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Yo, yo, yo, what's up, man? Good morning, good evening, good night, good afternoon, good dusk, good dawn.
Shout out to you whatever time you're listening, wherever you're listening from, whether that's Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Amazon Music, Samsung, Podchaser, Deezer, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, YouTube.
If you're watching in, glad I have a shirt on today.
Coming live from my voice to your phone, computer, headphones, TV, car stereo.
I'm going to check my analytics and see if any of you guys are listening from your smartwatch,
but I won't be disappointed if you're not.
Bluetooth speaker, hope it sounds good wherever you're listening from.
You could have been anywhere in the world, but you are here right now.
Let's take a moment and be present to recognize that it is now, right now.
Whether you're right now is working, running, exercising, cleaning, laying down, flying,
driving, shoveling snow, be grateful we're alive.
Failure can be frightening.
However, as Winston Churchill reminds us, success is all about going from failure to
failure without losing enthusiasm.
This is I Will Not Lose Podcast, where we set out to prove everything is learned from
failure, and we must persevere and recognize it as one step closer to success.
I'm your host, Tony Ortiz.
Let's jump right in.
Ah, you see what I did there?
Trying to explain what the podcast is and who I am in every episode.
That was a tip, a shout out to the Reddit podcasting community.
I'm going to put some of this stuff into practice.
Just a quick disclaimer.
It's not what the episode's going to be about, but I was at the National Center for Civil
and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia this past week.
My God.
Um, it was absolutely, uh, completely mind altering experience. Um, you know, I knew,
but I had no idea. So after seeing not only defenders, but perpetrators of civil rights
and things as simple as your freedom of speech, uh, you know, after hearing the story of a woman
who couldn't perform without the government in South Africa, writing her a note, confirming
the address of her mother saying, hey, we just want to make sure this is where your mother lives.
Watch what you say. People, government storming into my house. Nobody's going to do that
because I'm putting out this podcast. So I just wanted to shout out a quick disclaimer
that I have a whole new respect. I've always been intentional with my words,
but just the fact that I can put this out and you guys can listen to it wherever on whatever
platform is really amazing. So I know I mentioned it, but wow. Shout out to our freedom of speech
and everybody who's fought to defend it. All right, let's go. What are we talking about today?
Imposter syndrome. What is it? What can it affect? I'll share some of my embarrassing
personal stories and maybe even some of the coping techniques that I've learned.
but if you're not familiar with imposter syndrome it is a common experience that high achievers feel
of anxiety it's like if you've ever had the feeling that maybe you don't belong at your job
like everyone at your job is much more educated than you uh much more qualified for that position
literally you feel like an imposter so yeah you just you feel like a fraud if you've ever been
I know I've been at a job where I'm like, what am I doing here? How did I get in the door? Who
trusted me with this position? And what I've kind of learned from that. But the whole imposter is
the idea that you're going to be exposed as a fraud, that suddenly somebody is going to find
out you don't have the qualifications and you're going to lose everything or whatever the actual
fear itself is. I'm not positive, but this was identified by, I'm not actually going to quote
the psychologist because I didn't check my sources, but let's say around the 1970s,
they realized a common thing in high achieving individuals that a sense of self-doubt,
this sense of anxiety, even though there was overwhelming evidence of their competence.
and so they coined the term and studies have been done since then. This was interesting as I was
looking into it doing some research for the episode. There's subtypes of imposter syndrome
like the perfectionist subtype where individuals set impossibly high standards for themselves and
then feel like failures if they fall short. I'm definitely, definitely in the perfectionist
subtype of imposter syndrome. I never put the two and two together, but yeah. There's the superhero
subtype where the individual feels like they need to be able to do everything themselves and they're
afraid to ask for help. Yeah, I'm sure everyone or a lot of people can relate with that. Then
there's the expert subtype where the individual feels like they need to know everything about
their field and they're afraid of being exposed as a fraud. So this can all affect your life
If you're dealing with imposter syndrome, you might not even realize that you fear of,
you know, especially when you think, okay, I'm competent.
I have all the qualifications.
I deserve to be here.
Why am I feeling like I don't belong here?
If you don't actually journal and dig deep into that, it might be, you know, it'll manifest
itself in anxiety.
It'll manifest itself in just fear, angst, maybe even depression.
So low self-esteem, there's definitely mental health ailments, I would say, or maladaptive
behaviors that you can generate from letting imposter syndrome get out.
So I do want to go into some coping techniques, but I have some notes here.
And it was funny.
I said, yeah, I felt imposter syndrome.
I'll tell them about that one time.
Then I'm like, wait a second.
This has been a recurring theme in my life, something I've felt as early as even last
year.
I mean, it's insane, but, um, let's see. All right. Personal stories. Well, let's go. We're
not going to go way back in my past. Let's just go a few months ago. If you listen back to my
first episode and the goal is to fail. Um, I said, why am I doing this? Who am I to be an orator?
You know? Um, but yet here I am every week putting out long form spoken content. I am by definition
an orator. So if I can tell myself I'm going to do it, and trust me, I constantly feel imposter
syndrome even with doing the podcast. I mean, I was sitting there earlier today and I'm looking
at my, I'm getting ready to throw a podcast on. I go to Spotify, throw on my podcast section.
First one is a recent one I followed, Make It Click by a friend of mine, Christine Rothdeutsch.
So I'm going to be putting that into my rotation. And as I'm looking through, you got Malcolm Gladwell there, Joe Rogan, Brilliant Idiots. And then I see I Will Not Lose by Tony Ortiz. And there's my name right next to Joe Rogan in the Spotify app.
and there's somebody that has me followed and saved in their podcast that sees my thumbnail
that I designed every week or every time they go for podcasts. So yeah, it's very easy to say I'm
in the same space. Not that I'm even in the same league numbers wise or talent wise or experience
wise as any of these podcasts, but I'm still sitting right next to them giving people the
choice when they're looking for something to throw on and listen to my voice. So I'm absolutely
grateful for that. One of the things you can do to combat imposter syndrome is just remind yourself
of your successes. You know, remind yourself you've been able to put out content consistently
for three or four months every single week, something you set out to do. So sure, the imposter
syndrome is going to come. It's going to come when you see other people that put content out or
somebody drops an episode that you can tell, put them tons of time into editing and they have
multiple, or they have a really fire guest and the conversation is just flowing. And you're like,
man, how am I supposed to compete with that? Just me sitting here talking. It's crazy. But
as I'm editing the video of me and my son's episode that I hope to drop next week or the
week after, um, he's getting some of his drawings together. We're going to feature them on the
episode. So I have my son on with a conversation about a multitude of things. We have about a 45
minute conversation and it's amazing. I can't wait to drop it, but I'm here editing a video
and I'm thinking, man, I'm not a video editor and don't get me wrong. I have stuff to learn,
but I got into, uh, I think my first paid portfolio piece for a video was in 2016.
Uh, Gil Thompson posted a video of a lyric video that I did for him all the way back in maybe 2015
or so. And, um, he was either, yeah, I think he was my first paid project. And then, you know,
I still do motion graphics video to this day, but I'm like, what am I doing video editing? Who am I
to be a video editor? Every time I go to buy a new tool or a new piece for my stuff, I say,
I don't do this professionally. But yet, I just spent the last two weeks working on a documentary
for Black History Month. Shout out to the NAACP in Bayonne. We put together Moving Us Forward,
the African-American contributions to the city of Bayonne. And it's like, this is going on
broadcast. Maybe it's time to say, Tony, you really do this. Maybe it's time to say, okay,
people pay you. You're good enough at this that people pay you. And we can get into different
prices and different categories of stuff. But I like to think if you're going to be doing
something professionally, if you can get somebody to pay you and then them to refer somebody else,
you're in the mix. You're at least good enough. So it's about time for me to remind myself and
say, okay, I'm good enough at this. And yeah, there's mistakes even when putting the podcast
together. There's little mistakes I let fly that I would never let go in a paid video, but this is a
hobby. This is fun. This is therapeutic. This is not something that somebody's paying for that my
name or reputation is really on that much. So, I mean, as I get into talking about editing,
this is how often I go through imposter syndrome. I'm editing the audio and I'm wondering how to do
a gate in this program, if there's a better way to do it, because I just can't seem to get it right.
And I think about audio engineers, like shout out to Jay Palos, who recommended the mics for
the podcast. I worked with him together at another job that I felt imposter syndrome at,
but I'm thinking, man, he knows this. People pay him. He does this professionally. He spent time
as an audio engineer. He can run the graphic equalizer way better than I can. So who am I
to be editing my own audio? And somebody comes by and says, hey, Tony, it sounds fine. I don't
have to put the volume up. I can hear everything you're saying, you know, maybe it's time after
spending most of my teenage years and twenties editing rap lyrics and rock music. Maybe it's
time to say, okay, I'm at least decent enough of an audio engineer that people aren't turning
my stuff off because of the audio quality. I mean, my voice might be one thing, but it's not
on, it's not unlistenable. It's not unlistenable by any means, but this is the perils of being
self-taught. You know, when you go and you look at a forum and there's all sorts of industry lingo
and you may know it as something else, you may know it as the nickname of the plugin that you
did and you get the gist of what it's supposed to do. But it's another thing that brings in the
self-doubt. Like, you know, did I learn everything the way I was supposed to? Did I skip over some
basics? Was there some things that I didn't do? And I've even taken formal classes on things that
I'm self-taught about. And at the end of the course, it was like, yeah, I picked up that
one little thing here or there, but I really wasn't far off. I wasn't doing this wrong
the whole time. I just want to take a quick second and stress the fact that there's a
difference between self-doubt and doubting yourself and being humble. And there's a difference between
reminding yourself of your accomplishments and being cocky. So for the latter, reminding yourself
of your accomplishments, you know, there's always going to be somebody better. So you don't say
something to say, ha, I'm the top of, I'm the king of the mountain at the top of this hill. I'm the
absolute best. You know what I mean? For some reason, as humans, we like to see that. We like
to hear the guy at the top, the superhero, the Goku, the world champion. We like them to talk
shit until another guy comes by and it's the heavyweight contender of the world. It's just
something we love to see the clash of the titans. But reminding yourself, I am accomplished. I do
deserve to be here. Kind of like what I'm doing as I go on this episode. I don't say this to say,
hey guys, I edit my own podcast. I'm an audio engineer. No, it's not that. It's like, I'm not
saying it to impress you. If anything, I'm saying it to impress upon you. Like I probably stifle
myself a whole bunch thinking that I'm not good enough at something that I'm probably pretty damn
good at. It's insane. So this is kind of anecdotal for myself, but also to push out to other people.
like, look, if you're feeling self-doubt where you're at, try some of these things. Try to
remind yourself of your accomplishments. I mean, so I was writing my show notes. I was thinking
of a time that I am at, I get asked to speak at an entrepreneur panel. I believe I was invited
by Rita Guthrie. Shout out to Rita Guthrie, Open Door Public Relations. Anyway, I ended up at this
thing. It was on the importance of writing in business. So they had a bunch of different
people in different professions. I was the entrepreneur sitting next to a business owner.
There was a doctor on my left. Next to her was a realtor. And I'm sitting here thinking,
what am I doing on this stage sitting next to a doctor? This doesn't make any sense.
doctor in writing, not a medical doctor. I'm not exactly sure what her doctorate was,
but her title was doctor, and that's a hell of an accomplishment regardless.
So here I am sitting without a degree at the college that I dropped out of, getting ready
to speak to 80 entrepreneurial students about the importance of writing and how often I use it.
and I'm thinking, who am I to be up here? And I hear about two or three people down,
they're saying, oh, well, you know, I didn't like this, but I thought it was cool. And I thought I
would definitely check it out. I saw this ad and here they're talking about one of our,
one of my clients. So the guys that I was working with, uh, shout out, we were going under the name
of view designs at the time. Um, one of our clients, they had seen our ads and they live
40, 50 miles away from Bethlehem where the restaurant was. And they're talking about
going and checking it out. So I'm like, okay, I may not be able to fix a car. I may not be good
at everything, but in terms of what we do and what people are paying for, the word's getting out.
And that's just of our job. And it's a great to introduce yourself, somebody, when you say,
oh, I've did the marketing that you saw that's coercing you to drive like, I'm sorry, maybe 40
minutes, not 40 miles. That's real far. I don't think they were 40 miles. I feel like I said that
wrong. But, you know, I reminded myself, okay, maybe I do deserve to sit here. And now as I'm
sitting here with less anxiety, they go and one of the people ask, one of the people, one of the
students asked, what is networking and why is it important? So I said, oh, I got this one. Raise
my hand and I say, I stand up and I say, who in here has a business card? One person raises their
hand. So I make a beeline to that woman. I hand her my business card. She hands me hers. I say,
I'm going to reach out to you. We'll get together for coffee for about 30, 40 minutes. You tell me
what I do. I'll tell you what I do. And, you know, we'll go from there and see if there's anybody I
can connect you to. She's like, all right, cool. I said, no guys, I wasn't like, I'm actually going
to do that. I'm actually going to reach out to her. And I think anybody who has business cards,
you know, you're making a mistake. They say, well, we don't, we don't do anything. What is
our business card going to say? It's going to have your name and your phone number on it.
But networking is the idea of going out and figuring out how you can offer some sort of
value to somebody else professionally. And I said, I'll leave my card up here since you guys forgot
it, but I'm not going to reach out to you. You guys got to get my card and you got to send me
an email. And I'd say about 15 of the 80 students did of those 15, about six of them actually sat
down with me. And I ended up going into a short partnership with one of them, um, in a web design,
uh, got him some client work for web design and we worked on some stuff. So it's like,
at least they got some sort of value. Nobody was sitting there saying, who's this guy up here on
the panel? What is he saying? Shut up. I want to listen to the doctor. You know, I had something
to offer to the panel. I was able to be there. And so it's, uh, it's just, you can't get in your
own head. You can't, you can't do that. You got to reframe your thinking, like focusing on your
accomplishments rather than your inadequacies as one coping technique. Seeking support from others,
realizing that there's other people that go through imposter syndrome. Einstein didn't
think he was a genius. And here it's like he's literally the picture next to the definition of
genius. And he didn't think so of himself. So this affects everybody. This doesn't just affect
people in low paying jobs, middle paying jobs. This affects executives, CEOs, everybody, you
know, um, focusing on your accomplishments, developing a growth mindset. Um, this will all
help you overcome your feelings of inadequacy. So definitely something you want to do. And this is
one of my favorite, this is what I've found through the podcast, but the best advice is just
Embrace your authentic self, like recognizing that everyone experiences self-doubt and inadequacies,
realizing there's just things that some people will like, some people won't like.
Focusing on your strengths helps you build confidence in yourself.
You know, not everybody likes every decision you make.
I know I went out on a limb a few months ago and decided I wanted to grow my hair out.
I love it.
I had long hair for years after I cut it.
I dreamt about it.
I would dream about it and play with it.
And it's just something about calming.
And now I'm learning to manage it and keep it.
So if I can't manage it, then I'll cut it and go back to what I know.
But for the meantime, I feel myself with it.
And it's something that I'm going to continue to do.
Um, the clothes that I choose to wear when I come on the podcast are more myself.
Like, don't get me wrong.
I'll rock slacks and a collar shirt all day.
But, uh, for the most part, I tend to wear dark colored jeans, a collared shirt, you
know, and having to choose and be somewhat visual because this is a shout out to everybody
listening on Apple or Google podcasts or Spotify, but we do syndicate this to YouTube as well too.
So being that about 60% of people are going to watch their podcasts, there's decisions that I
have to make. And it's fun because I'll put more thought into dressing up to come to my basement
for the podcast than I will into what I'm wearing when I go out in the street, unless I have an
actual meeting or somebody that I'm meeting specifically, in which case I'll choose color
psychology and wear different colors based on what the meeting is about or what I'm trying
to accomplish in that meeting. But for the most part, I don't take a ton of thought. So embracing
myself, realizing that people are listening. It's funny. It's easy. You know, somebody says,
well, how many listens you get? How many downloads you get? Oh, well, you know,
Joe Rogan gets one point some million per snippet on YouTube. It's like, you know, that's great.
Imagine if that many people came to hear you speak in a room and we're approaching it being
outside of a room, a large room. So if you think visually, that's a lot of people. And it's funny
because you're going to hear on the episode, Jaden says that to me, my son, Jaden, when we're
talking on the episode, he's like, you don't understand, you get 300 likes, but 300 people,
imagine that's a lot of people in a room that are listening to you or doing this. That's super,
super cool. So all these things, I hope help you deal with imposter syndrome. I mean, I could go
on for an hour about all the different times in my life that I've felt something and then had to
remind myself, you know what, maybe you are already doing this, you know? And so it's super
interesting, but that's about all I got. Announcements, um, big V or little V, little
sis, whatever you want to call her. V Alvarado is in town. So we're going to do everything we
can over the next day or two. Probably just after this episode drops, we're going to try
to record an episode. So I definitely want to get her on the pod. Got the episode that I'm just
waiting on my son to get his drawings together so we can really put together an awesome piece
of content. Spend more time on that one because that's one's going to live a little longer. It's
not really so much just this is what's going on this week. So that's going to last. Other than
that, big plans. We are now officially in season two. So if I haven't put the new background up
already, I'll switch it up for the beginning of next episode. But this will be the first episode
we're posting in season two. So expect some big differences, some big changes. Champions are made
when no one's watching. So if you've been listening, you've been checking in every day,
there's not going to be, I'm sorry, every week, there's not going to be a huge difference in
season two because we've been upgrading as we go throughout season one. So if you go back and you
look at the beginning of season one, and then you look at even just the set now, 17 episodes in,
you see that it's definitely grown, definitely changed. So the idea is not to do one big,
huge change. It's the idea of success learned from failure and slow growth and growth over time,
slowly improving on what was and making something that is better. That's all I got, folks. That felt
good. This is I Will Not Lose podcast, stories of success learned from failure. To support the show,
visit the website, shows.acast.com slash I Will Not Lose. Let me know. I'm thinking of putting
together a tip jar through my website, just something. It is what it is. Just like if we
were having a conversation at a bar, I was making a drink for you. I'm just going to have a small
spot. It's not quite sponsorship, but it could buy me a coffee. So I'd be pretty interested to
see if any of you would drop a dollar or five or 10 or 20 through a tip jar. So working on some
small monetization upgrades. In the meantime, subscribe on your favorite podcast player,
share this episode link, leave a comment. Your contribution is appreciated. Thanks for listening.
No, really, thank you for listening.