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

  From here on you’ll want to practice doing things to strengthen the mental link between you and your accomplishments. For starters, pay more attention to when and how you minimize your accomplishments. Maybe you don’t run around telling everybody you lucked out in getting the big promotion, but you may notice that you wave off compliments more often than you think.

  If so, instead of pushing the compliment away, practice responding with something more appropriate, like Thank you. Once that becomes second nature, step it up a bit with statements like I really appreciate you saying that or Thank you—it makes me feel good that all my hard work paid off.” Simply hearing yourself say these words in reference to something you did can help you internalize your accomplishment more fully.

  You probably think that you’re just being modest. But did you ever consider how constantly pointing out why you don’t deserve praise may feel insulting to the person giving it? When you think about it, there’s an element of arrogance involved in the impostor syndrome. After all, what you’re really saying is You people are so stupid you don’t even realize I’m inept! Imagine that you and I met and you told me that you enjoyed my book and I responded with something outrageous like Really? Then I guess you don’t read many books, do you? I mean, do you even get out of the house much or what? Pretty arrogant, right?

  All of us like to have our work noticed and appreciated. But remember, you’ve got that impostor thing going, which means that the person who most needs to recognize your achievements is you. One way you can do this is by giving yourself some kind of reward following the completion of a big project or a win. In addition to being fun, learning to appreciate yourself helps break your old pattern of seeking and then dismissing approval from others. The simple act of rewarding yourself is a concrete way to serve our goal of making that stronger mental connection between you and your achievement.

  How you reward yourself is not important. You could treat yourself to a massage, a fancy dinner, even a simple walk in your favorite park. When I finished this book I bought a piece of art for my home. Every time I look at it I’m reminded of all the time and effort I put in. When I told this to a friend, she worried that if the book flopped, the painting would wind up serving as a painful reminder. To the contrary, rewards are not reserved only for the victories. If you gave something your best shot, you still deserve kudos for effort.

  Another way you can cement your accomplishments in your mind is to make them more visual. Just because you’re not a kid anymore doesn’t mean you can’t proudly adorn a wall with letters of recommendation, certificates, and other tangible evidence of success. If you don’t feel comfortable with such public displays of self-appreciation, take a more private approach and create a success folder you can refer to when impostor feelings creep in.

  The Bottom Line

  People who identify with the impostor syndrome externalize their success by attributing it to factors outside of themselves. In reality, evidence that you are bright and capable is all around you. In order to feel fully deserving of your success you must learn to claim your accomplishments on a gut, visceral level. This begins with understanding that external factors such as luck, timing, connections, and personality play a valid role in everyone’s success—including yours.

  What You Can Do

  Create a list of all your achievements large and small.

  Next to each achievement note the role luck, timing, connections, or your own personality may have played in your ultimate success.

  Then write down the specific actions you took to take full advantage of these contributors.

  Make an agreement with yourself that the next time someone compliments your work you will say, “Thank you.” Then zip it.

  What’s Ahead

  Hopefully now you see that you really are responsible for your achievements. With that reality check out of the way, it’s time to take stock of what is very likely the core of your impostor feelings—your personal competence rule book.

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  The Competence Rule Book for Mere Mortals

  I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  How will you know when you’re “competent”? All achievers want to do their best. But when you feel like an impostor, “best” includes a host of self-expectations that go far beyond doing well. Whether you know it or not, your view of competence is a major contributor to perpetuating your belief that you are an impostor. Over the years you’ve adopted notions about what’s required for you to be considered talented, knowledgeable, skilled, or, in a word, “good” enough. And these notions have everything to do with how competent and confident you feel.

  The fact that everyone else sees a highly capable individual where you see an inadequate fraud tells me right there that you operate from a competence playbook that bears little resemblance to reality. It doesn’t matter how intelligent or talented or skilled you are right now because I have news for you: You are never going to consistently reach that insanely high bar you’ve set for yourself—ever. That’s why if you truly want to beat the impostor syndrome, you must adjust your self-limiting thinking as to what it takes to be competent. This redefining process is, bar none, your fastest path to confidence.

  What’s Your Competence Type?

  Every impostor on the planet has a distorted view of competence. However, not all impostors skew it the same way. To show you what I mean, I’d like you to take a moment now to complete the following sentences with the first thing that pops into your head:

  I’ll know I’m competent at___________________________

  when____________________________________________.

  If I were really smart,_____________________________________________

  I should always______________________________________.

  If I were really qualified, I would________________________.

  As you are about to discover, your answers tell a lot about your competence type. They are the Perfectionist, the Natural Genius, the Rugged Individualist, the Expert, and the Superwoman/Man/Student. Each represents one kind of erroneous thinking about what it takes to be competent—your inner competence rule book.

  Competence rules include words like should, always, don’t, and never. For instance, you might be guided by an inner rule that says, If I were really smart, I would always know what to say. This way of thinking may in turn drive rules of behavior like Never raise your hand unless you are 100 percent sure you are right, or Don’t ask for help, or Always overprepare. At its core, your rule book represents a strong internal expectation that you meet a standard of performance that is rarely achievable and most definitely not sustainable—at least not for mere mortals like you and me.

  As you learn about the five competence types, you may recognize parts of yourself in several of them. Typically, though, you’ll have one dominant type. A clearer understanding of your own limiting self-expectations will go a long way toward helping you rid yourself of the shame and fraudulence you feel when you fall short.

  Once you have a better idea of what you’re up against, the next step is to swap your old, unreasonable rules for the Competence Rule Book for Mere Mortals you’ll receive here. As you’ll discover, these new rules represent a profoundly different mind-set than the one that currently fuels your impostor fears. And because your new rule book reframes competence in realistic terms, it offers the opportunity for you to instantly feel more confident and competent.

  The Perfectionist’s View of Competence

  For the Perfectionist, there is a single focus, and that is how something is done. Your competence rule book is quite straightforward. I should deliver an unblemished performance 100 percent of the time. Every aspect of my work must be exemplary. Nothing short of perfect is acceptable. When you fail to measure up to these unrealistically high standards, it only conf
irms your feelings of impostorism.

  Some Perfectionists hold only themselves to these exacting standards, while others impose them on other people. At home the latter might sound like this: No, honey, that’s not how you fold a towel—this is how you fold a towel. There is a right and wrong way to do everything from packing the car for vacation to preparing a project plan. Since no one can measure up to your precise standards, your motto is “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.” When you do delegate, you are often frustrated and disappointed at the results.

  To be clear, perfectionism is not the same as a healthy drive to excel. You can seek excellence without demanding perfection. More important, non-Perfectionists will attempt difficult challenges and feel okay about themselves afterward—whether they succeed or not. And they’re flexible enough to redefine success as the situation warrants. That’s not to say they aren’t disappointed if they fail. But as long as they gave it their best shot there is no shame. Not so for the Perfectionist.

  Indeed, for you just the opposite occurs. Quality-wise, Perfectionists always go for the gold, the A+, the top spot. Anything less and you subject yourself to harsh inner criticism, often experiencing deep shame at your perceived “failure.” Precisely because there is such shame in failing, you may avoid altogether attempting anything new or difficult. After all, getting things “right” takes a lot of effort, energy, and aggravation. It’s much easier not to even try than to put yourself through those paces and risk the humiliation of coming up short.

  Even if you are extremely motivated, success is rarely satisfying because you always believe you could have done even better. You get into a good school but are disappointed because you could have gotten into a better one. You deliver a top-notch presentation but kick yourself for not remembering to make some minor point. You broker a major transaction only to wonder if you could have struck an even better deal.

  Perfectionism is a hard habit to break because it’s self-reinforcing. Because you do overprepare, you often turn out a stellar performance, which in turn reinforces your drive to maintain that perfect record. But it’s a huge setup. Because when you expect yourself and your work to always be perfect, it’s a matter not of if you will be disappointed but when.

  Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough—that we should try again.

  —Julia Cameron, author, poet, playwright, and filmmaker

  Competence Reframes for the Perfectionist

  What you consider to be merely “satisfactory” work probably far exceeds what’s actually required. That’s why it is so important to reframe your current thinking about things like “quality” and “standards.” In the sixteen-plus years that I’ve been helping people who aspire to be their own boss, I have found that women are by far more likely than men to wait for everything to be perfect before they launch. They endlessly tinker and tweak and adjust, making sure everything is just so, but they never begin. In the end these high-minded notions of “quality standards” and “getting it right” equal paralysis.

  On the whole, male entrepreneurs operate from a very different definition of quality. The mantra repeated by speakers at the numerous Internet-marketing seminars I’ve attended always comes down to some variation of “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”1

  One marketing guru went even further, telling procrastinating Perfectionists that “Half-ass is better than no ass.” His wording may have been crass, but the fundamental truth remains: If you wait for everything to be perfect, you’ll never act. Whether it’s a product, a service, or an idea, you have to put version one out there, get some feedback, improve on it, then create a new and improved version from there. You can always course correct as you go. But at some point you must decide it really is good enough.

  If you work in the corporate world or in academia, you may be understandably turned off by advice like “Half-ass is better than no ass.” So what if we repackage it into something more respectable, like a paradigm? As it turns out, the software-development world not only shares the basic mind-set of my Internet marketer friends, but the concept even has an official-sounding name. Paradigm creator James Bach calls it “good enough quality,” or GEQ.

  Bach’s article “Good Enough Quality: Beyond the Buzzword” appeared in a well-respected publication dedicated to advancing the theory and application of computing and information technology. In it he asserts that GEQ is standard operating procedure in the software-manufacturing world, explaining that “Microsoft begins every project with the certain knowledge that they will choose to ship [a software product] with known bugs.”2 This is not a jab at Microsoft or, for that matter, any software company. Rather, it’s recognizing the reality that any manufacturer in the technology sector must operate with a degree of uncertainty.

  To be clear: The principles of GEQ—or “Half-ass is better than no ass”—have nothing whatsoever to do with mediocrity. Nor are they about providing the minimum quality you can get away with. None of the seven- and eight-figure-earning entrepreneurs I know got rich selling schlock. And Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did not build the two dominant technology companies in the world by putting out inferior products. For a product to be considered “good enough,” Bach insists it must still meet certain criteria. To guide those efforts, his good-enough quality paradigm includes six factors and six “vital perspectives.” Notably, being perfect is not one of them.

  None of this is to say that you have to relinquish your quest for excellence or do things willy-nilly. What it does mean is, with some obvious exceptions such as performing surgery or flying an airplane, not everything you do deserves 100 percent. It’s a matter of being selective about where you put your efforts and not wasting time fussing over routine tasks when an adequate effort is all that is required. If you get a chance to go back and make improvements later, great—if not, move on. There’s a reason why scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov is proud to describe himself as a “non-perfectionist,” telling fans, “Don’t agonize. It slows you down.” With five hundred books to his name, I’d say he’s on to something.

  Reframing perfectionism is also a smart career move. If you work with other people, there’s a good chance that your constant need for everything to be just so is a problem for them too. A project manager at IBM told me things got so bad with one perfection-obsessed team member that she finally had to pull her aside to say, “Knock it off. You’re slowing the whole team down.”

  Rather than enabling your success, perfectionist thinking is actually a gigantic barrier. The late author Jennifer White said it best: “Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with having high standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead.” It’s that last line that is so powerful.

  It will take some practice, but you really can learn to appreciate the virtues of non-perfection. The most beautiful trees are often those that are the most misshapen. Many of the most profound scientific discoveries were the result of mistakes. I once read that in some Islamic art, small flaws are intentionally built in as a humble acknowledgment that only God is perfect. How stupendously boring life would be if every wave was the perfect wave, every kiss the perfect kiss. There is utility, beauty, and grace in non-perfection. Learn to embrace it.

  New Competence Rules for the Perfectionist

  Perfectionism inhibits success.

  Sometimes good is good enough.

  Not everything deserves 100 percent.

  Your perfectionism impacts others.

  Non-perfection is to be embraced.

  The Natural Genius’s View of Competence

  The Perfectionist is perhaps the most obvious and familiar of the five competence types. There is an entirely different set of competence rules that is also highly characteristic of impostors ty
pified by the character I’ve dubbed the Natural Genius. According to Webster’s dictionary, competence means “having the capacity to function or develop in a particular way.” The operative words here are capacity and develop. Unfortunately, no one told that to the Natural Genius. Rather, for you true competence means having inherent intelligence and ability. Since intelligence and ability are seen as innate, the thinking here is that success should be effortless. If you identify with the Natural Genius, what you care mostly about is how and when accomplishments happen.

  Like the Perfectionist, the Natural Genius has set the internal bar impossibly high. But instead of the key measure being flawlessness, you judge yourself based on ease and speed. You expect to know without being taught, to excel without effort, and to get it right on the first attempt. You think, If I were really smart, I would be able to understand everything the first time I hear it, or If I were a real writer, it wouldn’t be this hard. When you’re not able to do something quickly or fluently, your impostor alarm goes off.

  The reason Natural Geniuses want to go from novice to expert without having to suffer the in-between stages is not because they’re lazy. It’s because they don’t even realize that an in-between stage exists. You look at people who are at the top of their field, and it all looks so effortless. So as a new job hire you expect yourself to hit the ground running. As a student, you believe you should have emerged from the womb knowing how to do advanced calculus or write a dissertation. You start a business and expect to earn a profit on day one. When learning how to play an instrument or master a sophisticated procedure, you expect to pick everything up right away.