Lesson: Overcoming Impostor Syndrome with Alicia Liu

Step #8 Goals: To make a change, set a goal, work toward it, and establish new behavior patterns

Lift is a goal setting app that allows people to form better habits and work towards goals that they want to achieve. Whether that's exercising more, or flossing more or calling your parents more, anything that they want to work towards, they can use Lift to track their progress, set those goals and work towards them.

I started using Lift when I joined the company. So for example, flossing. I'm actually terrible at flossing to the extent that I almost didn't want to put flossing as one of my goals on Lift because I was afraid that people would see that I never flossed. But the thing was, as soon as I put it on there, I was like "Oh no people are going to see," so I did it every day and now I don't even need to track it on Lift anymore because now I do it every day, its just automatic. I just formed that habit. I think that's really powerful. Obviously flossing is a small thing and we are working on much harder goals, like really changing your diet or exercising if you've never exercised before. These are really, really hard things to change.

But I think that what's really, really special about Lift is that once you change some things, like one of our users, they dropped 10 pounds. That spurred them to go on to learn different languages. That is the power of just changing how you think about yourself. There's this other book called Fixed Versus Growth Mindsets. When you have a growth mindset, then you feel like things are changeable about yourself and you are going to work towards making those changes and attaining the goals that you want, so Lift helps you do that.

I was actually pretty wary of like self-improvement as a category because I felt like a lot of those things were very gimmicky. But at the time that I was looking for new opportunities I was definitely looking for something that was personally meaningful to me. Because, for a long time I was working on things that, they sounded like they would make money. I worked in Enterprise software for quite some time, and you work on these problems but they weren't personally meaningful to me.

So after a while of doing that, I think you get this realization that there should be more meaning in your work. So that's the realization I came to, and Lift did that really well. Some of the ways that therapy can help body dysmorphia, it can also help Imposter Syndrome, like cognitive behavior therapy for example. It just gets you to reset, like "I think this, but is what I think really true? Are there other ways of looking at this?"