The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (28 page)

It’s called chutzpah [
hoot
-spuh]—a wonderful Yiddish word originally used to register indignation over someone shamelessly overstepping a boundary. Yiddish, and later English, put a more positive spin on it to mean gutsy audacity. “That took chutzpah” is frequently used admiringly to describe a display of “guts” with flair and boldness.

You are about to meet some famous and not-so-famous “chutzpah
artists,” people who have a very different take on what it means to “fake it,” who understand that the ability to wing it a bit (or a lot) is a valuable skill. At their core, none of these stories are about deception. Rather, they are examples of believing in one’s inherent capacity to succeed. All of these individuals, in their own way, saw a problem or recognized an opportunity and had the boldness to act, no matter how insecure they may have felt. The fact that they did it with more than a bit of creative flair is what makes them chutzpah artists! Their stories are meant to inspire you to add a bit of fun to your future risk-taking endeavors.

For example, someone who was undaunted by risks was Estée Lauder, who built what would become a multibillion-dollar cosmetics empire from scratch. Mostly she did it the same way any successful entrepreneur does—through enormous amounts of grit and hard work. But Lauder was also not above a few shenanigans. In his book
Profiles of Female Genius: Thirteen Creative Women Who Changed the World
, Gene N. Landrum tells how Lauder managed to land an important buyer for her first perfume:

For a particularly audacious example of chutzpah in action, we turn to a teenager with a passion for moviemaking. The tale beings when a seventeen-year-old visiting relatives in Canoga Park, California, went
on the studio tour of Universal Pictures. The tram didn’t stop at the soundstages, so he snuck away on a bathroom break to find them and watch. When a man asked what he was doing, he explained about the 8-millimeter films he’d been making in his parents’ living room since he was practically old enough to hold a camera.

As luck would have it, the guy was the head of the editorial department. He invited the fledgling filmmaker to bring in his films and gave him a one-day pass to get onto the lot. The department head was genuinely impressed but had to get back to work, so he wished the teenager good luck and said good-bye. As it turned out, he wouldn’t need luck, just the chutzpah to break a few rules.

The next day the young man donned a business suit, tossed a sandwich and two candy bars into one of his father’s old briefcases, and returned to the studio. With a wave to the guard intended to convey the message “I belong here,” he strode confidently onto the grounds of Universal Pictures. This went on all summer. The teenager in the suit who dreamed of being a director got to hang out with actual directors, writers, editors, and dubbers. He even found an office that wasn’t being used and became a squatter. Since he was there every day, people just assumed he worked for the studio. And in an even more incredible show of chutzpah, the kid bought some plastic letter tiles, which he used to add his name to the building directory. It read: S
TEVEN
S
PIELBERG
, R
OOM
23C.
⁸

As audacious as Spielberg’s stunt was, it was hardly original. Clare Boothe Luce was equally bold some thirty-five years earlier. After graduating first in her class at the age of sixteen, Boothe Luce looked forward to a bright future. However, ten years later she found herself divorced from a cruel alcoholic. With little job experience and the Great Depression just beginning, anyone would have found it hard to get work; being a woman and a single mother only made it more challenging.

But Boothe Luce was no ordinary woman. She’d met Condé Nast,
owner of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
magazines, through mutual friends. When she ran into him at a dinner party, she saw her opportunity. According to biographer Stephen Shadegg, “She approached the publisher with a directness which must have been disarming and asked him for a job on one of his magazines.” Nast gave her the brush-off. “My dear girl,” she later recalled him saying. “I’ve had many like you come and ask for jobs, but you won’t stick it out. You won’t have any capacity for work.”
⁹

Undaunted, Boothe showed up at the
Vogue
offices three weeks later only to find that Nast had left for Europe. What others might have viewed as a setback Boothe recognized as an opportunity. “She noted through the open door another editorial office where there were six desks. Two of them were vacant. She popped into the office and asked about the empty desks,” Shadegg writes. “Someone told her that two caption writers had left to get married. [She] took off her coat and gloves and settled herself at one of the desks with the brief explanation that she was ready to go to work.” By the time Nast returned, she was already on the payroll, proving herself.

Boothe continued to prove herself. Four years later she became managing editor of
Vanity Fair
. That was in 1933. From there she went on to write six plays, three books, and an Oscar-nominated screenplay, to work as a foreign correspondent for
Life
magazine in Europe and in China during the early part of World War II, to become the first congresswoman from her home state of Connecticut, then ambassador to Italy, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her service. Boothe used a bit of fakery to make it, but there was nothing false about her competence or her success.

Companies do this kind of thing all the time. In the early days when cash was tight, the owners of Home Depot had employees stack up empty boxes to create the illusion of a fully stocked store.
¹⁰
As new business owners, Claudia Jessup and Genie Chipps also recognized the value of appearing bigger than you are. In 1972 the two out-of-work actors started
a creative personal-assistant company with ninety dollars and a catchy motto: “We’ll do anything that’s not illegal, immoral, or already being done.” They knew it would be hard to make the right impression when their world headquarters was a tiny Manhattan studio. So they bought a record of background noises called
Sounds of the Office
, complete with ringing phones and busy typewriters. And voilà, problem solved!
¹¹

Our last chutzpah artist is a children’s book writer named Starr Hall. By the time she was twenty-one, Hall had written three books. Despite positive reviews, every time she tried to set up a reading at one of the major bookstores she was met with the same response: “It sounds great. Have your publicist call us.” “Even if I could find a publicist,” said Hall, “I couldn’t afford one.” That’s when she hatched a plan to take on the persona of “Holly Grant, publicist.” “Holly” even had her own phone line and business cards.

Hall didn’t know the first thing about being a publicist. So she did what any resourceful chutzpah artist would do—she learned “on the job.” “Each time I called on a new bookstore I’d discover something more about being a publicist,” she said. “When they asked about the media release, I’d think, ‘Okay, time to figure that out.’ ” It worked. Kids lined up outside Barnes & Noble for story time, and once she even got a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
to show up. And in one final act of boldness, when one bookstore manager innocently pointed out how much Holly sounded like Starr, Hall/Grant replied, ‘Oh yes, and people tell us we look a lot alike too!”

You have been held hostage to your impostor feelings long enough. It’s time for you to set yourself free. And as Robert Frost said, “Freedom lies
in being bold.” If you are already a risk taker, congratulations! You join a long line of women who have taken bold action in the face of uncertainty. Women such as Madam C. J. Walker, Andrea Jung, Dara Torres, Jessica Watson, and Julie Taymor remind us how satisfying and fun it can be to go for it. Chances are, though, you’ll need some help getting there.

For the record, no one is asking you to trespass your way into a career or make up a fictitious persona. But you do need to start acting like you deserve a place at the table—whether that’s space on the bookshelf, in an elite school, the corner office, or a prestigious art gallery. None of the people you just heard about are any smarter, more talented, or deserving than you. Being bold is not about being right, being perfect, or knowing it all. Rather it is about marshaled resources, information, and people. It involves seeing problems as opportunities, occasionally flying by the seat of your pants, and ultimately being willing to fall flat on your face and know you will survive.

Building your risk-taking muscles begins with the recognition that new challenges will always create a certain amount of inner tension. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t up to the task. Not only should you expect to feel afraid, you should worry if you
don’t
. Two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington certainly never took his starring role in the Broadway hit
Fences
for granted. “That last five minutes before we go on that first [Broadway] preview, if you don’t have that ‘what the hell am I doing here [feeling],’ … if you don’t have that, then they say it’s time to quit.”
¹²

Next, when performance jitters strike, you need to practice reframing the situation. That’s what Elizabeth Alexander did. When President-elect Obama tapped Alexander to be the inaugural poet, there was a flurry of interviews leading up to her big performance. One question everyone had was “Are you nervous?” (a question I would venture to guess was not put to the first inaugural poet, Robert Frost). Each time she was asked, Alexander
spoke of feeling excited, thrilled, honored, humbled—but never scared. Why? The way she put it: “To be scared would not be helpful.”
¹³

The second you feel fear kick in, take a deep breath, then calmly remind yourself,
This is not helpful right now
. Then decide which emotion
would
be helpful in the situation. How about exhilaration, anticipation, wonder, joy, pride, enthusiasm, or determination? There’s a reason why famed psychologist Fritz Perls describes fear as “excitement without breath.” Think about it. Your body has the same physiological responses to both fear and excitement—nervous stomach, sweaty palms, dry mouth. And since your mind only knows what you tell it, it doesn’t know the difference.

Say, for example, that you have a fear of public speaking. You should still expect to have some butterflies as you head to the podium. Just make sure you keep telling yourself, “I’m excited … 
I’m
excited … 
I’m excited!
” From there you can do things like increase your volume and use gestures that support your message. Not only will you be a more engaging speaker, but both techniques offer the bonus of burning off nervous energy.
¹⁴

Taking risks is like any other skill. The more you do it, the more comfortable you get. Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice was to “do one thing every day that scares you.” Try it for a week. Sign up for a singing or a fencing class. Submit your poem or an article to a magazine. Raise your hand for a challenging assignment. Naturally you’d like things to turn out well, but the outcome is not so important. Really! What is important is that you stepped outside of your comfort zone and learned something in the process.

As you ponder different risks, make sure you put the perceived consequences into proper perspective. A bright midlevel manager at an international cosmetics conglomerate told me she’d spent her entire career erring on the side of caution because she didn’t want to be responsible if
something went wrong. That is until her boss told her, “Look, there is no single thing you could possibly do that is going to bring this company down, so go for it.” Decisions do of course have consequences, but rarely are they as dire or as permanent as you think.

Going for it comes down to having faith that, despite your insecurities, you’ll be able to figure it out along the way. And what if your plan goes awry? Well, in the words of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, “It’s much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.”

Recognize too that playing it safe can be the riskiest move of all. If you don’t take chances or ever put yourself or your work out there, you will avoid failure. But you also need to consider what all that safety is costing you. In her book
Perseverance
, Margaret Wheatley writes, “Security is not what creates life. Safety, safe havens, guarantees of security—none of these give life its capacities. Newness, creativity, imagination—these live on the edge.”

Stop now and think of a challenge or opportunity you could go after but have been afraid to. Name three things you’ll miss out on if you continue to play it too safe. It could be anything from a financial cost to the chance to get valuable feedback to the pride of knowing that win or lose, at least you tried.

If you can’t “see” yourself doing something, it probably won’t happen. Using any of the chutzpah artists you met here as inspiration, picture yourself with more chutzpah. Go back in your mind to a specific situation where even a small amount of chutzpah would have come in handy. Replay the scene in your mind, but this time add a dash of creative boldness. What would you do or say differently? What would that feel like?

Now that you have a mental image, just as a scientist would, I want you to set up some experiments and then evaluate what happened. Maybe you can’t imagine bluffing your way into a job, but if you knew it might keep you from being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous auto mechanic,
would you feel all right about giving the impression that you know more about cars than you actually do? In other words, I want you to find your own chutzpah comfort zone—and then to stretch a bit further.