The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It

by Valerie Young

  Copyright © 2011 by Valerie Young

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Young, Valerie, Ed.D.

  The secret thoughts of successful women: why capable people suffer from the impostor syndrome and how to thrive in spite of it / Valerie Young.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Women—Psychology 2. Success. I. Title.

  HQ1206.Y68 2011

  155.3′33—dc23 2011016330

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45273-3

  Jacket design by David Tran

  v3.1_r3

  This book is dedicated to the codiscoverers of the impostor phenomenon, Dr. Pauline Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes.

  By putting a name to the feelings, they have helped free countless people—including myself—from needless self-doubt.

  [CONTENTS]

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  [1]

  Feel Like an Impostor? Join the Club

  [2]

  Consider the Source

  [3]

  It’s Not All in Your Head

  [4]

  Hiding Out

  [5]

  What Do Luck, Timing, Connections, and Personality Really Have to Do with Success?

  [6]

  The Competence Rule Book for Mere Mortals

  [7]

  Responding to Failure, Mistakes, and Criticism

  [8]

  Success and the Female Drive to Care and Connect

  [9]

  Is It “Fear” of Success or Something Else?

  [10]

  Why “Fake It Till You Make It” Is Harder for Women—and Why You Must

  [11]

  Rethinking Risk Taking and Cultivating Chutzpah

  [12]

  Playing Big

  APPENDIX

  The Dirty Little Secret About the Impostor Syndrome

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Women don’t give themselves enough credit for what they can do. You see it in the twenty-one-year-old senior just coming out of school, you see it in the Ph.D. candidate just coming out of graduate school, and you see it in the professional who’s been working for ten or fifteen or twenty years.

  —Director of minority-student affairs at a prestigious women’s college

  Countless books promise to reveal the “secrets” of success. This is not one of them. You’re already successful. You just don’t own it. And that’s what this book is about—helping people just like you who have already achieved some measure of academic or professional success to feel successful. This book exposes the kinds of hidden fears and insecurities well known to millions of accomplished women—and men—and explores the myriad of reasons why they secretly feel undeserving of their hard-won success.

  For the record, you don’t have to feel especially “successful” to relate to the dichotomy of the public face of confidence and competence on the one hand and the private voices of self-doubt on the other. You could have won the Nobel Prize in physics, an Oscar, and the respect of peers and competitors alike, and still you would wonder, “What if they find out I’m not as smart as they think I am?” “Can I really pull this off?” “Who do I think I am?”

  Fortunately, this book shows you how to, in the words of the famous Apple ad, “think different.” Not only about things like competence, luck, faking it, failure, and success, but about yourself. Will you become more successful as a result? Undoubtedly. Once you have the tools to transform your thinking, you’ll find yourself reaching new heights. In fact, this book will help you positively thrive.

  Frankly, this is the book I wish I’d had in 1982. I was four years into a graduate program in education and procrastinating terribly on writing my dissertation. One day while I was sitting in class, another student began reading aloud from an article by a couple of psychologists from Georgia State University, Dr. Pauline Rose Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes, titled, “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women.” Among the 162 high-achieving women they sampled, Clance and Imes uncovered a pervasive pattern of dismissing accomplishments and believing that their success would disappear once others discovered the awful secret that they were, in fact, “impostors.”

  My head was nodding like a bobble-head doll’s. “Oh my God,” I thought, “she’s talking about me!” When I looked around the room, everyone else—including the professor—was nodding too. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I knew these women. I’d been in class with them, I’d taught alongside them, I’d read their work. To me, they were intelligent, articulate, and supremely competent individuals. To learn that even they felt like they were fooling others rocked my world.

  A group of us began to meet as a kind of informal impostor-support group, where we did what women commonly do under stress—we bared our souls. We talked about how intimidated we felt when we discussed our research with our respective faculty advisors, about how more often than not we left these sessions feeling confused and inept. How we’d clearly put one over on the admissions office, and how anyone who looked too closely would realize we weren’t scholar material after all. A few of us were convinced that certain professors had overlooked our obvious intellectual shortcomings simply because they liked us. We all agreed that these feelings of fraudulence were keeping us from finishing our dissertations in a timely fashion—or, in my case, from even starting.

  The nineteenth-century English literary critic John Churton Collins was right when he said, “If we knew each other’s secrets, what comforts we should find.” Just being in the company of like-minded women was tremendously reassuring. Everything was going pretty well until about the third meeting. That’s when I began to have this nagging sense that even though they were saying they felt like impostors … I knew I was the only real impostor!

  Turning Pain into Gain

  A few months later I came across a column in the New York Times by then ABC news correspondent and author Betty Rollin, with the headline: “Chronic self-doubt: Why does it afflict so many women?”1 Despite an impressive track record, Rollin admitted to being plagued throughout her professional career by a constant fear of “screwing up.” She wondered why more men weren’t reduced to tears, as she often was, by the “I’m-in-over-my-head-and-this-time-they’re-going-to-catch-me” feeling that accompanied each new assignment.

  So one day Rollin decided to put the question to a young male producer she worked with at ABC, someone who, she was quick to point out, “is as competent as he thinks he is.” Here’s how Rollin described the exchange:

  “When you’re on a story,” I asked him, “do you ever think it’s not going to work out?” “Sure,” he said merrily. “All the time.”

  “Do you worry about i
t?” “Sometimes,” he said, not sounding sure.

  “When it doesn’t work out, do you usually figure it’s your fault?”

  “No,” he said, sounding sure.

  “Suppose it is your fault. Does it make you feel terrible?”

  “Nah,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He looked at me. “Aren’t I entitled to make a mistake once in a while?”

  It’s been decades since I first read those words, but I still recall how this simple rhetorical question stopped me cold. Entitled to make a mistake? This was new information to me—and, as I came to learn, to an awful lot of other women too. I was beginning to see that even if the myriad of occupational obstacles facing women at that time vanished altogether, our own inner barriers might well prevent us from taking full advantage of opportunity.

  I realized then that I had a choice, I could let my own secret fears continue to stand between me and my goals, or I could channel my energy into trying to understand them. I chose the latter. The impostor phenomenon or the impostor syndrome, as it is more commonly referred to in the popular media, became the impetus for my doctoral research, in which I explored the broader question of why so many clearly intelligent, capable women feel anything but.

  My search for answers entailed in-depth interviews with a racially diverse group of fifteen women: executives, clinicians, social service providers, and academic advisors. I wanted to hear from them about the kinds of internal barriers to success they’d observed in the women they managed, counseled, or advised. What I learned became the basis for a daylong workshop called “Overcoming the Imposter Syndrome: Issues of Competence and Confidence for Women,” which I co-led with fellow grad student Lee Anne Bell.

  Lee and I booked a small meeting room at a local hotel, put up some flyers, and hoped that at least a few people would come. When forty women showed up, we knew we’d hit a nerve. We facilitated several more packed workshops before Lee relocated to pursue a career in higher education. I continued to speak on the impostor syndrome and in 2001 renamed the program “How to Feel as Bright and Capable as Everyone Seems to Think You Are: Why Smart Women (and Men) Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and What to Do About It.”

  Taking impostor feelings out of the realm of therapy and into an educational arena has proved tremendously successful. To date, more than fifty thousand people have attended this workshop. Simply giving people an alternative way of thinking about themselves and their competence has yielded some amazing results. Women reported asking for—and getting—raises. Corporate execs who had participated in a workshop as students told of being so transformed that years later they asked me to address their employees. Writers who had played small for years became prolific. People who had lacked the confidence to start or grow a business suddenly found the courage to go for it.

  The core of what you’ll learn stems from my original research. Now and then I draw from the professional and management experience gained in my own seven years in a Fortune 200 company and sixteen as an entrepreneur and pioneer in Profiting from Your Passions® career coaching. However, most of what you will discover here comes from the collective experience and wisdom of my workshop participants over a quarter of a century.

  During that time I’ve led workshops for tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff at more than sixty colleges and universities including Harvard, Stanford, Smith, MIT, and Cal Tech. Unfortunately, the impostor syndrome does not end with a diploma. Some of what you’ll learn comes from working directly with employees in such diverse organizations as Intel, Chrysler, Ernst & Young, UBS, Procter & Gamble, EMC, Bristol-Myers Squibb, IBM, the Society of Women Engineers, and American Women in Radio and Television, and with numerous groups of Canadian women entrepreneurs.

  In addition, I’ve run seminars for groups of nurses, psychologists, optometrists, administrative assistants, jewelers, cancer researchers, social workers, and attorneys—all of which has been incorporated in this book. Despite their various situations and occupations, the women and men I’ve worked with have one important thing in common: They are not impostors. And, as you will soon discover, neither are you.

  The Impostor Syndrome Then and Now

  Clearly a lot has changed for women since 1982. I wish I could report the same with regards to women and the impostor syndrome. In fact, of the four overarching themes in this book, the three that emerged from my initial research are no less apt today:

  1. How you define and experience competence, success, and failure has everything to do with how confident and competent you feel. Not only is adjusting how you think about competence, failure, and success the fastest path to overcoming the impostor syndrome, bar none, but it won’t happen unless you do. Period.

  2. Women’s self-limiting attitudes and behavior barriers must be viewed in the context of certain sociocultural expectations and realities. If you have difficulty always seeing yourself as competent and qualified, it may be because at times society has a hard time seeing you that way too. In spite of all the progress, the fact remains that being “too” anything that’s considered unfeminine can cause people of both genders to perceive you to be less competent and a less desirable hire.

  3. It is impossible to separate women’s achievement experience—including “fear of success”—from the feminine drive to affiliate with others. Relocating for school or a new job, receiving a major promotion, or training to work in a predominantly male field are just a few of the situations where you may feel uncertain of yourself. It could be the impostor syndrome talking. In some cases, though, what you assume is fear of success may in fact be a heightened sensitivity to the potential ramifications of success on your relationships with others.

  There is one aspect of the confidence conversation that was not present in the 1980s that you’ll learn about here. Then women were striving to break down the cultural, educational, and legal barriers to higher-paying occupations that had been historically male-only. Now that the structural barriers have largely fallen, the quest for work/life integration, satisfaction, and meaning has for many women superseded the singular pursuit of money, status, and power. Overall the change is good. However, it’s also complicated things, making it harder at times to tell if you’re holding back because of self-doubt or a shift in priorities.

  Can Men Feel Like Impostors?

  When psychologists first began to study the impostor phenomenon, they suspected it was something experienced primarily by women. That has proven not to be the case. In fact, it is one of the few psychological issues initially thought to affect primarily women that has later been determined to relate to both genders.2 Men are attending my seminars in increasing numbers, and among graduate students the male-female ratio is roughly fifty-fifty.

  This of course begs the question, if men identify with the impostor syndrome too, why is this book aimed primarily at women? It’s a legitimate question and frankly one I struggled with. I’ve heard from or worked with countless men who suffer terribly from their fraud fears, including a member of the Canadian mounted police, an attorney who argued before the Supreme Court, a corporate CEO, and an entire team of aerospace engineers, one of whom spoke of the “sheer terror” he feels when handed a major assignment. In the end, though, I decided there were more reasons than not to focus on women.

  Articles about the impostor syndrome invariably cite the fact that numerous studies have found no difference between men and women. Some articles do mention the multiple studies where women scored significantly higher on impostor scales.3 Nearly all point to the single study in which men outscored women.4 However, few mention that these subjects were college professors. Given that academia is a breeding ground for impostor feelings, I think you’d be hard-pressed to replicate this finding in other settings.

  Perhaps the real question is, if men experience the impostor syndrome equally, why aren’t more clamoring for a solution? Of the sixty-six dissertations on the impostor phenomenon, 90
percent are by women. Speaking from my own experience, I can tell you that every seminar I’ve conducted for undergraduate students, members of professional associations, or corporate audiences has always been at the invitation of a program or committee whose mission it is to attract, develop, retain, and advance female students, members, or employees. All of which would seem to confirm impostor-syndrome researcher Dr. Joan Harvey’s explanation that “men take it for granted and just live it, while women want to do something about it.”5

  More important, this book is aimed at women because the impostor syndrome holds them back more. Betty Rollin says it best when she writes: “I know the theory that says men are as scared as we are and they just repress it. Well, ok, then maybe repression works. Because when I look around the workplace I see an awful lot of men who are less competent than they think they are and as many women for whom the opposite is true: Women who are far more competent than they know and, if they keep it up, more than anyone else will ever know.”

  The next obvious question is, can men who experience the impostor syndrome benefit from this book? In a word—absolutely! All the more so if you are a man of color, have working-class roots, or identify with any of the other “at-risk” groups I talk about in this book. Similarly, if you know, teach, manage, mentor, parent, or coach a male or groups of males who are susceptible to the impostor syndrome, you will gain greatly from this book as well.

  Although the book is geared toward women, I’ve tried to make it as helpful to male impostors as possible. For one, you’ll find I’ve included a number of male voices here. Also know that when I refer to men or to broader gender differences relative to the impostor syndrome, unless otherwise noted, I’m not referring to distinctions between male and female impostors. In other words, when I talk about impostors in general, I’m talking about men too. If you are a man who identifies with the impostor syndrome, I have a favor to ask. After reading this book, I invite you to take a moment to send any feelings, thoughts, or experiences that you consider unique to male impostors to me at maleimpostors@​impostorsyndrome.com. I’d love to have your voice more fully represented in future editions.