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

  Because you believe a more competent person would be farther along by now, when you do run up against something that is not easily understood, that’s difficult or time-consuming to master, you think, It must be me. This thinking is reinforced by a culture that has lost the notion of apprenticeship, one that reveres talent over effort and overnight success over slow, steady progress.

  If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.

  —Michelangelo

  The Natural Genius’s perspective is similar to what Stanford researcher Carol Dweck refers to as a “fixed mindset.” In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck summarizes three decades of research that demonstrates the enormous impact your views on intelligence and what it takes to succeed have on how you see your own capabilities.

  Briefly, when you have a fixed mindset, your energies are focused on performing well and being smart, both of which require you to continually prove yourself. Succeeding does inspire self-confidence—for a while. When you’re faced with a setback, however, your confidence tumbles. And because not performing well evokes such shame, you often go to great lengths to avoid challenge and failure.

  To the fixed-mindset person, intelligence and skill are seen as a sum game. Either you can do math or you can’t. You’re artistic or you’re not. You have what it takes to sell or to be a great speaker or you don’t. Not surprisingly, Dweck found that people who have a fixed mindset are more likely to rate high on the impostor scale.

  Competence Reframes for the Natural Genius

  A major reframe for the Natural Genius involves the recognition that innate talent has remarkably little to do with greatness. Not only can you learn how to do any number of things, you can even become great at them—if you’re willing to work at it. As extensive research in the United States and Britain reveals, people who excel in fields from music to sports to chess are the ones who devote the most time in engaged “deliberate practice.”3

  This involves not just repeated practice but repeated practice based on highly targeted measures and goals. Even people who’ve already reached the top know that staying there requires constant practice. That’s why just before he’s scheduled to appear on one of the late-night shows, comedian and actor Chris Rock readies himself by doing a couple of nights of stand-up.

  This emphasis on continuous improvement is indicative of what Dweck calls a “growth mindset.” In direct contrast to the fixed mindset we looked at earlier, the growth mindset sees intelligence as malleable and capability as something that can be built over time. Success is not considered a function of being inherently intelligent, gifted, or skilled. Instead the path to mastery is seen as one of lifelong learning and skill building.

  And because growth-mindset people know how to learn from mistakes and failure, rather than withdrawing from difficult endeavors or becoming discouraged, they redouble their efforts. When you see yourself as a work-in-progress, you’re automatically less likely to experience feelings of inadequacy.

  Not only is natural talent not required to be competent, having it does not automatically guarantee success. Dweck cites example after example from the world of sports and art of people who started out with only average abilities but were willing to persevere and wound up doing as well and often better than those who are naturally gifted but fail to apply themselves. The good news is that effort is available to anyone willing to use it—and that includes you. With practice you get better, and when you get better, you feel better. Best of all, you’ll have the hard-won confidence to prove it.

  In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity.

  —Albert Einstein

  Will you encounter setbacks along the way? Bet on it. The difference is that instead of seeing difficulty and challenge as signs of your ineptness, you now approach them as opportunities to grow and learn. Here’s where the power of self-talk and reframing comes in.

  Instead of thinking, I’m unqualified, think, I may be inexperienced but I’m fully capable of growing into the role. In the past, when you were faced with something you’d never done before, you thought, Yikes, I have no idea what I’m doing! Now you tell yourself, Wow, I’m really going to learn a lot. Words really do matter. Simply changing how you talk to yourself about a difficulty or a challenge changes how you approach it.

  Michelangelo said, “Genius is eternal patience.” Writing a dissertation or building a practice or doing anything of consequence takes considerable time, effort, and patience. Remember that your first draft, first presentation, first painting, or first anything is never going to be as good as your second—or your two hundredth. Swap your false notions of overnight success for the ideal slow, steady progress, and you’ll discover the true meaning of genius.

  New Rules for the Natural Genius

  Effort trumps ability.

  Challenges are often opportunities in disguise.

  Real success always takes time.

  The Expert’s View of Competence

  For the Expert, your primary concern is how much knowledge or skill you possess—and as far as you’re concerned, you can never have enough. This emphasis on knowledge, experience, and credentials leads to self-talk that sounds like this: If I were really competent, I would know everything there is to know. Or, If I were really smart, I would understand and remember everything I read. Or, Before I can put myself out there, I need in-depth education, training, and experience.

  Women are especially prone to the Expert trap, some astonishingly so. Mary was valedictorian of her class, had a full academic scholarship to college, and scored so high on the LSAT that the dean of the law school agreed to admit her even without seeing her application. Mary decided instead to pursue a doctoral degree.

  She worked at it for a few years until her husband was accepted into medical school in another state. With the move and a pregnancy, she dropped out. A few years later she contacted the university to inquire about her transcripts. That’s when an administrator pointed out that she was just shy of completing all of the requirements for a master’s degree. He even offered to help her get reinstated. “Oh no,” she said, “I couldn’t possibly know enough to deserve a master’s degree.” In hindsight Mary wonders, What was I thinking?

  Actually, Mary was thinking what a lot of impostors think, namely, that there is a defined threshold of knowledge and understanding that a person must meet in order to be deemed expert “enough.” Women don’t just fixate on garnering more and more education and credentials, they are also more preoccupied with how much experience they have. Among entrepreneurs, for example, experience was found to loom larger in women’s estimation of their own success than it does for men.4

  It makes sense that men would be less rattled. After all, they grew up with the pressure of other people assuming that they know what they’re doing. All that time having to act confident while peering clueless under the car hood or at a frozen computer screen forced males to become comfortable with diving in despite a lack of knowledge. As a result, when a man takes on a new job or project he’s more likely to be okay having only a basic (or no) understanding because he’s comfortable figuring things out as he goes.

  Women grew up with a different set of messages—ones that often assume a lack of knowledge or ability. As you learned in chapter 3, the cultural bias against female competence is well documented. So it’s not without reason that you’ve come to believe that you need to know 150 percent before you consider yourself even remotely up to the task. You read a job description that requires a couple of minor skill sets or some previous experience you don’t possess, and you disqualify yourself right off the bat. And in an economy where jobs are being eliminated and the job market is increasingly competitive, this reluctance to jump in and learn as you go has real consequences.

  The irony of striving to be the Expert is that even when you really are one, you’re probably uncomfortable seei
ng yourself as such. For a lot of women the title of “expert” feels somehow presumptive. Then there’s all that pressure: If you make that kind of public declaration, then you had darned well better be able to back it up. And since you’re pretty sure you can’t, naturally you’re going to worry about what people would think.

  This concern about how you’re perceived is a frequent theme among women. On numerous occasions Sara Holtz, the former vice president and general counsel for Nestlé, invited me to speak on the impostor syndrome at the practice-building seminars she conducts for female partners of major law firms. In these sessions Sara has participants craft a thirty-second answer to the question “What do you do?”—often referred to as your “elevator talk.” It was during this exercise that I met an extremely successful attorney named Stephanie.

  Since approximately 60 percent of Stephanie’s practice involved representing manufacturers of medical devices, her first instinct was to describe herself as an expert in this type of litigation. On second thought, she worried that it might make her sound “too full of herself.” So she ditched the term “expert” and instead decided to say she had a “special interest” in that area of law. You know, like it was her hobby or something. When I told this story to a male attorney who very definitely did not feel like an impostor, his response was, “Sixty percent? I would have said I was a leading expert!”

  If you identify with the Expert, know that operating out of the mindset that competence requires absolute knowledge has consequences. This idea that you need to know a subject backward and forward keeps you from speaking up or offering an opinion for fear of being wrong. And because you accept the false notion that you need to know everything there possibly is to know before you consider yourself remotely competent, you may not even attempt things you’re perfectly capable of doing.

  This endless pursuit of ever more information, skills, and experience is also what drives a lot of women to chase after additional and often unnecessary training, degrees, or credentials. Indeed, 2009 marked the first time in history when more women achieved doctoral degrees than men. This is of course great news. But I’ll never forget finishing a talk at the University of Pennsylvania when the husband of a woman who was working on her third Ph.D. pleaded with me: “Please make her stop.” Easier said than done.

  It’s hard for the Expert to stop because in her mind there will always be one more book to read, one more class to take, one more experiment to run, one more degree or designation or certification to earn before she dares pronounce herself “expert.” Unfortunately, this relentless pursuit to reach the elusive “end of knowledge” can cause you to take months or sometimes even years longer than necessary to achieve a goal.

  Obviously, there are professions where testing, matriculating, licensing, and other methods of credentialing are and should be mandatory. But unless your dream is to perform open-heart surgery or design aircraft or something of that ilk, with obvious exceptions, this notion that you need a piece of paper in your hand that “proves” you can do something is nonsense. It’s also a serious impediment to success.

  I know you feel more “comfortable” when you have a solid grounding in a field or endeavor. However, it’s also possible that you’re acting in part out of a hyper concern for how your work affects others. The more typically female compulsion to “go by the book” credential-wise is partly a function of insecurity. But it also has to do with not wanting to act irresponsibly. You don’t want to go off half-cocked, especially if your actions impact other people. And you certainly don’t want to promise something unless you’re absolutely certain you can deliver.

  All of this is admirable. However, you may think that you’re protecting others when you’re really just protecting yourself—protection you wouldn’t need if you understood that it really is okay to pick up knowledge as you go along and that being an “expert” often comes just as much from doing as it does from degrees.

  Competence Reframes for the Expert

  Will Rogers once said, “Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.” For the Expert the main task is to practice being more comfortable with not knowing everything and trusting what you do know. Your obsession with being credentialed and your shame about what you don’t know is keeping you from attempting all kinds of things you’re perfectly capable of doing. Can you imagine not buying an exquisite piece of art because you found out the artist didn’t earn an M.F.A? It’s easy to see how silly the preoccupation with formal training is in a subjective area such as art. But what about other fields, like technology, for example?

  In an article on the prevalence of the impostor syndrome among women in the high-tech sector, former national director of DigitalEve Canada Jennifer Evans makes the case that a “lack of confidence is a more critical ingredient to women not advancing in technical fields than is their lack of formal education in technology itself.”5 True, the people who head up corporate IT functions often do have impressive degrees after their names. But at the same time, most of the techies Evans knows are self-taught. One of these was a former street kid with little formal education who found some discarded computer parts, began tinkering, became a self-taught computer “engineer,” and went on to earn a six-figure income installing firewalls.

  Successful people who had the confidence to act on their goals despite a lack of formal training are great role models for the Expert. Take Jean Nidetch. When the overweight homemaker felt her resolve to diet waning, she invited friends to join her for weekly support meetings. Before long she was squeezing forty people into her small Queens apartment. Nidetch’s approach of mutual support and empathy coupled with sensible eating was so successful that a few years later she incorporated her business, rented space to hold her first public meeting, and set up fifty chairs. Four hundred people showed up. As you may have guessed, Nidetch went on to found what is now a multibillion-dollar international empire called Weight Watchers.

  Notice, she did not have a degree in nutrition or exercise physiology. Nidetch was a high school graduate whose work experience consisted of raising her sons while helping support the family selling eggs door-to-door for an aunt who owned a chicken farm in New Jersey. Her credentials were her success stories.

  Finally, there’s the unlikely story of a self-taught weapons-system expert named Jeff Baxter. Baxter was initially interested in learning about the technology behind music-recording equipment and in the process discovered that it used hardware and software originally developed for the military. With his curiosity sparked, Baxter began to study weapons systems and ultimately wrote a five-page paper proposing a missile-converting option.

  Despite having zero formal education on weapons systems, Baxter went on to chair the Congressional Advisory Board on Missile Defense and become a highly paid consultant to such military contractors as General Atomics and Northrop Grumman. What was his previous job? “Skunk” Baxter, as he used to be known by his fans, was a guitarist with rock bands Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. If a former rock star with no formal training is good enough for the Pentagon and major aeronautics companies, then trust me, you can become a self-made expert on just about anything!

  The reason I’m sharing these stories is not to deter you from getting an education. It’s because I want you to know that there are many paths to expertise. You can get multiple degrees and never have the same knowledge as what can be gained from your own firsthand experience. If your approach works, then it’s just as valid as anyone else’s. If you have no track record or if there is no recognized path from where you are to where you want to be, then design your own “degree” program, minus the degree.

  Think about the course topics you’d include, the books that should be required reading, the publications you’d subscribe to, and the field trips or internships that could provide valuable experience. If you need to establish a track record or credibility before applying for a job or hanging out your shingle, then volunteer, run a pilot project, or offer a fe
w freebies to prospective customers or clients in exchange for feedback, testimonials, and referrals.

  On the flip side is the famous Clint Eastwood line in Magnum Force: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” And so do you. Having a healthy respect for the limitations of your own knowledge and expertise is also a sign of competence. You don’t want your financial advisor dispensing your medications or your pharmacist managing your investments. Why should you expect yourself to know it all? Instead of judging yourself, respect where your expertise ends and someone else’s begins.

  As coaching legend John Wooden said, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” There is no “end” to knowledge. When you try to know everything, especially in such fast-moving and information-dense fields as technology and medicine, it’s like trying to get to the end of the Internet. It’s simply not possible. The quest for ultimate knowledge is based on a delusion. Instead relax and just do the best you can.

  Besides, you don’t need to know everything. You just need to be smart enough to figure out who does and take it from there. Once you reframe knowledge this way, you no longer need to apologize or to judge yourself or to fret when you don’t understand something. Instead you know you have just as much right to ask questions or to not understand as the next person. Gone are the days where you sit in a group feeling hopelessly lost only to be totally relieved when someone else asked the very question you didn’t out of your fear of appearing “stupid.”

  From now on, you’re going to confidently raise your hand and say, Can you explain what you mean by that? or How would that work exactly? or I’m not following you; can you go over that again? And if someone asks you a question about which you have no clue, channel Mark Twain, who said confidently, “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”