Meet Chealsea Wierbonski

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chealsea Wierbonski. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Chealsea, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

Impostor syndrome is something that I struggled with for a very long time.

I grew up in a small town in West Virginia in a very working class family. My father’s side of the family were Polish immigrants and my father, grandfather and great grandfather were all coal miners. My mother’s side of our family was equally working class. They were Italian immigrants, who mostly owned their own businesses (used car sales and things like that). But in both cases, they were very humble families that worked extremely hard. Higher education was definitely respected, but seemed unattainable for us due to cost and the unfamiliarity with the admissions process or even how to select the right school. So, I was a first generation college student.

Growing up in a place like West Virginia gave me a sheltered perspective on possibilities. I wasn’t exposed to a lot of options in terms of what life could look like. Everyone I grew up with had a similar background to mine; maybe not as working class in some cases, but we all certainly had a similar cultural context. Wealth disparity is also not as evident in WV as it is in other parts of the United States, so I didn’t grow up being exposed to different types of lifestyles (other than poverty).

I finally moved away to California in 1995 after I graduated from WVU. I landed a job at a tech company in Silicon Valley and immediately I felt very, very different and uncomfortable around my co-workers a lot of the time. At that time, I didn’t understand why. No one talked about impostor syndrome back then.

In 1999, I moved to NYC, also working in tech and continued to feel alienated from the people around me. In NYC I would say that feeling of alienation and differentness was amplified. There’s a lot more socializing after work in NYC, so I got to hear a lot more personal stories about the way my co-workers grew up, which was so much more privileged than my upbringing!

As I got further along in my career and started to move into more leadership type roles, I began to notice that I’d feel defensive for no apparent reason around others on the leadership team. I often felt anxious to the point where I was afraid to talk in meetings, I was in constant fear of being fired, and I lived in a state of never feeling good enough. It was an emotionally difficult way to live and made work super stressful!

It also impacted my career negatively in some major ways. Because it was difficult for me to relate to other people, I wasn’t able to connect with my co-workers in a way that would help me build a network. This created a self-perpetuating cycle; I felt alienated, so I didn’t connect with people and since I didn’t connect with people, I didn’t have as much support as I could have, which made me feel even more alienated!

I remember one time I was talking to someone in HR (this was many years into my career), and she mentioned the term “impostor syndrome”. This was the first time I’d ever heard that phrase, but I identified with it immediately. I finally felt like I had a name for what I was feeling, which was a relief because it meant that I wasn’t alone in what I was feeling.

In terms of how I overcame impostor syndrome, one of the first things I did was to start to listen to what I was telling myself, especially in situations where I felt anxious, defensive, isolated or alienated. I did this really just out of survival–I wanted to get ahead in my career and I knew I needed to figure out what was going on with me, or I wouldn’t make much progress as a leader.

And when I finally stepped back to reflect and notice what I was telling myself, I was pretty shocked at the narratives I had. I realized that I had a lot of limiting beliefs around not being good enough, which was fueling my impostor syndrome.

Once I identified the source of my impostor syndrome, I was able to get to work on shifting the narratives that were tearing me down and reinforcing this feeling of not being good enough. I’m not going to lie, this took time. And it took a lot of persistence. I had to be very diligent about paying attention to what I was telling myself.

The way I did this was by using my negative feelings as indicators that there was something unproductive happening in my mind. So for example, if I felt defensive and anxious in a meeting, but nothing was really happening in that meeting, I knew that there was an unproductive internal dialog happening. Over the next several years, I got better and better at this process, but as I said, it was difficult in the beginning.

Another thing that was really crucial to helping me move beyond this feeling of “not good” enough was to develop authentic confidence. And I did this by essentially pushing myself to do things that I was not comfortable doing, such as speaking up in meetings, or scheduling a one-on-one meeting with someone who I felt intimidated by. Each time I did one of these things, afterwards, I would acknowledge what I’d done, including the feelings that I had to process when I was actually doing this thing. And again, over a few years of building myself up this way, I started to feel better and better at work.

These two strategies (and a few others) helped me so much in my own journey to overcome limiting beliefs and their outward manifestations, like impostor syndrome, that I created a framework around them. Over the last year, I’ve been sharing this framework through public speaking. I’m also launching a new video course on June 25th called “Leadership Through Inner Strength” that will share this framework at a deeper level. My focus in this course is on helping women understand the connection between our inner world of negative feelings, thoughts, and self-perceptions, and the impact that these things have on our careers and how we live our lives in general.

When we feel good at work and we’re happy, we perform better, we make better decisions, and we have a positive impact on those around us, all of which support our leadership journey and accelerate our careers.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I’ve been working in technology for over 25 years at various Internet technology companies in New York City and Silicon Valley; about half of that time has been at Google, which is where I’m currently working as a Group Product Manager.

A little over a year ago, a few months before I turned 50, I was reflecting on my life, how much I’d grown not just professionally, but also internally. I was noticing as well that my job just wasn’t fulfilling me in the same way that it once had. And I had what I suppose you could call an intuitive inspiration to pursue something deeper and more meaningful in my professional life.

Through this reflection, I was able to take a step back and acknowledge all of the emotional growth that I’d done. I could finally see just how far I’d come and how different I was now compared to that person who left West Virginia nearly 30 years prior.

I remembered acutely how bad I once felt, not only mentally about myself, but also physically, due to the level of stress and anxiety I experienced because of my feelings of “not enough”. These feelings were so intense at the time, that I can still remember now what it was like to experience life in this way. I suddenly had compassion for that person that I once was.

At that moment, I felt a deep desire to help anyone else who was feeling that way. The thought of someone else feeling so bad–alienated, stressed out, alone, feeling like they had so much potential but were not seeing the success they wanted–made me really sad and I knew it was something that I had to help with. I immediately felt inspired and a deep calling to embark on this new phase in my career where I wanted to dedicate my work to helping other women who may be experiencing life in a similar way.

​Since that moment, I’ve been building my personal brand and thought leadership through public speaking and content creation. I have a website and blog (www.chealsaw.com), I create short-form videos on social media (chealsea_w_), and I’ve been doing as many public speaking engagements as I can, all focused on helping people understand the connection between our inner world of negative feelings, thoughts, and self-perceptions and how these things impact our careers and our lives in general.

I am also excited to announce that I’m launching my first full-length video course called “Leadership Through Inner Strength”, which will go into much more depth on all of these topics (https://courses.chealseaw.com). This is a 7 module video course that includes an online community forum as well as several live virtual community meetings where all participants can come together to ask me questions and discuss the content, as well as to connect with each other. I think it’s so important to build a community and I thought the live events would be the perfect way to do that.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

#1 would be perseverance. As I mentioned, I grew up in a family who worked exceptionally hard. No one really talked about it or acknowledged it, because that would be too gracious or cushy haha, but every person in my family (men and women), including both of my grandmothers, most of my aunts, and my own mother worked extremely hard.

And when I say they worked hard, I don’t just mean at work. I’ll give you an example. In my grandmother’s case, she raised my brother and me for a period of time, and not only worked in a bottle factory, but also took care of the home. She did all of the grocery shopping, cooking, driving us around, etc. And when she cooked, it wasn’t like TV dinners, it was homemade Polish food, pies with crust made from scratch using blackberries that she and my grandfather had picked themselves in the woods off the interstate. They did nothing the easy way.

Even shopping was difficult because she didn’t just buy whatever was convenient. She scoured newspapers for the best deals on sales, bought tons of food that could be frozen in the giant freezer she had downstairs; clothes, furniture and other household items were all bought at yard sales, which also required work–scouring newspapers in the early morning and then going out all day in the car from sale to sale to find the best deal. Everything I saw growing up indicated that life takes work and taking the easy way somehow meant you weren’t doing it right or that you were less of a person. So because of that, I have an incredible work ethic and also possibly a high threshold for struggle haha.

In addition to this hard work mentality, my home life with my mom and dad was very chaotic. They were young parents (they had me when my mom was 20 and my dad was 24) and it was the early 70’s. They were hippies and well, you know, doing what young hippies did during that time, which wasn’t sitting at home taking care of us and going to church. They partied. A lot. And my brother and I saw that. We had to live our lives at school like everything was normal, which it very much was not.

Having a childhood like this gave me an incredible ability to withstand a lot and so it wasn’t (and still isn’t) easy for me to get discouraged. No matter how painful, challenging, stressful, or intense something is, I seem to have an innate ability to be able to push through and persevere.

I really believe that this is something that can be learned though. So even if you didn’t grow up in such a chaotic way, you can still push yourself. We all possess the ability to be resilient and I think that all it takes to learn to do this is to put oneself in situations that seem challenging, and then do those things, no matter how challenging they feel. And then when we make it through to the other side, celebrate our accomplishments and acknowledge the feelings of struggle that we endured to do that. Doing this regularly will grow that perseverance muscle.

#2 is definitely the ability to self-reflect and observe myself almost as a different person. This one took me a while to develop and I talked about it a bit in my other answer about impostor syndrome. I think for anyone who wants to learn how to do this, one of the fastest paths to developing this ability is learning how to meditate. If meditation seems daunting, then doing a simple pause exercise helps. Doing anything that helps you create space between your thoughts and feelings on the inside, and the behaviors on the outside, helps develop this skill.

When you are able to self-reflect you become familiar with the inner workings of your mind. It’s like discovering an entirely new person on the inside. Being willing to take a look at this person, and acknowledge them for all that they are, which includes the good and the bad, is a very powerful tool for accomplishing anything you want in your life.

#3 would be creativity.

Creativity is #3 on my list because I think it’s a skill that can be used really effectively in so many areas of our lives, but in my case, I applied it to problem solving. I’m a pretty analytical person; so I look at myself, my personality, and even my life, almost as a puzzle to be solved. When I realize that I want something, or I want my life to look a certain way, I immediately start thinking, well, how can I make that happen? Sometimes the answer isn’t always obvious, and it takes a lot of creativity to find a solution.

Creativity is interesting because we seem to live in a culture where it’s seen as this binary quality–like, you’re either creative or you’re not creative. But I don’t think that’s true; I think everyone is creative. Some people just express their creativity through art forms, which is the traditional way we think of creativity. But other people may express their creativity through problem solving, business, writing code, or something else, even raising a family can be creative. I believe that creativity is the act of expressing oneself and in whatever way you choose to do that is your own personal form of creativity. So if you feel things, and express those feelings, you have the ability to be creative. It may just take a bit of time to find your preferred form of expression.

Once you find this form and then get in the habit of expressing yourself through it, you can apply this practice to other parts of your life. In other words, when you get comfortable with *expressing* yourself in a way that’s unique to you, it’s easy to get comfortable with *doing* things in a way that’s unique to you, which I think then translates to living your life by your own standards and not those that are predefined by society or one’s culture. In my opinion, this is the definition of freedom and is what allows us to live a life of authenticity and empowerment. This is the feeling that gave me the strength and courage to do what I’m doing now on this new journey that I’ve embarked on.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?

I used to look at my upbringing and even the parenting style of my mom and dad as a burden, like something that had to be “overcome”. But the older I get, the more I’ve changed that perspective.

It’s true that things weren’t always stable when we were growing up, and that gave my brother and me a lot of emotional challenges that we’ve had to work through as adults, but they gave me so many gifts that have helped and continue to help me into my adult life.

One of the biggest gifts was the encouragement they gave me to think independently and to always be myself. They were always very loving people and encouraged me to be my true self. They told me that I could do whatever I wanted as long as I set my mind to it, which actually ended up to be pretty true.

Also because they were hippies, and possibly just young and naive, they both had such a magical view of the world that went beyond just a spiritual view. I think they both did and still do recognize the world for all of its beauty and wonder and they taught me to never take that for granted; to always appreciate what a beautiful opportunity it is to live the life we have. This gave me a deep belief that it’s important to pursue life in such a way that you are living it to your fullest desires and abilities and not to just settle for mediocrity.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.chealseaw.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chealsea_w_
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chealsea/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@chealsea_w_

Image Credits

Timo Ellis, Tre Dasher