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

  The higher the achievement stakes, the more likely you’ll wind up feeling like a fraud. If you were considered academically gifted or enrolled in honors classes, you may feel more pressure to be brilliant. Or you may have skated through your undergraduate years relatively confident, but once you decided to get an advanced degree you began to wonder whether you really had what it takes to go from student to scholar. In any of these scenarios you wonder, Do I know enough? Can I really do this? Am I good enough?

  If you’re a student, there are a few things you want to keep in mind. One is that every field, from law to psychology to art, has its own specialized and often unnecessary convoluted language. In order to be deemed sufficiently knowledgeable or scholarly, you’re required to “elevate” things that could just as easily be described in everyday language. At times the language can be so dense that even when you’re relatively well versed in an area, you may still have to read the same sentence over and over again to comprehend what’s being said. Whether you eventually decipher it or not, the fact that you had to struggle in the first place can set off your impostor alarm. Truth be told, if more experts communicated with the goal of making their work accessible to a larger population, everyone, including you, would feel a lot smarter—and be more informed.

  When you’re surrounded by well-educated people it’s easy to assume that everyone else is somehow “smarter” than you. Some are. Some aren’t. Either way, as Thomas Armstrong points out in 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Multiple Intelligences, there are different ways of being smart—and “book-smart” is just one of them.

  When intellectual insecurity does strike, try to remind yourself that not only did you sign up to have your knowledge and ability tested on a regular basis, but you paid for the privilege. After all, getting an education costs good money. So approach being a student as you would being any paying consumer and take advantage of every possible resource available to you, including tutoring and academic advising. Recognize too that some subjects are going to come more easily to you and others you’re going to have to really work at. If you’re struggling to do the work, stop being embarrassed or judging yourself as inadequate and seek assistance instead.

  Most of all, you need to recognize that the impostor syndrome is part of the student experience, and all the more so if you’re in graduate school or belong to any of the other groups covered in this chapter. Just knowing this can go a long way in helping you see your lack of confidence less in personal terms and more as part of the collective student experience. So repeat after me in your most confident voice: I’m a STUDENT. I’m here to LEARN. I’m SUPPOSED to feel stupid!

  3. You Work in an Organizational Culture That Feeds Self-Doubt

  It is entirely possible, of course, to work in an environment that fosters cooperation and mutual support and still feel inept. However, if you happen to be trying to make it in a culture known for eating its own, there’s a greater risk for the impostor syndrome to take hold.

  Adversarial organizational cultures are hardly new. Nearly a century ago the distinguished physicist and chemist Marie Curie observed that within her field “there are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.”

  Take academia. Scholarly debate and rigorous investigation are what motivates many people to pursue a career in higher education in the first place. But what you might not have bargained for, especially if you’re in a highly competitive research setting, is a culture where spirited debate and inquiry can quickly turn hostile and derisive. It can be so intense that physicists at one university refer to these exchanges as “combat physics.”

  In fact, Diane Zorn at York University in Canada insists that the less desirable elements of academic culture, such as aggressive competitiveness, scholarly isolation, nationalism among and between disciplines, and lack of mentoring, are the reason the impostor syndrome is so rampant on college campuses and not just among students.2 In the only study in which men actually identified more strongly with the impostor syndrome than women, the men were university professors.3

  Things are somewhat different in the business world. Here success is measured not by the ability to punch holes in other people’s theories but by your skill at beating the competition and getting promoted. Still, there is no shortage of egos, one-upping, and infighting. Having spent a decade in the corporate world, I’ve seen firsthand how overbearing executives can belittle subordinates, how despite the party line, everyone knows there really is such a thing as a “dumb question,” and how risk taking is acceptable—as long as you always get it right. If the place where you spend most of your waking hours makes you feel stupid or inept, your self-confidence is bound to suffer.

  If you feel intimidated or out of your league in your job, stop assuming it’s because you’re not smart enough or sophisticated enough and recognize the ways in which your organizational culture may be contributing to your impostor feelings. Is asking for help—or even information—considered a sign of weakness or a legitimate request? Is admitting a gap in knowledge seen as normal and necessary for learning or as a sign of incompetence? Is perfectionism the unspoken rule?

  Only you can decide whether your workplace nourishes your intellect or feeds your insecurities. If you’re in an especially hostile setting, reach out to like-minded colleagues within or across disciplines or fields. Collaborating or even just talking with people who understand and who can validate your work is an effective counterbalance to being in a less-than-supportive environment. If nothing works, take Oxygen Media CEO Gerry Laybourne’s advice: “If they make you feel stupid … move on.” While you obviously can’t change jobs overnight, you would be wise to keep your eyes open and your résumé up-to-date.4

  4. You Work Alone

  You can work all by yourself and still feel like a giant fake. In fact, in some ways working alone can cause you to question your competence even more. After all, being your own boss means you have no real job description, no management feedback, and no outside performance standards to guide you. So instead you come up with your own, which makes for tough going when you work for a demanding and unforgiving boss like yourself.

  Working alone also puts you more at risk for professional isolation. Not having anyone to bounce ideas or decisions off of makes it easier to second-guess yourself. With no one to point out your blind spots or pat you on the back, you can get discouraged more readily and become mired in self-doubt.

  Because it’s so easy to lose perspective when you work alone, one of the best things you can do is connect with another solo worker for regular check-ins. It’s less important that the other person be in your business or field than it is to have someone to help hold you accountable for follow-through and deadlines, to troubleshoot problems, brainstorm ideas, and offer that much-needed feedback that you really do know what you’re doing.

  5. You Work in a Creative Field

  After his novel Everything Is Illuminated made the New York Times bestseller list, Jonathan Safran Foer told a reporter, “I can be very hard on myself. I convince myself that I’m fooling people.”5 Award-winning author Maya Angelou also worries that her success is a big ruse, once saying, “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.”

  It’s not just writers. The Internet is full of impostor confessions from people in the entertainment industry who despite receiving much acclaim still worry about being unmasked. She may be a bona fide star, but as the stakes got higher, Kate Winslet says, there were times when “I would wake up in the morning before going off to a shoot, and think, I can’t do this. I’m a fraud.”6 And Don Cheadle says that when he looks at his work, “All I can see is everything I’m doing wrong that is a sham and a fraud.” It doesn’t matter which side of the camera you’re on.7 When he’s on the set, Michael Uslan, the producer of the Batman movies, says, “I still h
ave this background feeling that one of the security guards might come and throw me out.”8

  And why wouldn’t they—or you—have these feelings? The very nature of creative work makes those who do it vulnerable to feeling inadequate, especially if you are not formally trained. For one, your work is highly public. Plus you are defined not only by your work but by artistic and literary standards that are completely subjective. How many other occupations do you know where a person’s work is judged by people whose job title is “professional critic”? It’s a challenge to maintain confidence when you know you are only as good as your last painting, your last movie, your last book, when even the brightest stars fade quickly, and where success requires that you prove yourself over and over again in ways few others must.

  But what if you really have achieved a certain degree of notoriety? You might expect to feel more confident. Instead it can cause you to question yourself even more because the reactions of those around you can be so skewed. “When you’re a celebrity,” says writer A. J. Jacobs, “anything that emerges from your mouth that vaguely resembles a joke is cause for gut-busting laughter from everyone within earshot.”9 With all that adoration it’s only natural to question whether you really deserve the attention.

  Given the nearly universal nature of impostor feelings among your fellow creative types, what if you were to stop fighting it and instead get with the program? The reason I’ve included so many impostor confessions from well-known actors throughout this book is that evidence of their talent is commonly recognized. Even Meryl Streep, the most Academy Award–nominated actor in history, gets cold feet at the beginning of every new project, telling a reporter, “You think, ‘Why would anyone want to see me again in a movie?’ And I don’t know how to act anyway, so why am I doing this?”10 Meryl Streep, for crying out loud! If that doesn’t tell you something about how normal and absurd the impostor syndrome is, nothing will.

  As esteemed choreographer Martha Graham once said, “No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” When so many of the most acclaimed people on the planet feel like impostors, why wouldn’t you? Instead of berating yourself, do a little happy dance at the blessed unrest that allows you to share the human insecurity with some of the most talented people of all time.

  6. You Are a Stranger in a Strange Land

  A sense of belonging can go a long way in fostering self-confidence. Conversely, when you feel like an outsider you are in a sense wearing a mask, a situation that can easily open the door for impostor feelings to slip in. There are a few different ways you may feel like a fish out of water, including operating outside of your culture or socioeconomic class or being in a work environment that feels highly foreign.

  If you do work or study in another country, for instance, then you know what a constant struggle it is to fit in. In addition to all the normal expectations and pressures facing anyone doing demanding work, you’ve got to do it while navigating a different culture and perhaps language as well. Little wonder a whopping 85.7 percent of foreign-trained medical residents in Canada tested high for impostor feelings.”11

  A sense of belonging can also be a function of your socioeconomic class. British students who attended private schools prior to college, for example, ranked low for impostor feelings.12 If, on the other hand, you sprang from blue-collar roots, you may feel like a poser. When she stepped onto the Princeton University campus from the Bronx, the future Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor says, she felt like “a visitor landing in an alien country.” For the entire first year, she was “too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions.”13

  As a first-generation professional who has “made it,” you may find yourself in the precarious position of not fully fitting in. You may have an underlying sense that “I don’t really belong here. I don’t really deserve this.” While hobnobbing in your new world, you may half expect to be tapped on the shoulder and asked to leave. “I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit,” Sotomayor says. “I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.”

  Regardless of geography or class, if you are a woman working in a corporate environment, whether you know it or not you are also operating in an alien culture. That’s why you’ll find scores of books seeking to educate women about how to navigate the unwritten rules of organizational politics but none specifically aimed at teaching men how to make it in a world that is culturally speaking neither strange nor new.

  This is no small matter when you consider that in the private realms of relationships, home, and family, women are far less likely to struggle with impostor feelings. You don’t feel like a fraud when you’re sorting laundry or think it’s a fluke that your pet adores you. True, there may be times, when, for instance, you feel like you’re winging it as a parent. But that’s different from questioning your intellectual capacity or chalking your parenting success up to luck or charm.

  If the impostor syndrome were merely a matter of confidence or upbringing, says Wellesley Centers for Women senior researcher Dr. Peggy McIntosh, you would feel fraudulent in all aspects of your life. Instead, the places where women are most apt to feel incompetent and illegitimate are in the public spheres of power and authority. This is true for men too, of course. But here again the difference is that up until a few short decades ago these arenas were the near exclusive domain of men.

  Since women do not have a long history of belonging in these spheres—especially at the highest levels—the feats of the great and powerful wizards of industry, finance, science, politics, and even art can, for some, seem downright mysterious. You may see important people doing important things and think surely that what they’re doing is beyond your abilities or comprehension. If you don’t understand the game for what it is, you may be so intimidated that you never even try.

  If you fall into any of these categories, the first thing you need to do is give yourself a break. When you are outside your cultural comfort zone, for example, you’re bound to have more insecurity about your competence than a native does. If you are a first-generation professional, the fact that you got where you are without the benefits that accompany social class makes you both commendable and exceptional. When impostor feelings hit, give yourself extra points for performing as well as you do.

  Next, look for ways to address the isolation that goes along with feeling like a stranger in a strange land. If you’re a student, tap into campus programs that serve international students. If you are a professional working abroad and there are no resources that offer contact with others from your culture, look for online venues that can connect you with others either elsewhere in the country where you currently reside or back home. Once you do, look for opportunities to raise the impostor syndrome not as a confession, but as an interesting topic of discussion. Given the universal nature of these feelings, I guarantee that once you name the feelings, you’ll find people who will identify.

  Remember too that regardless of the reason, whenever you feel like a stranger, a certain amount of fakery is required just to fit in. The important thing is not to take the discomfort of feeling out of your element to mean you are somehow less intelligent, capable, or worthy than others. You are where you are because you deserve to be. Period.

  7. You Represent Your Entire Social Group

  Clare Boothe Luce once remarked, “Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn’t have what it takes.’ They will say, ‘Women don’t have what it takes.’ ” The playwright, magazine editor, ambassador, and congresswoman launched her career in 1935. And yet some eight decades later the pressure to carry the competence torch for one’s entire gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on is still on.

  Some years ago a
young woman who was blind attended one of my workshops. The recent college grad struggled with the same impostor feelings as everyone else in the room. But she also expressed tremendous anxiety about being the first sight-impaired person at her new workplace. “If I’m not ‘Super Disabled Person,’ ” she explained, “I worry the next time someone with a disability applies for a job, they’ll think, ‘Uh-oh, we tried one of those people, and it didn’t work out.” It’s a situation highly familiar to people of color as well.

  You don’t have to be blind to see the pressure that comes from feeling like you have to represent not just yourself but your entire social group, pressure that makes you more vulnerable to the impostor syndrome. Upon her retirement, Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor reflected on her pioneer status. “My concern was whether I could do the job of a justice well enough to convince the nation that my appointment was the right move. If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women.”14

  Merely thinking about being in the minority relative to men has been shown to lead to palpable anxiety in women (something we’ll explore in more detail in a future chapter). At best, you feel self-conscious; at worst, intimidated. Add to that any assumptions that you got where you are solely as a result of affirmative action (which in the minds of some translates into the belief that you are automatically less capable) or that you cruised on the basis of good looks. Either scenario can undermine your confidence and up the pressure to prove yourself.

  If you don’t think numbers impact performance, think again. As researchers at Massachusetts Institute for Technology discovered, once the percentage of female students in a department rose above about 15, women’s academic performance improved. Girls who attend single-sex schools have higher career aspirations than both boys and girls at coed schools.15 Studies repeatedly show that if you attended a women’s college, you are likely to have higher self-esteem and more intellectual self-confidence than your counterparts at coed institutions. The same is true for African Americans who attend historically black colleges.