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

  Regardless of your competence type, you can and should strive to do your best. Just stop expecting yourself to remain in a constant state of extreme brilliance. Instead strive to feel comfortable with being fabulously adequate. The reality is, even the brightest and most talented among us spend the majority of their waking hours smack in the middle of the competency scale. Just like me—and you.

  When you feel yourself sliding into competence extremism, recognize it for what it is. Then make a conscious decision to stop and really savor those exhilarating mental high points and forgive yourself for the inevitable lulls. That’s what Tina Fey does. “The beauty of the impostor syndrome,” says Fey, “is you vacillate between extreme egomania and a complete feeling of: ‘I’m a fraud! Oh God, they’re on to me! I’m a fraud!’ So you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud.”7

  Few things are black or white, and that includes your competence type itself. Obviously, your old rule book has enormous downsides. However, you don’t have to ditch it entirely. For example:

  As the Perfectionist you are welcome to hold on to your pursuit of high standards, but shed the shame you feel when you fall short.

  As the Natural Genius you can keep your desire for mastery, as long as you recognize the time and effort that’s required to get there.

  As the Expert you can still value the importance of knowledge, but ditch the unrealistic expectation that you should know it all.

  As the Rugged Individualist you can take pride in the knowledge that you can go it alone if you have to, just stop thinking you must.

  As the Superwoman/Man/Student you can honor your desire to be the very best you can on multiple fronts, but abandon the idea that you have to do it all.

  The trick is to make a conscious choice to hold on to these positive aspects of your type while letting go of the far-more-numerous unrealistic and self-limiting tendencies that are fodder for impostor feelings.

  The Bottom Line

  Everyone has a personal definition of competence. The extreme and unrealistic notions of what it takes to be competent only perpetuate the lie that you are an impostor. If you continue to measure yourself using this same warped yardstick, it will not just be harder to beat the impostor syndrome, it will be impossible.

  Fortunately, there is a solution. Lower your internal bar by adopting the healthy rules in the Competence Rule Book for Mere Mortals. The quicker you can “right-size” your unsustainably high performance standards, and the more effort you make to integrate this new way of thinking into your life, the more competent and confident you will feel. Guaranteed.

  What You Can Do

  Identify your primary competence type.

  Pick one of the new realistic rules for your competence type, ideally the one that would give your confidence the biggest boost, and start there.

  Spend the next few weeks consciously looking for opportunities to put your new rule into action.

  What’s Ahead

  At the heart of each of the competence types is a fundamental fear of failure. In the next chapter we’ll explore how your response to failure, mistakes, and criticism contributes to your fraud fears and how learning a new response can boost your confidence.

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  Responding to Failure, Mistakes, and Criticism

  Treat a male student badly and he will think you’re a jerk. Treat a female student badly and she will think you have finally discovered that she doesn’t belong in engineering.

  —Dr. Sheila Widnall, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former secretary of the U.S. Air Force

  No one likes to fail. Impostors positively hate it. The fact that researchers have found a strong link between fear of failure and the impostor syndrome is hardly surprising.1 In one way or another you’ve spent your entire adult life trying to avoid stumbling. In the impostor world there is no such thing as constructive criticism—there is only condemnation. To not make the grade in some way only serves as more proof that you’re a fraud. And to receive less-than-positive feedback from someone else—well, that just makes it official.

  The Competence Rule Book for Mere Mortals you received in the last chapter will help for sure. But taken together, failure, mistakes, and criticism constitute another piece of the competence puzzle. How you think about and handle these inevitable parts of life has an enormous impact on how competent and confident you feel. See for yourself:

  Answer yes or no

  When things go wrong, I automatically blame myself.

  When I make a mistake, I have a really hard time forgiving myself.

  I often walk away from conversations obsessing over what I said—or “failed” to say.

  I remember every dumb thing I ever said or did.

  I take even constructive criticism personally, seeing it as proof of my ineptness.

  If you answered yes to the majority of these statements, you are most definitely not alone. And by you I mean you and practically every other woman in the world. Of course, male impostors struggle with these issues too. However, in regard to failure, mistakes, and criticism, there really are some notable gender differences that shed light on why impostor feelings are so much more prevalent in women.

  “It Must Be Me”

  Perhaps the biggest difference has to do with where males and females ascribe blame. It’s well known, for example, that despite doing better academically in the early school years, girls have less confidence in their intellectual abilities.2 Partly this has to do with the tendency for females to blame failure on a lack of ability. Males do just the opposite. They credit themselves for their accomplishments and point to outside reasons for failure—the teacher didn’t give us enough time to study, the test was too hard, the referee was unfair.3

  It’s known as self-regarding attribution bias. Basically it’s the difference between thinking that rises in your stock portfolio are a result of your savvy financial instincts and blaming losses on bad luck. A cartoon I once saw said it all. A woman struggling to zip her pants says, “Yikes, I must be getting fat!” A man in the same predicament says, “Hey, there must be something wrong with these pants!”

  It’s easy to laugh. But if you happen to be the one constantly pointing the finger at yourself, you’ve got a major problem. For starters, where you place the onus of responsibility for a failure directly impacts your options for managing it. Say you deliver a presentation and it bombs. It’s one thing to assume ownership of the failure by admitting that you skimped on prep time. It’s quite another to believe that you performed poorly because you’re incompetent. In the first scenario the solution is clear: Prepare more next time. If, however, you believe things went badly because you are fundamentally inept, then you have no recourse for improvement. It’s why when faced with the prospect of failing a course, female engineering students are likely to leave the program altogether, while their male peers are more likely to repeat the course and continue to pursue their degree.4

  When you personalize failure or criticism in this way, you also allow them to mean more about who you are as a person. So when your boss or your advisor tells you that your work is inadequate, what you hear is “You’re inadequate.” You may be so accustomed to reading too much into things that even kudos can be interpreted as criticism. Like the graduate student who after successfully passing her oral exam was told by her advisor, “You couldn’t have done any better.” At first the student took it for the compliment it clearly was. On further reflection, though, she decided that what he really meant was, “Given your limited intellectual capabilities I guess that’s the best we could expect from you.”

  Obviously, the more personal ownership you assume for your failures and mistakes, the harder you’re going to be on yourself when they do happen. Berating yourself in the privacy of your
own mind is one thing. But when other people judge your performance as lacking, it’s another thing entirely. After all, now you have outside confirmation that you are indeed deficient. You think, They ought to know—right?

  After Tony DiCicco’s U.S. Women’s National Soccer team clinched the 1999 World Championship, Today show host Matt Lauer asked the coach to clarify past statements that he coached women differently than men. DiCicco began by stating that the similarities are more common than the differences. But, he said, there are differences. Research shows that women tend to respond to criticism with shame or sadness, while men are more inclined toward anger. That certainly mirrored DiCicco’s experience.5

  Of female athletes he said, “I can go into a room of women, and I can say, ‘We have some players that aren’t fit,’ and they all think I’m talking about them individually.… [But] if I did the same thing with men … the men on the team would go, ‘Coach is right, I’m the only one fit here. The rest of these guys better get it together.’ ” As DiCicco put it, “Women internalize everything.”

  There are those who attribute men’s tougher skin to the fact that they grew up playing sports. Exposure to constant critiquing by no-holds-barred coaches early on helps you learn that everyone has his mistakes pointed out. You realize that it’s a vehicle toward greater competency and not personal indictment. Of course, Title IX opened the doors for many more girls to engage in sports under the same conditions. Even though he was coaching elite female athletes who have been involved in team sports since childhood, DiCicco still found that the “getting in your face type of coaching just doesn’t work with women. Being overly critical in front of their peers doesn’t work.”

  True, men do different things with criticism. But that doesn’t mean they’re always more confident or that their way of handling it is better. When they do take in the criticism, men are more apt to assume a defensive posture. On numerous occasions in my own workshops I’ve observed men who identify with the impostor syndrome deal with negative feedback by invalidating the messenger, insisting, That guy was a moron, or What does she know about good design work anyway? For that reason there are some who maintain that when delivering corrective feedback to men, a more public approach may be required. “When coaching men, you’re coaching their egos a lot of times,” said DiCicco. “So sometimes you have to address them in front of everyone, to make sure that they know, and everyone knows, where their shortcoming is.”

  It’s possible you grew up being sheltered from failure. In chapter 2 you were asked to recall an early “failure.” When Kim did this exercise, she immediately recalled the time she tried out for the high school basketball team. She was so confident she’d made it that she took a uniform home after the tryouts. Not only did Kim not make the team, she was the only girl to get cut. The coach sent her best friend home to deliver the bad news and retrieve the uniform.

  How did Kim feel? Devastated, embarrassed, humiliated, disappointed, confused. How did those around her respond? The way Kim told the story, everyone knew how crushed she was, so family and friends alike went out of their way to be supportive. They reminded her of all the other things she was good at, and for the entire next week she enjoyed special attention from her parents—she even got to pick out a new outfit.

  Kim’s parents were supportive. But it’s what I like to call the “Don’t you worry your pretty little head” form of support reserved for girls. The message is subtle but clear: If it’s too hard, you don’t have to try. How else might Kim’s parents have supported her after she failed to make the team? Well, along with all the nurturing, they could have said something like “That was a really tough break, honey. But if you really want to make the team, then you have to try again. And when you do we’ll support you one hundred percent.” Then they could have backed up their promise by putting up a hoop in the driveway, driving her to the local basketball court, or signing her up for a youth league. The point is, like Kim, too many girls don’t learn to lick their wounds and then quickly get back out there and try again.

  At the same time, if there are relatively few women in your workplace or at your organizational level, then a hypersensitivity to failure and mistake making should be seen in its larger social context. We know there are still those ready to magnify women’s mistakes and sell them as proof of being underqualified. In other words, when you succeed, you succeed on your own as an individual. But when you screw up, you do so as a woman.

  “I Can’t Stop Thinking About It”

  There’s little danger of criticism rolling off you. Couple the tendency to internalize failure with the superior memory often ascribed to women, and a harsh review can become permanently seared in your brain. The same slight you can’t stop thinking about may barely register for a man. It’s the same with failure. Women will hold on to memories of transgressions long after their usefulness as a learning tool has passed. You can turn the same scene over and over in your mind grappling for answers to the unanswerable How could I have been so stupid? Why did I say that? Depending on the magnitude of your alleged offense, an incident that took all of ten seconds to occur may take you days or even months to get over.

  Whether it’s male bravado, denial, or, as some have argued, brain hardwiring, men generally don’t hold on to their failures and mistakes the way women do—at least not with the same intensity or longevity. The good news/bad news is that you have easier access to emotions that men more often compartmentalize. It’s also why so many women in my workshops report that when they do endlessly revisit some unsettling incident or something they did—or that they wished they’d said or done—their husband or boyfriend responds with things like Just don’t think about it, or Let it go, or Forget about it.

  He thinks he’s being helpful. But to a lot of women, his seemingly more “rational” knack for externalizing things only makes you feel worse about your own more visceral response. Instead of feeling better, you wind up thinking, If I were really competent, I wouldn’t let this get to me this much.

  It’s easy to take his being less rattled to mean he’s more competent—or at least more confident—which to the untrained eye is often mistaken as one and the same. More likely you’re seeing the effects of socialization. Girls are raised to believe it’s their job to please others. You’ve grown up assuming that if someone isn’t happy, it must be something you’ve done.

  Boys got other not necessarily healthy messages. For example, one reason men may be more resilient to criticism is that they grew up hearing more of it. When Stanford researcher Carol Dweck and her team observed grade schools, they saw boys receive eight times more criticism for their conduct than girls.6

  Boys grow up criticizing one another more too. They call it “razzing.” Girls don’t tend to do that. Communication experts tell us that females will make themselves the brunt of the joke, while males make fun of others. You’re never going to hear a woman tease another woman about her expanding waistline—even in private. But men think nothing of publically razzing another man about his receding hairline or reminding him of the time he blew the big sale. Insult humor is a way to bond. In the workplace it’s also a way to establish the pecking order, since (like other things) humor always flows down the organizational chart, not up.

  Criticism also raises the prospect of abandonment, something that females tend to be more sensitive to than males. Which raises another point. This tendency for females to internalize and dwell on criticism and for males to tune out or lash out may actually be a reflection of how the two genders manage stress. To withdraw or attack in the face of criticism are both characteristic of the fight-or-flight stress response more typical of men. However, when a woman has been criticized, her first instinct is probably going to be to talk about it, a phenomenon UCLA stress researcher Shelley Taylor famously dubbed the “tend and befriend” response.

  Communication is a tool that can be used in different ways. Generally speaking, men use it to create solutions and fix probl
ems whereas women use it as a means to express thoughts and feelings. So when a man tells you to “stop thinking about it,” he probably is trying to help. The problem is that “Stop worrying about it” also means “Stop talking about it,” and that’s not going to fly with you because when you’re anguishing over some unsettling experience, you aren’t actually looking for a “solution”—at least not in that moment. What you need to hear is “I feel that way too sometimes.” Not because you’re any less competent or confident. But because for you, talking it out and getting support is the solution.

  How to Win at Failing, Making Mistakes, and Receiving Criticism

  The reason I’ve been talking about failure and mistake making in tandem is that I know that in your competence rule book the two are synonymous—to make a mistake is to fail. In reality all mistakes do is make us human. There will be days when you turn out a top-notch performance and days when you bomb miserably. One day the critics—your professor, advisor, boss, clients, readers—love you, and the next day they pan you. Sometimes you’ll nail it the first time, and other times you’ll need to do multiple retakes.

  It’s better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.