Good afternoon, everyone. You're attending the Florida Society of Pathologists June Grand Rounds. I am Dr. Marilyn Bui. I serve as the president of FSP. Today, it is truly our privilege and honor to have our keynote speaker, Dr. Jennifer Hunt, giving us this lecture, talking about unlocking your authentic self. In her great company, we have a panelist. They are all FSP board members, Drs. Krysek, Henderson-Jackson, and Jim Zhai. People may ask why FSP Grand Rounds? This is from the suggestion of this brainstorm meeting composed of academic department chairs and the fellowship and the residency program directors. I really feel like FSP is really strong in those two annual meetings, one in the spring, one is in the summer, and we're very strong in educating pathologists on various practicing-related or academic-related issues. However, we really need a statewide Grand Rounds to focusing on professional and the leadership development. This course will satisfy the ACGME requirements for faculty development and the training. So with that, we developed this series, and this is one of them focusing on leadership development. So without further ado, I'm gonna talk about our keynote speaker, Dr. Jennifer Hunt. She is a physician executive who has held a leadership role at the institution and the national level in pathology. She's now serving as the chair of pathology, immunology, and the laboratory medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Before that, she served as the department chair in University of Arkansas for almost 10 years. She's now the chief of staff of Shands Hospital in Gainesville. She oversees medical staff of more than 200 credentialed individuals. Before that, she served in a similar role at the University of Arkansas. And she has been a board member of the CAP and also in various leadership roles in different pathology associations. And she is also a certified executive leadership coach and has a passion for coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring emerging and aspiring leaders in healthcare. She has written a popular book on overcoming imposter syndrome called Unlocking Your Authentic Self. In all of her roles from chair to physician leader to executive coach, Dr. Hunt founds great joy in helping people to thrive in their careers and find joy and passion in their work. So we're going to ask Dr. Hunt to give us a talk, 35 to 40 minutes. Then we're going to have a panel discussion. So Dr. Hunt, everybody is patiently waiting, so please take it away. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you. It's so good to be here. And it's fun to see some familiar faces on the panelist list, obviously, and also on the attendee list as well. So I'm going to share my screen. Can you guys see that okay? Just nod if you can, perfect. Okay, so I am going to be talking today about one of the elements of what I call and think about the authentic self. And the element that I'm going to be talking about today in particular in this world of imposter syndrome is going to be very specifically geared towards the inner critic. Now, I have a number of reasons for doing that. The number one reason is that it's a really important part of imposter syndrome. The number two reason is that this time of year is a time of year when we see a lot of imposter syndrome flaring up, especially in July, when people are starting new jobs, when residents are coming in and experiencing all new things. So July is a really, really great time to be thinking about some tools and some skills that you can adopt in your own life, but also teach as faculty members, if you're faculty, or mentor, if you have new people coming into your group. These are things that are really important for you to be thinking about as you go into the July time period. So before we even start, I would like to have everybody here just think about for a moment what your intention is for the next 45 minutes or an hour that you're going to spend with this group of people here. You know, when you think about setting an intention, it can be an intention to learn something, it can be an intention to experience something. But also another part of, another way to think about intention is who are you showing up as today? Are you a trainee who's showing up looking for tools and skills for yourself? Are you a pathologist in practice who's also thinking about things that you might be able to integrate into your own life as a professional, as a leader, as a pathologist? Are you an educator or a faculty member who's going to be training the next generation and wants to be thinking about, you know, how to bring these tools and skills to our trainees? Maybe you're all of these in some way or fashion. You know, all of us stay trainees for our entire life. That's the idea of lifelong learning. So you may come to this sort of with a beginner's mind, with a learner's mind, and be a pathologist in practice and be a faculty member. And that's a great way to approach this material as well. Now, again, I did tell you right off the bat that we're only going to be talking about a sliver of the work that I do in imposter syndrome. And obviously the book has a lot more information and it's a lot more dense. But I am going to be giving you some tools that are really very actionable, some things that you could take away today, this week, this month, and think about for yourself and think about how you could use those from a day-to-day basis. We're only going to touch the surface here, but hopefully it'll give you a little bit of, a little bit to think about, again, as we move into a period of time that I think is, is when a lot of people's imposter syndrome flares up. Newness, things that are happening, new challenges, new exciting things, but also things that give us a little bit of angst and a little bit of, you know, just worries and concerns and a little bit more self-doubt than we're used to feeling. So all of that will play into today and we'll take a long tour through imposter syndrome, but also touch on some real concrete skills. I always like to make a webinar as interactive as a webinar can be. What that means is that you'll be interacting with the group without even really knowing about it. So if you're sitting someplace where you have a pen and a paper, or you have a phone or you can jot down something, I mean, if you're really bold, you could put it in the chat. You don't have to, but you could be really bold, but just take some time to be participating in the content in a way that's meaningful for you. So here's your first challenge to sit and just think and consider what's the highest rank or aspiration or level that you have for your career, maybe for your job, or maybe it's for your volunteer activities. Maybe it's you want to be the next third president of FSP, or you want to be on the board of CAP. Maybe it's that you want to be chair. I hope some of my faculty on here want to be chair. What is it that you want to achieve? And just, if you're bold, write it down for yourself, put it down on a piece of paper for yourself, write it out. Now, if I could see your faces right now, if we were all in one room together, my guess is that some of you would be feeling a little bit anxious, even just from this little exercise that we're doing here. Some of you would be laughing or giggling, or if I started to call on people around the room, some of you would flat out refuse to read what you wrote down. And I'm wondering about that feeling, and I always think about this when I ask this question, what is that about? What is that nagging feeling? If you experienced a little twinge of something and you went, oh, I don't like this. I don't like this exercise. She's starting off on something I don't like already. What is that? You know, what is that? What is it that's driving that little nagging feeling? Does it feel like you're being arrogant or bragging or not humble to write that aspiration down? One of my favorite words, does it feel presumptuous or maybe ambitious? That's another bad word, isn't it? Or grandiose, it's too big, it's too aspirational. That's too bold. Or maybe it feels aggressive or pretentious. What is that little nagging feeling of if I was calling on people and I said, say it out loud, what's that nagging feeling that would make you be like, whoa, no, I'm not doing that. And why is that feeling there? I mean, what if instead of bragging or not humble or arrogant or presumptuous, what if writing down that aspiration, that goal, that big goal was just normal and it was just forecasting or strategic planning or preparing for the future or like athletes do, visualization, my kids are all swimmers. You'll probably hear me give swim analogies, but swimmers do that, they imagine winning. They put themselves into a race in their head and they imagine hitting the wall with the best time they've ever had. And that's not bragging, it's not arrogant, it's just visualization of that future. What if it was predetermination or maybe this word I also love, manifestation, but it's not, it feels like bragging, it feels a little funny when we do that. So why is it so difficult? What makes it so difficult to just speak our goals out loud, not hesitate, just firmly and with confidence, speak them out loud? What makes it so hard to step into that power, that personal power and not feel like you need to apologize for it? What's so hard about just expecting success and not having a bunch of caveats after it, just saying, yes, I intend to be department chair, for example, if some of you on here are not, or I'm gonna be president of FSP. What is so difficult about that? And as we go through the next couple of slides in the next bit of content, I want you to really think about this question, what is so difficult about that? And think about the answer for yourself and the answer for colleagues, maybe for trainees that might be bubbling up as you have conversations about this. I'm gonna tell you what I think it is. I think a lot of the nagging feelings that exist in that question and writing that down and owning that success story that you have for your future is really about imposter syndrome. We're gonna talk a lot about imposter syndrome and I'm gonna tell you about sort of what it looks like, how it shows up. I wanna start with a very, very basic understanding that I like to promote about imposter syndrome. And that is that imposter syndrome at its root is more like poor vision than it is like a disease or a condition. It's really poor vision directed inwardly. It's your inability to see your success, your talents, your strength, the wonderful things you bring to the world as well as the outside world does. So it's a disconnect. You see one thing and everybody else sees another thing. So you might've experienced this about, we'll go into the statistics, but 70% of women and 50% of men in medicine have experienced imposter syndrome at one time or another in their lives. So you might've experienced that feeling of everyone else saying you're completely awesome and you just not feeling all that awesome on the inside. We'll talk about the definition of it and talk about a few more illustrations of imposter syndrome. But fundamentally, I want you to think about this vision problem, this vision of the internal you, the seeing of you as the world sees you and how it's really at its root, a disconnect between those things. Imposter syndrome has been described, it was described in the 1970s by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. And they described imposter syndrome from a group of women that they had in therapy and in psychotherapy practices. And the experience that they described was this experience of self-perceived intellectual phoniness. Now, Pauline Clance and Imes never intended this to be called a disease or a syndrome. They really actually started out by calling it imposter phenomenon. And they were describing it from their practice of seeing high-achieving women who had this feeling that they were fakes or frauds. Now, most of you have also experienced this. If you went to medical school, you might've remembered the first day of medical school like I did, where I was sitting in a big room and the dean came in and told us how amazing our class was. I will never forget it. One of the people in your class is an Olympic gold medalist. Another played the piano in Carnegie Hall and another did this amazing thing and another did that amazing thing. And I was sitting there going, oh my gosh, I totally got the wrong letter. I am not supposed to be here. I'm not an Olympic gold medalist. I'm not a concert pianist. I'm not amazing like that. And that is what Clance and Imes were describing is that feeling of fake or fraud syndrome. The feeling of being a phony or a fake and showing up and not belonging in the room that you're in. Now, I think that that old fashioned view of imposter syndrome has been around a long time. And I see it as really changed over time. And what I think of imposter syndrome is really more deep and it's a little bit more related to the actions that we take. And I think of it more like an experience of not valuing and appreciating and honoring your own skills and talents as much as the outside world does. Like that poor vision, right? I see myself one way and the world sees me some other way. But the most important part of real true pervasive imposter syndrome is letting that false impression change the way you show up, change your actions, your behaviors, your decisions, the way that you make choices. So let me give you an example. One of the people that I coached a while ago remembers back 10 years ago to their residency. And in residency thinking that they wanted to do this high powered fellowship. But the inner critic, the nagging voice, the imposter syndrome kept telling that person, you're not good enough. They don't want people like you. That fellowship is never gonna accept you. They will never take somebody like you. And that nagging voice, she remembers it. She remembers that voice. She remembers the experience. And because of that voice, she never applied for those fellowships. Now, this person has a great career, really excellent practice, does wonderful at work, feels very successful, but does remember that as a disappointment. Remembers not acting on the desire to do that high powered fellowship by applying, never giving herself the chance to know whether she was competitive. That's imposter syndrome at its root. That is imposter syndrome, keeping someone from realizing their greatest potential. Although I would say that she has realized her greatest career. She has a terrific career, but she never will know. She never will know whether she could get that fellowship or not. It's more than just a career derail or two. Imposter syndrome has been associated with high levels of burnout, sort of dissatisfaction with life across the board, low optimism, unhappiness, disappointment. All of those things are associated with imposter syndrome. And when you work on things in the spectrum of imposter syndrome, those things get better. So people who work on the elements of imposter syndrome have less burnout and they move into a life of more satisfaction and optimism and happiness just by simply tackling the dysfunctions that are present with imposter syndrome. I really don't like the name imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome, first of all, it implies a disease or a condition that's medical, which it's clearly not. Second of all, if you think about imposter syndrome as a term, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way, because if you say I have imposter syndrome, then the correlate to that would be I am an imposter. I mean, if you have diabetes, you are a diabetic. And if you have imposter syndrome, well, you're not actually an imposter, you just think you are. So I like to use the term self under appreciation. You can say syndrome, but we should probably say phenomenon. It's not a syndrome, but a self under appreciator, someone with self under appreciation, self under appreciates. And that shows that disconnect between what other people think and what you think. If you are wondering, you can see this in little signs and symptoms, like consistently feeling like you're not good enough, not a good enough mother, not a good enough father, not a good enough pathologist, not a good enough resident, not a good enough, you can put any word in there you want, but that consistent feeling of not meeting some external bar that you may not even recognize is there. Also minimizing past accomplishments and successes. So if you're constantly trying to explain away or pretend that those accomplishments don't exist and you're embarrassed by even talking about them, that might be a little bit of a little tweak of imposter syndrome or self under appreciation. Questioning other people's confidence in you. If you have the experience where someone comes to you and says, oh my gosh, you totally should run for the board of FSP. You think, oh, I couldn't do that. I'm not ready. I'm not prepared. I'm not a good candidate. Little twinge, maybe a little twinge of self under appreciation there. And then pervasive feelings of self-doubt. Now, I always like to point out that self-doubt is actually a healthy protective force in many cases. So just because you have self-doubt, like, I mean, there are gonna be a lot of trainees who in a few short weeks are gonna be sitting at the microscope on the other side doing their first frozen. And if you have a few feelings of self-doubt, we would say that's good. That's good. You should have a little bit of self-doubt in that. In that setting, you're brand new at something and being new at something is always gonna feel that way. But if you have pervasive feelings of self-doubt that keep you from doing things and keep you from being bold and feeling confident in the setting of your sign out or in the setting of tumor boards, that's probably moving into the self-underappreciation phenomenon world instead of just the normal, healthy, protective self-doubt that we have when we do new things. So just watch for that to make sure that it's the normal level of self-doubt that comes along with being new at something. Imposter syndrome does exist on a spectrum. So at one end, you have self-underappreciation phenomenon, which is imposter syndrome. And at the other end, you have self-overappreciation syndrome. Obviously, you don't wanna be this person either. The person who has the poor vision, the other direction, like I am amazing and awesome and incredible. And the other people in the world are going, I don't think you're all that great. So you don't want that end of the spectrum either. But there is this healthy zone in the middle, which is a very great place to live, which is appreciating and honoring your skills and talents at the same time, honoring your weaknesses and realistically assessing where you have growth opportunities in a nonjudgmental way, in a way that just honors the fact that we're all learning all the time. So that zone in the middle, that green zone in the middle is really where you will be happiest. You will be healthiest. You will have the most joy and you'll bring the most to the table for your work or your trainees or for wherever else your setting is. There is a lot of stuff out there right now circulating in social media about how imposter syndrome doesn't really exist or maybe isn't what we think it is. And I think that it's really important to honor that side of the story as well. So there is a really great article from the Harvard Business Review from a couple of years ago saying, stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. And my takeaway from this article is twofold. First of all, the one part about this is we don't get to tell someone else they have imposter syndrome. So you don't get to look at somebody and say, gee, I think you have imposter syndrome. It's a self-experience, it's not an external experience. In fact, most people who feel pervasive self-doubt, no one else even knows it. And so most of the time, you'll never even know somebody's having these experiences. The caveat to that is that when women are turning things down or they feel like they don't belong, it might not be that they have imposter syndrome at all. It might be that they are being, there is active discrimination against them. And this is particularly true for populations that are underrepresented in medicine. And so if there are societal pressures that cause discrimination or bias or microaggressions, then usually any kernel of self-doubt is gonna be amplified and it's gonna look like unbelievable imposter syndrome when the root cause is actually more societal. And so that's a really important message that these articles give us as well. Now, the second thing that's circulating out there is a video from somebody giving a really nice commencement address about imposter syndrome. And the point that video makes is that a lot of this is a societal problem. And there's no question that society has sort of bolstered and helped imposter syndrome flourish in all of the ways that I just mentioned. My take on all of this though, is that there's always internal work that we can do to overcome the bad parts of imposter syndrome, like the inner critic that we're gonna talk about. At the same time, we can be social activists and we can also be working to decrease the societal stressors and pressures that we don't approve of or that we don't condone. And we can be doing both. We don't have to do one or the other, we can actually do both and we should. So that's just the point about self-doubt can be really magnified when it's combined with other things like discrimination and bias or microaggressions, marginalization, social cues. That being said, in the literature and publications about imposter syndrome, about 70% of women physicians, 50% of male physicians have experienced some element of imposter syndrome in their career. And if you really wanna start to watch for it and listen for it, you can listen for the language of imposter syndrome. You know, I was just in the right place at the right time. I was just lucky. That's that big fraud kind of feeling. I just got that opportunity because I was lucky. Or observe behaviors in people turning down great opportunities because they don't feel that they have the skills or the talents while you're looking at them saying they're the best candidate out there. So you can start to recognize a little glimpses of imposter syndrome in the way we show up ourselves and in the way people show up around us. You can also take an assessment. Glantz and Imes have an assessment. It's a very old assessment that's been around for decades and very well validated over time. It really looks at the thoughts and feelings associated with imposter syndrome. I have an assessment I use for imposter syndrome that actually looks at the tendencies of imposter syndrome more as a way to build action around them and to make changes for oneself rather than just recognizing the thoughts and feelings associated with it. The five tendencies that I call out for imposter syndrome, one of which we're gonna dive into in a little bit of depth is a very powerful, pervasive, mean-spirited, nasty inner critic. And probably most of you, most high-achieving people in medicine are extremely familiar with your inner critic and you probably know it very well. And that's just one of the prominent tendencies of imposter syndrome. Difficulty managing intense emotions, really self-management, self-regulation, difficulty containing those emotions. And I think emotions are wonderful and make people human and interesting and awesome. But if you feel that you don't manage the emotions in a way you want, that would fall into this category. So it's really more about the choice. It's not about having them. It's about how they come out of you. This is another one that's really, really prominent in medicine. And I see this all the time in people I work with, unwavering perfectionism. I know some of my faculty on this call right now would probably be raising their hand right now when we talk about perfectionism. Now, most of us think that's a skill and not a problem. If for another day, another time, we could get into how it really is not a skill. It is actually self-sabotage. But unwavering perfectionism is clearly one of the imposter syndrome tendencies. There's also other overdone behaviors that come along with perfectionism, not just perfectionism, but some other ones like fierce independence and having to do everything oneself rather than looking for help and teams. And then lastly, extreme amplification of criticism, which again, is really, really common in medicine. It's really common for us to feel very, very passionate about the criticism that we get to the point that, you know, if I asked you right now, if we were in a room together and I asked one person to raise their hand and I said, okay, look, what's the worst criticism you got 10 years ago? You could probably tell me verbatim what somebody told you. And then I said, what's the best compliment you got 10 years ago? And you'd be like, no, I got nothing. And that's one of the tendencies of imposter syndrome as well. This is just a heat map in UF Colors, I will point out, that shows how as imposter syndrome gets more intense at the top, each of the five tendencies also gets more intense as it goes over to the right. And I see this in population after population. So I do wanna dig into one of the tendencies in a little bit more detail so that you can walk away from today with a few tools, not just this feeling of, oh my gosh, there's imposter syndrome out there, it's holding me back, but, you know, some action items, some things that you can think about for yourself and some things to test out, see if they work for you. So I wanna start with one of the most important ones and that is the inner critic. Now, all of us are gonna see the inner critic in the next couple of months. I mentioned that at the beginning, that the inner critic really tends to come out in times of challenge, new challenges, when things are hard, when we're doing new things. Now, some of you in here are gonna be starting new jobs July 1st and you're gonna really feel this inner critic just bubble out of you. Some of you are gonna be training new residents and you're gonna get them in and they're gonna be looking wide-eyed and scared. And you're gonna see that inner critic judging themselves, you know, just constantly, I don't know anything, I don't know how to do this, I'm so incompetent. All those thoughts of the inner critic that will just be everywhere in July. So this will give you all something to think about, whatever setting you're in, you know, something to think about over the next month or two, watching for and mitigating for as well. So the inner critic is also called the judge. The judge is judging you, it's judging other people, it's judging circumstances, it's just judging everything. Judge, judge, judge, right and left. So I like to think about this definition of judgment. It's very interesting. This is straight from Google, you know, one of the definitions in one of those dictionaries online. What's a judgment? A judgment is to express a bad opinion of somebody, often when you think you are better than them. Now, this one just completely jars me when I think about the inner critic. The inner critic is you, it is you, it is inside your brain, it is part of your brain. And yet it is judging you by making this assumption that the inner critic is somehow better than you. It's a crazy, weird, convoluted brain thing there. And when you start to think about it, it's almost laughable. Like, oh my gosh, my inner critic is judging me and pretending to be better than me, but it's me, it's just a part of me. So you get really into this weird brain vibe there if you really start to think about what the inner critic is doing. The fact is the inner critic is doing it and the inner critic is relentless. It's causing shame, it's causing self-doubt, it makes you feel less than everybody else. It undermines you too, it makes you, it destroys self-confidence and self-esteem and just starts amplifying that feeling of self-doubt. Now it does originally way, way back in childhood come from a good place. The inner critic started as kind of guardrails for behavior way back when you were a little kid and the inner critic, that self-talk was telling you what's right, what's wrong. It was learned from adults, trusted adults, giving you those guardrails of behavior. Over time, the guardrails get narrower and narrower and the inner critic gets more and more judgmental till you realize that the inner critic's not letting you succeed because it's expecting some kind of very, very ridiculous level of perfectionism, of confidence, of whatever else your inner critic is judging you about. And it comes from a good place but it doesn't stay in a good place into adulthood. There's a lot of sort of weird popular advice about silencing the inner critic. You can find some really great stuff on blogs, ignore it all, it's not gonna help you. Things like, oh, just ignore that inner critic, just dismiss it, just tell it to shut up and go away. Well, you all know that just ignoring things doesn't actually make them go away. In fact, sometimes it makes them even more prominent. There's a great phrase, I love it. It's what you resist persists. And you can think of the inner critic that way. If you start to ignore it and tuck it away, it's probably gonna stay there and it might even bubble up and grow even bigger. Another one, fight against it, overcome it, just tell it to stop loudly and it will go away. Probably not either. Fake it till you make it, that's another really good one. And then a very strange one, befriend your inner critic, manipulate your inner critic. I'm not sure that's been proven to work either. And to be honest, none of this is gonna, there's no magic easy thing that you can do here to manage your inner critic. The real truth is it just takes time and effort and attention and practice. It takes your energy, your mental energy to recognize your inner critic and start to push it down in your life rather than letting it flourish behind the scenes. It takes building new habits. It takes creating new thought pathways and new ways of thinking and existing before you can start to really manage that inner critic. So I'm gonna talk about two things that you can do in real life, in real time today, this week, now to start to quiet that inner critic. The first one is to expose the inner critic and the second one is to distance from it. So first of all, the inner critic, it exists and thrives by lurking behind the scenes. So if all of your inner critic thoughts were written out for you to visualize and see, or you had to verbalize them, it would be less powerful than it is by just having a kind of running reel behind the scenes in the back of your head that you don't really think about, but it's just back there. So one of the very first things you can do, and I'm gonna urge you to just do this for like 30 seconds take a piece of paper and write down a couple of phrases that your inner critic says. So just take a minute to do that. You won't have to share them, you don't have to tell them to anybody else. Most of us have some pretty consistent ones that show up for us pretty often. So you might have a couple that are happening all the time that the inner critic is constantly telling you. Right before we started, I had to clean off the back of my desk because it was a real mess. It was a real mess. I made it look nice for you all. But one of my inner critic phrases is always, oh my gosh, you have such a mess all around you. I mean, constantly, I'm hearing that all the time. And it's true. I mean, it's got an element of truth. I do have a mess behind me. Actually, it's now on the floor, not behind me because I just kind of swept everything out onto the floor. But my inner critic talks about that and it criticizes me and judges me for having a mess behind me. And your inner critic probably has some things that it picks on as well. So just by starting to write it down and think about it, and even if you wanted to go further and log and track it, you're starting to identify it. You're starting to call it out and you're starting to make that inner critic be out in public rather than really behind the scenes in your brain, kind of guiding you in an inappropriate and unpleasant way. The second thing you can do, which is kind of fun, is to name your inner critic. Mine's named Alice. I apologize to anyone on the call who's named Alice. I do occasionally, when I speak, have an Alice and I have to publicly apologize to them, but she really is named Alice. I actually bought Alice from Amazon a couple of years ago. I actually thought I was getting something way more interesting than what I got. I got this really weird Halloween character thing with giant weird hands, but I do travel with her. She goes in that suitcase when I give a workshop or a talk somewhere and TSA likes it. They always open my suitcase. It's probably those weird hands. But if you name your inner critic, you're actually giving voice to it in a way that makes it much more present. It's like calling it out and not having it be this super secret thing in the back of your head, but rather saying, oh, yes, hello, Alice, I hear you. That's what that is. That's that nagging feeling about the mess behind me. That's Alice talking. And you can start to really call it out. The second tool is also very interesting and that is distancing yourself from that inner critic because the inner critic thrives by installing these skewed negative interpretations into your actual identity. So your inner critic will try to convince you. Now, my inner critic would say, you are such a disorganized mess. Now, that's my inner critic trying to give me an identity instead of saying, oh, wow, things are disorganized around you right now. My inner critic's trying to tell me that I am a disorganized mess instead of just having an experience of being disorganized right now. So I like to think of this as DNA and RNA. This really only works really well with pathologists. It doesn't always work with non-pathologists. But if you think about DNA, it is your identity. It's your true being. And RNA is emotions. It's fleeting. It comes, it goes. It's supposed to come and go. So if you can move your inner critic conversations from identity over to feelings, you can change the impact that that inner critic voice has on you. So here are some examples. I am lazy becomes I feel lazy. Now, it's a lot different to say, oh, wow, I feel kind of lazy than it is to say, wow, I am lazy. See the difference there? It's a difference between identity and experience. I am disorganized. Ooh, I feel disorganized. I feel disorganized is changeable. Like tomorrow, I might not feel disorganized. I am disorganized implies that that is me. That is the fundamental me. And the inner critic wants you to feel like it is all your identity. And so, and that is truly, it's very, very difficult to get past that. So, you know, just speaking to the trainees right now, if we have trainees here right now, July 1st, you're gonna go and you're gonna sit behind a microscope and you're gonna be making decisions. And your inner critic's gonna tell you that it's gonna say things like, wow, you are a terrible pathologist. You are so incompetent. Or I might say, I am incompetent. I know nothing. I am terrible at this. It's not true. We've trained you and you're excellent. You have a great fund of knowledge. You are highly skilled. You have, we are so proud of you, but you will be new and you will not have experience and you will feel like you don't have the confidence to sign things out. And you will feel like this is all new and that's because it is. So, if you can change that narrative away from I am to I feel, you can realize that what we already know is that in a year or two years or three years, those things will all be gone and you will feel competent and you will feel confident and you will feel like a good pathologist because you always were, but you needed to grow into the feeling. And so, I want you to really think about this if you're starting a new job or if you have trainees who are starting and you wanna listen to their inner critic language as they look at slides with you and as they work with you, or you have a new pathologist starting in your group and you're the mentor. Really start to notice those being words versus feeling words. And you can actually really help people with their inner critic voice. Now, here's a little tip. You can't go up to somebody and say, wow, it sounds like you have imposter syndrome. I'm really worried about your inner critic. But what you can do is start to help them question that voice. So, here's an example. My daughter, who's a swimmer, big swimmer, she swims all the time. One time, a couple of months, a couple of years ago, she was sitting on the couch after practice and she said, ah, mom, I'm so lazy. And I was like, ooh, that sounds like an inner critic statement to me. And here's what you can do when you hear somebody say something like that. You can say what I said to her. You know, that's really interesting. That's just not my experience of you. My experience of you is that you're swimming like crazy. You're putting a ton of energy. That just doesn't sound like lazy to me. Is there something else that you're feeling? And she said, ah, I'm just feeling really tired. I was like, well, that's probably because you just came home from practice. But you can help friends with this. You can help your colleagues and friends when they say, I am a terrible pathologist. You can say, you know, that's just not my experience of you. I think you're pretty awesome. I wonder what you're feeling right now that might be having you think that. And you can help people to illustrate or to pull out that identity versus feeling. This is really about rewriting your narrative. It's really about rewriting those inner critic statements to represent something different, to represent that this is a temporary experience and not becoming your identity. All of this work in imposter syndrome inner critic work is about rewiring a mindset. It's about rewiring and rethinking the way you think. It's about not letting your inner critic pull you into deficit thinking with this all or none or shame, doubt, undermining you. It's about really thinking differently. It's about thinking about abundance and wisdom and options and possibilities and fulfillment. It's about looking at that tree as having all the green leaves instead of just looking at it as having no green leaves and dead dull branches. It's about looking at things from a different perspective. So you can do this exercise every day. You can think about what are you gonna manifest today? What experience am I gonna manifest today? I'm gonna manifest confidence today. I'm gonna manifest that. I'm just gonna feel confident today. And if I feel a little bit not so confident, I'm gonna remember that I'm learning and growing and that that's just part of my existence as a human and that I will always be learning and growing. So you can practice that and you can practice manifesting the feeling that you wanna feel. While you do that, you're also telling that inner critic to kind of stop talking. And it's gonna help you to overcome that inner critic, whatever yours is named and however yours shows up. So we've talked a little bit about imposter syndrome showing up at work and how it looks. And then we've talked a lot about that destructive inner critic and I've given you two tools to try out and play with and I hope you will. And you can email me if you do. And I know we're gonna talk more in the panel discussion as well. So we're very glad to be able to take your questions and talk to the panelists about some of this work as well. Wow, thank you, Dr. Hahn. That was really, really powerful. So I thank you and also the panel of FSP board members and they are all great leaders. And I'm gonna ask people to go around to introduce each other. So we'll start with Dr. Zhai, Dr. Kresnik and Dr. Henderson-Jackson. But before we go that, we also want to thank Ms. Amber Nace who works for the FSP who coordinated, organized this webinar. So let's start with Dr. Zhai. Please tell us who you are and also let us know what's your big takeaway from this conversation and when we're waiting for other people, everybody else that is attending this to send us the questions. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Jim Zhai. I'm the Director of Research at Mayo Clinic, Florida and Professor of Surgical Pathology. And I want to thank you, Dr. Han. This is absolutely one of the best seminar or lectures I heard. And thank you, Dr. Bui, for organizing FSP. It's a great organization. And also I'm the immediate past president for FSP. It's such a wonderful, wonderful organization. I have this book, it's a very unique book. It's not only you read this, they offer the tools, they offer the actionable items. And like, you know, you're facing the author directly, they tell you what to do, it's wonderful. And you don't want to call it syndrome, that's okay, but it is real. It is real, it's more common than we realize, actually. I have that, no question. But reading this, oh my gosh, from time to time, I have that. So, and thank you for offering the tools. And we need to recognize, like a lot of things, if you don't recognize, you cannot fight, right? You recognize and find your own individualized tool, make big difference in your life, in your career, in the organization. It's just wonderful. I can go on and on. It's just, Han Zhouxi, thank you so much. It's helpful and I really enjoy the presentation, the book too. Thank you. Dr. Cresack. Hi, I'm Jessie Cresack. I'm also at the University of Florida with Dr. Hunt. I am the director of anatomic pathology. So I think the biggest takeaway for me in the book is learning how to talk to yourself, which sounds so funny. I mean, I don't know, we have some people who talk a lot to themselves, like literally out loud. One of our secretaries all the time. And then we have others, you just talk to yourself in your head, but changing the way that you talk to yourself and just rewording what you just said. So stopping it and recognizing, like, gosh, I'm an idiot. Well, are you Jessie? And then I get to stop and think, no, there was reasons I just did what I did. And, you know, come at it from a different direction. Wonderful. Thank you. Dr. Henderson-Jackson. Hi, I am one of the pathologists that works with Dr. Bui at Malfoy Cancer Center. I trained here at USF and now I'm a program director here at USF. And I'm one of the board members of FSP. And I just love my job. And which I was able to incorporate the love of pathology with the love of teaching and education. With Dr. Hunt's book, one thing I take away is that this is a continuous process and that, yes, I am a project that will be worked upon continuously because these are things I've dealt with and things I continue to deal with. And I like the examples and tools because then I can provide my trainees with other tools that they can use with the things that they are experienced and how to be more happy with myself, happy with what I do, excited to accept praise and what I do. That was very hard growing up and hard to do and know that, yes, I'm not perfect. And I think the key thing is knowing that this is something you have to work and it's a habit that I had to get out of and it's not unachievable. It can be done. Wonderful. And Dr. Hunt, the question is how you get interested in this topic and what triggered you to start working on this book? Okay, so my original interest in imposter syndrome came from working with high-achieving women and having to have the same conversation over and over and over again with each of them and recognizing just how pervasive these feelings of self-doubt were and how it was truly holding people back from their aspirations, holding them back from even applying for the things that they wanted. I had one person that I worked with in this imposter syndrome program who really wanted to be the division chief. She's not in pathology. She wanted to be the division chief. She wanted it so badly. And I said, well, have you told anyone? Oh, no, I would never tell anyone. It's like, well, I mean, how the heck are you gonna be division chief if you won't even tell anyone you want to be? Oh, I couldn't do that. That would be presumptuous. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to shake you right now. And that kind of story happened over and over again. By the way, she did not tell anyone. She did not apply. Somebody else got it. They were a total abject failure. Six months later, that person was fired and she finally got bold enough to say to somebody, I really actually want to do that. And she's been in the job for the last eight years and done miraculously, amazingly well, right? So thankfully fate stepped in and quashed her inner critic. And the next time around she was bold. But that kind of story happened over and over again in the women I was working with. And it really made me recognize that we need more, we need more conversation about this. We need to keep the focus on this. And I really truly believe that this contributes to the gender leadership gap. And so for me, it's kind of a lifelong mission to be working towards reversing the gender leadership gap. And this is part of it. The book was the outcome of the program, which I just could not scale up big enough to kind of work with the number of people that I thought needed the information. Wonderful. So now you are in the leadership position as a department chair. So can you share with us how do you do professional development to help faculty men and women to unleash their power, reach their potential? It's a great question. And there's a couple of different things that I subscribe to. And my faculty will probably notice a little bit of this just from their experiences. I probably didn't tell them this. It's just been happening in the background. But I personally like to do what I call GPS leadership. And the reason I call it that is because we pick a destination or you tell me, and I will sometimes ask my faculty, like, what do you want? That first question, what do you wanna be? And it can be like, whoa, I'm sure Jesse had that experience. Like, I'm not telling you what I wanna be. Like their first day we met probably. We pick the destination and then we don't worry about the roadmap to get there. But we create experiences that will give you the competencies that that next level will need. And so it's kind of like you pick a kind of generic destination in terms of leadership and then you build the portfolio of experiences that would support you getting that next level job. And that's one of the key ways I think you can do faculty development in order to kind of reach the potential with the experiences that you would need when you arrive there. Very good. And at the same time, you're also parents. How do you do parenting? Use the skills you talk about in your book. Oh my gosh. Are you kidding me? My kids are like, stop that coaching. Don't be coaching me like that. They don't appreciate it at all. I think one of the things with, especially with my youngest child, cause I'm so, I noticed this so much, is that I really do try to help her squash her inner critic. And when I see it rise up, I just like, whack it and try to help her recognize that that is not serving her in her goals. It's not pushing her forward to have a nasty inner critic criticizing her. Now, some people worry about this work with their kids in particular, because it feels not humble. And that can be cultural. It can be family-wise. It can be also just how you're brought up. I have this slide that I didn't put in here, but I like it. And it says, stop hiding behind the humble wall. Being humble does not mean that you're not proud. It means that you recognize all the parts of you. It means that you recognize your strengths and you recognize your weaknesses with a realistic and humble approach. So humble doesn't mean that you can't be proud of your achievements. It just means that you also have to be recognizing that you are one of society and you have all of the same flaws and all of the same strengths that other people in society have. So it's more like self-compassion than it is self-denigration. So being humble does not mean hiding. It does not mean diminishing yourself or not speaking proudly of what you've done. It just means recognizing you are a flawed human with great strengths. And that's all true, all at once. Wonderful. So teaching your kids, that's important, is important too. I do have a 19-year-old son that I'm working on the humble part with. It's not working very well so far. So you work with one on the humble part, work on the other one, be more generous. Exactly. It's like, come on, the two of you together in the middle would be great. Very good. I'm gonna ask the panelists, do they have any specific questions they would like to ask Dr. Hunt? Yeah, so what, when you have a young faculty member, like a junior faculty member who is brilliant, energetic, trying to do all the things at one time and just feels this weighted pressure and feels like they're not succeeding because they're trying to do all of the things, how do you approach that person? Another wonderful question and one that comes up frequently, it comes up with residents and trainees too, right? Where they wanna be able to do it all. There's different approaches. Number one approach, or not number one in order, but things you can talk to people about is that you probably can't do everything all at once. I mean, just technically, there's too many things to do. So it's good to think about priorities and weighing things at different times in your life that are gonna become more important and less important. It's never imbalance, it's not work-life balance, it's work-life imbalance. And it happens like this and it goes back and forth and it changes over time. So there's periods of your career where you're gonna prioritize learning clinical. There's periods of your career where you'll prioritize more on the research and you have to be nimble enough to kind of say, oh yeah, I can't do all of it all the time. I need to prioritize one over the other based on the time of my career. The other part of it, I think that's important too, is to help people identify what bar they're holding themselves to. And to really, to talk to people about like, what standard are you using? Because it doesn't really compute with my standard of where I think you should be. So for example, when new faculty come in, I do tell them this, I'm sorry, you probably won't like this, but I'm like, you should be showing all your cases. You should be showing most of them. It's normal to show us 50, 60, 70% of your cases. That's normal. You don't have to try not to do that because we expect that. That's part of our nurturing you and growing you and helping you. And besides, if you don't show us anything, we feel like you don't like us. Like, what's our purpose here? But giving people permission to have a bar that's different from the one in their head. All of our trainees have learned from us, faculty, and they look at us and say, wow, Jessie Krusek never shows anything to anybody. She's amazing. That's my standard for perfection. And they think that they should be there July 1st when they leave their residency. And it took you and me. I mean, I still show Jessie my cases. Okay, let's just be honest. I'm like, look at this slide and hold my hand for a minute. But they don't see that. They don't see the bar as our bar. They see it as this crazy bar that's unidentifiable. So you can help people to also identify what standard they're holding themselves to. Right. So when we talk about, we ask people, what do you want to achieve? And it's easier to say, I want to have this leadership role. I want to be a professor. I want to be the president of IFSP. How do you balance happiness, success? How do you balance that? Because not everybody will be the IFSP president. Not everybody will be the department chair. You will see a lot of brilliant pathologists and they just have different pathways that how do you communicate with our junior faculty and craft this happy trip, leading them to a place where happy joy of life is actually the core. Because at your bio and what is most important is you find great joy in helping people to thrive in their career and find joy and passion in their work. How can you coach people to get to their happy place? One of my favorite phrases that I heard somebody say and you'll appreciate this is, you know that phrase, someday we'll laugh about this. Have you guys all heard that? Oh, someday we'll laugh about this. And he goes, why wait? Let's laugh now. And I think that a lot of us are so tuned in to kind of the next goal. Like I will be happy when I become a division chief. I will be happy when I get promoted. That we forget to just experience today as the biggest joy. And we're putting all of our hopes in this future destination, which isn't really even a destination. It's something that we've made up. And we forget to just get the joy out of today and really just get the happy out of today. Today should be more important than tomorrow. I know we were trained to the opposite. Our parents taught us the opposite. Our academic career taught us the opposite. But in reality, today's the only guarantee. This is what you got. You got today. And if we can get more joy out of right now, right here today, whether it's, you know, just laughing with each other for a minute in the hall or sitting, I have this, I have an awesome resident that I've been with. And I'm like every day, I'm like, you know what? I love working with her. I like sitting there with her. It makes me happy to talk about slides with her. And that, if I can focus on that joy instead of, oh my gosh, I'll be so happy when I get done with my cue. Well, really? Will I? Because there's just going to be another case tomorrow. But I can be happy sitting with her and just truly enjoy the dialogue and the interchange and say, yep, this made me happy today. Wonderful. So now I'm going to give our panelists, each person to say a final words. What's your advice to your younger self? Because you're all quite accomplished. What would you tell your younger self today? And on this particular topic, we'll start with Dr. Jackson, Dr. Kresek, and then Dr. Tsai and Dr. Hunt. Well, today what I would tell my younger self is it is okay to not be correct in everything. And it's okay to enjoy each moment of your life. Because as Dr. Hunt said, it was a mission that was me at the time determined to do. This is the next, this is the next. I am very mapped out. My family, my husband, my kids even. Mommy is very, very specific. She has things. This is what's going to happen. This is what's a go and go. But then just really enjoying the times that I have with them and enjoying the process, the journey of getting there. That's what I would tell my younger self. Wonderful. Dr. Kresek? Yeah, so, you know, it talks a lot about the book and the talk talks a lot about perfectionism. And I didn't experience that so much myself as I did the fierce independence part. I mean, I just had no idea how to ever ask somebody else for help, how to ever rely on anybody, you know? And I mean, that stems way back. So it's a hard thing to change. And so I would look back and tell my younger self, you know, like there are people you can rely on. You can use your village. I, in fact, asked one of my colleagues on this call to go do a frozen that I got called for during this call, you know, and in other times I'd be like, how can I do it at the same time? Maybe they won't notice if I run and I do it. And instead I was like, could you please cover this for me and not have to feel so bad about it? So that's one of the things I would look back and tell myself. Thank you. Dr. Tsai? Thank you. Short. Yes, we can. Yes, I can. So many times you doubt yourself and probably miss the opportunity and look at yourself and recognize that is a potential. I think that's the theme and the title of the book, Unlock the Authentic Yourself. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. You probably have to overcome a lot of your inner voice when you decided to run for the president-elect for the College of American Pathologists. Now you're endorsed by the nomination committee. Your name is on the ballot. So best wishes. Thank you. And Dr. Hunt. Thank you. So I'll give you, I will give you a phrase that somebody put on the insight wall at one of the workshops I did for residents in the last year. And I just, it really hit me. It was a resident who put it up and she wrote this and I thought, oh yeah, that's the best advice ever. The challenges you're experiencing today are the things you dreamed about a few years ago. I was like, wow. So even appreciate the challenges. Wonderful. Wow. Our time is up. And this is such a insightful, inspirational and nurturing type of lecture. It's like the chicken soup for our soul. So we're gonna record this. We're gonna post it online. And this is gonna be enduring educational material for all FSP members. And it's such a honor and privilege to be with you all. And thank you everyone, speaker, panelists, Amber and everybody who is attending. Have a great rest of the noon and take care. Bye bye. Thanks everybody.

Florida Society of Pathologists

Dr. Jennifer Hunt

imposter syndrome

authentic self

inner critic

self-awareness

leadership development

healthcare professionals

personal growth

professional growth