The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (2 page)

1.
How you define and experience competence, success, and failure has everything to do with how confident and competent you feel
. Not only is adjusting how you think about competence, failure, and success the fastest
path to overcoming the impostor syndrome, bar none, but it won’t happen unless you do. Period.

2.
Women’s self-limiting attitudes and behavior barriers must be viewed in the context of certain sociocultural expectations and realities
. If you have difficulty always seeing yourself as competent and qualified, it may be because at times society has a hard time seeing you that way too. In spite of all the progress, the fact remains that being “too”
anything
that’s considered unfeminine can cause people of both genders to perceive you to be less competent and a less desirable hire.

3.
It is impossible to separate women’s achievement experience—including “fear of success”—from the feminine drive to affiliate with others
. Relocating for school or a new job, receiving a major promotion, or training to work in a predominantly male field are just a few of the situations where you may feel uncertain of yourself. It could be the impostor syndrome talking. In some cases, though, what you assume is fear of success may in fact be a heightened sensitivity to the potential ramifications of success on your relationships with others.

There is one aspect of the confidence conversation that was not present in the 1980s that you’ll learn about here. Then women were striving to break down the cultural, educational, and legal barriers to higher-paying occupations that had been historically male-only. Now that the structural barriers have largely fallen, the quest for work/life integration, satisfaction, and meaning has for many women superseded the singular pursuit of money, status, and power. Overall the change is good. However, it’s also complicated things, making it harder at times to tell if you’re holding back because of self-doubt or a shift in priorities.

When psychologists first began to study the impostor phenomenon, they suspected it was something experienced primarily by women. That has proven not to be the case. In fact, it is one of the few psychological issues initially thought to affect primarily women that has later been determined to relate to both genders.
²
Men are attending my seminars in increasing numbers, and among graduate students the male-female ratio is roughly fifty-fifty.

This of course begs the question, if men identify with the impostor syndrome too, why is this book aimed primarily at women? It’s a legitimate question and frankly one I struggled with. I’ve heard from or worked with countless men who suffer terribly from their fraud fears, including a member of the Canadian mounted police, an attorney who argued before the Supreme Court, a corporate CEO, and an entire team of aerospace engineers, one of whom spoke of the “sheer terror” he feels when handed a major assignment. In the end, though, I decided there were more reasons than not to focus on women.

Articles about the impostor syndrome invariably cite the fact that numerous studies have found no difference between men and women. Some articles do mention the multiple studies where women scored significantly higher on impostor scales.
³
Nearly all point to the single study in which men outscored women.
⁴
However, few mention that these subjects were college professors. Given that academia is a breeding ground for impostor feelings, I think you’d be hard-pressed to replicate this finding in other settings.

Perhaps the real question is, if men experience the impostor syndrome equally, why aren’t more clamoring for a solution? Of the sixty-six dissertations on the impostor phenomenon, 90 percent are by women. Speaking from my own experience, I can tell you that every seminar I’ve conducted
for undergraduate students, members of professional associations, or corporate audiences has
always
been at the invitation of a program or committee whose mission it is to attract, develop, retain, and advance female students, members, or employees. All of which would seem to confirm impostor-syndrome researcher Dr. Joan Harvey’s explanation that “men take it for granted and just live it, while women want to do something about it.”
⁵

More important, this book is aimed at women because the impostor syndrome holds them back more. Betty Rollin says it best when she writes: “I know the theory that says men are as scared as we are and they just repress it. Well, ok, then maybe repression works. Because when I look around the workplace I see an awful lot of men who are less competent than they think they are and as many women for whom the opposite is true: Women who are far more competent than they know and, if they keep it up, more than anyone else will ever know.”

The next obvious question is, can men who experience the impostor syndrome benefit from this book? In a word—absolutely! All the more so if you are a man of color, have working-class roots, or identify with any of the other “at-risk” groups I talk about in this book. Similarly, if you know, teach, manage, mentor, parent, or coach a male or groups of males who are susceptible to the impostor syndrome, you will gain greatly from this book as well.

Although the book is geared toward women, I’ve tried to make it as helpful to male impostors as possible. For one, you’ll find I’ve included a number of male voices here. Also know that when I refer to men or to broader gender differences relative to the impostor syndrome, unless otherwise noted, I’m not referring to distinctions between male and female impostors. In other words, when I talk about impostors in general, I’m talking about men too. If you are a man who identifies with the impostor syndrome,
I have a favor to ask
. After reading this book, I invite
you to take a moment to send any feelings, thoughts, or experiences that you consider unique to male impostors to me at
[email protected]
. I’d love to have your voice more fully represented in future editions.

SINCE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF GENDER:
I’ve been doing this work long enough to know that anytime you talk about social difference you open yourself up not just to debate but to potential misunderstanding. Some argue that addressing differences reinforces stereotypes. Others prefer not to mention gender differences at all, seeing
difference
as synonymous with
conflict
. Still others may misconstrue points raised here to mean that I believe men to be a bunch of overly confident blowhards. Or the opposite—that men have it all together and women are insecure shrinking violets. Neither, of course, is true.

You and I both know that
all
women are not one way or
all
men another. Still, when speaking about gender differences, it is impossible to avoid making certain “genderalizations,” and this book is no exception. With that, I ask your permission to use
men
and
women
here as shorthand, recognizing that discussions of differences of any sort can only be statements about averages.

As trite as it sounds, the more you put into this book, the more you’ll get out of it. That may seem obvious, but I’ve met plenty of people who tell me they’ve read all the advice books out there but “nothing worked.” My question to them is always the same: “Did you apply the advice?” The answer is always no. It’s always easier to keep reading than it is to stop and do the exercises, and trying on new behaviors does require you to stretch
in sometimes uncomfortable ways. Yet it’s only by actively engaging in the process that we learn.

I know the impostor syndrome can cause great anguish, which is precisely why I’ve tried to bring a bit of levity to a subject that can carry such an emotional punch. It may seem impossible now, but I guarantee that by the end of this book you’ll laugh at the absurdity of fully capable people—yourself included—feeling like impostors, fakes, and frauds. As the great Bugs Bunny once said, “Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out alive.”

Finally, the fact that you’re reading this book tells me you’re ready to “think different.” That you’ve decided once and for all that the time has come to see yourself as others do. I want everyone to know just how bright and capable you really are. But the person I most want to acknowledge your brilliance is
you
.

Y
ou don’t have to look far to find intelligent, competent, talented women who feel anything but. Reflecting on her early days as a rising star at Revlon and later Avon, Joyce Roché, the former president and CEO of Girls Inc., remembers thinking, “Somewhere, deep inside, you don’t believe what they say. You think it’s a matter of time before
you stumble and ‘they’ discover the truth. You’re not supposed to be here. We knew you couldn’t do it. We should have never taken a chance on you.”
¹

When entrepreneur Liz Ryan, founder and CEO of WorldWIT, a women’s online discussion community, won the Stevie, the business equivalent of an Oscar, she didn’t feel like a winner. As she took the stage in New York to receive her award from Bill Rancic of
The Apprentice
, all Ryan could think was,
Who the hell am I? I’m just a mom with an overflowing laundry room and a two-year-old with applesauce in his hair
.
²

Countless other women feel the same way. After graduating near the top of her class, a bright engineering major named LaTonya
^*
was accepted into a highly competitive doctoral program. Instead of feeling proud, she was worried, telling me, “I was certain they’d made a mistake. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.” Dawn, desperate to get off the fast track, invested thousands of dollars and considerable amounts of time training to become an executive coach. Two years and a hundred coaching hours later, she had yet to hang out her shingle, explaining, “I can’t shake the feeling that I faked my way through the program.”

What you’ve just seen is the impostor syndrome in action. What about you?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you of all people know it doesn’t really matter how much acclaim you’ve received, how many degrees you’ve earned, or how high you’ve risen. True, there are a lot of people who regard you as intelligent or talented, perhaps even brilliant. But you’re not one of them. In fact, you have profound doubts about your abilities. No matter what you’ve accomplished or what people think, deep down you’re convinced that you are an impostor, a fake, and a fraud.

Despite the fact that we’ve never met, I suspect I already know a lot about you. For starters, you probably seem remarkably able and accomplished to the outside world. But secretly you believe you are merely passing for competent. When you do manage to nail the presentation, ace the exam, or get the job
—which you almost always do
—you see yourself as lucky or industrious, never intrinsically good at what you do. People who know or work with you have no idea that you lie awake at night wondering when they will finally discover what an incompetent sham you
really
are.

I also happen to know that you are intelligent, even though you don’t always feel that way. Part of you knows this too. It’s just that it’s tough for you to maintain a consistent image of yourself as smart. And while we’re on the subject, I don’t necessarily mean you’re book-smart. Although there’s a pretty good chance you have at least one degree—perhaps even two or three.

You’re also an achiever who by most standards is considered
successful—although here too you may struggle to see yourself that way. I’m not talking just about achieving wealth, fame, or status (although you very well may have). You don’t have to have graduated first in your class or made it to the top of any ladder. But you do have to have achieved something to feel fraudulent about. Usually it’s something you didn’t expect of yourself, or have not yet mastered, at least not to your ridiculously high standards. Am I close? I thought so.

The Impostor Club has untold millions of members around the world. It’s made up of women and men of all races, religions, and socioeconomic classes. They come from a wide range of educational backgrounds from high school dropouts to multiple Ph.D.’s, from such diverse fields as law enforcement, music, and medicine, and from entry level to CEO.

You may not even have known that these vague yet overwhelming feelings of self-doubt and angst actually have a name. I didn’t either, not until my first year in graduate school when I was introduced to a 1978 paper titled “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women” by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. At the time both psychologists were at Georgia State University, where they observed that many of their students who excelled academically admitted during counseling that they felt their success was undeserved.

At its heart, the impostor syndrome, as it’s more commonly known, refers to people who have a persistent belief in their lack of intelligence, skills, or competence. They are convinced that other people’s praise and recognition of their accomplishments is undeserved, chalking up their achievements to chance, charm, connections, and other external factors. Unable to internalize or feel deserving of their success, they continually
doubt their ability to repeat past successes. When they do succeed they feel relief rather than joy.