Progress Over Perfection

In this episode of The Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about the pressure to be perfect and the freedom that comes when we shift our focus to progress instead. My guest this week is Maria Rincon, a public speaking coach and former communications consultant at the United Nations. Maria shares her story of growing up as an overachiever in an immigrant household where perfection was expected and external validation became the measure of success.

In our conversation, we explore how perfectionism and impostor syndrome often go hand in hand, especially for those raised to equate achievement with self-worth. Maria talks about what it felt like to always be chasing the next accomplishment, how her work at the UN helped her reconnect with her values, and the mindset shift that allowed her to stop striving for approval and start living on her own terms.

She also shares the mantras she uses to ground herself, including “progress over perfection,” and why this phrase has become a daily reminder to let go of unrealistic expectations. We talk about how she brings this perspective into her work with clients, helping high performers build confidence through play, self-connection and a simple practice she calls an “evidence log.”

About My Guest

Growing up in a Colombian-Chinese household in Canada, Maria was a perfectionist since the age of seven. Always striving for success and to please her parents, she went on to get straight A's, win beauty pageants, complete a prestigious Master's program on full scholarship and work for the United Nations, until she hit a personal crisis of finding her purpose. As someone recovering from imposter syndrome, she's now a public speaking coach helping multilingual professionals speak with more confidence (and believe in themselves!).

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Connect with Maria:

Website: https://publicspeakingwithmaria.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrincon/

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Transcript

Kim Meninger

Welcome Maria. It's so great to have you here today. I'm excited for this conversation. I'd love to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit about yourself.

Maria Rincon

Yes, definitely. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Maria. My Chinese name is Wang Si Si. I'm Colombian Chinese, and I immigrated to Canada when I was just seven years old, and I feel like that's the moment that my imposter syndrome began. I was under a lot of pressure from my parents to get good grades. I worked really, really hard. I brought Chinese lunches to school. I didn't speak very good English, so I didn't have a lot of friends, and I turned all my attention to studying really hard and thinking that, hey, if I get the best grades, if I make the teacher proud, then maybe the kids are on. We will like me and my parents will get off my back. So that turmoiled into me becoming an overachiever all through high school and university. So I went to university on full scholarship, started to do some beauty pageants. I won, and I went to work in television in both Canada and China. And if that wasn't enough, after a Master's in Business Journalism at Qinghua University, which is like the Stanford of China, made my Mom very proud of that, I decided that I wanted to use my communication skills for good, and I went to work at the United Nations. So I ended up working at three United Nations offices, working myself up from an intern to a communications consultant, then realizing that the bureaucratic calls were not for me. And a lot of soul searching went into, into that journey, and now I'm currently a public speaking coach, so using all the skills that I've built up over my career and helping other people gain more confidence in speaking up in their workplace for presentations and for getting promotions, etc.

Kim Meninger

Wow, so you have quite a story, lots, lots of different twists and turns, and I'd love to go back to the beginning, if that's okay with you, and talk a little bit about that overachiever in school, because I do think that's where it all begins, right? It starts with that academic pressure from parents, and then we, we adopt that as our own. We kind of internalize that voice that tells us that we have to keep you know excelling and can be coming. Can be it, can transition into perfectionism, right? So can you talk a little bit more about what that looked and felt like at that time?

Maria Rincon

Yes, so being the eldest also played a role. So I have a younger sister, and she's three years younger, and because my parents divorced when I was 10 years old, I initially took on that big sister role, but also just growing up very quickly. So not only did I have a lot of responsibility at home, but I put a lot of responsibility on myself to be the best that I could be at school. And there's a term in in Chinese called Hu Ma, which means tiger mom. So having a very strict mom and saying you're not allowed to go out from Monday to Friday, like Saturday, you wake up at nine and you do chores and you go to Chinese school and you can't have fun more than two days in a row. So if I went out today with my friends, I couldn't go out the next day. So very strict household, and I think I started to internalize the voices of my mom into how I should act in school, but also as I grew up. So I did adopt a very perfectionist mindset and put a lot of pressure on myself. And as soon as I got that first report card with straight A's. I felt like I was on a ride that I could knock it off of, like I could not let her down, but I could not let myself down now that I had achieved this much and I had to keep going.

Kim Meninger

And that's a really that's a really challenging time too, the anxiety of not just getting the good grades, but maintaining them right. Because if you get all A's, there's always that fear of, when do I get a B right? And so it's like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, right?

Maria Rincon

Definitely. And there was one specific subject I was terrible at, which was math, so it was very hard to keep an A on there, and I actually didn't. But I had enough, I don't know why, but I had enough grace in myself to be like, Okay, I can excel at everything except math.

Kim Meninger

I love that you carved out a special husband.

Maria Rincon

I had to, or else I could have driven myself crazy.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, so you have this awareness, right? Did you always like, Did you always have this sort of part of yourself that recognized that you were doing this, that you had this pressure? Or did was there a turning point in your life when you realized like, Oh, I am putting a lot of extra pressure on myself?

Maria Rincon

That's a great question, really, for the first part of my life, it was autopilot and starting to learn more about myself. I am talking more to people. I was like, Oh, I actually am a perfectionist. I am, actually am very hard on myself. Oh, not everyone achieves so much as me, yet feels kind of bad about themselves. So I started to question a lot of what my achievements meant for me specifically, and why they weren't making me happy. So that's when I started to reflect on my journey and my achievements, and really starting to look into why did I accomplish all this? Was it for myself, or was it to please somebody else? And in that case, a lot of it in the beginning of my career in pageant, in television, it definitely was to please my mom. And so when I turned to working in the NGO sector, I did feel more aligned with myself, and while I was still quite hard on myself, I realized I wanted to continue to be better, but it was for, for my own sake, not for pleasing somebody else.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, and I hear that all the time. Is that, that implicit or explicit desire to make somebody else happy, right? And oftentimes that's our parents. It could be our managers, could be our teachers, right? But that when the motivation comes from that place of, I just want to make somebody else, you know, happy with me, like me, love me, whatever that is, it never feels like enough. There's never that sense of like, okay, I've achieved this goal.

Maria Rincon

Things are good now, absolutely that that resonates so much, even now that I'm 31 I'm like, no matter what I do, it's, it's never going to be enough for my mom, and the faster I realize that, the less pressure I can put on myself and just be like, you know, it's not, it's not my job to please her so I can live my life according to, to my standards. But of course, having a very close relationship with my parents and, and being raised in a certain way has really taught me to kind of start to observe and start to reprogram into how I think about success, how I think about joy, how I think about perfectionist mindset, and how I think about my self-worth.

Kim Meninger

I love that, and I, you know, I try to think about things from the parent perspective, now that I have two boys, and I'm so aware of the possibility that I might be inadvertently, like, pushing messages on to them that are going to send them into therapy someday, you know. And so I tried to look at it from both sides. And I think I wonder, you know, I often think that parents are generally well intentioned, and that a lot of their behavior comes from a place of fear of a place of wanting more for us than they had for themselves, and so that all you know intellectually works, but it doesn't necessarily change, change the emotional relationship that We have with them. Do you talk to your mom about this at all like, Have you ever told her that you feel this way?

Maria Rincon

Spicy question. I would say, we have a very good relationship now, and I think I can understand that from her perspective. She genuinely thought that if she was pushing me hard, I would succeed and I would be happy. Of course, in addition to her being happy, I remember being back one summer, maybe two or three years ago, and telling her thank you for all the hard work she's put into raising me and my sister, because it wasn't easy. She was a single mom, new immigrant in Canada, and I also told her that she did put a lot of pressure on me growing up, but she shrugged it off, and instead of taking it personally, I just realized, you know, I can't change her, and it's not my job to change her, but as long as I've expressed how I feel, or as long as I've have expressed what my side of the story was that feels like it's enough for me.

Kim Meninger

I love that, and you're right, it's so important for all of us to really think about what's within our control and what isn't. Because, you know, we could spend our lifetime lamenting the things that the people around us do, but that doesn't serve us in any way. It consumes a lot of energy that doesn't realize anything. So you went to the UN and it said, You, you, you indicated that going in that direction maybe helps you a little bit in terms of your I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it took some of the pressure off is that what you were saying, like, I'd love to hear more about what that shift looked like for you.

Maria Rincon

Sure, I was more aligned with my own values when I switched my communications route into the UN, but of course, this is called the imposter syndrome file, so I'm happy to talk about that. And I, yeah, I felt like I did have imposter syndrome before. It still comes up sometimes in my work, and I work with a lot of clients that have as well. So yes, we can explicitly talk about that. Working at the UN I felt more aligned in my mission, so I didn't feel so much it wasn't like a burden to be achieving so much because I wasn't doing it to please anyone but myself. However, in the role itself, of course, there were a lot of moments of self-doubt, a lot of moments that my skills weren't good enough, and a lot of moments of yeah, do I deserve to be here? So it was all kind of mixed together. And I think the thing that helped me the most was to stop overthinking and just taking action. And I was very hard on myself and my mistakes from the beginning, however, I realized that over the years, I needed to adopt a new mantra and it's progress over perfection. And I still repeat that to myself every day with things like do my best, accept the rest. Progress over perfection. And it's very hard because some there are some things that I can't let go, but I'm learning to be kinder to myself in that regard, and not be caught up by the tiniest things. And that's something that started in my journey at the UN.

Kim Meninger

That is a huge shift, and I do think it takes a lot of practice, like you said, having that mantra, you probably have to say it to yourself over and over again, right? Because these mental habits are very, really deeply wired into us, and it's very hard to reverse them and change them. And so it's not as though you're going to flip a switch and suddenly think, oh, you know this. I don't have to be perfect. If it were that easy, we wouldn't, we wouldn't have this problem to solve. But I think just that consistent practice of reminding yourself of that does eventually work, because your brain believes what you tell it right, and it changes your relationship to the environment around you.

Maria Rincon

Absolutely. I am a very big fan of using mantras in an action-oriented space, so that has helped me a lot. And one trick actually we learned recently is, is saying to stay in the line. I'm the kind of person that so not flipping the switch right away to be like, Okay, I'm not a perfectionist anymore. But instead saying like, I'm the kind of person that doesn't need everything to be perfect, or I'm the kind of person that is able to let go of little mistakes, and that felt soothing and it feels transformational, but it's not something that feels too positively toxic. It feels something relatable that I can achieve, but it also includes, like a transformation aspect. So that's one of my new, recent favorite mantras, or ways to reframe how I think about myself and when I do have imposter syndrome.

Kim Meninger

One of the things I love about that too is that by saying that you tie yourself to a collective which kind of weakens some of the pressure. I think a lot of times we operate as though we exist in this vacuum and it's all about us, whereas if you say I'm the kind of person that what that implies is that there are other people out there too who operate in this way and share my values and share and so that kind of normalizes it a bit and makes it easier to do.

Maria Rincon

Oh, that's so cool. I haven't thought of it that way. It makes sense.

Kim Meninger

Well, thank you for sharing that with us, and I want to talk a little bit now about your transition into doing the work that you do, and what it's been like for you to be more entrepreneurial, right? Because that can, I think, at least from my experience, can be a little bit of a double-edged sword. I know I built a lot of confidence working for myself because I got out from under a system that I didn't necessarily. Feel aligned with my values, right? But then that that comes with its own pressures too. Of now you're selling yourself and you're, there's a bigger spotlight on you, so I'm curious what your journey has looked like?

Maria Rincon

When you said that, like the viewers can't see this, but I lit up because I'm like that resonates so much like getting out of a system that didn't feel completely aligned with what I want to do. Gave me so much more confidence. So that, for sure, resonated a lot. In the beginning, I thought that I was just teaching presentation skills. So essentially, I looked back into okay, what are my skills? What does the world need? And what do I enjoy doing? And, essentially, it was a mix between teaching, because I always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher when I was younger. I would say kindergarten teacher by day and Shakira by night. So doing the pageants and TV had already kind of made my dream come true of something like Shakira, but I've always wanted to go into pedagogy, and I had such a big interest in that. And the beginning when I was teaching presentation field, I thought it was just okay, voice, body language frameworks for effective communication. However, as soon as I started having more clients and working more closely, one-on-one with them, I realized that at the end, it's just a foundation of self-confidence. And I was also working with high-profile people that also had imposter syndrome. And so the first thing that helped, I think us in that moment, was, number one, connecting with the first so allowing them to feel heard, and then from there, finding out ways to help them boost their self-confidence, which in turn would make their public speaking skills better. So I never thought of it that way from the beginning, but it's something I learned along the journey. This is why this is something I'm so passionate about speaking about, because it's something I encountered in my own journey, but it's also something I see with the people that I work with on a daily basis.

Kim Meninger

So do you work with people who are preparing for a presentation, or is it just wanting to speak up more in their everyday meetings? A combination? What does it look like? What do people come to you for?

Maria Rincon

It's a big combination. So I've been told to niche down, but I have a variety of clients all over the world. So if anything, from an engineer working at Meta in New York to a director of AI in Spain for a big public relations company, to a senior vice president at a hotel bookings company, to a senior legal counsel at a company in Dubai. And they're all ambitious working professionals. However, when it comes to presentations, panel discussions, investor pitches, they say that that's when they start to freak out, start to blank, and they their self-confidence just lowers a lot. So that's what we work on.

Kim Meninger

And I love that you brought in the confidence piece too because I, I operate from the perspective that it's all well and good to have systems and frameworks that help you understand how to do something more effectively, but if you're afraid to do it, the frameworks are not really all that useful. If there's still that part of you that feels like I don't deserve this opportunity or I can't do this, I'm going to fail. Those frameworks have limited value. So I love that you're talking about the interplay between the mindset and the actual mechanics of speaking.

Maria Rincon

Oh, absolutely. And what I try to bring into my classes with my clients is also having a lot of fun. I think I call it like coaching their, their inner child, because as professional as they are, like they're still an inner child that's either creative or playful, and we bring these parts out, just like in theater class, people are able to come out of their comfort Yeah, comfort zones, step out of their shells and just take themselves less seriously, which enables them to, to be more confident as they continue this like competence confidence loop.

Kim Meninger

Well, and it's funny to me to think about some people who are pretty senior level, right? They kind of take themselves very seriously, getting into that play mode, right? Do you have to convince them to let go, you know?

Maria Rincon

Oh, definitely it's not something that everyone enjoys at the very beginning, but I do give a heads up, like, I'm like, if you want to work with me, you definitely have to be prepared to get out of your comfort zone. But afterwards, we always have a great laugh, and they truly enjoy being in that space as well.

Kim Meninger

I think that's great. I think that, that is part of is we do take ourselves too seriously. And one of the things that I think has helped me tremendously is to realize that people aren't judging us. Yes, in the way that we think they are. You know, people aren't just like sometimes we see ourselves as, you know, in the Olympics, where they put up the numbers and, you know, or they have that, I know they have, like, the digital version of that now. But if you think like the old days with competition, and they'll put up, like some number out of 10, and every all the panelists put it up, I feel like that's how we operate, right? We think, like, anytime I speak, anytime I do anything, there's a panel of judges that's putting up these numbers and that I have to make this huge impression on people, but most people are distracted by their own insecurities, and there are their own worries and, you know, things that they need to get done. And so even just recognizing that we're not as important as we think we are, can help.

Maria Rincon

Exactly. Yes, this is, yeah, attribute to the spotlight effect. This was something I also teach about, that there was an experiment at Cornell University where they put the student in a Barry Manilow t-shirt, a very embarrassing one, and then they asked him to walk around campus, and then they made a survey about how many people noticed the shirt. And he thought it was around 50% of people, but in fact, it was only 25% so people are not thinking about as much as we think they are. Definitely.

Kim Meninger

Going back to what you were saying about being playful and experimental too. Gives you a little bit more freedom to step outside of your comfort zone, if you, if you really embrace the, the idea, not just the idea, but the, the fact that people aren't judging you and watching you as closely as you think they are. That gives you more space to be creative and to, you know, sort of test out different ways of speaking and connecting with people.

Maria Rincon

Yes, and that's what I love to see. It's in those sessions I get to see someone really enjoying what they're, what they're experimenting with, what they're trying out. And that essentially leads to more confidence in expressing oneself. One fun exercise we have for this is, we call it like the expert Hot Seat. But I make it really silly though. I say that we're doing a role play, and I'm a journalist, and they're the expert in something, and I'm going to ask them a few questions, but the expert topics are completely like, out of this world, essentially something very random or silly, like, let's say you were in charge of the SOC Olympics for 2025 or if you were in charge of serving food on a spaceship on its way to Mars, what would you serve? So they would have to talk in a way that's confident, that's selling a message, and using their improvisation fields to come up with some crazy answers to some random questions about this silly topic, but owning it. So that's, that's always a lot of fun.

Kim Meninger

I love that too, because then you're separating out the content from the delivery, right? Sometimes that can get interwoven too. I think there's a way in which we put pressure on ourselves, not just about the speaking itself, but about the subject matter expertise that we bring to that presentation, or comments I know I hear all the time for people who say, What if people in the audience know more than I do about this topic, right? And so either that audience are, the audience is judging their credibility or potentially going to ask a question that exceeds their expertise?

Maria Rincon

Yeah, that can be a tough one. However, at the end of the day, we're not judging each other as much as we think they are, and everyone brings their unique perspective to a specific topic. So that's what I tell my clients if they ask that.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, and I think too, going back to the beginning of our conversation, the academic pressure, I think there are ways in which our academic mindset carries over into other aspects of our lives and our work. And you know, if you're doing a presentation at school, you are being graded on 100-point scale, and somebody is going to judge you, and you do have to do certain things right, whereas when you are in the workplace, sure, you can bomb it right, but most of the time it's not. There's not like a really rigid rubric that people are using to eventually not evaluate you, right? But I don't think we have, in many cases, adequately shifted the paradigm in our minds and in our experience away from that model of I need to perform in this way because my teacher is going to, is going to grade me?

Maria Rincon

Yeah, definitely.

Kim Meninger

So, how about you? Are you? Do you still struggle with confidence challenges in your new world and in your new life, like what and, and what? What is it? I guess. Said, I wonder, does it look or feel any different, and what do you do about it?

Maria Rincon

I still definitely do. I think as an entrepreneur, you are always going to be facing challenges in different areas. So for me, a recent one is that I'm expanding from working with individuals to now working with corporations, so working with companies and doing workshops. And while I love working with people, doing a workshop is much more different than working one-on-one. And in the beginning, I didn't want to do any outreach related to that, because I was like, Well, if I fail, or if I'm not good at it, then at least I haven't tried. So that was kind of the mindset in the beginning. What I did was I like the Nike slogan, I just did it. So I sat down, even though I was holding my breath the entire time that I was like cold emailing a bunch of companies and some quite big names actually got back to me and actually want to pay me for the services. I realized that I just have to do the action, and then the confidence will come back, will come after. And another thing that I've has helped me, that I also teach my clients, is to write down and keep a list of something called an evidence log, so a list of things where you write down a date, what action you've taken, what went well, how you felt afterwards, and what this tells you about yourself, so what strength it tells you, and it's literally like just plain evidence of challenges that you've overcome or things that you've accomplished and you've done well in your life, because your brain is so, Like you said, it's so easy for it to just go to a negativity bias sometimes, just having it down on a piece of paper and looking at, hey, this is what I've achieved. This is what I've overcome. This shows me that I don't need to feel shamed about myself or like I'm not capable enough, or feel like I'm an imposter, because I have this proof in front of me. So that is something that has helped me personally, and it's something I kind of assigned for homework to my clients as well.

Kim Meninger

Oh, I do the same thing, and I love that. You call it an evidence log. I always call it an accomplishments journal. But evidence is such a struggle, because I think that is exactly what it is. It's evidence that you're capable, right? And my, my, my definition of confidence is trusting that you can handle whatever situation comes your way, right? It doesn't mean it's always going to go well or according to plan, but you can handle it. And I think keeping track of things in that way just reinforces that belief that, you know, I, I can do hard things, as they say, right, like I, I can overcome challenges. I'm capable of more than I think I am. [Absolutely.] Yeah, that's a great that's a great strategy. Well, Maria, thank you so much for being here. You've given us some really great insights. I appreciate your sharing your personal story with us as well, and just thank you so much for the work that you're doing. Can for people who are listening, who want more of you. They want to learn more about your work. They want to follow you. Where can they find you?

Maria Rincon

Yes, so my website is public speaking with maria dot com I am quite active on LinkedIn, and share also quite a few tips regarding confidence, presentation skills and storytelling. So you can find me at Maria C dot Rincon.

Kim Meninger

Wonderful. So I will make sure those links are in the show notes as well. And thanks again for being here.

Maria Rincon

Thank you so much. Kim.