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

by Valerie Young

  Never Finishing

  Granted, it may be by the skin of your teeth, but ultimately most procrastinators do get the job done. Most. There are others who take procrastination to the extreme by starting only to never finish. Like the doctoral candidate who completes all of her course work only to languish in a state of incompletion (sometimes for years) known as being ABD—all but dissertation. Or the artist who works ceaselessly on the same piece of work but never completes anything. Or the aspiring self-bosser who endlessly researches, plans, and tinkers with a business idea but never gets it off the launch pad.

  By not finishing, you not only shield yourself from possible detection but you also effectively avoid the shame of being criticized. After all, if someone does question your work, your talent, or your expertise, you can always insist that it’s still in progress or I’m just dabbling.

  Self-Sabotage

  In some cases, the fear of being exposed can be so anxiety-producing that you subconsciously do things to undermine your very success. This is different from withholding effort because on the surface anyway, you’re still striving. Here, however, your actions have the effect of undercutting your prospects for success. You may do things like show up late or unprepared for an important audition or appointment. Perhaps the night before a big performance you stay up too late or drink one too many glasses of wine. If you do poorly, you can blame it on the fatigue or the hangover. If you do well, then you feel undeserving because you know you dodged a bullet.

  Or you may unwittingly employ a self-sabotage strategy known as “other-enhancement.” This happens in situations where you’re competing against or being compared with another person and you do things like point out information or coach her in some way or otherwise provide some advantage that will enhance her chance of doing well. In doing so, you’ve strategically obscured the link between your performance and its evaluation. Since “technically” you’ve done nothing to actually interfere with your own performance, you may still do well. However, if you are outperformed, then you’ve preserved the ambiguity about your failure by creating a convenient excuse that you helped the other person. Plus, by helping someone else, you preserve your image as someone who is selfless—something that is especially important to women.

  Substance abuse is another way to avoid success and thus escape the emotional burden of impostorism altogether. A distressed mother once wrote me for advice after her twenty-five-year-old daughter was arrested for drunk driving. For the previous year and a half the young woman had been a mere three credits away from completing a degree in graphic art. “After her arrest,” wrote the mother, “my daughter confided in me that she feels she doesn’t really deserve the degree anyway because she has somehow just fooled her professors into thinking she’s good.”

  At the same time, just because someone risks his career by flirting with disaster does not mean it’s because he feels like a fraud. But that hasn’t stopped some in the media from blaming the impostor syndrome for all sorts of self-destructive behavior, from the sexual impropriety of Hugh Grant, Bill Clinton, and Eliot Spitzer to the misconduct of disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair.3 It is possible of course that these men did act out of feelings of inadequacy. However, the impostor syndrome should not be blamed for every stupefying display of self-destruction.

  Put a check mark next to the coping and protecting mechanism that resonates most with you:

  ___ Overpreparing and hard work

  ___ Holding back

  ___ Maintaining a low or ever-changing profile

  ___ Use of charm or perceptiveness to win approval

  ___ Procrastination

  ___ Not finishing

  ___ Self-sabotage

  To be clear: None of these coping and protecting behaviors do anything to actually alleviate your impostor feelings. That’s not their job. Their job is to keep you safe from harm by avoiding the shame and humiliation of being unmasked as well as to relieve some of the stress that comes from feeling like a fraud. As self-defeating as these behaviors are, we don’t engage in them because we are masochists. We engage in them because we are doing the best we can to protect ourselves under particular life circumstances.

  In other words, you really are trying to take care of yourself. So in that sense you need to appreciate whatever coping and protecting behaviors you’ve created. Most impostors rely on one strategy more heavily than others. Don’t be alarmed, however, if you employ multiple coping mechanisms. It just means you’re really taking care of yourself!

  What Are You Getting Out of This?

  Becoming more aware of how you’ve tried to manage this impostor syndrome of yours is important, but it’s just the beginning. To really understand what’s going on requires digging a bit deeper. So we’re going to borrow from the work of Dr. Gerald Weinstein. Weinstein’s book Education of the Self4 has at its core a self-discovery process that consists of a series of questions designed to help you see and modify a self-limiting pattern of behavior—in this case the impostor syndrome.

  For example, you already know that your pattern is there to keep you from being unmasked. But that’s not all it does. To get at the broader function of any pattern of behavior, you need to ask yourself three questions: What does this behavior help me avoid? What does it protect me from? What does it help me get?

  On their face, all these questions seem to ask the same thing. However, when you begin to answer them you’ll discover that each comes at the issue from a slightly different angle, which in turn helps you peel back layers you may not have gotten to otherwise. For example:

  What does my behavior help me avoid? If you never push yourself intellectually, you avoid the humiliation of trying and coming up short. If you never finish writing your dissertation or your business plan, you don’t have to show your work to others, which keeps you from receiving negative feedback.

  What does my behavior help protect me from? By constantly changing jobs, you protect yourself from finding out whether you could have gone higher. If you maintain a low profile, you protect yourself from scrutiny.

  What does my behavior help me get? This question is often the hardest to answer because it’s difficult to imagine how sabotaging your own success, for example, could get you anything but stress and misery. Go deeper, though, and you’ll no doubt see that you’re getting more out of your behavior than you think.

  For example, when you put in eighty-hour workweeks, there’s a good chance you’ll be recognized by higher-ups. When you constantly call your friends to anguish over what you are convinced will be an impending failure, you’re probably going to get a lot of sympathy and stroking. When you keep a low profile, you automatically get a degree of security and safety. And in a very practical sense, when you procrastinate, you get more time to do things that are more fun—or at least easier than whatever it is you’re putting off doing.

  Similarly, if you are prone to overpreparing, you probably spend a fair amount of time mentally replaying worst-case scenarios—a phenomenon psychologist Albert Ellis calls “awfulizing.” Not only will I fail the qualifying exam, but I’ll become a laughingstock. No one will want to work with me again. I’ll be tossed out of my profession. I’ll end up living in a cardboard box down by the river.

  As distressing as this mental disaster movie may be, Wellesley College psychology professor Julie Norem argues that this behavior is actually highly adaptive. Overpreparing helps ensure your success in part because of what she calls “defensive pessimism.” This is when you have unrealistically low expectations, then devote considerable energy to anticipating everything that could go wrong and planning for all possible scenarios. Mentally running through every conceivable negative outcome, says Norem, helps impostors reduce anxiety by taking concrete steps to minimize potential problems.5

  Now it’s your turn. To uncover additional ways your impostor pattern serves you, ask: What does this behavior help
me avoid? What does it help protect me from? What does it help me get?

  Uncovering Your “Crusher” and Exposing the Lie

  You think you developed your protecting strategy solely to keep people from finding out you are an impostor. However, a core function of all self-limiting patterns is to protect us from what Weinstein calls the crusher. The crusher is a core negative belief we hold about ourselves. At its heart, your crusher has to do with a basic feeling of inadequacy and unworthiness. You developed your pattern in part so that you wouldn’t have to face this hidden negative belief.

  You may assume that everyone who identifies with the impostor syndrome would share a common crusher, namely: I’m a fraud. Go below the surface, however, and you’ll realize that your own crusher reflects a deeper, more painful belief that is unique to you and your pattern. Let’s say, for instance, that the way you attempt to protect yourself from the shame of being found out is to not speak up in meetings or in class. You tell yourself it’s because you don’t want other people to think you’re stupid. But the real reason you hold back is to escape having to face the crushing “truth” of your own core belief, which is, “I really am stupid.”

  It’s important to recognize that you didn’t develop your crusher overnight—or by yourself. This irrational negative belief has been reinforced through interactions with family, teachers, coworkers, and, as you learned in the last chapter, by the culture at large.

  One way to identify your crusher is to imagine the statement you would most dread hearing said aloud about you in your impostor scenario: You’ll never measure up. You have no special gifts. You’re not as intelligent as other people. You have no talent. You’re not an original thinker. Or simply, You’re unworthy. If your crusher is not immediately obvious, then imagine that your best efforts to protect yourself failed and you are publically revealed to be a fraud.

  Take a few moments now to quiet yourself and tune into your own crusher. Giving voice to your crusher statement can be an intense emotional experience. At the same time, you can’t change what you don’t understand. Tough as this step can be, it is essential to expose this false belief to the light of day so it can be seen for the lie that it is. I know your crusher feels true. But you can’t believe everything you think. The real truth is this:

  WITHOUT EXCEPTION,

  ALL CRUSHERS ARE LIES.

  YOURS INCLUDED.

  I don’t expect you to fully believe this—at least not right away. Right now all I want you to do is become consciously aware of the lie you’ve avoided confronting up until now.

  What’s All This Protection Costing You?

  The good news is that your coping and protecting behaviors really do keep you safe from harm. They help you escape the humiliation of being discovered and having to confront the pain of your crusher. At the same time, as the adage goes: You never get something for nothing. Even though your pattern serves a protective function, we always pay a price for that protection.

  The way to hone in on your pattern cost is to ask these questions: What will happen if I never change this pattern? What price would I pay? What opportunities would I miss? What options or possibilities would be closed to me?

  Some of the costs are the same for all impostors—things like living with the anxiety of waiting for the other shoe to drop or allowing your fraud fears to, in the words of one workshop participant, “steal the joy of the ride.” Others are highly specific to you and your situation and may include things like If I don’t finish my research, I’ll never graduate or get tenure or If I keep procrastinating, I’ll miss my chance to get the job in France. See if any of these costs resonate with you:

  If I never change this pattern …

  I’ll only get safe, dead-end jobs that don’t fully utilize my gifts and passions.

  My health will suffer.

  I will live with the regret of never knowing how far my talents and effort could have taken me.

  The price I would pay is …

  Unnecessary psychological stress and fatigue.

  I’ll earn less money, which will limit me from doing things I want to do in life.

  I won’t get to meet valuable mentors and contacts who can help me achieve my goals.

  I won’t have the chance to learn from my mistakes so I can really grow.

  I’ll never get recognition for my work.

  I’ll never know what it’s like to really feel and own my successes and then build on them.

  The opportunities I would miss would be …

  The satisfaction of taking risks—win or lose, knowing I tried.

  Learning new things about myself and the world.

  Receiving valuable feedback—both positive and critical—that I need to grow and improve.

  I’ll never learn what I need to know to advance in my field.

  The excitement, challenge, and growth involved in flexing my mind and enjoying my own progress.

  The options and possibilities that would be closed to me would be …

  The option of taking my career (or business) to the level I know it can reach.

  Other more challenging and satisfying job possibilities.

  Gaining the experience I need to further my reputation.

  The chance to make a positive difference in the world.

  Now it’s your turn to decide for yourself: What would happen if you never changed your coping and protecting behavior? What price would you pay? What opportunities would you miss out on? What options and possibilities would be closed to you?

  You already knew that the impostor syndrome was a huge drag on your energy and potential. However, if I’d asked you before to outline exactly what your attempts to evade the No-Talent Police were costing you specifically, you may have been hard-pressed to do so. But now you know. Being conscious of the price you pay for all that protection means you now have a more personalized incentive to continue taking the steps required to unlearn this unnecessarily self-limiting pattern.

  At the same time, letting go of any habitual response, even when you know it’s in your best interest to do so, is not easy. The familiar, even if it’s not working, is always more comfortable than the unknown. But growth is not meant to make us comfortable. Its purpose is to stretch us so we can perform at our full potential and achieve our highest purpose.

  The good news is that all of the information you identified here constitutes your “before” picture. The feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that embody your impostor pattern now do not represent the self-assured person you are going to be. The ultimate payoff for the work you put in here will come at the end of this book when your “after” picture fully emerges.

  In the meantime there really are small things you can do to become the self-assured person you are meant to be. For example, if you know that you’re procrastinating or that you have yet to finish an important task, then put a stake in the ground right now and set a completion date. Next, build in accountability by publically declaring your deadline. Then get out your calendar and make an appointment with yourself to work on this project. Time blocking, as it’s called, helps ensure that you don’t schedule other things on the days—or part of a day—you’ve set aside to work on this task.

  On this last point, stop telling yourself that you can’t possibly work on something unless you can devote an entire day to it. Anything that involves a lot of steps or time to complete almost always gets done in small focused chunks of time over a period of days, weeks, months, or even years. To get yourself started, set a timer for forty-five minutes to an hour and focus all of your attention on chipping away at that one thing. When the timer goes off, you can stop. However, since the hardest part was getting started, there’s a good chance you’ll keep going. Either way you’ll not only get more accomplished but you’ll feel more accomplished too.

  If you’ve been relying on
charm or perceptiveness to win approval, rather than continuing to seek validation from others, make a point of celebrating your next accomplishment. If you’ve been engaging in intellectual flattery, ask a role model to lunch and practice talking about your own views or work. If you know you’ve been doing things to sabotage yourself, pay attention to what you’re doing and why, then practice what it feels like to show up for yourself. If you’ve been avoiding applying yourself, pick one goal to tackle this week.

  Other things you can do: Ask someone you trust for feedback. Share something with another person that you’re proud of, maybe something you wrote or won. Write yourself a letter of recommendation so that you can see your accomplishments and attributes through someone else’s eyes. Resolve to accept your next compliment graciously. Rewrite your résumé, adding accomplishments and skills you had previously omitted or downplayed. Speak up without self-judgment in your next meeting or class. Take a public-speaking seminar or join Toastmaster. Role-play a challenging exchange/event. Make a list of the reasons why you deserve a raise or promotion. Join a study group, writing group, or other support group designed to help people stay on track. Spend five minutes a day visualizing yourself being confident in a situation where you typically feel anything but.