The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (10 page)

A part of you feels inadequate. But another part of you believes you’re quite remarkable. If only you could find the right person to recognize your brilliance and then help you embrace it too. Once you find someone you admire, you use your social skills to impress him in hopes that he will see you as “intellectually special.” The problem, say Clance and Imes, is that if your efforts are successful, then you dismiss his feedback, believing that the
only
reason he thinks you’re special is because he likes you. Plus, in your mind, the fact that you even
need
outside validation just reinforces the fact that you are a fraud.

Another way I’ve seen personality come into play is the calculated use
of humor. If you are blessed with a quick wit, you may have come to rely on it as a way of deflecting attention away from those aspects of yourself where you feel most fraudulent, such as your intellect. As one sales representative told me, “I figure if I can just keep ’em laughing, maybe they won’t see that I don’t have a clue.” But when you do manage to impress, you feel like a phony.

Everyone procrastinates from time to time. When you feel like an impostor, though, it can also be a way to put off whatever situation you fear will lead to your eventual undoing. If you’re self-employed or in school, there’s a good chance that procrastination is your coping mechanism of choice. After all, it’s a lot easier to drag your feet when you’re accountable primarily to yourself. When I was a graduate student not only did I have the cleanest house in Amherst, Massachusetts, but every room of my rental needed to be painted personally by me.

You tell yourself it’s because you “work best under pressure.” And maybe you do. But you also know that when you leave important things until the last minute, there’s greater chance that quality will suffer. On an unconscious level, Clance says, procrastination is a way to give yourself an out. Take Kate, a bright political science major who desperately wanted to land a coveted internship in Washington. To earn a spot required completing a lengthy application, which included writing a heady essay. Kate had months to work on it. But instead she waited until the very last minute, literally dashing it off the day before the deadline and popping it into overnight mail. She didn’t get the internship.

Kate probably wasn’t deliberately trying to blow her chance. However, once she did fail, her procrastination provided a built-in excuse because she could tell herself,
I’m disappointed, but hardly surprised. After all, I just
whipped it off at the last minute
. But here’s the kicker. If she
had
managed to pull it off, she wouldn’t have felt deserving because she knew the application did not reflect her best efforts. For the chronic procrastinator, the resulting success just reinforces your belief that you fooled them again.

Granted, it may be by the skin of your teeth, but ultimately most procrastinators do get the job done.
Most
. There are others who take procrastination to the extreme by starting only to never finish. Like the doctoral candidate who completes all of her course work only to languish in a state of incompletion (sometimes for years) known as being ABD—all but dissertation. Or the artist who works ceaselessly on the same piece of work but never completes anything. Or the aspiring self-bosser who endlessly researches, plans, and tinkers with a business idea but never gets it off the launch pad.

By not finishing, you not only shield yourself from possible detection but you also effectively avoid the shame of being criticized. After all, if someone does question your work, your talent, or your expertise, you can always insist that
it’s still in progress
or
I’m just dabbling
.

In some cases, the fear of being exposed can be so anxiety-producing that you subconsciously do things to undermine your very success. This is different from withholding effort because on the surface anyway, you’re still striving. Here, however, your actions have the effect of undercutting your prospects for success. You may do things like show up late or unprepared for an important audition or appointment. Perhaps the night before a
big performance you stay up too late or drink one too many glasses of wine. If you do poorly, you can blame it on the fatigue or the hangover. If you do well, then you feel undeserving because you know you dodged a bullet.

Or you may unwittingly employ a self-sabotage strategy known as “other-enhancement.” This happens in situations where you’re competing against or being compared with another person and you do things like point out information or coach her in some way or otherwise provide some advantage that will enhance her chance of doing well. In doing so, you’ve strategically obscured the link between your performance and its evaluation. Since “technically” you’ve done nothing to actually interfere with your own performance, you may still do well. However, if you
are
outperformed, then you’ve preserved the ambiguity about your failure by creating a convenient excuse that you helped the other person. Plus, by helping someone else, you preserve your image as someone who is selfless—something that is especially important to women.

Substance abuse is another way to avoid success and thus escape the emotional burden of impostorism altogether. A distressed mother once wrote me for advice after her twenty-five-year-old daughter was arrested for drunk driving. For the previous year and a half the young woman had been a mere three credits away from completing a degree in graphic art. “After her arrest,” wrote the mother, “my daughter confided in me that she feels she doesn’t really deserve the degree anyway because she has somehow just fooled her professors into thinking she’s good.”

At the same time, just because someone risks his career by flirting with disaster does not mean it’s because he feels like a fraud. But that hasn’t stopped some in the media from blaming the impostor syndrome for all sorts of self-destructive behavior, from the sexual impropriety of Hugh Grant, Bill Clinton, and Eliot Spitzer to the misconduct of disgraced
New
York Times
reporter Jayson Blair.
³
It is possible of course that these men did act out of feelings of inadequacy. However, the impostor syndrome should not be blamed for every stupefying display of self-destruction.

Put a check mark next to the coping and protecting mechanism that resonates most with you:

To be clear: None of these coping and protecting behaviors do anything to actually alleviate your impostor feelings. That’s not their job. Their job is to keep you safe from harm by avoiding the shame and humiliation of being unmasked as well as to relieve some of the stress that comes from feeling like a fraud. As self-defeating as these behaviors are, we don’t engage in them because we are masochists. We engage in them because we are doing the best we can to protect ourselves under particular life circumstances.

In other words, you really
are
trying to take care of yourself. So in that sense you need to appreciate whatever coping and protecting behaviors you’ve created. Most impostors rely on one strategy more heavily than others. Don’t be alarmed, however, if you employ multiple coping mechanisms. It just means you’re
really
taking care of yourself!

Becoming more aware of how you’ve tried to manage this impostor syndrome of yours is important, but it’s just the beginning. To really understand what’s going on requires digging a bit deeper. So we’re going to borrow from the work of Dr. Gerald Weinstein. Weinstein’s book
Education of the Self
⁴
has at its core a self-discovery process that consists of a series of questions designed to help you see and modify a self-limiting pattern of behavior—in this case the impostor syndrome.

For example, you already know that your pattern is there to keep you from being unmasked. But that’s not all it does. To get at the broader function of any pattern of behavior, you need to ask yourself three questions: What does this behavior help me avoid? What does it protect me from? What does it help me get?

On their face, all these questions seem to ask the same thing. However, when you begin to answer them you’ll discover that each comes at the issue from a slightly different angle, which in turn helps you peel back layers you may not have gotten to otherwise. For example:

For example, when you put in eighty-hour workweeks, there’s a good chance you’ll be recognized by higher-ups. When you constantly call your friends to anguish over what you are convinced will be an impending failure, you’re probably going to get a lot of sympathy and stroking. When you keep a low profile, you automatically get a degree of security and safety. And in a very practical sense, when you procrastinate, you get more time to do things that are more fun—or at least easier than whatever it is you’re putting off doing.

Similarly, if you are prone to overpreparing, you probably spend a fair amount of time mentally replaying worst-case scenarios—a phenomenon psychologist Albert Ellis calls “awfulizing.”
Not only will I fail the qualifying exam, but I’ll become a laughingstock. No one will want to work with me again. I’ll be tossed out of my profession. I’ll end up living in a cardboard box down by the river
.

As distressing as this mental disaster movie may be, Wellesley College psychology professor Julie Norem argues that this behavior is actually highly adaptive. Overpreparing helps ensure your success in part because of what she calls “defensive pessimism.” This is when you have unrealistically low expectations, then devote considerable energy to anticipating everything that could go wrong and planning for all possible scenarios. Mentally running through every conceivable negative outcome, says Norem, helps impostors reduce anxiety by taking concrete steps to minimize potential problems.
⁵

Now it’s your turn
. To uncover additional ways your impostor pattern serves you, ask: What does this behavior help me avoid? What does it help protect me from? What does it help me get?

You think you developed your protecting strategy solely to keep people from finding out you are an impostor. However, a
core
function of all self-limiting patterns is to protect us from what Weinstein calls the crusher. The crusher is a core negative belief we hold about ourselves. At its heart, your crusher has to do with a basic feeling of inadequacy and unworthiness. You developed your pattern in part so that you wouldn’t have to face this hidden negative belief.

You may assume that everyone who identifies with the impostor syndrome would share a common crusher, namely:
I’m a fraud
. Go below the surface, however, and you’ll realize that your own crusher reflects a deeper, more painful belief that is unique to you and your pattern. Let’s say, for instance, that the way you attempt to protect yourself from the shame of being found out is to not speak up in meetings or in class. You tell yourself it’s because you don’t want other people to think you’re stupid. But the real reason you hold back is to escape having to face the crushing “truth” of your own core belief, which is, “I really
am
stupid.”

It’s important to recognize that you didn’t develop your crusher overnight—or by yourself. This irrational negative belief has been reinforced through interactions with family, teachers, coworkers, and, as you learned in the last chapter, by the culture at large.

One way to identify your crusher is to imagine the statement you would most dread hearing said aloud about you in your impostor scenario:
You’ll never measure up. You have no special gifts. You’re not as intelligent as other people. You have no talent. You’re not an original thinker
. Or simply,
You’re unworthy
. If your crusher is not immediately obvious, then imagine that your best efforts to protect yourself failed and you are publically revealed to be a fraud.

Take a few moments now to quiet yourself and tune into your own
crusher. Giving voice to your crusher statement can be an intense emotional experience. At the same time, you can’t change what you don’t understand. Tough as this step can be, it is essential to expose this false belief to the light of day so it can be seen for the lie that it is. I know your crusher feels true.
But you can’t believe everything you think
. The real truth is this:

I don’t expect you to fully believe this—at least not right away. Right now all I want you to do is become consciously aware of the lie you’ve avoided confronting up until now.