Guide, Not Guru. A Mindset Shift to Overcome Impostor Syndrome

The tightrope stretched taut across the canyon, a single streak of black against a clear blue sky. On one side, Goo Roo prepared to cross the chasm on her bike, without a balance bar above or a safety net below, in case the worst happened. As the waves crashed against the jagged rocks hundreds of feet below, she pedaled her bike slowly onto the narrow wire... and glided across without breaking a sweat.

Now imagine that someone told you to watch a video of Goo Roo as your how-to guide for riding a bike. Crazy right? Yet we do this so often without realising it. It's like a startup founder with a prototype looking to Elon Musk for guidance. While Musk may have a lot to offer, the canyon between the founder's exploratory steps and Elon's trillion dollar empire is too vast for the learnings to be directly applicable.

Elon is a guru. What our founder needs is a guide. There's a reason we learn to ride bikes the way we do - with training wheels and an older sibling holding the handlebars, as we try to pedal without toppling over. We learn best from people in similar positions to ourselves.

So next time your brain questions whether you're qualified to share what you know, give yourself permission to be a guide, not a guru. A guide is just another learner who's a little further along the path. You may have just taken off your training wheels, but you damn sure know how to hold a handlebar.