from that place of being externally focused and validated, to being internally focused and validated, magic starts to happen.
The reason is because your entire motivational strategy shifts. You’ve all experienced doing something with all your heart and having it end up not being the outcome you want. I’ve been an athlete, I’ve gotten a personal record in a race but I didn’t win. But I did a PR! And a PR is by definition internally validated. We have clients who we coach who are going into big interviews for positions they don’t even feel qualified for necessarily, and when they go into this interview process and work with them to get ready for it, they often walk out of the interview process saying, “you know what, that was the most amazing experience, and I don't really care about the outcome because I nailed that interview.”
That’s what really matters because what you want to do is show up and nail the interview. You don’t control if there are candidates that have more experience than you, but what you do control is how you show up in that interview. And that’s the difference. It’s a joyous distinction, and what we know is that when you start to be internally motivated, you stop doing stuff for other people, and you start doing stuff that matters to you. You start to figure out where your values intersect with the world, and you start to be able to do things that have much more meaning. That is this self-fulfilling cycle, this beautiful cycle that continues to encourage you to do more and more of that and worry less and less about the outside world. That’s why we say the magic happens. Things like serendipity and coincidence start showing up in the world, and everything gets a little bit easier.
DT: Sounds to me like we’ve uncovered the need for another episode! But, to wrap up today, how can our listeners learn more about COMPOSURE and all the research that forms the foundation of your work?
KP: I just want to say, before I go into the book, our process is really simple. This is nothing new. It’s step one, awareness; step two, resolution; and step three, transformation. And the great news about the work we do, and many others in the field do, is that awareness is 80% of the game. Becoming aware of the fact that you’re triggered by something and be able to observe it, almost as though you're sitting outside and saying, “whoa, I just got triggered. Isn’t that interesting…” That’s 80% of your way to getting to a better place that you want to be in.
That’s what COMPOSURE takes you through. We have a free workbook that comes with it that provides chapter summaries, writing exercises, guided meditations that we’ve pre-recorded. COMPOSURE is a really interactive experience, like a conversation, like you’re a voyeur in my office when we’re meeting with our clients and we’re going through these challenges that they’re dealing with, interspersed with the latest research on neuroscience and trauma therapy and psychology, which provides a great blend of all of that.
DT: Awesome. Thank you Kate and Lee, and thank you to our listeners for joining us for our first episode. We’ll see you next time.
KP: And thank you Naomi Osaka! We greatly admire and appreciate you.
