The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (19 page)

Next, although these scenarios depict a primarily female experience, some may resonate equally with men from working-class backgrounds and men of color. Also, just because the ethos of care, concern, and connection is central to female culture doesn’t mean every woman will identify with the more typically female responses described here. In addition, the message here is not that success is bad or is something to be avoided. To the contrary, I want you to go as far and as high as your dreams take you.

Finally and most important, the message is most definitely
not
that there’s something wrong with your caring so much about others. Empathy, compassion, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness are valuable traits. So valuable, in fact, that not only do companies with the highest representation of female executives experience better financial performance, but as Gloria Feldt points out in
No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power
, Ernst & Young, Catalyst, the World Bank, and McKinsey have “all discovered over the past few years that once parliaments and corporate boards reach 30 percent female representation, the quality of decisions improves, the guys behave better, and there is less corruption.”
¹

Empathy is also one of six aptitudes Daniel Pink cites as necessary
to flourish in the new world economy. In
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
, he makes the case that companies can move functions like customer service, tech support, and reading X-rays overseas. But you can’t outsource empathy. Once diminished as “touchy-feely,” empathy is now reshaping how training is conducted in fields such as medicine and law. These trends bode well for women, who more naturally tune in to other people’s pain and apologize when mistakes are made—behaviors, says Pink, that can be a stretch for a lot of men.

To be a woman is to experience a certain tension between your personal ambitions and wants and the image you have of yourself as an unselfish person who cares about others. In fact, in her quest to uncover what women themselves think about ambition, psychiatrist Anna Fels found that most shunned the very word. “Ambition necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends,” says Fels.
²

And why wouldn’t it? From a young age, girls learn from their mothers to sacrifice themselves by putting others’ needs first. This notion that being virtuous lies in self-sacrifice, says Gilligan, “has complicated the course of women’s development by pitting the moral issue of goodness against the adult questions of responsibility and choice.” These first two success scenarios depict this core dilemma.

Even as girls, females are highly sensitive to the feelings and needs of others, and achievement situations are no exception. If you got an A and
your best friend got a C, you may have lied about your grade to protect your friend’s feelings. Caring is commendable. However, often what you’re also seeing is the belief that your success will somehow diminish others—a belief that can cause you to feel more guilt than pride. As the British actress Rachel Weisz told a reporter, “Any success—getting a good degree, getting an agent, getting on TV [makes me feel guilty]. As if somehow by doing well, I was depriving someone else of something—it could be anyone, sister, mother, friend.”
³

The idea that if you win, someone else has to lose reveals itself in subtle ways. There are women, for example, who will remain with an employer even when it’s clearly in their long-term interest to move on. You may be staying in your comfort zone to keep your impostor fears at bay. However, it’s also possible that you stay because you believe they “need” you. Loyalty is admirable, just not when it’s always at your expense.

Competitive success can be especially loaded for females because winning violates the code of caring. Sports psychologists tell us that boys will battle their best friend tooth and nail, beat them, and then shake hands. But if relationships are central to your life, competition can be fraught with inner conflict. It certainly was for National Spelling Bee contestant Zoe Londono, who at age twelve was called “the Human Dictionary.” In an NBC
Dateline
segment Zoe went head-to-head with her best friend, Sheila, and beat her. The victory was bittersweet. “We’re best friends,” said Zoe. “I just beat my best friend. I’m sorry.”
⁴

Obviously, there are women who thrive on competition, and you may well be one of them. Yet even seasoned competitors and epic tennis rivals Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert struggled to strike a balance between competition and connection. The two would share bagels an hour before a match, go out and battle tooth and nail, then return to the locker room, where the winner would console the loser. Not because the
winner was
sorry
she’d just trounced her opponent. But because each knew what it felt like to lose.

Martina especially struggled to figure out how to care and compete at the same time. Her onetime fitness coach and partner, basketball star Nancy Lieberman, felt that in order for Martina to reach the top she had to hate Chris. “[Martina] tried that for a while,” says former athlete and author Mariah Burton Nelson, “but it didn’t work for her so she went back to sharing bagels and laughter with Chris in the locker room. The two remain friends.”
⁵

Empathizing with the loser or with the underdog is fine. The problem comes in when you routinely suppress any pride or excitement about your own achievement in order to spare another person’s feelings. In her work with gifted elementary school girls, Dr. Lee Anne Bell found that this tension between empathy and achievement can cause females to want to change the rules altogether. When she asked a group of girls to role-play a hypothetical situation in which one girl won a science prize but then dismissed her accomplishment in front of a friend who was envious of her win, the girls were able to act the scene out with ease.
⁶

Next Bell instructed the girls to find ways the winner might respond that would enable
both
girls to feel good about themselves. This task proved considerably more daunting. At first the girls came up with options like “tear the trophy in half,” “give it to the teacher,” “leave it in school,” or “give the trophy away, it’s just a piece of metal.” Although all of these strategies did preserve the relationship, they still sacrificed the winner being able to feel good about her achievement. Finally the group arrived at a solution focused
not
on individual achievement but on changing the system of judging altogether. If students got to work cooperatively in teams rather than competing as individuals, the girls surmised, everyone would get to do creative, high-quality science projects, and
everyone
could win.

The female desire to change the system from “I won and you lost” to “We all won” is a powerful reflection of what clinical psychologist Georgia Sassen refers to as women’s “heightened perception of the ‘other side’ of competitive success … [a sense] that something is rotten in the state in which success is defined as having better grades than everyone else.”
⁷
It also casts the difficulty women have in claiming credit for their achievements in a different light—one that, according to Dr. Peggy McIntosh, speaks to other dimensions of the impostor syndrome that can’t be addressed by raising confidence.

McIntosh sees a lot of authenticity in feelings of fraudulence, wondering if perhaps those who really think they are the best and the brightest are the real frauds. “When women apologize or falter in public, or refuse to take individual credit for what they’ve done, I think we should listen twice,” she says, because these behaviors may help us to “question the myth that those who have power individually deserve it.” She adds, “When women feel fraudulent, often they are trying to share power, privilege and credit in ways that have not yet been recognized.”
⁸

If you identify with this success scenario, ask yourself:

If you have a family, any career advancement that requires you to spend more time at work is going to trigger concerns about the impact of your success on loved ones. If moving up in the organization also entails a physical move, it can mean disrupting your partner’s career or children’s education or being away from aging parents. These decisions are difficult enough. Feeling like an impostor makes it that much harder to parse relationship considerations from your usual self-doubt.

One thing that can help is to at least recognize that your guilt is not entirely self-generated. No one raises concerns about a man’s ability to work and raise children at the same time. Even at the highest levels, no one assumes he’s not up to the job. But society is quick to sow these seeds of doubt about you—
seeds that, if you’re not careful, can take root in your own mind
. After all, success enhances a man’s likelihood of being a good provider and makes him deserving of the title “family man.” There is no comparable term to describe a woman who provides financially for her family because she’s seen as pursuing her career at the
expense
, not for the
sake of
, her family.

If you feel selfish or guilty for being driven, remember that to have children is to experience a certain amount of parental guilt—period. Thinking of others first is admirable. At the same time, there’s a reason flight attendants tell you to put your oxygen mask on first before helping
children. Rather than see your success as coming at the expense of your family, make sure you give equal weight to the ways your success
serves
them. Of course there is the obvious financial contribution you make. In addition, though, consider how your children benefit from having an accomplished role model, one who is pursuing her goals and utilizing her talents.

If this success scenario speaks to you, ask yourself:

We just looked at two scenarios that have to do with the impact of success
on
others. Now it’s time to explore the ways that saying yes to success can factor into your relationship
with
others.

One of the exercises in my workshops involves asking participants to generate a list of self-expectations or inner rules that contribute to their feeling like impostors. Two rules that invariably come up for women are
Don’t act too smart
and
Always downplay your accomplishments
. No surprise there.

Next I ask them to name the perceived consequence of breaking these rules. The most obvious, of course, is that other people might find out
that you’re a fraud. After all, if you act like you know the answer or that you’re “all that,” and you turn out to be wrong or average, people will know you’re an impostor. But that’s not all that’s going on here. When asked why they care what people think of them a more fundamental female fear is revealed, namely,
People may not like me
.

This is not just insecurity. Females learn young that being “too” anything not associated with traditional notions of femininity can put you at risk of not being liked—a well-documented dilemma that led Facebook COO and mother of two Sheryl Sandberg to tell an audience, “I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter not only to succeed but to be liked for her accomplishments.”
⁹

This is important because when connection is paramount in your life, any decision that holds the potential to lessen the connection between you and others can be disconcerting. As Gilligan observes, in achievement women recognize “the danger [of] isolation, a fear that in standing out or being set apart by success, they will be left alone.” To different degrees, the next four scenarios speak to this core issue of isolation.

The last thing most male executives worries about is being the only man at his level. You, however, are keenly aware that the higher up the organizational chart you climb, the more male and pale the landscape becomes. And for women, it really is lonely at the top. According to
Fortune
magazine, in 2010 only eleven of the Fortune 500 companies were run by women, down from fifteen the previous year. Among Fortune 1000 companies, a total of fourteen women had the top job. The isolation is even more profound if you are also a person of color who is expected to leave her—or his—racial identity at the door.

You don’t have to occupy the executive suite to know that a promotion can incur jealousy and even resentment from people who were once your peers. Men have to deal with this too, of course. But even in tightly knit work groups men tend to relate to coworkers more superficially—or at least in a less familial way than do women. Guys might bond over a drink after work or on the golf course. But it’s the women who organize the office parties, collect the money for the baby-shower gift, and decorate for the holidays. The more familylike the atmosphere, the tougher it can be to leave work pals behind, especially if your former coworker is now your direct report.