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

  If being highly money-oriented is a turnoff, it’s probably because you’ve seen what money can do to people. Obviously money can be used for enormous social good. But you also know it can turn people into jerks. In fact, psychologists found that just reminding people of money made them both less willing to help another person and more likely to put more physical distance between themselves and others.10 You may think, If that’s what money does to people, count me out.

  The fact is, money really does bring happiness. Just not in the way you were probably led to think. As it turns out, it’s what you do with money that matters. When given the chance to spend money on other people or on themselves, those who spent money on others felt happier.11 Instinctively you know this. It’s just that we live in a society that celebrates people who measure their success by their ability to amass a fortune. You hear far less about the people who measure their success by how good they are at giving it away. But that’s what Rosie O’Donnell does. Over the years the entertainer has donated over $50 million to various charities, explaining, “When I started making the money, I said to the money person, ‘If I’m ever on the Forbes list of richest people, you’re fired.’ ”12

  You don’t need to be a multimillionaire to have a more socially oriented approach to money. In their interviews with minority women entrepreneurs, Babson College professors Mary Godwyn and Donna Stoddard discovered that having an outsider status can lead to better business practices. These entrepreneurs see business values as an extension of their personal values and profits as something to be balanced with social good and environmental sustainability. “This pattern is repeated in statistical evidence from around the globe that women contribute a much higher percentage of their earnings to social good than do men,” say the authors.”13

  If money alone is not enough to inspire you to advance, it may be because you’re sensitive to the hidden cost of money. If you’re living a middle-class lifestyle, you know that money can both free you and trap you. You spend money to buy services and the latest time-saving devices. Yet in order to afford these devices, you must maintain a heavy workload. In his book Time and Money, Gary S. Cross sums up the dilemma this way: “The choice to consume more is the choice to be more exhausted. You make a decision to have weaker family ties, to have fewer friends. There are all sorts of things that go into the decision to have more goods.”14

  Still, it’s confusing when all you’ve ever heard is people singing the praises of financial success. I mean, who doesn’t want to be a millionaire? Money, as the song goes, does make the world go around. It’s also what pays the rent, buys the food, clothes us, and keeps the lights on. If you already make good money, you may feel pressure to maintain the lifestyle your success has afforded you. At some point, though, you may ask, how much is enough? “Buy now, pay later” takes on new meaning when you gauge the true price of working more hours to make more money so you can buy more things. “If you spend your life energy on stuff that brings only passing fulfillment and doesn’t support your values,” write Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin in Your Money or Your Life, “you end up with less life.”

  After you reach a certain financial threshold, even money can lose its appeal. If you find yourself wanting to hop off the fast track (or you resisted getting on it in the first place) or are content in middle management or running a small self-sustaining business, it may not necessarily be that you lack the confidence to do more. Rather the attitude I see in some women is I’m making good money where I am. Who needs all the added grief?

  This “less is more” attitude typically associated with women is remarkably similar to that of a majority of New Zealand business owners. But not everyone is happy about it. According to an article in Inc. magazine, “At a time when American entrepreneurs aspire to improve their work-life balance, New Zealand—as a matter of public policy—is trying to coax its lifestyle entrepreneurs into spending a little less time enjoying life and a little more making money.”

  The “problem,” as the government sees it, is that the country’s business owners work just enough to buy a second home and a boat and to send their kids to school. After that the incentive to keep enhancing their personal fortune at the cost of sacrificing work-life balance seems to vanish. Most are so keen on keeping things simple that they avoid hiring employees. By one count, the entire country, with a population of 4 million, has just 240 businesses that employ more than 500 workers.15 When you come from a culture like the United States, where people live to work rather than work to live, that’s pretty remarkable.

  Yet there are signs that even those who have money are starting to redefine what it means to be rich. As Chris Rock told CBS’s Harry Smith, “Being rich is not about having a lot of money. Being rich is about having lots of options.”16

  Maybe your self-worth is not as dependent on your bank statement as it is for a man. But you also live in a status-oriented society. There may be times when you judge yourself for not being as financially driven as you think you should be. That’s why it’s so important to get clear about exactly what’s going on. If the reason you earn less money than you know you really could be earning is that you feel like an impostor, then it makes sense to focus on bolstering your self-confidence. However, if the reason you’re reluctant to go higher is that you know that achieving greater financial success will require an unacceptable demand on your time or because you believe making money is self-indulgent or evil, then no amount of confidence building will help. If that rings true for you, stop defining yourself as someone who is afraid to succeed and recognize instead that you may simply embrace a different definition of success.

  What about you? If you are not motivated by money, what does inspire you to work harder or otherwise achieve your dreams? Do you have certain attitudes that prevent you from achieving financial success—attitudes that result in guilt or shame? Do you look at rich people with contempt, envy, or maybe a little of both?

  Think too about how much money you make now and how much you’d like to earn. If you’re like most women, you will probably shoot lower than you deserve—and less than you’ll practically need in retirement. If so, know that there truly is no nobility in poverty. Whatever number you come up with, keep adding to it until you feel anxious. Then double it. You can give the other half away if you like. Just the act of thinking bigger will cause you to stretch your thinking about what’s possible.

  Find Your Own Success Comfort Zone

  Any of these success scenarios can easily masquerade as fear of success. That’s why it’s so important that you step back to see what’s really going on. Are you afraid to take that next big step because you genuinely don’t believe you’re intellectually or otherwise up to the challenge? Or are you apprehensive for any of the reasons cited here? Chances are it’s not a simple either/or, but from situation to situation it’s probably more one than the other.

  One way to tell the difference is to imagine yourself as the confident, fully capable person you would like to be. If the supremely competent you was faced with the exact same decision, how would she feel? If you’re still averse, then you know something other than confidence or lack thereof is at play, and you have an opportunity to explore what it is.

  If pausing only briefly to affirm their values can cause women to do better on a physics exam, imagine what taking some time to reflect on what you care most about can do for you. Take a moment to explore what success means to you. Is it standing out in your field, being recognized or respected in your organization? Being promoted or elected? Being famous? Raising a healthy family? Making policy? Making money? Making a difference? A combination of the above? Remember, there is no right answer, only the right answer for you. As writer Anna Quindlen says, “If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.”

  The reason I’m pushing you to be crystal clear here is because as legitimate as your concerns about success
may be, let’s not forget that you also struggle with the impostor syndrome. And there’s nothing quite like a good challenge to induce a full-blown crisis of confidence. I’ve seen how lifestyle or money issues can also be used as an excuse to continue to play small.

  I saw this firsthand at a recent presentation I delivered to 150 managers and executives at a multinational technology company. Toward the end of the program a woman currently in middle management raised her hand to say she’d seriously considered senior management but held back because she saw how many more hours executives had to put in. The time demand is a valid consideration. Yet in the exchange that followed it also became clear that despite an impressive track record, the impostor syndrome caused her to question her ability to perform at that level. In other words, both things were true.

  You may be of two minds about going after success as well. If so, I’ll tell you the same thing I told her. Why don’t you go be an executive or build a megabusiness or run for public office or go for the Oscar—and then decide if you don’t like it? After the presentation I was swarmed by four women who wanted to know one thing: Do you really think she should go for it, or did you feel like you had to say that? The fact that they asked speaks to how difficult sorting out these issues can be.

  The Bottom Line

  When faced with the opportunity to achieve greater levels of success, indifference can easily be confused with fear and self-doubt. In fact, there are any number of non-confidence-related factors that can make you reluctant to move ahead, including a mismatch between your definition of success and what is expected, the additional demands that come with success, and your relationship with money. Once you’re aware of these things you can sort out for yourself, are you anxious because you don’t think you can do it, or do you just not want it?

  What You Can Do

  Explore other reasons why you may be anxious or ambivalent about moving ahead, such as being in the wrong career, managing increased complexity, suffering the pitfalls of specializing, or having diminished time to do the work you enjoy.

  Your natural skills and talents are bound to be less leveraged if you’re in a job that does not involve much, or enough, of what you most love to do. If you think a career change is in order, spend less time worrying about what you think you should do and ask yourself instead, “What do I really love to do?” If you’re still not sure, consult a traditional career coach; if you are interested in self-employment, find a coach who specializes in helping people see ways they can profit from their passions.

  Take fifteen minutes to capture in writing what success means to you. If you get stuck, flip the question around and ask instead, What am I not willing to sacrifice in order to have money, status, and power or to otherwise succeed?

  Examine your relationship with money and how it impacts your desire to advance.

  What’s Ahead

  In this chapter and the previous one you learned how factors like relationships and how you see success can confuse the confidence picture for women. Now it’s time to switch gears. Next we turn our attention to a challenge that all impostors face, and women especially: the challenge to act more confident than you really feel.

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

  I’m very good at pretending that I know what I’m doing when I don’t.

  —Christian Siriano, Project Runway clothing design competition winner

  You’re finally starting to see yourself as the bright, competent, successful individual everyone else sees. But not completely. Despite all your progress, there are bound to be times when you still feel a little (or a lot) shaky. This is when you need to heed the often issued advice to newbies and impostors alike: Just fake it till you make it. The idea is that you don’t have to wait until you feel sure of yourself before you step up your game. In other words, it’s perfectly normal to be nervous as heck, just as long as you act as if you expect to be an unqualified success.

  This strategy may strike you as being at odds with the challenge you’re already facing. Here you’ve spent a lifetime pretending to be more confident than you really feel, and all it’s ever done is reinforce your belief that you’re an impostor. It’s only natural that you’d think, I already feel like a phony and you want me to pretend even more? I know it sounds like a contradiction. But the short answer is: Yes, I absolutely do want you to start acting like the bright, competent person you really are, even when you don’t always feel that way.

  The premise behind “acting as if” is that you become what you do. It worked for James Taylor. The Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter once said, “I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could.” Seeing that you really can do the thing you didn’t think you could do in turn generates real confidence.

  Fake it till you make it is more than a catchphrase. It’s actually been proven that pretending to act differently than you feel can cause you to feel differently. When scientists at Wake Forest University asked fifty students to act like extroverts for fifteen minutes in a group discussion, even if they didn’t feel like it, the more assertive and energetic the students acted, the happier they felt.”1 It works the same way with confidence. You can still have serious doubts about whether you have what it takes to get elected, earn an advanced degree, or achieve any number of goals. What matters is that you do it.

  I am fully aware that acting self-assured when you feel anything but is not easy, especially for women. Even when you see the merits of the fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy, you may fail to employ it. But not necessarily for the reason you might think. True, it is harder to feign confidence when you already feel like a big phony. However, even if you didn’t identify with the impostor syndrome for any of a host of reasons we’ll explore here, you may be uncomfortable faking confidence.

  “Fake It Till You Make It” on Steroids

  Bertrand Russell once said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” Part of the reason you resist acting as if is because you know that sometimes those who are the most confident have the least reason to be.

  On one end of the confidence continuum is the impostor syndrome. Fully capable people like you who have every reason to feel confident but don’t. On the other end is a lesser-known but arguably far more dangerous condition known as irrational self-confidence syndrome (ISC)—a wonderfully apt term coined by former Rocky Mountain News reporter Erica Heath to describe the unjustifiably confident. If you’ve ever watched contestants audition for shows like American Idol or America’s Got Talent, then you’ve seen people who seem unable to recognize the true limitation of their talents.

  On television it’s comical. But it’s not so funny if you’ve ever had to work with or under a poor performer who can talk a good game. “Big talk and supreme self-confidence have landed many jobs in fields such as sales, marketing and elected office,” writes Heath. “Once he’s on the inside, the ISC patient can be difficult to spot if he plays the game right.” Over time, she says, ISC employees move up the ladder, acquiring bigger budgets and more support staff, and frequently reorganizing their departments to avoid detection. “The best of the bunch can pull off this sleight of hand several times before sensing that it’s time to pull up stakes. Just in time, they talk their way into a new, better job, leaving behind a mess and angry ex-colleagues.”2

  To be clear: This is not the same as the healthy confidence that comes from accepting that you can’t possibly know everything but jumping in anyway. As you’ll soon discover, that kind of confidence is not only a good thing, it’s essential in overcoming the impostor syndrome. What we’re talking about here is the danger of those arrogantly confident people who really do think they know everything.

  The problem, says entrepreneur and self-identified impostor
Steve Schwartz, is that [such people] “have a tendency to make others think they know what they’re doing, which makes others tend to rely on them. It causes others to put them in charge of things it seems like they know how to handle. And, of course, since these people legitimately think they know how to handle these things, they are likely not to look it up or defer to people who actually know.”3

  Research bears out that people who do things badly are usually supremely confident in their abilities, while the better performers tend to make more humble predictions and therefore more accurate self-assessments. To be clear, not everyone who is confident (deservedly or otherwise) is either inept or reckless. Still, we’ve all run into people whose self-assurance far exceeds their actual base of knowledge.

  There are hundreds of studies on the impostor syndrome—90 percent of them conducted by women. Oddly, there’s been scant attention paid to another phenomenon that disproportionately strikes untold numbers of men. It’s called “male answer syndrome.” The term first appeared in a 1992 Utne Reader magazine article by Jane Campbell, who used it to describe the “chronic answering of questions regardless of actual knowledge.” Not all men feel this compulsion, of course. Although, she says, there are not many men who like to say “I don’t know,” preferring instead to say things like “That’s not what’s important here.” Campbell offered this tongue-in-cheek yet accurate description of male answer syndrome at work:

  [Men] try not to get bogged down by petty considerations such as, “Do I know anything about this subject?” or “Is what I have to say interesting?” They take a broad view of questions, treating them less as requests for specific pieces of information than as invitations to expand on some theories, air a few prejudices, and tell a couple of jokes. Some men seem to regard life as a talk show on which they are the star guest. If you ask, “What is the capital of Venezuela?” they hear, “So tell us a bit about your early years, Bob.”