Jen Coken is funny. And that’s on purpose, because humor and playfulness is a key trait to achieving success as a leader.

“Incorporating play vastly reduces the number of times a person must practice something when learning a new habit,” says Coken, a keynote speaker at IMEX America, Oct. 11-13 in Las Vegas. “Usually, it takes 500 or 600 repetitions to develop a new habit. When you introduce play or, in my case, humor, some research has shown that it reduces that number to 12 repetitions.”

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Coken doesn’t think leaders outright dismiss play as much as they may feel they don’t have time to incorporate it into the workday.

“Most [people] are so in the weeds of running a company or trying to figure out solutions to a problem they forget that likely their most creative moments are the moments when they are playing,” she says.

Discovering her bigger purpose

Being playful is part of Coken’s brand. It’s something she values, and it helps get her point across. And she’s no stranger to the stand-up comedy scene.

“I did stand-up comedy, performing about once a week or more, while living in Denver for about seven years,” she says. “I was trained by a friend who had been a professional.”

Then she got married, helping to raise three small children.

“Performing at midnight or 1 a.m. and being awake enough to drive the kids to school at 6 a.m. did not work, so I chose to stop,” Coken says. “I have performed several times since then in person and virtually but not like I used to. Instead, I incorporate humor into everything I do—speaking or coaching.”

She has found great success in her career as a speaker and coach for almost 25 years, entertaining and educating crowds with a mixture of comedy and leadership insights.

Coken used to lead programs for an international personal growth and development company called Landmark Worldwide.

“I did that while working in politics,” she says. “As I was writing my first book (‘When I Die, Take My Panties’— soon to be made into a film!), I was laid off four different times. The last time was the day before my book hit the shelves. I didn’t see it coming. It made me sit back and think about my bigger purpose. There was something more the universe had in store for me.”

Coken thought about what that could be for a week while her former bosses called her trying to lure her to other jobs. But she went into coaching full-time.

“It is what I am most passionate about—creating a world where people feel at home with themselves by coaching and speaking about authentic leadership,” she says.

The impostor syndrome

Represented by The Keynote Curators, Coken will lead a keynote address at IMEX America about leadership titled “The Science of Self-Sabotage: Making Imposter Syndrome Your Superpower.”

But she says there’s a catch: Imposter syndrome isn’t a “syndrome” at all.

“A syndrome is a medical diagnosis, and this is not that,” Coken says. “The experience of imposter syndrome is phenomenological—meaning it is happening in the body experientially as a person is living their life.”

Drs. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes identified the experience, calling it the “impostor phenomenon” in a paper published in the journal “Psychotherapy” in 1978. During therapy sessions, Clance observed high-achieving women experiencing psychological beliefs that they were intellectual frauds and would be discovered as imposters. This feeling caused anxiety and dissatisfaction with their lives.

“Initially, many thought that women had it more than men because men have more testosterone, also known as the ‘confidence gene,’” Coken says. “That isn’t the case at all. Some 70 percent of people experience these impostor feelings at some point in their lives.”

“It is what I am most passionate about—creating a world where people feel at home with themselves by coaching and speaking about authentic leadership.”

She tells her clients if they DON’T feel like an imposter at some point, then they aren’t playing a big enough game.

But Coken never tells people how to overcome imposter syndrome. That’s because if you’re attempting to overcome something, the thing you’re trying to overcome is still there.

“I have choices if I’m hiking and come across a boulder on the trail,” she says, as an example. “Climb over, go around, go back, etc. The boulder is still there.”

However, if you search on Google how to overcome imposter syndrome, you’ll find more than 8.2 million results.

“I promise you none will make any difference in the long run because you cannot manage your mind,” Coken says. “Have you ever been upset, and someone tries to tell you everything will be OK? At that moment when the brain is triggered—no amount of tips, tools or tricks will make a difference. That is going against 40,000 years of evolution. Hard to do.”

She says people cannot manage their minds, but they can learn to master them by identifying the triggering event and the subsequent brain patter that is put together.

“Once identified, and it is never dramatic or traumatic, you can start seeing the imposter phenomenon in action,” Coken says.