Here is an excerpt from an article written by Alisa Cohn for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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No matter what job you have or which industry you are in, understanding your weaknesses is just as important to your success as recognizing your strengths. Without an awareness of where you’ve got room for growth, it’s almost impossible to improve your performance at work and progress in your career.

At the same time, this self-awareness has to be carefully managed. If you focus too much on your shortcomings and ignore the value you do bring to your organization, what started out as productive mindfulness can balloon into insecurity or imposter syndrome, holding you back from reaching your full potential.

As an executive coach, I’ve worked with a number of young professionals who were so focused on their shortcomings that they ended up overwhelmed by self-doubt, unable to take the risks necessary to move forward in their careers. Especially when you’re just starting out, it’s easy to become submerged in your own insecurities — but it is possible to overcome these doubts. Here are four strategies that anyone can use to combat self-doubt and build confidence in the workplace.

Channel an Alter Ego

Sometimes, being too tuned in to our own limitations can make it difficult to move past them. When this happens, it’s helpful to gain a little distance from ourselves by channeling an alter ego. Taking on the persona of someone more confident can help you acknowledge the challenges you face without letting them completely take you over. Psychologists call this “self-distancing” — it’s a method of gaining perspective that empowers you to get out of your own way and activate more productive behaviors.

For example, one client I worked with, Rebecca*, founded a nonprofit to combat homelessness in her community right after graduating college. Rebecca sometimes had trouble holding her own with the local politicians and, as she described them, the “tough street cops” she had to work with. She told me that she had been raised to respect authority, and so when she met with these politicians and police officers who were so much older and carried such a strong air of authority, she struggled to effectively advocate for her organization.

To help her take charge, I asked her to imagine a character — real or fictional — who she thought would handle these situations in the way she wished that she could. She immediately came up with Anthony Bourdain, the late celebrity chef, who travelled and explored foods from all over the world. She told me that for her, Bourdain embodied the kind of fearlessness she wished she had. I encouraged her to channel Bourdain as her alter ego, and so right before her next meeting, she took a few moments to imagine how he would approach the interaction. After this short thought exercise, she found that the authority figures seemed less intimidating, enabling her to overcome her insecurities and advocate for herself much more successfully.

View Yourself Through the Lens of Others

Another strategy that can help snap you out of excessive self-consciousness is to intentionally think about yourself from someone else’s point of view. This is a technique I used myself when I was just starting out as a coach. One time, while waiting my turn to interview for a prestigious coaching group, I felt myself getting so nervous that my brain started fogging up. I knew I was qualified, and yet I could feel my confidence evaporating by the second.

To escape this spiral of insecurity, I consciously shifted my perspective to think about how my client, Chris — a senior vice president at a large technology company — viewed me. Chris intimidated most people, but I had helped him make miraculous strides in his leadership skills, and we had formed a very close relationship. I thought about Chris laughing at me and saying, “What do you have to be nervous about? You’re a rock star!” Immediately my anxiety melted away, my brain cleared up, and I was able to perform at my best.

Tune Out Uninformed Feedback

Constructive feedback can be incredibly valuable — but when feedback is not constructive, it’s essential to learn to ignore it. Especially if you hold a leadership role or some other very visible position within your organization, everyone will have some opinion on how you could do your job better. You have to remember that not everyone’s opinion is useful.

This is something that my client Sandy, the head of design at a fashion company, dealt with recently. Sandy referred to himself as a “very sensitive creator.” While his sensitivity was a key part of how he was able to come up with unique, exquisite clothing designs, it also led him to take criticism very personally. Moreover, he was the youngest member of the leadership team, and the other members of the team weren’t shy about sharing negative feedback on his designs (even though most of them were about 20 years older than the company’s target market). When he was on the receiving end of their input, he would question whether he brought any value to the company at all, destroying his productivity for days.

Of course, when he took a step back and thought about the situation, he could clearly see that this feedback was largely uninformed and unhelpful. To help him distance himself from this irrelevant feedback, I encouraged Sandy to explicitly label these comments as “opinions” and “noise.” Instead of reacting so intensely to his colleagues’ thoughts, Sandy started to hear the feedback, acknowledge it politely, and recognize what was and wasn’t useful. Over time, he became more and more comfortable noticing and ignoring feedback that was not helpful to him, keeping it from derailing his work and ruining his mood.

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