Are you a fraud? Am I?
Do you ever find yourself feeling like a fraud? Like everyone around you knows what they’re doing and you’re just pretending, hoping you don’t get caught?
I do.
I remember about a year ago, I was giving a talk to a bunch of recent college grads. I have never seen such dead faces in my life. As my awkward jokes got nothing (not even a sympathetic chuckle!) I struggled to keep my attention on what I was saying, and not get swept back into the thoughts that had run through my head while I was preparing:
“It’s too bad they couldn’t get a REAL speaker”
“Does this talk even make any sense? Is it worth giving?”
“What if there’s a REAL expert in the audience and they say I’m totally wrong?”
“Is it too late to back out?”
But let’s be serious… I’m far too attached to my identity as a reliable person to bail, so instead I over-prepared like a fiend. I made my poor husband sit through multiple rehearsals, complete with making him do all the little interactive parts. And then I used my arsenal of mindfulness techniques to get through my anxiety and get up on that stage…
By the time I got to my final slide, I was already planning my exit route, sure that the students were doing the same… but who knows how a talk lands. As I gathered my notes a young woman came up to me and burst into tears telling me how she’d felt truly seen.
And what about the next time I go to write a talk… will I remember that woman? Or how I’m actually pretty good at putting a bunch of information into an engaging talk? Nope, I go right into more anxiety about all the things that could go wrong.
This is a pretty classic illustration of Impostor Syndrome (or Impostor Phenomenon or Perceived Fraudulence depending on who you ask).
This collection of behaviors, emotions and coping mechanisms was first codified in 1978 by Drs. Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes. Over the course of 150+ interactions with professional women, they found that even though their subjects had clearly, measurably, objectively achieved (with things like good grades, degrees, professional recognition etc.) they still felt like unintelligent frauds, living in fear of discovery (Clance & Imes, 1978).
Over the last 40 years the concept has evolved. We now know that people experience feelings of Impostorism regardless of profession, race, socio-economic status, intelligence or gender. (Langford & Clance, 1993 and Sakulku & Alexander, 2011). And though a lot of the literature disagrees and gets bogged down in semantics, they do agree on these core pillars Impostor Syndrome’s definition…
Impostor Syndrome is:
The inability to internalize success or achievement
The fear of being discovered or exposed as a fraud
Sukulku and Alexander (2011) created this great summary of the actions, emotions and thoughts present in the impostor cycle … I paraphrased it a little more…
Public speaking is a pretty classic trigger for the Impostor Cycle, but many people experience feelings of impostorism when speaking to their boss, pitching new clients, applying for new jobs… basically any time you put yourself out there and are evaluated by others.
At a talk I gave on the topic, one woman told me that her most acute experience of Impostor Syndrome occurred when she, a young professional woman, found herself surrounded by her colleagues who were all older men. Despite her accolades and experience, she felt that she had something to prove, and was only one sentence away from being exposed as an idiot.
Let’s look a little closer at the cycle. It begins when we do something cool, like land a new client, get into a great school, or write a pithy article, but when faced with positive feedback either find a way to discount our achievement…
“anyone can get into that school”
“designing that magazine isn’t really that hard”
“that paper accepts practically every submission”
…or we attribute our success to an external cause…
“I got lucky, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time”
“really, Jake did all the hard work”
“I worked my ass off” (we’ll get into why this one counts below)
By saying these things we make it clear to ourselves and the world, that it is not any inherent ability or talent that made us able to succeed.
And so we’ve taken our achievement away from ourselves, which means that the next time a challenge comes along we have all the anxiety, self-doubt and worry of a person who has no experience.
We remove the confidence of knowing we’ve succeeded before, and leave ourselves sure that we will fail.
In order to cope with that fear of failure we either procrastinate (and binge watch, say, The Office) or we over-prepare, sitting in our offices rehearsing talks until I’ve memorized every word. The danger of over-work, is that now we’re convinced that unless we maniacally over prepare, we’ll fail… that the extreme hard work is the only thing keeping us afloat.
And the cycle continues. For me, sure maybe talks to 20–50 people rooms will stop freaking me out — but, like most of us caught in the Impostor Cycle, I’m ambitious which means that I’ll start pitching larger rooms, always keeping myself at the edge of my ability and swirling around in all that emotion.
It’s an absolute trap, you can’t think yourself out from inside of this cycle. For instance, what if I say to myself, “ok Michelle, you’re being silly. You know you can do this, you’ve done it before… just be confident!” Then that little voice sneaks in and says “how do you know you actually did a good job, maybe everyone was just humoring you?” So then I over-prepare, and well you get the idea…
I used to speak a lot about the power of mindfulness for dealing with Impostor Syndrome, especially techniques from the practice of mindful self-compassion (Patzak, Kollmayer and Schober, 2017). And to be clear, I still think this completely legit. Mindfulness practice is excellent for lowering your state and trait anxiety (Chen et al, 2012) which is hugely correlated with Impostor Syndrome (Oriel, Plane and Mundt, 2004).
When my clients are in the grips of an Impostor Cycle storm, I send them right over to Dr. Kristin Neff’s site self-compassion.org and get them using the 5-minute “Self-Compassion Break” meditation you can find here (it’s a game-changer).
And it does make logical sense: if I can reduce my worry, I can reduce my over-preparation, which means that when I do another cool thing, I’m less able to point to my insane over-preparation and have to give myself a little pat on the back… maybe it was me after all. The crazy spin of the cycle slows, and with practice, over time, might be something we can take an intentional step out of.
But I’m increasingly of the belief that Impostor Syndrome is just the tip of the iceberg, a symptom of a much deeper problem; our culture’s deeply unhealthy relationship with success. But that’s another conversation, one which I’ll explore more in a future article.
Here are links to all the published articles in this series:
Is your relationship with success healthy?
Why do some people feel successful, and others don’t?
Fixing your relationship with success… A model and a magic pill (sort of).
Chen, K. W., Berger, C. C., Manheimer, E., Forde, D., Magidson, J., Dachman, L., & Lejuez, C. W. (2012). Meditative therapies for reducing anxiety: A systematic review and meta•analysis of randomized controlled trials. Depression And Anxiety, 29(7), 545–562. doi:10.1002/da.21964
Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(#3), 241–247.
Langford, J., & Clance, P. R. (1993). The imposter phenomenon: Recent research findings regarding dynamics, personality and family patterns and their implications for treatment. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 30(3), 495–501. doi: 10.1037/0033–3204.30.3.495
Oriel, K., Plane, M. B., & Mundt, M. (2004). Family Medicine Residents and the Impostor Phenomenon. Family Medicine, 26(4), 248–252.
Patzak, A., Kollmayer, M., & Schober, B. (2017). Buffering Impostor Feelings with Kindness: The Mediating Role of Self-compassion between Gender-Role Orientation and the Impostor Phenomenon. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01289
Sukulku, J., & Alexander, J. (2011). The Impostor Phenomenon. International Journal of Behavioral Science, 6(1), 73–92.