Let’s take it back to when you were a kid and you had a piggy bank. Mine was named Porky, maybe yours was Arnold.

Now, remember riding your bike to the market a few times a week. Every so often you’d see some change on the ground in front of the phone booth or the front door. Someone had dropped a few dimes and pennies, maybe a quarter.

So you’d put those coins into your pocket and, when you got home, you’d empty them into your piggy bank.

Pretty soon you had a few dollars.

Now, imagine someone telling you that money wasn’t yours. Imagine someone telling you that money wasn’t even real. Crazy, right?

And yet, we do this to ourselves all of the time. We go to the gym, we train to be stronger, healthier, and happier, and once we’ve made some progress we search frantically for ways to delegitimatize what we’ve done.

This isn’t real.
I cheated on that rep.
I got lucky that time.

One of my favorite things about our team of coaches at Woodshed–the best team top to bottom that we have ever had–is that every single one of them understands this feeling. We’ve talked about this a lot.

Imposter syndrome is real, and it’s persistent. We can’t solve this in one blog post, but we can tell you this:

Just show up. Whatever you do. Show up, count yourself present, and remind yourself every day of what you’ve done.

Because that money in your piggy bank isn’t phony. It’s real. So are you.