The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (11 page)

The good news is that your coping and protecting behaviors really do keep you safe from harm. They help you escape the humiliation of being discovered and having to confront the pain of your crusher. At the same time, as the adage goes: You never get something for nothing. Even though your pattern serves a protective function, we always pay a
price
for that protection.

The way to hone in on your pattern cost is to ask these questions: What will happen if I never change this pattern? What price would I pay? What opportunities would I miss? What options or possibilities would be closed to me?

Some of the costs are the same for all impostors—things like living with the anxiety of waiting for the other shoe to drop or allowing your fraud fears to, in the words of one workshop participant, “steal the joy of the ride.” Others are highly specific to you and your situation and may include things like
If I don’t finish my research, I’ll never graduate or get tenure
or
If I keep procrastinating, I’ll miss my chance to get the job in France
. See if any of these costs resonate with you:

Now it’s your turn to decide for yourself: What would happen if you never changed your coping and protecting behavior? What price would you pay? What opportunities would you miss out on? What options and possibilities would be closed to you?

You already knew that the impostor syndrome was a huge drag on your energy and potential. However, if I’d asked you before to outline exactly what your attempts to evade the No-Talent Police were costing you
specifically
, you may have been hard-pressed to do so. But now you know. Being conscious of the price you pay for all that protection means you now have a more personalized incentive to continue taking the steps required to unlearn this unnecessarily self-limiting pattern.

At the same time, letting go of any habitual response, even when you
know it’s in your best interest to do so, is not easy. The familiar, even if it’s not working, is always more comfortable than the unknown. But growth is not meant to make us comfortable. Its purpose is to stretch us so we can perform at our full potential and achieve our highest purpose.

The good news is that all of the information you identified here constitutes your “before” picture. The feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that embody your impostor pattern now do not represent the self-assured person you are going to be. The ultimate payoff for the work you put in here will come at the end of this book when your “after” picture fully emerges.

In the meantime there really are small things you can do to become the self-assured person you are meant to be. For example, if you know that you’re procrastinating or that you have yet to finish an important task, then put a stake in the ground right now and set a completion date. Next, build in accountability by publically declaring your deadline. Then get out your calendar and make an appointment with yourself to work on this project. Time blocking, as it’s called, helps ensure that you don’t schedule other things on the days—or part of a day—you’ve set aside to work on this task.

On this last point, stop telling yourself that you can’t possibly work on something unless you can devote an entire day to it. Anything that involves a lot of steps or time to complete almost always gets done in small focused chunks of time over a period of days, weeks, months, or even years. To get yourself started, set a timer for forty-five minutes to an hour and focus all of your attention on chipping away at that one thing. When the timer goes off, you can stop. However, since the hardest part was getting started, there’s a good chance you’ll keep going. Either way you’ll not only
get
more accomplished but you’ll
feel
more accomplished too.

If you’ve been relying on charm or perceptiveness to win approval, rather than continuing to seek validation from others, make a point of
celebrating your next accomplishment. If you’ve been engaging in intellectual flattery, ask a role model to lunch and practice talking about your own views or work. If you know you’ve been doing things to sabotage yourself, pay attention to what you’re doing and why, then practice what it feels like to show up for yourself. If you’ve been avoiding applying yourself, pick one goal to tackle this week.

Other things you can do: Ask someone you trust for feedback. Share something with another person that you’re proud of, maybe something you wrote or won. Write yourself a letter of recommendation so that you can see your accomplishments and attributes through someone else’s eyes. Resolve to accept your next compliment graciously. Rewrite your résumé, adding accomplishments and skills you had previously omitted or downplayed. Speak up without self-judgment in your next meeting or class. Take a public-speaking seminar or join Toastmaster. Role-play a challenging exchange/event. Make a list of the reasons why you deserve a raise or promotion. Join a study group, writing group, or other support group designed to help people stay on track. Spend five minutes a day visualizing yourself being confident in a situation where you typically feel anything but.

W
hat if you believed in no uncertain terms that the reason you got the degree, the job, the role, the deal, or the corner office was because you deserved to get it? In other words, what if you really and truly
owned
your accomplishments as your own and not some fluke? If that were the case, then there wouldn’t be anything for you to feel fraudulent about, would there? Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

Instead you’ve spent years essentially giving away your success. And the way you’ve done this is by crediting your accomplishments to anybody or anything—except yourself. You tell yourself,
It was dumb luck … The stars were aligned … My father got me in the door …
Or,
Oh, the judges just liked me
. The time has come to reveal the true reasons behind your success.

Detective Joe Friday of the iconic 1950s television show
Dragnet
had a famous catchphrase. If a witness who was being questioned began to wander off track by offering extraneous information, Friday would redirect them with “All we want are the facts, ma’am.” We already know you’ve deemed yourself guilty of the charge of impersonating a competent person. So you probably won’t believe me yet when I tell you that you and everyone else in the Impostor Club are a pretty competent bunch. How do I know? Evidence—hard evidence.

In the last chapter you learned that countless people have felt like they’re waiting for, in Mike Myers’s words, the No-Talent Police to come and arrest them. I want you to imagine that this competence-enforcement unit actually does exist and that they’ve just hauled you in for questioning. However, instead of trying to wrench from you a false confession that you’ve committed success fraud, this squad is out to prove your innocence. But in order to do that they need evidence—and that proof is going to come from you.

Evidence can take many forms, depending on the situation. Academic competence and success are measured by qualifying exam scores; getting into a top school; earning good grades, degrees, academic scholarships, internships,
and awards; letters of recommendation from faculty; licensing; and the like. Employee success is typically viewed in terms of job titles, salaries, performance evaluations, promotions, raises, citations, or awards. In other cases it could mean being tapped for an appointment or winning an election.

In creative arenas, competence and success are gauged by things like getting a part, a grant, a contract, recognition, selection for a juried show. It could be winning a writing contest, receiving an award, or indeed being able to make a living as an artist, writer, musician, poet, actor, or craftsperson. Of course, evidence of entrepreneurial competence and success varies widely depending on the business you’re in, but essentially it comes down to your ability to make things happen in order to generate profit.

The problem isn’t that you deny the existence of such evidence in your own life. The problem is your compulsion to explain your success away with qualifiers. But not this time. This time you’re going spill the beans about everything you’ve ever done, from passing a particularly hard class in school to being asked to chair an important committee—any shred of proof that you are, in fact, an intelligent, talented, resourceful, and otherwise fully capable human being.

And this time you’re going to do it without explaining it away. If in the process of creating your achievements history you’re tempted to stray from the what, when, and where, remember: “All we want are the facts, ma’am.” Either you got good grades or you didn’t. You wrote the thesis or you didn’t. You got promoted or you didn’t. You performed onstage or you didn’t. You made the sale or you didn’t. No qualifiers, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Take ten minutes to create your list now
.

When you leave out all the qualifiers and just stick to the proof at hand, you get a very different picture of who you are and what you’ve accomplished. Indeed, after thoroughly and dispassionately considering all of the evidence, the only conclusion any rational person could come to is that you are innocent on all counts. So innocent, in fact, that if it were up to our No-Talent Police, why, you’d be tossed out of the Impostor Club this very minute.

Fortunately or unfortunately, you and I both know that ultimately the only one who can free you of the belief that you are a fraud is you. That’s why you need
perspective
. And to get perspective it’s essential to clear up some fundamental misconceptions you and other impostors have about how success happens. As you are about to learn, rather than diminishing or negating your achievements, factors like luck, timing, connections, and charm actually do play a role—a
legitimate
role—in everyone’s success—yours included. Just not in the dismissive ways you’ve been thinking.

To a certain degree your success—and everyone else’s—is a result of some kind of luck.