Episode Introduction

Welcome to a deeply insightful episode of the Agency Mavericks Podcast, where I join host Troy Dean to explore the fascinating intersection of neuroplasticity and impostor syndrome. As a licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist, I’m passionate about helping high-achieving women and professionals break free from the cycles of self-doubt and internalized criticism that so often hold us back. In this conversation, we unpack the neuroscience behind why impostor syndrome feels so real and persistent, and how the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself—known as neuroplasticity—offers a powerful path towards healing and transformation.

Whether you’ve ever felt like you’re not good enough despite evidence to the contrary, or you struggle with that nagging voice that questions your worth and accomplishments, this episode offers practical ways to become more self-aware of those internal messages and start reshaping them. I also share how therapy, self-compassion, and intentional rewiring of thought patterns can create new neural grooves, replacing old, limiting beliefs. If you’re ready to embrace a kinder inner dialogue and harness your brain’s potential for change, this conversation is for you.

Key Takeaways

• Impostor syndrome is a common experience characterized by persistent self-doubt and feelings of not deserving success, especially among high-achieving individuals.
• Neuroplasticity means the brain is malleable and capable of forming new neural pathways through repeated thoughts, habits, and behaviors.
• Becoming aware of your internal self-talk—often automatic and unconscious—is the first critical step in changing limiting beliefs.
• Replacing negative self-talk with kinder, more supportive messages helps create new neural grooves that weaken old patterns of self-criticism over time.
• Therapy can be a powerful resource for making unconscious negative beliefs conscious and developing healthier thought patterns.
• Normalizing feelings of impostor syndrome and self-doubt can reduce shame and help you respond with self-compassion rather than avoidance or sabotage.
• Persistence and patience are essential—rewiring the brain takes consistent practice and time, but the results can be life-changing.

Notable Quotes

“The brain is plastic, or in other words, malleable. It’s not fixed. Just because your brain is a certain way, or you think certain thoughts, or you have particular habits or beliefs does not mean those are fixed indefinitely.”

“Every time we think a thought or say it out loud, it reassigns the neural groove in our brain and actually helps keep us stuck in that loop.”

“Therapy is incredible and can help mirror back to you maybe what some of those things that are unconscious for you are.”

“It took 20, 30, 40 years of you doing things in this one way or speaking to yourself in this one way. It will take time to practice something different and to have that become automatic.”

“Much like the feeling of shame, impostor syndrome is a completely normal and natural human experience. If you’re not feeling it, then I get clinically curious for other reasons.”

Topics Covered

• Impostor Syndrome: Understanding the pervasive feeling of self-doubt and fear of being “found out” despite external success, especially common among high-achieving women.
• Neuroplasticity Explained: The science behind the brain’s ability to change and rewire itself, forming new neural pathways through repeated thought and behavior patterns.
• Internal Self-Talk: How the automatic, often unconscious messages we say to ourselves shape our beliefs, emotions, and actions.
• Relational Trauma: The impact of early developmental trauma on self-esteem and internal narratives, and how these wounds manifest in adulthood.
• Therapeutic Approaches: The role of therapy in increasing self-awareness, identifying unhelpful patterns, and supporting the development of healthier thought habits.
• Practical Strategies for Change: Techniques such as pausing to catch negative self-talk, substituting kinder messages, and using evidence-based reflection to challenge impostor thoughts.
• Self-Compassion and Normalization: Embracing discomfort and normalizing anxiety and self-doubt as universal human experiences that can be managed rather than avoided.
• Entrepreneurship & Mindset: Personal reflections on balancing the challenges of business ownership and motherhood, and coaching oneself through uncertainty with resilience.

Full Transcript

Troy Dean: This is the WP Elevation Podcast, helping digital creatives and agencies elevate. Just before we get into this episode of the podcast, I have a quick favour to ask. If you’re enjoying the show, please subscribe on iTunes at wpelevation.com slash iTunes, or if you’re not an Apple user, you can get us on Stitcher Radio at wpelevation.com slash Stitcher. And please, if you are on iTunes, leave us a rating and a review. It really does help us come up in the search results and get the show in front of a wider audience. And we love your feedback and we read all of the reviews. Thanks in advance. Now let’s get back to the show.

Troy Dean: G’day folks, Troy Dean here and welcome to another episode of the WP Elevation Podcast. You’ve probably asked the show where we help you start and grow your very own digital agency and this week is a slight departure from our usual topic. My feature guest this week is Annie Wright, who is a licensed psychotherapist and coach from the Bay Area in Northern California from Evergreen Counseling. Annie, welcome to the show.

Annie Wright: Hi, Troy. Thank you so much for having me.

Troy Dean: Now a little bit of context as to why we have a licensed psychotherapist and coach on our show when usually the guests on our show are in the marketing space or the web design space. So just a little bit of context for our listeners and how we connected. I was doing some research recently for a presentation and the point I was trying to make in this presentation is how the words that you hear or in fact, more explicitly, the words that you say to yourself can, I believe, can impact your thoughts and therefore impact your beliefs and therefore your actions and your overall kind of well-being. And I went researching online, as you do, and through the power of the internet I found this fantastic article on your website called Neuroplasticity. And the pull quote was, speaking more kindly to yourself helps because neuroplasticity. And so I went down the Annie Wright rabbit hole of learning about neuroplasticity and used your article in that presentation to prove my point and reached out to you on Facebook Messenger and said, Hey, I love this article. I’d love to have you on the podcast. And here we are.

Annie Wright: Here we are.

Troy Dean: So tell me, how did you first get interested? A little bit of context for people. You’re a licensed psychotherapist and coach. My wife is a clinical psychologist. Let’s just draw the distinction here. What is it that you do? Who are the clients that you usually see and what are the problems that you’re usually helping them solve? Obviously, I know you can’t give me the details there for confidentiality and privacy reasons, but just give our listeners a little bit of context as to what your day looks like.

Annie Wright: Well, sure, sure. I’m happy to share a little bit more. So I am a licensed psychotherapist and that means I’m a mental health clinician and my area of expertise is what we might call complex relational trauma, or in other words, early developmental trauma, and sometimes called complex PTSD. Now, those sound like very overwhelming terms, but one way to think about it is I work with high functioning folks who come from a background of childhood abuse, neglect, sometimes abandonment. You can be very high functioning and still come from a background like that and have it impact you in your day to day life. So the folks I work with as a clinician are the people who tend to have everything looking really great on paper, but who have really hard feelings going on on the inside. Their inner life does not match what’s on the paper. So that is my work as a clinician, but I also founded and run a boutique therapy center here in the heart of Berkeley where I have a staff of very highly seasoned, highly trained clinicians and we treat individuals, couples, families, teens from all over the Bay Area for a wider range of issues. So it’s a little bit about me and the work I do in the world.

Troy Dean: And how did you first become interested in the idea of neuroplasticity and how the words that we say to ourselves and the messages that we give ourselves can play into neuroplasticity and can impact our overall wellbeing? How did that first become something that you’re interested in?

Annie Wright: Absolutely. So this has a direct correlation to my clinical work and the type of clients that I do my work with. For folks who come from backgrounds where there’s been trauma, neglect, abandonment, or how shall we say, less than supportive upbringing. It’s very common for these folks to have internalized beliefs and worldviews about themselves, about others, and about the world in general that aren’t very supportive. So we see this when adults are saying, I’m so fat, I’m so stupid, I’ll never find a love, I can’t get that promotion, who am I to think that I can buy a house in the Bay Area? These really unkind, unsupportive beliefs are part and parcel of coming from a background like that. And part of the work I’m always interested in doing with my clients, I’m interested in working at issues at all levels, but very much helping them identify what they say. Sometimes they may not even be aware of the things they’re saying that are so unkind and so critical about themselves or others, and helping them understand that every time they think this thought, or they say it out loud, it reassigns the neural groove in their brain and actually helps keep them stuck in that loop. So that’s part of how I came to neuroplasticity as a subject area. And it’s part of the work I do with these clients. I could park here for weeks and unpack this stuff. I find this so interesting and so fascinating, but I do want to define neuroplasticity.

Troy Dean: So my introduction to neuroplasticity is my wife was reading a book called The Brain Changes Itself, I believe is what it’s called, or The Brain Can Change Itself, which is about neuroplasticity. And I first was introduced to the concept through my wife reading the book. And then I attended a conference, a WordPress conference, and the keynote speaker was a woman by the name of Kate, whose last name escapes me right now. And she was diagnosed with early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s in her early 50s. And so she started using WordPress to blog every day so that she could basically remember her life, because short-term memory loss was the thing that was impacting her the most. And her doctors and her clinical team were astounded that she was so highly functioning. And she attributed her high functioning to the fact that she was just forcing herself to learn new skills every single day, and that her brain was literally forming new neural pathways and that the concept of neuroplasticity was the thing that was keeping her so active. So for those uninitiated, what exactly is neuroplasticity?

Annie Wright: Well, neuroplasticity, as I define it, refers to this idea that now science has proved that the brain is plastic, or in other words, malleable. It’s not fixed. And what I mean by it, specifically, I mean the neural pathways in our brains. When neurons fire, they create a neural pathway. That is not static. That is not fixed. Just because your brain is a certain way, or you think certain thoughts, or you have particular habits or beliefs does not mean that those are fixed indefinitely. Plasticity of the brain means that we can essentially create new neural grooves in our brain around habits, thoughts, words we speak, and that the brain can therefore change. In other words, there’s a lot of opportunity to change our brain.

Troy Dean: And when you say neural pathways, and I’m not a neuroscientist, so I’m trying to understand, I’m visualizing neurons in the brain that might transmit and receive messages between each other. I’m trying to put this in layman’s terms for my own benefit, but also for our listeners, that those little messages that get transmitted between transmitters and receivers in the brain are like little electric pulses that burn a groove on a record player, if that makes sense.

Annie Wright: Exactly. And it’s like a worn path. The more that we continue sending that message, the more that groove gets a little bit deeper and we get stuck in that groove of believing that message. And so what the concept of neuroplasticity is that we can actually form new little grooves by sending new messages between neurons in the brain.

Troy Dean: Have I kind of got that right in a layman’s way?

Annie Wright: Correct. Absolutely. And to be clear, I’m not a neuroscientist either, but the metaphor of the record and the grooves is the metaphor I use to illustrate this. So the more we do a habit, a behavior, a thought, we create a deeper groove in the record. In order to create a new neural groove, imagine picking up that little spindle, the little needle and setting it down elsewhere. Not gonna create as deep of a groove right away, but if you keep going over that new groove in time and time with repetition, you will create one that is as deep, if not deeper. Now, the other piece I will say to that too, that I think is important, when we create a new habit, a new thought, a new worldview, it does not mean that that former, that old groove remains as deep. It can lessen in intensity over time as we create the new deep groove.

Troy Dean: I wanna put this into some kind of very, very practical application for our listeners who might be listening to this saying, well, you know, what’s this got to do with anything? I grew up in the 70s, right? I grew up in a working class background in the 70s and the message that I always heard when I was growing up is money doesn’t grow on trees. Now, no one’s fault that I got that message. It was just that’s what my parents, parents, parents told them and it just got passed down from generations, right? Now, the irony is when I grew up in the 70s, money here in Australia was actually made out of paper. It wasn’t made out of plastic like it is these days. It was made out of paper. So it actually did grow on trees. We used to chop down trees to make money. So, but this message that I got growing up was money doesn’t grow on trees. So I had, for years, I had this massive, I wasn’t even aware of it, but I had this massive scarcity mindset and thinking around money and the fact that I would never have enough. And by me saying and thinking I will never have enough money actually manifested situations and environments in my life where that was true. I would never have enough money. It took me probably, I reckon, a good seven or eight years of consciously talking to myself out loud using actual verbal words like a mad person to kind of reprogram that messaging in my brain. And I remember saying to my wife and my brother, I was talking about this, that I feel like there was like 35 years of really bad brainwashing in my head. And again, no one’s fault, I don’t blame anyone, but it was just that that was just the way it was. And so it’s taken me probably seven or eight years to undo that brainwashing and re-brainwash myself, reform those neural pathways. And now I have a very abundant mindset and that absolutely informs my decisions around money and has had a huge impact on my entrepreneurial journey as well.

Troy Dean: So I guess the question is, it’s one thing to say that we can practice these new habits which we’ll talk about in a moment and we can form your new neural pathways. But first of all, I suppose you have to be aware that the messages that you’re listening to or that you’re latching onto are not serving you. What can we do to become more self-aware of the messages that are in our brain and how they might be affecting our behavior?

Annie Wright: Such a great question. So, well, and I’m gonna say, I wanna break this down further. I think there’s two parts here. One, there’s becoming aware, just period, full stop, of what it is you think or you say, even unconsciously. So many of us have these automatic thoughts or these automatic internal messages that just fire off that, frankly, we’re not consciously paying attention to most of the time. So the first part, our first task, was actually to help bring our awareness to what’s going on. Now, I am biased. As a therapist, I think therapy is incredible and can help mirror back to you maybe what some of those things that are unconscious for you are. But you don’t have to be in therapy to start to get in touch with those messages. You can start to track yourself and just pay attention more closely. A lot of people attribute it to that little voice in our head that goes off, well, that voice is probably talking about things all day long. Just bring a little more awareness there and see what that voice has to say about your body, about money, about your spouse, your partner, your work, et cetera. Bring your attention there and let’s see what turns up.

Annie Wright: Now, the second piece of this, Troy, is becoming aware of how those messages might not be serving you, or in other words, what impact they’re having on you. So every time you get out of the shower and you have this thought when you see your body in the