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

  Sadly, every day exceptional students drop out of school. People take jobs far below their abilities or aspirations or otherwise fail to rise to more mentally challenging and financially rewarding opportunities. Still others abandon long-cherished dreams of writing a book, becoming a photographer, or starting their own business, all in an attempt to avoid detection.

  These are, of course, the extreme cases. Fortunately, the vast majority of people with impostor syndrome don’t give up. Instead, like you, they press on in spite of the nagging self-doubt. They get the degree, advance in their field, take on the challenge, and succeed—sometimes spectacularly so. Still, the anxiety remains. Fortunately, though, you won’t have to suffer much longer.

  From “Impostorism” to Confidence

  As you embark on this journey to feel as bright and capable as you truly are, there are a few things you need to know. First and foremost is that you are neither broken nor sick. True, something is not quite right about your impostor feelings, but there is nothing wrong with you. I’m not going to try to talk you out of those feelings, at least not yet. I know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t believe me anyway. More important, you’re going to do that yourself soon enough. All the tools, insight, and information you need to overcome the impostor syndrome await you here.

  Up until now your shame, along with the mistaken belief that you’re the only one who feels like a fraud, has kept you from speaking up. However, in picking up this book you’ve acknowledged something you may have kept hidden for years, and by breaking the silence you have taken what is an essential step in beating the impostor syndrome.

  Throughout this book I’ll be encouraging you to both get support from and give support to fellow members of the Impostor Club. I mention this now because you may have learned the hard way that sharing with people who don’t get what you’re going through is often not helpful. Your family, friends, or close colleagues either pooh-pooh your self-doubt, insisting that you’re “worrying over nothing,” or have grown impatient when their reassurances of your brilliance are constantly brushed aside. It’s not that they don’t want to be supportive—they do. But if you perpetually agonize over striking out only to consistently hit the ball out of the park, after a while even your most ardent supporters will find it hard to sympathize

  The good news is that you’re not alone anymore. Even better news: It really is possible to unlearn the self-limiting thinking that feeds your impostor feelings. How can I be so certain? Simple. The reason I know you so well is that I am you. Allow me to also officially introduce myself by letting you in on my not-so-secret secret. Namely, I am a recovering impostor. See, I told you you were in good company!

  The Bottom Line

  You’ve become adept at explaining away or minimizing evidence of your success and hence never really owning your accomplishments. Because you believe you’ve fooled others into thinking you are brighter and more capable than you “know” you are, you live in fear of being unmasked as an impostor.

  Now that you have a name for the feelings and the knowledge that you are not the only one who feels this way, you can finally begin to turn this impostor business around and see yourself as the competent person you really are.

  What You Can Do

  The impostor syndrome packs too much of an emotional punch to try to reason it away. Overcoming it requires self-reflection as well. Keep a notebook handy to capture “ahas” as they occur as well as to write your answers to exercises you’ll find throughout this book. With everything in one place, you’ll be able to more easily trace your entire journey from impostorism to the more confident you who you’ll meet at the end of this book.

  For a more engaged experience, consider reading this book as part of a book club or with a friend.

  If this is the first time you’re learning about the impostor syndrome, take a moment now to identify your biggest take-aways so far. What did you learn here that surprised you or you found most helpful? What thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors did you recognize in yourself? What questions do you have? Write them down now.

  What’s Ahead

  The question is, Why do intelligent, accomplished women—and men—from Indiana to India fall victim to this faulty thinking? To unlearn the impostor syndrome, you need to know where it comes from. So let’s begin there.

  * * *

  * Unless otherwise noted, all names have been changed.

  [2]

  Consider the Source

  The more one analyzes people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

  —Oscar Wilde

  You did not come by your impostor feelings all by yourself. These irrational feelings of inadequacy can get sparked by a host of things. When you have an “impostor moment,” it’s tremendously helpful to understand the possible reasons behind it. That’s because when you shift away from the personal it allows you to put your responses into perspective more quickly. It’s the difference between thinking Yikes, what an incompetent fraud I am! and knowing It makes perfect sense that I’d feel like a fraud. Under the circumstances, who wouldn’t?

  Not only do you no longer need to feel the shame that comes from the mistaken assumption that you’re the only one who feels this way, but as you are about to discover, feeling like an impostor is not only normal, but in certain situations it’s to be expected. This alone can go a long way toward lowering your anxiety and raising your confidence.

  Seven Perfectly Good Reasons Why You May Feel Like an Impostor—and What to Do About Them

  You are about to discover seven perfectly good reasons why fully capable people like you wind up feeling like impostors. Even if you can’t relate personally to every reason, knowing about them will help you see the larger picture. None of the seven are unique to women, and most are situational. As such you may identify with one or some more than with others. However, there’s one source that everyone can relate to. Raise your hand if …

  1. You Were Raised by Humans

  Since it looks like almost all of you have your hands up, we’ll spend a bit more time on what is for some the start of their impostor story. Your family—with help from teachers, coaches, and other significant adults in your life—had a profound impact on shaping your early self-expectations and, therefore, how confident, competent, and even successful you feel today. Discouraging messages especially can linger for years. In his memoir, crooner Andy Williams speaks of never having been able to get out of his head what his father had told him when he was a child: “You’re not as good as them, so you have to work harder.” They were words that prompted a “crisis of confidence” that haunted Williams throughout his long and exceptionally successful career.1

  Impostor feelings can be spawned by far more subtle messages as well. If you were the kid who came home with all As and one B and your parents’ only response was “What’s that B doing there?” there’s a good chance you grew up to be a perfectionist. If your parents were preoccupied with grades to the exclusion of anything else, you may have come to believe that being loved depended on being smart.

  Or you may have grown up in a family where your talents and accomplishments went unnoticed. You made honors or took home the trophy and all you heard was “That’s nice,” or worse, they said nothing. For kids, approval is like oxygen. The absence of praise during childhood can make it difficult as an adult to own your accomplishments and feel deserving of your success. If that resonates, you should know that there are any numbers of reasons why a parent would withhold praise—none of which involve a lack of love.

  Your parents may have been afraid that praise would give you a big head or that you’d come to depend on it. If you always brought home the gold, your parents may have simply come to expect it. If you had siblings who struggled academically, your parents may not have wanted to single you out for your achieve
ments. Depending on your parents’ own education level, it’s possible they simply didn’t value schooling. Or they were raised to believe that modesty and not calling attention to oneself are virtues.

  On the other hand, you may have been lavished with praise no matter how well you did. As enviable as this may sound to the approval-deprived, unearned applause has its drawbacks. After all, if everything you did was considered remarkable, you may never have learned to differentiate between good and great, or between taking a shot and giving it your all. You may have grown so dependent on constant validation that if your professors or employers fail to continually stroke you, then you immediately start questioning your performace. Or you don’t value the judge, believing, “They love everything I do because I’m their kid.”

  It’s possible too that you grew up in an atmosphere where the norm was to emphasize effort over outcome and everyone got a trophy or gold star. Certainly this approach kept many kids who are not natural athletes or students literally and figuratively in the game. However, you may be among those who grew up to experience confusion at the lack of correlation between results and praise. Jack, a bright graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, believes his parents’ inclination to praise only his approach is what led to his own tendency to rationalize away his accomplishments and to feel guilty when the process doesn’t match the outcome. For example, if Jack aces a class without extraordinary effort, he feels undeserving of the grade. He wonders too if the impostor syndrome actually fuels some high-achieving people, explaining, “I have long felt driven to do something that will completely surprise and impress my parents, instead of eliciting the same stock praise for all occasions.”

  As you can see, early messages about achievement, success, and failure run deep. At eighty-one, Andy Williams says he’s “finally beginning to believe that maybe I am as good as the others after all.” It might take a lifetime to fully uncover and recover from the childhood roots of your impostor feelings. But that’s not to say you can’t get a jump on things here.

  For example, it may help to think back to an early success, preferably something you were proud of. It could be something you excelled at, that came easily to you, that you won or achieved. What was your response at the time? Were you excited, embarrassed, surprised, or proud? Did you celebrate, or did you beat yourself up for not doing even better? Did you tell your friends or keep a low profile? How did your family and/or other significant adults respond to this success? Did they reward, praise, encourage, or ignore you? Were they excited, disappointed, ambivalent, or proud? How do you think this experience has impacted how you respond to success today?

  Of course, there’s the other side of the achievement coin—failure, challenge, and mistakes. Here you’ll want to think back on a memorable “failure” or challenge you experienced as a child or young adult. Was there something you found especially difficult—for example, reading, math, art, learning a language, or athletics? Perhaps something you performed poorly at or blew, like the big game, a test, or a class presentation. Did you consider things like not making honors or winning a prize at the science fair to be a failure?

  How did you respond to this early difficulty? Were you embarrassed, disappointed, or upset? Did you beat yourself up or shrug it off as no big deal? Did you try harder, or did you feel discouraged and give up? Did you share your feelings with others? What was your family’s response? Were you punished, comforted, encouraged, protected, ignored, or rescued? If relevant, how did teachers, coaches, or other significant adults in your life respond? Finally, what impact do you think this experience had on how you respond to failure, difficulty, and risk taking today?

  Children who grow up to feel like impostors can also be affected by what psychologist Joan Harvey refers to as “family myths and labels.” In families with multiple children or close cousins it’s common for children to get labeled according to their perceived traits or talents. There may be “the funny one,” “the athletic one,” “the sensitive one,” “the responsible one,” “the bad one,” and so on. If another sibling was dubbed “the smart one,” you may have been torn between believing the family myth and desperately wanting to prove your parents wrong. If, however, you did get to be the chosen one, you may have felt tremendous pressure to live up to the label. Either way it’s no picnic.

  Even if you had the most supportive family in the world, you no doubt learned to measure your adult achievements through your family’s eyes. Of course different families can have very different definitions of what constitutes success for their children. For the Korean American teenager Patti in Paula Yoo’s novel Good Enough, the expectation was crystal clear. Under the heading “How to Make Your Korean Parents Happy,” Yoo placed three things:

  Get a perfect score on the SATs.

  Get into Harvard Yale Princeton.

  Don’t talk to boys.*

  Your own messages may have been far less explicit, but still you somehow knew what success looked like. In some families it meant that you graduate high school or train to enter a trade. In others, success was getting a four-year college degree. In some that wasn’t good enough—you had to earn an advanced degree. In still others it was about the “right” college or even earning the “right” degree—often in things like law, medicine, or engineering. Then there are families for whom education was not the focus at all. Instead children were expected to go into the family business, join the military, marry and have children, enter the clergy, or grow up to be a contributing member of one’s racial, religious, or cultural group—something some African, Latino, Native, and Asian Americans refer to as “collective success.”

  What about you? How was success defined in your family? If success centered on education, what did your parents expect of you academically? What would a typical report-card conversation sound like? What did your family assume you would grow up to do or be? In the eyes of your family, would you say you’ve met, exceeded, or fallen short of their expectations? What, if anything, does your family have to say about your current level of achievement? If your family doesn’t speak of such things, what do you imagine they’re thinking or feeling? Once again, what impact has all this had on how you feel about your success today?

  We all want to feel like our family is proud of us. If you’ve achieved at the level of success established by your family—and you’re good with that—then everybody’s happy. But when you succeed on different terms than what was anticipated, you may wonder, Am I really successful? Go far beyond what your family had envisioned, and you might feel guilty for outdoing your parents or siblings. Fail to live up to parental expectations, and you may experience shame. Either scenario can send you running to the nearest therapist.

  No matter how old you are, you never fully outgrow the need for your family’s acknowledgment and approval. But needing it and getting it are two different things. If your parents designated another sibling as the family genius, as much as you may like to, you can’t unring the bell. On the other hand, if you did happen to be crowned “the smart one,” accept that you’re not always going to be able to live up to the title. Once you make the decision to stop wasting your time and emotional energy trying to maintain your family’s approval, you’ll free up a lot of time in your schedule. You can’t change the past. The future, though, is yours for the making. Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name, George Eliot, said, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” It’s also never too late to be the confident, self-affirming person you were meant to be.

  Finally, don’t lose sight of the fact that your parents were raised by humans too. If you were underpraised, it’s possible that your parents never received praise themselves. Or maybe the reason they demanded academic perfection from you was that their parents demanded it of them—or they wish their parents had. When you can finally understand and forgive your parents, you’ll be able to do the same for yourself.

  2. You Are a Student

/>   Since 1985 more than sixty colleges and universities have invited me to their campuses to speak. Occasionally it’s to address faculty and deans. Primarily, though, it’s to talk to a group that’s especially vulnerable to the impostor syndrome—students. It makes perfect sense really. What other group do you know who have their knowledge and skills literally tested and graded practically on a daily basis?

  If you graduated from high school near the head of your class or were otherwise recognized for your academic excellence, you probably got used to being seen as the best and the brightest. But then you went off to college, where suddenly you were just one of many. Now who are you? On the other hand, if you were an average student in high school and then went on to do well in college or beyond, you might question how you managed to pull it off.

  It’s possible that you began your academic life quite confident, only to have your confidence squashed by an insensitive educator. It’s a story I’ve heard far too often. One distraught engineering student was told by her professor, “You are certainly not brilliant, but you may be able to muddle through.” Another master’s student who worked under a cruel and condescending advisor told me that the most encouraging comment he heard in four years was “Nothing in your thesis is too egregious.” Translation: “Your work doesn’t suck too bad.” With feedback like that, how could anyone’s self-confidence not suffer?