The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (24 page)

This strategy may strike you as being at odds with the challenge you’re already facing. Here you’ve spent a lifetime pretending to be more confident than you really feel, and all it’s ever done is reinforce your belief that you’re an impostor. It’s only natural that you’d think,
I already feel like a phony and you want me to pretend even more?
I know it sounds like a contradiction. But the short answer is: Yes, I absolutely
do
want you to start acting like the bright, competent person you really are, even when you don’t always feel that way.

The premise behind “acting as if” is that you become what you do. It worked for James Taylor. The Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter once said, “I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could.” Seeing that you really
can
do the thing you didn’t think you could do in turn generates real confidence.

Fake it till you make it is more than a catchphrase. It’s actually been proven that pretending to act differently than you feel can cause you to feel differently. When scientists at Wake Forest University asked fifty students to act like extroverts for fifteen minutes in a group discussion,
even if they didn’t feel like it
, the more assertive and energetic the students acted, the happier they felt.”
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It works the same way with confidence. You can still have serious doubts about whether you have what it takes to get elected, earn an advanced degree, or achieve any number of goals. What matters is that you do it.

I am fully aware that acting self-assured when you feel anything but is not easy, especially for women. Even when you see the merits of the fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy, you may fail to employ it. But not necessarily for the reason you might think. True, it is harder to feign confidence when you already feel like a big phony. However, even if you didn’t identify
with the impostor syndrome for any of a host of reasons we’ll explore here, you may be uncomfortable faking confidence.

Bertrand Russell once said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” Part of the reason you resist acting as if is because you know that sometimes those who are the most confident have the least reason to be.

On one end of the confidence continuum is the impostor syndrome. Fully capable people like you who have every reason to feel confident but don’t. On the other end is a lesser-known but arguably far more dangerous condition known as irrational self-confidence syndrome (ISC)—a wonderfully apt term coined by former
Rocky Mountain News
reporter Erica Heath to describe the unjustifiably confident. If you’ve ever watched contestants audition for shows like
American Idol
or
America’s Got Talent
, then you’ve seen people who seem unable to recognize the true limitation of their talents.

On television it’s comical. But it’s not so funny if you’ve ever had to work with or under a poor performer who can talk a good game. “Big talk and supreme self-confidence have landed many jobs in fields such as sales, marketing and elected office,” writes Heath. “Once he’s on the inside, the ISC patient can be difficult to spot if he plays the game right.” Over time, she says, ISC employees move up the ladder, acquiring bigger budgets and more support staff, and frequently reorganizing their departments to avoid detection. “The best of the bunch can pull off this sleight of hand several times before sensing that it’s time to pull up stakes. Just in time,
they talk their way into a new, better job, leaving behind a mess and angry ex-colleagues.”
²

To be clear: This is not the same as the healthy confidence that comes from accepting that you can’t possibly know everything but jumping in anyway. As you’ll soon discover, that kind of confidence is not only a good thing, it’s
essential
in overcoming the impostor syndrome. What we’re talking about here is the danger of those arrogantly confident people who really do
think
they know everything.

The problem, says entrepreneur and self-identified impostor Steve Schwartz, is that [such people] “have a tendency to make others think they know what they’re doing, which makes others tend to rely on them. It causes others to put them in charge of things it
seems
like they know how to handle. And, of course, since these people legitimately think they know how to handle these things, they are likely not to look it up or defer to people who actually know.”
³

Research bears out that people who do things badly are usually supremely confident in their abilities, while the better performers tend to make more humble predictions and therefore more accurate self-assessments. To be clear, not everyone who is confident (deservedly or otherwise) is either inept or reckless. Still, we’ve all run into people whose self-assurance far exceeds their actual base of knowledge.

There are hundreds of studies on the impostor syndrome—90 percent of them conducted by women. Oddly, there’s been scant attention paid to another phenomenon that disproportionately strikes untold numbers of men. It’s called “male answer syndrome.” The term first appeared in a 1992
Utne Reader
magazine article by Jane Campbell, who used it to describe the “chronic answering of questions regardless of actual knowledge.” Not all men feel this compulsion, of course. Although, she says, there are not many men who like to say “I don’t know,” preferring instead to say things like “That’s not what’s important here.” Campbell
offered this tongue-in-cheek yet accurate description of male answer syndrome at work:

Psychologists at Southwestern University sought to determine whether such a thing as male answer syndrome actually exists. Through a series of studies they found three things. One: Men and women alike are indeed aware that when faced with a difficult or ambiguous question some people feel compelled to generate a rational-sounding answer rather than admit that they don’t know. Two: Everyone believes that this tendency is much more common in men. Three: They’re right.
⁴

When you combine the bluster of irrational self-confidence syndrome with the false authority of male answer syndrome, you get yet another more typically male tendency. This one involves a small but vocal minority of uninformed men who nonetheless feel compelled to go out of their way to “enlighten” others, and women especially. And if you’re unaware that it’s happening, it can knock your confidence for a loop.

In a compelling essay in the
Los Angeles Times
titled “Men Who Explain Things,” award-winning author Rebecca Solnit reflected on the many times men had explained things to her, “whether or not they know what they are talking about.”
⁵
In it she recounts this exchange between herself, her friend Sallie, and their pompous party host:

Their host was undaunted, and so it took Sallie three or four more tries before he finally took in what was being said. At which point he was stunned speechless by the fact that she was indeed the author of a very important book that as it turned out he hadn’t even read but had only read
about
. After a brief moment, Solnit writes, “he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.”

Of course, men like this explain things to other men too. And there are certainly women who can, in Solnit’s words, “hold forth on irrelevant things
and conspiracy theories.” But, she says, “the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.” It’s a lot of other women’s experience too.

Unfortunately, rather than distrust the expounder of misinformation, women often doubt themselves instead. Look at Solnit. She’s an accomplished author of half a dozen well-regarded books. If a woman with this level of success can even for a moment be, in her own words, “willing to believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over my more shaky certainty,” it’s not hard to imagine the tamping effect the superior tone of presumed greater knowledge can have on someone who perceives herself as having far less under her belt. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this kind of “confrontational confidence,” you know how intimidating it can be, and all the more when the man who is explaining things to you is older, has a bigger title, exercises power over you, or all of the above.

Solnit says it best: “It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

Certainly the occasional encounter with an egotistical man who explains things is unlikely to affect your confidence in any lasting way. However, if you were raised by, study under, or work for the terminally pompous, your view of “acting as if” may be permanently tainted. You think,
If that’s what it means to fake it till you make it, then count me out
.

When you do meet an explainer, the first thing you need to do is to see the situation for what it is. First, don’t immediately assume that the person knows what he’s talking about. And definitely don’t question your own
knowledge or your better judgment. If your instinct tells you that someone is full of hot air, trust it. This sort of uninformed bluster can be infuriating. If you feel your blood pressure rise, it may help to shift from anger to pity for someone who is so sadly self-important. Most important, remind yourself that what’s happening has everything to do with the explainer’s insecurity or narcissism and nothing to do with you, your intellect, or your abilities.

When an uninformed man is explaining things to you, you have two choices. You can walk away or you can engage him. If you decide to reply with accurate information, recognize that the odds of any sort of admission on his part are next to nil. However, if the situation in any way undercuts you or your work, especially in a public forum, you should push back. You don’t need to be confrontational in order to stand firm in the face of someone else’s confrontational confidence. Instead, calmly but firmly set the record straight and in no uncertain terms.

What about you? Have you ever been on the receiving end of an uninformed man or woman explaining things to you? If so, how did you feel about yourself at the time? To what extent has this experience affected what you think about faking it till you make it? Knowing what you know now about the sometimes false authority of the overly confident, what do you think you might feel, say, and do differently in the future?

The kind of blustery confidence on steroids you’ve just seen is off-putting and potentially dangerous. So it makes sense that you’d have misgivings about anything that seems to suggest you need to become “like them.” Pretending to know more than you really do feels deceptive, phony. It’s the stuff of scoundrel politicians, unscrupulous used-car salesmen, home-repair contractors, and others fairly or unfairly associated with “bullshitting.”

He doesn’t know it, but I can honestly say Ted Koppel changed my life. Or at least his words did. The broadcast journalist and longtime host of the award-winning late-night news program
Nightline
spent the better part of his career interviewing world leaders, scientists, and leading experts from a myriad of fields. In a 1985 special student edition of
Newsweek
, senior editor and columnist Jonathan Alter turned the tables on Koppel by asking, “Do you ever feel you don’t know enough about a subject to ask the tough questions?”

Koppel’s answer forever changed how I looked at the world. He said: “No. When I can, I’d rather go into a program knowing as much as possible about the subject, but I don’t consider it a handicap [when] I know next to nothing.” Part of the reason is that Koppel saw himself as a conduit for the audience. If he didn’t understand, he figured, his audience probably didn’t either. Even with this explanation, when you’re accustomed to disqualifying yourself from applying for jobs because you lack one or two minor requirements, the idea that someone could be unperturbed at knowing “next to nothing” is both stunning and illuminating.
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