The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (29 page)

Come up with two or three ways you can practice chutzpah where there is not a big price tag. What if, for example, you went into a Jaguar dealership and took a test drive? It doesn’t matter if you can’t afford a Jaguar or that you wouldn’t want one even if you could. The point is to see what it feels like to pretend a bit. Were you sufficiently convincing? Too bold? Not bold enough? Most important, how did you feel?

Remember, the thing all risk takers have in common is that they love a thrill. If you’ve played the icebreaker game Two Truths and a Lie, then you know how fun—even thrilling—it can be to pretend. Here’s how the game works: Each person takes a turn telling a group of strangers two things that are true about himself, and one outlandish lie. Then everyone has to guess which one is false. So you might say something like I took a cooking class in Paris, my mother delivered me on the way to the hospital, and I used to be a competitive archer. Take a moment now to think up your two truths and a lie—the wilder, the better!

You could try it with friends or, if you really want to practice “acting as if,” you might try it when you strike up a conversation with a stranger on an airplane or while on vacation thousands of miles from home. You can still be from Cleveland and have two kids. But instead of being Teresa from accounting, be a freelance writer who gets paid to travel the world reviewing health spas or an internationally recognized expert on the history of beer. Don’t know a thing about either subject? Make it up as you go along! You’ll be amazed at what comes out of your mouth when the person asks you how you got into that. What have you got to lose? In the worst case a person you’ll never see again thinks you’re delusional. Remember, it’s all in the name of building confidence and seeing what life is like in the “bold zone.”

In her autobiography,
I’m Wild Again: Snippits from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts
, Helen Gurley Brown wrote, “People think chutzpah is in the genes. It isn’t … it’s in the needing and longing and being willing to fall on your face. It isn’t fun … who wants all that rejection, but life is sweeter if you make yourself do uncomfortable things.”
¹⁵
Fortunately, not only do you have a choice about how you handle failure, you also have a huge say in what
kind
of failures to have. You can have relatively mundane ones like flunking a class or losing a big client. Or you can take the advice Garrison Keillor offered in a commencement address when he urged graduates to “have interesting failures.”
¹⁶

Let those words sink in for a moment. Have
interesting
failures. Each one of the chutzpah artists you met here could have just as easily failed. Lauder could have ended up building a mere multimillion-dollar cosmetics company versus a multi
billion
-dollar one—or she could have fallen flat on her face. Spielberg could have taken home only one Oscar instead of four—or he could have not won any. The point is, life is short. And since a certain amount of failure is inevitable, why should you settle for boring failures when you can experience failing at something amazing, like coming in a close second in a major election or getting only one of your inventions manufactured or being the twenty-thousandth person to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon?

F
rom now on everything is going to be different. When you started this journey you thought you were the only one who secretly believed you were fooling others. Now you know that these feelings of ineptness and fraudulence can strike any thoughtful, reflective person with a pulse. You used to assume that your self-doubt was all self-generated, which meant all your energy went into figuring out how to “fix” yourself. Now
that you understand that your impostor feelings have a larger social context, you can do far more contextualizing and far less personalizing. This alone is tremendously freeing.

You even have an entirely new competence rule book, one that acknowledges that you can be competent and human at the same time. Now when you nail an assignment, it no longer occurs to you to credit your success to anything other than yourself. If there was a bit of chance involved or if someone put in a good word for you, you think, “So what?” In the end, you know it was you who made your good fortune or connections count. By now you even
sound
different. Instead of pushing compliments away like you used to, today you just smile and say, “Thanks.”

And it’s going to get even better. From now on, instead of dreading challenges because you’re afraid you’ll be unmasked, you actually look forward to them and seek them out. You know you don’t always have to feel confident to act confident. Even if some of the self-doubts creep back in now and then, you’re not worried. This time you know exactly what to do to tame those impostor voices. If you think I’m exaggerating, think again.

Remember Joyce Roché, the former cosmetics-company executive and president and CEO of Girls Inc., whom you met in
chapter 1
? All you knew about Roché then was that she recalled thinking it was only “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.” But not anymore.

Her transformation from worrying about being unmasked to owning her success and competence offers hope to anyone who worries that she’s a hopeless case. Some years later Roché was asked to contribute to a book called
What I Know Now
. In a letter to her younger self she offers some pointed advice that could just as easily be directed at you: “Stop. It. Now. You’re not an impostor. You’re the genuine article. You have brainpower. You have the ability. You don’t have to work so hard and worry so
much. You’re going to do just fine. You deserve a place at the table. So relax and enjoy your success.”

You know she’s right. Behind your own mask is a woman who knows she is bright, resourceful, creative, able, and yes, even gifted. And she desperately wants that brilliance to be recognized. Not necessarily by the world (although deep down you probably think that would be pretty cool). Mostly, though, the person you want to see and embrace your brilliance is you. This is all incredibly good news. However, before I send you confidently off into the world, there are a few more things you need to know—and do.

Linus, the young and gifted character in
Peanuts
, once said, “I am burdened by a great potential.” And so are you. You’ve spent years explaining away your success … convinced that you’re really not as successful or as competent as everyone else knows you are … waiting for the other shoe to drop. But there is another truth and that is:

Consciously you’re afraid that people will find out you’re inept. But deep down you know you’re “smart”—or at least smart enough. As Marianne Williamson famously observed, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”
¹

Buried under all the debris of fear and self-doubt is the certain knowledge that you are infinitely capable. You’ll probably even smile when I tell you that leadership expert Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries considers the impostor syndrome to be “the flip side of giftedness.” If you don’t believe me, then consider the findings by Wake Forest University psychologists that some people who
say
they feel like frauds are secretly more confident than they let on. The conclusion was that such people are in effect “phony phonies.” I respectfully disagree. I believe what these researchers really revealed is the other side of impostorism. The side of you that, however small and inconsistent, secretly knows you
are
accomplished and competent and that you really
can
do it.

I wanted to tell you all this from the very beginning. But I knew you wouldn’t have believed me. Back then your impostor feelings were far too heavy for you to hear the whole story. That weight has lifted and you’re ready now. So repeat after me:
“I am powerful beyond measure.”
As cliché as it may sound, you really can do anything you put your mind to. Think about it.

For that matter, why Rick Steves, Stephen King, Gary Vaynerchuk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, Barack Obama, or any man who has achieved his goals and not you? I could go on, of course, but the
point is, not one of these amazing women or men are necessarily smarter, better, luckier, or more amazing than you are. True, they’ve acquired certain knowledge, skills, and experience. But the operative word here is
acquired
. An improbable television phenomenon like Julia Child did not come out of the womb being “Julia Child, cooking legend.” She
became
Julia Child—and at forty-nine years old at that. Playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s turning point came in her early thirties when a friend told her that “the way to be taken seriously is to take
yourself
seriously.”
²

Oprah Winfrey had none of the advantages of economic class or a stable family life. She spent the first six years of her life being raised by her grandmother in Mississippi before being shuttled north to live with her mother. At thirteen the scars of abuse and molestation drove her to run away from home and subsequently be sent to a juvenile detention facility, only to be denied admission because all the beds were filled. Nothing in Oprah’s background would have portended success, never mind megastardom. Yet Oprah was remarkably undaunted. Even after being fired from her television reporter’s job and told, “You’re not fit for TV,”
³
she remained undaunted and was later said to remark, “I always knew I was destined for greatness.” And so are you.

You can be powerful beyond measure without becoming a household name. In fact, it takes just as much courage to walk away from what everyone else considers a “dream job” to follow your own road. It takes not one more ounce of courage or energy to dream big than it does to settle. And you’ve got a lot more to gain by shooting high than by shooting low.

Unfortunately, when you dare to step into your genius, resistance is intent on keeping you small. Even if you are fearless, you may feel utterly
undeserving (we’ll talk more about this in a moment). The closer you get to believing that you actually can do it, the more likely you are to receive an unwanted visit from that niggling inner voice. The one that demands to know,
Who do you think you are?

In reality the question you should be asking yourself is
Who do I think I am
not
to go for it?
Whether you know it or not, your actions, and conversely your failure to act, have implications that extend far beyond you. It’s a lesson I learned while trying to complete the dissertation that set the stage for this book. Each of my subjects had been interviewed and all the recordings had been transcribed. I’d even settled on a title: “A Model of Internal Barriers to Women’s Occupational Achievement.”

Then the resistance kicked in. I was overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to make sense out of nearly a thousand pages of data. I started second-guessing my topic. I developed a severe case of writer’s block. In short, I felt like a fraud. Besides, who did this daughter from a long line of housekeepers and custodians think she was to be “Dr.” Valerie Young?

This was in the early eighties, a time when women were inching their way into middle management. My friend Rita Hardiman was leading diversity seminars for managers and executives at some of the largest corporations in the country. Every day she observed amazingly competent women struggling to feel as confident as their oversized shoulder pads implied. Rita had completed her own dissertation only months earlier, so she knew what I was up against. Fearing I might never finish, she sat down and wrote me a letter. There was a lot to it, of course, but the part that stopped me in my tracks was when she said, “Valerie, you have to finish this dissertation. The things you’ve learned through your research can benefit a lot of women. And if you don’t finish, we all lose.”