The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (21 page)

Finally, for some females the concern is not that people won’t like them for being too smart but for not being smart enough. After fourteen-year-old Melissa Rogers tied for twenty-second place at the 1999 National Spelling Bee, her hometown held a parade in her honor. When she made the competition again the next year, the pressure was on to at least improve on last year’s performance. While cramming for the contest, Melissa says she “had a breakdown.… I was thinking, you know,
What if I just totally spell my first word wrong and then I’m out in the first round?
I was, like,
Then nobody in my town will like me anymore.”

IF I ASK FOR TOO MUCH, PEOPLE MAY NOT LIKE ME

Make no mistake about it: A lack of confidence is a huge reason why most women undervalue themselves in salary negotiations. At the same time, a reluctance to ask for more money may also be based on a keen understanding of the social realities for women who do ask.

For instance, observers who watched videos of men and women in mock job interviews not only perceived the women who asked for more to be “less nice” and “more demanding,” but also said they’d be significantly less willing to work with a female candidate who attempted to negotiate her salary than with one who did not.
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It’s worth noting that while the men in this study penalized female candidates who asked, women penalized
both
male and female candidates who attempted to negotiate.

Just because you may be judged more harshly doesn’t mean you should
walk away empty-handed for lack of trying. What it does mean, say the researchers, is that while a collaborative approach benefits all negotiators, for a woman it may be crucial to make an extra effort to be liked during negotiation.

IF I’M TOO BOSSY, OTHER WOMEN MAY NOT LIKE ME

Earlier you learned that impostors sometimes attempt to skirt detection by keeping a low profile. If that rings true for you, it may explain a reluctance to step into the role of leader. However, it may be that you’re simply weighing the benefits of being in charge against the interpersonal repercussions of being seen as too “bossy.” In a 2008 survey by the Girl Scouts, a third of girls aged eight to seventeen who indicated a desire to be leaders worried about making people mad at them, being laughed at, not being liked, or coming across as bossy.
¹⁵

Typically we think it’s men who label female leaders as bossy. What you hear less about is the negative response women have to other women whom they perceive as bossy. For all the progress we’ve made, management experts Pat Heim and Susan Murphy observe, “women are somewhat more comfortable with a powerful woman who plays down her importance than one who does not.”
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After all, women are used to men exerting power. It’s the reason a male executive can drop a file on his female assistant’s desk with a curt “Have this ready in an hour” and get away with it. But if you do that to another woman, it’s going to cost you major points on the likability scale. It has to do with an unspoken dynamic between women that Heim and Murphy call the “Power Dead-Even Rule.” The Power Dead-Even rule says that in order “for a positive relationship to be possible between two women, the self-esteem and power of one must be, in the perception of each woman, similar in weight to the self-esteem and power of the other.”

That’s why your male counterpart can head off to his meeting confident that his demand will be met with no real consequences to the boss-assistant relationship. But if you want to maintain a good relationship with your female assistant, then the two essential elements of self-esteem and power must be kept “dead even.” This means that before you can delegate you need to first invest time and energy chatting about the weekend, the family, or otherwise psychologically balancing the relationship.

This desire to keep things even is one reason that women issue so many more apologies then men—something that can make you both look and
feel
less capable. You probably apologize for things that aren’t your fault. Not because you really think you’re to blame but as a leveling device. For example, let’s say a coworker named Deb sent you the wrong information. You don’t want Deb to feel bad, so you start out by apologizing for not being clear about what you needed. At which point Deb probably offers her own apology for misunderstanding. Since you both apologized, everything is “even.” With the balance restored, the relationship is intact and you can get back to the business of getting the correct information.

But if Deb’s name is Dave and Dave doesn’t understand the game, he might respond to what was a purely ritualized apology on your part with
Well, obviously you weren’t very clear, because I sent you exactly what you asked for
. Okay, now you’re pissed because you weren’t
really
sorry! You were just trying to help him save face and preserve the relationship.

If you identify with this success scenario, ask yourself:

I
f you’ve done well in the past in work or in school, then it would be reasonable to expect that you will continue to be successful in the future. At least that’s how it works for most people. But you’re not most people. You’re someone who believes that the achievements you’ve managed to pull off until now have been on a wing and a prayer. So naturally the idea of becoming even
more
successful is going to be stressful. There’s more
responsibility. More people will be counting on you. The stakes are higher. There’s farther to fall. And of course with each new success, the chance increases that they’ll find out you’re really not that competent or talented after all.

On a day-to-day basis you may not think a lot about success per se. That is, until either you decide to raise the bar or something happens to raise it for you. It was the latter scenario that caused my friend Sharon to call me in a panic. She was being recruited for a great position at a significantly higher level. The new job would put her in charge of more people and a larger operation. It also came with a huge salary bump.

Sharon was excited—and anxious. I’d been in enough of these conversations to know that my job was to talk her down off the impostor ledge. I was supposed to remind her of how normal it is to feel nervous when faced with a new challenge. That she was more than capable of handling any challenge that came her way. How she’d be crazy not to take what was clearly an incredible opportunity. But that’s not what happened. Instead I said simply, “Maybe you just don’t really want it.”

In seconds Sharon went from shock to relief. Make no mistake about it, my friend
was
afraid to take the job, although not totally because she didn’t think she could do it. What happened to Sharon happens to a lot of impostors. You become so used to those niggling voices of self-doubt that you totally forget to heed other voices. Voices that may have far more to do with
who you are
and
what you want
than with how much you know or what you can do.

Personally I hardly ever talk about impostors being
afraid
of success. That’s not to say that success can’t be intimidating or even downright terrifying, because it can, and all the more so if you think you’re a fraud. However, I believe everyone has a powerful inner desire to succeed. And that includes you. At the same time, I’ve met hundreds of women who,
like Sharon, find themselves standing hesitantly at the crossroads of success.

In the last chapter you learned that there are other reasons you might hold yourself back that can easily be confused with a lack of confidence. Here the focus is on whether there are aspects of success itself that may be causing you to pull back. By bringing to your consciousness some of the legitimate reasons for your success anxiety, you’ll be in a better position to decide for yourself:
Am I afraid because I don’t think I can do it—or is it because I don’t want “it”?

There are so many obvious benefits to success that they hardly require mentioning. And I certainly do not want to go on record as advocating that you or any woman not take her rightful place at the table or in any way contribute to the already diminished economic status of women. In fact, further into this book, I’m going to encourage you to shoot even higher.

At the same time, you really are allowed to define success for yourself. Which is why I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some of the less talked-about aspects of success that may be giving you pause. For instance, hopefully when you began in your career it was because you had a passion. Maybe you loved solving complex programming issues or working directly with kids or doing in-depth research. The problem is that organizations are famous for taking people who are happy as individual contributors and turning them into managers or bureaucrats, and for pulling them away to serve on committees or perform other good-citizen functions. All of which only takes you farther away from what drew you to the work to begin with.

Being considered a specialist can bring challenges as well. This one can catch you off guard because your whole life you were told to “just pick something” and specialize in that. But after reaping the rewards of your hard-won expertise, you may be surprised to discover that the more narrowly focused your work becomes, the more your success can funnel you into increasingly specialized and repetitive roles. Over time, the work can lose the excitement it once held, so naturally the idea of becoming even more specialized will be disconcerting.

More success also generally means more complexity. If you thrive on running a large operation, managing lots of people, and juggling multiple projects simultaneously, this is a nonissue. But if you’ve always been the keep-it-simple type or if you started out loving the fast track only to find yourself wistfully watching the gardener who cares for the company plants, then the more complicated things get, the more averse you’ll be to advancing.

It’s impossible to talk about women’s greater susceptibility to the impostor syndrome or for that matter about women’s supposed fear of success without looking at how women tend to
view
success. The fact is, hardly anyone talked about women being afraid of success until the 1980s when they began entering the traditionally male work world in large numbers. Once they did, it was naturally assumed that women would aspire to achieve the traditional measurements of success—status, money, and power. Plenty of women have. But not everyone got on board, or at least not to the exclusion of other priorities.

Whether you embrace the money/power/status model or not, it is no coincidence that situations where these elements are in play—salary
negotiations or being singled out for recognition in your field or being tapped for a promotion—are the very times when you wonder,
Do I really deserve it?
or
Can I really handle it?
You assume it’s the self-doubt talking. And maybe it is.

However, it’s also true that women have always had a more layered definition of success, which means it’s just as likely that your anxiety could be signaling a mismatch between the social definition of success and what matters most to you. It’s not that status, money, and power aren’t important. For you they may be paramount. Overall, though, women place—and it should be said, have been
allowed
to place—a higher value on the quality of their personal and work lives. It’s one of the reasons, for example, that women-owned businesses tend to be smaller than businesses owned by men. Instead of being motivated by the opportunity to be the “boss” and to grow the enterprise as big as possible, more women report starting a business to be personally challenged and to integrate work and family.
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