Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
Lisa Orbé-Austin, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and executive coach, with a focus on career advancement and leadership development. She is a co-founder and partner of Dynamic Transitions Psychological Consulting, a career and executive coaching consultancy, where she works mostly with high potential managers and executives. She earned her doctorate in Counseling Psychology from Columbia University. Her views about career advancement, job transitions, leadership, and diversity & inclusion are regularly sought by the media and she has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, NBC News, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Refinery29, Business Insider, and Insight Into Diversity. She has also been honored as a Top Voice on LinkedIn in the area of Job Search and Careers. Dr. Orbé-Austin recently gave a TEDx talk entitled "The Impostor Syndrome Paradox."
She regularly consults with organizations in the private sector, non-profits, and educational institutions in supporting their employees and senior leadership teams to address gender bias, diversity, equity, & inclusion concerns, leadership development, effective communication, team cohesion, and managing conflict. Her practice also consults to universities on the reorganization & evaluation of their career centers to enhance their efficacy and metrics, in order to improve service delivery, data analysis, and student career outcomes.
Her book, Own Your Greatness: Overcome Impostor Syndrome, Beat Self-Doubt, and Succeed in Life (Ulysses Press, 2020) co-authored with her partner, Dr. Richard Orbé-Austin, was released in April 2020.
In this episode…
Do you feel like you're a fraud, a sham, a pretender to your own throne? Are you sure that any day now someone is going to find you out and expose you?
In this episode of An Unconventional Life, Dr. Lisa Orbé-Austin shares her traumatizing doctoral experience with Dr. Russell Strickland. Having a difficult advisor always makes the dissertation journey longer and more perilous. But having an absentee advisor? An advisor who then threatens to sue you when you finally switch to another advisor? For Dr. Orbé-Austin, the experience added two years to her doctoral studies and sent her careening into a dead-end job that was only tenuously connected to her degree. Fortunately, an epiphanous moment at work jolted her into leaving that job behind, without knowing what might lie ahead. This leap is faith was rewarded with a more fulfilling job, that gave her time to grow her private practice, which motivated her to grow a vibrant community through public appearances, speaking, and writing.
As Dr. Orbé-Austin put it, "there are a lot of really great opportunities for academics." You simply have to get out there, "just really be human," and the opportunities will flow.