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The Impostor Syndrome

By Hillary Hutchinson / April 7, 2014

Photo by N. Palermo, Flickr 13441149854_c9acff35ff_n
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. ~ Bertrand Russell.

It’s finally spring, and I have been thinking how delightful it would be to open up my scalp and give my brain a thorough cleaning, shaking out the old cobwebs and beating the mites out. I’d especially like to find a way to connect my neurons for success, instead of letting my mind wander down old, hard-worn pathways that take me to places I’d rather not go: certain I am a fraud doomed to failure in every aspect of my life. Wouldn’t it be great to wake up every day feeling perfectly confident, upbeat, excited to face the challenges of the day, without wrestling the dreaded demon most commonly known as “The Impostor Syndrome”?

The term dates back to at least the fall of 1978, when Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes published “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention” in Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice. It’s defined as the feeling that you are a fraud and that any day the people around you will discover the truth. Or as Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian newspaper puts it, “A classic case of comparing your insides with other people’s outsides.” It’s a bit like looking in a fun house mirror and believing the distorted picture to be what you really look like.

In other words, only you know what’s going on inside your head, and you assume that means you know the truth about your abilities. Although women do seem to suffer from this syndrome more than men, plenty of men suffer from it as well. Margot Gerristsen surveyed engineers and earth scientists via Facebook in 2012 and got 220 responses in 24 hours (80 male, 140 female respondents), out of 2,000 people that actually viewed the post. She found 43% of men and 62% of women “often or always” think “I am afraid to be found out.” To quote Gerristsen’s results further, when asked whether having “impostor feelings” affected performance, 52% of men said, “Yes, negatively” (“scared,” “avoidance behavior”) and 27% said “Yes, positively” (“work harder”). In comparison, 87% of females said “Yes, negatively” (“scared”, “avoidance behavior”, “exhaustion”, “negative impacts on personal relationships”) and only 7% said “Yes, positively” (“work harder”).

“The impostor syndrome describes the countless millions of people who do not experience an inner sense of competence or success,” writes Dr. Valerie Young in her book, The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer From the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive In Spite of It. She adds, “Despite often overwhelming evidence of their abilities, impostors dismiss these as merely a matter of luck, timing, outside help, charm—even computer error. Because people who have the impostor syndrome feel that they’ve somehow managed to slip through the system undetected, in their mind it’s just a matter of time before they’re found out.”

If you do get better and better at whatever you do and rise to the top of your profession, it may not fix the sense of being an impostor. Actually, the feeling could get worse, because the higher you go in your own field, the more people you encounter with knowledge equal to or greater than your own. The insecurity induced can paralyze a person.

The cruel irony is that the impostor syndrome can lead to both success and failure. You succeed when you change your self-talk to something more positive, and you learn to embrace the times you feel totally in control and competent. On the other hand, if you hold yourself to a standard of rarefied perfection that no one can possibly achieve, you may stop yourself from even trying… a sure way to prove to yourself that you are, indeed, a fraud.

Graduate school was the place for me that I felt the sense of being an impostor most keenly. It is possible to beat it, as I know from personal experience, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to beat it back again and again. Getting out of academia helped me put my abilities back into perspective somewhat, but the fear still rears its ugly head from time to time. So, what can you do?

“Research shows that one of the best things we can do is name impostorism, to give students [and I will add, anyone else, too] the sense that what they are experiencing is more common than they believe,” blogged Jessica Collett, an associate professor of sociology at Notre Dame in Scatterplot on September 5, 2013. She adds, “Researchers find that impostorism is most often found among extremely talented and capable individuals, not people who are true impostors.” The bottom line is you are probably not going to be able to completely rid yourself forever of these feelings of being an impostor. Tina Fey, an amazingly successful comedian, is quoted in Dr. Young’s book as saying, “The beauty of the impostor syndrome is you vacillate between extreme egomania and a complete feeling of: ‘I’m a fraud! Oh God, they’re on to me! I’m a fraud!’ So you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud.”

Other steps you can take:

1. Celebrate successes, big or small;
2. Remind yourself that everyone makes some mistakes, and the vast majority of those mistakes are not fatal;
3. Remember that other people (advisors, mentors, supervisors, bosses) hired you because they think you are perfectly capable;
4. Know that feeling like a fake may just mean you are out of your comfort zone and into a learning zone; and
5. Realize that challenges lead to growth, personally and professionally.

By the way, there is a flip side to the impostor syndrome, which is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is when people greatly overestimate their abilities and competence and come to grief. But that, as they say, is a story for another day.