Professionalism - a white supremacist scam for your imposter syndrome

Lauren: 00:00:00

Did you know that professionalism is bullshit? So we're told that in order to survive in the workplace, we have to be, quote, unquote, professional.

And while maybe that's true to an extent, most of it's bullshit. And we'll talk about why. All right, here we go. I'm gonna pretend I'm pushing record. Cause that feels right. Okay, I'm pressing record. Boop.

Hi, everybody. I'm Lauren Howard. I go by L2. Yes, you can call me L2. Everybody does. It's a long story.

It's actually not that long a story, but we'll save it for another time. Welcome to Different Not Broken, which is our podcast on exactly that. That there are a lot of people in this world walking around feeling broken.

And the reality is you're just different, and that's fine. So I would like to say that we go through the rules every week so that I can remind other people of them.

But to be fair, it's mostly to remind myself, because I don't ever know what day it is. So, first is we're going to curse a lot. That's going to happen. Second, we tell a lot of stories. It's going to happen all the time.

The third is there's going to be a lot of dead dad jokes. It's like 94% of my personality. And last but not least, anything that comes out of your face is appropriate here.

You do not have to censor or filter yourself at all. We are talking about professionalism. As a company, we have kind of accidentally been very successful on threads. That was never the plan. That was.

I don't know what. We've never had a particularly large marketing budget because we really insist on paying our clinicians, which is like, a wild concept.

But, like, I always knew that I was gonna have to basically hoof it for marketing and that there wasn't gonna be a whole lot of money to go around for it. But I certainly don't think.

I thought that it was gonna come from this platform that barely existed when we started, and it really has, which is amazing. But every now and then, we get an influx of new people who, like, don't know how this works. And you can always tell when they're new.

And so they'll see me saying something that they perceive to be, quote, unquote, unprofessional. And every now and then, somebody feels like they have something to say about it. Right.

Sometimes it's me mouthing off at Elon Musk, or sometimes it's me firing back at people who are being bullies or. Or being unkind.

There's this idea that if you work in mental health, that people get to abuse you because you aren't also a human who has autonomy and independent thought. And so sometimes people are really, really crass or really unkind.

And my feeling about it is, if you'll do it to me when I'm really loud and vocal and have a large following on the Internet, then you're certainly going to do it to the people like my patients, who are really fighting hard to figure out where their place is in this world and how they're allowed to exist and how to navigate through the world. And is it necessarily my job to tell you to stuff it? No. But is it also within my.

I don't know if rights is the right word, but, like, am I allowed to stand up to you and tell you that I think you're wrong and you're harming people? Like, yes.

And if I'm the target, like, all right, it has happened a number of times where I will say something that is not only pro vaccine, but, like, very clearly anti.

Anti vaxxer, or I'll say something about the fascists in the White House or whatever, and somebody will basically respond with, you know, this is not very professional. As a mental health professional, you should make everybody feel welcome in your space, and you should not exclude people based on their beliefs.

And I'm like, mm, okay, well, as a human being, you should not exclude people based on your beliefs, but your entire belief system is built on excluding people based on their beliefs. So another story for another day. But there's this question of, like, can you be a mental health professional and.

Or can you be a professional, let's put it that way, and be very vocal about what's right and wrong.

And to be clear, our political setup right now is not a question of budgets and political ideologies and disagreements on fiscal responsibility versus social investment. Like, that's not what our political issues are right now.

They are fundamentally, should we participate in the open dehumanization of everybody who is not a mostly white male, but occasionally some white women? Or should we not. Should we actively fight against that? And so if you come to me and say, I like Toyota better than I like Hyundai, or Hyundai.

I think I was trying to say Honda. And it came out both ways. I probably should not have an opinion on you about that. Not at least one that affects the nature of our relationship.

But if you come to me and say, I support that fascist in the White House, but I Don't think that makes me a fascist. I've got news for you. You are a fascist.

And people sometimes get offended by that and say that it's not professional to be very direct with people about how their ideologies are harmful and they harm my patients, and they harm my patients access to care and they harm what we're trying to build.

And every time that comes up, I think really hard about it and about whether it is improper to be both vocal about our belief systems and also vocal about welcoming people in for mental health treatment whenever possible.

And I think a lot about the fact that there are people on the Internet who do not feel welcome because we are very vocal against their belief structures and how that might interfere with their ability to perceive us as unbiased in their request for care. Which boils down to, you cannot be both politically engaged and provide mental health treatment.

And after thinking about it for a long time, I have reaffirmed that that is bullshit and that there is nothing that makes me, quote, unquote, less professional. And I'll explain why.

In fact, it makes people trust us more because we have been very vocal about the fact that we do not support what is happening to a lot of people. In a lot of ways. I fundamentally take issue with the idea of professionalism as a whole structure. I think we should throw the whole thing out.

Professionalism is a white supremacist trope that was developed to create an environment that was habitable for 45 year old white men and no one else, because no one else was supposed to be there.

Maybe 50 year old white men, occasionally 55 year old white men, but it was designed to make everybody fit into that box as quickly as possible and as closely as possible so that we can take all of the variation out of workplace performance and we can otherize people who are not that. And so when someone comes to me and says, this is unprofessional, cool, I'm fine with that.

Because the version of professionalism that they're aspiring to is not something that we care about because it excludes most of the people who come to us for services. It excludes most of the people, most of the women, especially women, non binary people, marginalized identities, especially black women.

It excludes all of them from the work environment. It is an ableist concept.

It means that if you can't use our facilities exactly the way they are, and if we have to accommodate you that you don't fit into the box and that's why you're not employable, it ensures that Differing ideas don't make their way in and don't ruffle feathers. We don't make waves.

It perpetuates this idea of the difficult woman, which I will talk about I'm sure plenty of times, which is really what we just hurl at women who are not sitting down, shutting up and taking notes. The idea in and of itself was created because you weren't supposed to be here.

In the same way that I was not supposed to be in a math class when I was 16. You weren't supposed to be here.

And unless you can become something you're not, which is this 45 year old cishet white man who is the standard by which we judge all things. I'd love to say it's just our workplaces, but go look at some medical research while you're at it. Unless you can be that, you're not welcome here.

If you can do the job, and you can do it with kindness and empathy, you're self included in that you're a professional. It doesn't mean wearing a tie, it doesn't mean pointy shiny shoes, it doesn't mean 6 inch stilettos for women.

It doesn't mean tight skirts, it doesn't mean hard pants. It doesn't mean any of those things.

Doing a job, doing it well, and showing up with empathy and kindness for the people who you have to interact with all day, because most jobs require us to interact with somebody makes you a professional. The rest of it is fluff they've built out.

The rest of it is the way that they point out that you are not the standard and we are not aspiring to be the standard. So this is a very accepting place. We love you just how you are. You don't need to change anything about yourself to to be here.

As long as you're kind and you have empathy toward other people, you're welcome here. We're not gonna change anything about you, right? We talk about that all the time. Still true. Still a hundred percent true.

So knowing that, understanding that and accepting that, the next thing I'm about to say is gonna bother you and you're not gonna understand it. And I promise, I promise we'll get there. But I also need you to know that you're not that special. Let me explain.

If you're anything like me, anytime you're put into a new situation, or in a situation where you feel like you have a deficit of knowledge, sometimes even a situation where you're like the expert in the room, there's this voice in the back of your head or a little person on your shoulder that says that you don't belong there, that you have failed your way into getting here. They're gonna figure out that you're fraud. They're gonna know all the things about you.

They're going to know from the second that they talk to you that you don't deserve to be here, that this isn't a room made for you. What kind of audacity do you have to think that you belong here? We call that imposter syndrome. There are some other words for it as well.

There's also a question as to whether it exists because we put unreasonable amounts of pressure on people and expect them to perform in ways that have never been human. And so that we always feel that we're at a deficit. But imposter syndrome is a thing and I think most people experience it.

And quite frankly, the only people I've experienced who don't experience it are the ones who have failed into where they are. Like the ones who didn't actually do the work. But the reason I say that you're not that special. You are.

But the reason I say you're not that special is you would have to have some kind of immeasurable favor from the universe to be permitted to fail that many times to get where you are. And I promise you don't have that.

You actually got where you are by merit of your own work and maybe seizing some opportunities that got tossed your way. But the universe does not like you that much. And sure it likes you.

I'm a big believer that the universe is working in everybody's favor if they have good intentions.

But it doesn't like you so much that you're just going to get to fail over and over and keep dusting yourself off and being hoisted up from it, even though you've done none of the actual work to get there. I do this all the time. So I ran a practice for about 10 years.

I took it from being, I think there were what, six patients When I started to a multi site operation, we were making something like a million dollars a year per provider, which never happened. I had no idea what I was doing when I started. I just jumped in headfirst because that's kind of my jam. Actually. I don't.

I think I very much expected to fail. I think actually I don't know that I had any expectations at all. I just expected that we would just keep doing things until we had to do things.

And I really genuinely 100% thought that that job was A fluke. It was my dad's practice, so I definitely got the job via nepotism. I'm one of the OG Nepo babies.

Except, like, for the fact that I worked really, really hard. You know, I probably said this before, but my dad was an incredible psychiatrist and a shit businessman.

And he never should have been allowed near a checkbook or a credit card. And because of it, it made me really good at business. And it also made me really resilient in figuring out how to survive in business.

But I just assumed that because I learned everything by sweat equity, because I rolled up my sleeves and just figured out how to do things, that none of the things that I had ever learned were of any value, that when I went to go work someplace else, they would be like, oh, you don't know how to do anything the right way, therefore you don't know how to do anything. And I very much thought that when that job ended, I would never find another job. I wouldn't have any skills.

I would have to go back to entry level someplace.

I'd have to get a $12 an hour job, despite the fact that I had been making much more than that because people were going to look at my resume and go, you ran your dad's practice. That doesn't count. Did you know that when you write a resume, there is no line on it to say that your parents owned the place?

Like, you just get to name the place. Like, you don't have to put an asterisk on it and be like, by the way, this was my dad's.

You just get to write a resume and say the place and what you did there. And then the rest is like, kind of not relevant. I didn't realize that at the time.

Taking that a step further, I'll bet you that there are no asterisks on your resume. The things that you put on your resume are things you actually did.

Even though if you're like me, your instinct is to say, well, okay, yes, I did build a multi site clinic, but we were kind of just making it up the whole time. We thought maybe there would be another place that could use a site. The opportunity popped up, so we took it. It didn't have a whole lot of planning.

Was there a second building with a second door? Did you open it? Then you did that thing. No caveats to that. You did the thing.

And odds are everything on your track record that you try to downplay because you know the reality of it. You were there for it. Nobody cares about that. Did you do the thing. Did you do the thing?

The universe loves you, but it does not love you enough to keep giving you credit for things that you did not do. You worked hard to get where you are.

You will continue to work hard in whatever is next and you should not talk yourself out of those accomplishments. And please be clear, I'm talking as much about myself or to myself as I am to you.

You should not talk yourself out of those accomplishments because you were there for them and you know the real details. There's a whole bunch of your career that's not going to end up on your resume. It's a one page document, maybe a two page document.

If you're like extra wordy, you're not going to tell people what you had for lunch every day.

The universe does not like you so much that it created an environment where you're going to keep getting more without having done anything to earn it. And maybe most importantly, the only people that actually happens to are not worried about being imposters. They think they deserve to be here.

So if you're worried about it, it's probably not you. Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love you mean.

One important thing that I feel like maybe all of our listeners should know is that the number of tabs you have open is between you and whatever your higher power is. And that is nobody's business. I'm just saying that including your spouse who probably judges you for it. Mine certainly does.

Every time he asks me how many tabs I have open, it is like a personal invective. And he insists that's why my computer doesn't work. And I think it's just because my computer is stupid, stupid, stupid.