—Sophia Loren
You think you’re “supposed” to consistently bat a thousand. But if you know anything about baseball, you know it’s not even statistically possible. A .333 batting average is considered outstanding, which means that for every ten pitches the batter only has to hit the ball three times. Even the legendary Babe Ruth batted “only” .342. You can’t hit every ball that comes your way, and neither can anyone else. Remember, you can be at the top of your game and still strike out more often than not.
As real estate guru Robert Kiyosaki says, “Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn.” When you change your mind-set about failure, both you and your confidence level will grow exponentially. You may have bombed, but if you’re wise, you’ll actually wind up being more competent. Why do you think engineers spend so much time engaged in the process of failure analysis? They recognize that you can learn just as much from studying what went wrong as you can from what went right. It’s what led Thomas Edison to famously remark, “I have not failed. I have successfully discovered twelve hundred ideas that don’t work.”
You can’t change what happened. But you can use what happened to affect the future. It’s why athletes go back and study the game tape, especially if they lost. You need to do the same. You know what it’s like to hang up the phone and think, I sounded like such an idiot. Instead of beating yourself up, force yourself to take a moment to mentally rehearse a better response. Not in the regretful, self-berating way you normally do. But in the way athletes use visualization to improve their performance.
When you imagine a different way to handle the conversation, you essentially prepare yourself to know what to say—or not to say—as similar occasions arise. Plus a mental do-over helps you to depersonalize the situation. When you focus on what you can learn, you automatically make it less about you and more about growth and moving forward. This is important, because when you internalize failure, there’s a greater chance that you’ll give up following a setback. Don’t. Instead study famous “failures” who pressed on despite the odds and the critics.
Creativity icon Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper job for “lacking ideas.” Rowland H. Macy’s store failed seven times before it caught on. Michael Jordan was cut from his junior varsity basketball team. Abraham Lincoln suffered repeated failures on the road to success, including losing in his first bid for Congress, when he sought the appointment to the United States Land Office, and when he ran for the United States Senate. From time to time everybody makes bad decisions. We all get egg on our face sometimes. The key is to see failure for what it is—a curve in the road, not the end of it. Like Billie Jean King said, “Be bold. If you’re going to make an error, make a doozy.”
Besides, it’s how you handle failure that matters. Imagine literally taking a tumble with no fewer than a billion people watching. That’s what Miss USA Crystle Stewart did when she fell during the 2008 Miss Universe pageant. She handled the fiasco by putting on a radiant smile, picking herself up, and clapping her hands over her head as if to say, “Let’s have a round of applause.” This was not the first time Stewart had to pick herself up after a failure. It took her five tries before being crowned Miss Texas. Failure is a given. You can’t control what other people think. You can only control your own response—which begins with giving yourself permission to literally and figuratively fall as flat on your face as the next person.
Because it’s coming from the outside, learning to think about and respond to criticism differently will probably be more challenging than dealing with failure. There will be times when no matter how thick-skinned you are, when someone criticizes you or your work it will take all of your emotional strength to quiet the relentless critic in your head. Precisely because criticism does pack an emotional punch, depersonalizing it requires a major shift in thinking.
Here again sports analogies can be useful. In international competitions, for example, judges recognize that even supposedly objective assessments involve a certain amount of bias. That’s why they routinely throw out both the high and low scores and instead go with the average. You need to apply the same filter yourself. Hillary Clinton says she’s “heard the nastiest of smears about myself [and] the most inflated and overheated praise.” Which is why, she says, her general rule is to “disregard comments that are at either extreme and focus on what I believe to be true of myself. I try to take criticism seriously, but not personally.”7
The next time your work is subjected to unflattering remarks, step back and ask yourself, “How would a person who took criticism seriously but not personally respond?” Then proceed to assess what’s useful, what’s not, and toss out anything that’s not true to you.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Better yet, what if you were able to see critical feedback as a form of compliment? That’s not to say it doesn’t hurt, because it does. Once you’ve licked your wounds, remind yourself that those whose opinions matter are not going to give you feedback if they didn’t think you were competent enough to use it. That’s what Walter Cronkite did. While he was writing for his high school newspaper, the fourteen-year-old’s confidence was badly shaken when his mentor sat him down and told him a story he’d written was “simply terrible.” That one comment could have completely squashed his journalistic dreams. Instead, Cronkite says, as he gathered up his article and headed for the door he consoled himself by thinking, “Well, he couldn’t be that mad at me if he’s suggesting ways I could do better.”8
Your best defense against criticism may be to go on the offense by proactively seeking it out. In decades of observing negative feedback in various work environments, Boston University psychologist Peter Gray found the most constructive and amiable interactions were those in which an individual reached out to an older mentor or peer for advice. Gray says its human nature not to want unsolicited advice. However, advice you ask for, even when corrective, is apt to be perceived as more helpful and less personal.9
Some of the feedback you’ll receive in your life will be dead-on. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of critics who will get it wrong. Jack Kerouac, George Orwell, Anne Frank, and Sylvia Plath are just a few of the authors whose books were turned down—all by a single publisher. After Elvis Presley’s first—and last—appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, a producer advised him to go back to his previous job as a truck driver. And following dance legend Fred Astaire’s first audition, a producer famously observed, “Balding, skinny, can dance a little.” Let’s face it, you don’t like everyone else’s work, so why should you expect everyone to love yours?
A certain amount of criticism and rejection are inevitable. Why not have a bit of fun with it? Wallpaper a room with your rejection letters, write a rap song about all of your bad reviews, or craft an imaginary future award speech in which you thank all the admissions officers, hiring managers, casting directors, or whoever turned you down (won’t they feel embarrassed)! Whatever you do, don’t burn those rejection letters or bad reviews. After all, they’ll make for great reading when your biography is written!
If you still need help depersonalizing things, try this approach I learned from a couple of Coast Guard Academy graduates. In advance of their first deployment, a senior female commander offered the female cadets some final words of wisdom and a Q-tip to serve as an acronym: Quit Taking It Personally. Try it yourself. Tape a cotton swab to your bathroom mirror, tuck another inside your desk drawer or bag to use as a visual reminder.
Realize too that just because you feel inadequate doesn’t mean you are inadequate. I can practically guarantee that sometime in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours you will have the opportunity to feel stupid just like the rest of us. It’s called life. Again, the words you use really do matter. You’ll be amazed at how differently you feel simply by changing your response from “I am so stupid!” to “Boy, did I feel st
upid.”
There’s no quick fix for ruminating. Just as with a song you can’t get out of your head, stopping those pesky recurring thoughts begins with becoming aware of what’s happening. Sharing your feelings does help. When you talk things through, you’ll probably see that whatever you were obsessing about is not as big a deal as you thought. You can also practice using what psychologists refer to as stop-thought techniques. The moment you realize what’s happening, silently shout STOP! Repeat this as often as necessary. You can also try techniques like tapping on a table or deep breathing.
When the self-blame game begins, consciously call upon your more logical self for a “second opinion.” In other words, the instant the thought My proposal was so lame enters your mind, check in to see what the “other side” thinks. With emotions out of the picture, allow your rational mind to counter with I’m sure it was better than I’m giving myself credit for. Even if by objective standards your proposal was weak, counter the impulse to blame yourself with the rational reminder The more I write, the better I’ll get.
The Bottom Line
It’s well known that from a young age females are more likely than males to internalize failure and personalize criticism. Women blame themselves more when things go wrong, take criticism personally, and have a hard time mentally letting go of both. By comparison, men’s more tempered response can make them appear more confident and, presumably, more competent. In reality what we’re seeing are the effects of socialization. Regardless of how we got here, a key to ditching the impostor syndrome is to learn a new, self-affirming response to failure, mistakes, and criticism—one that recognizes these things as both inevitable and offering priceless lessons on the road to success.
What You Can Do
Add these rules about failure to the Competence Rule Book for Mere Mortals you received in the last chapter:
No one ever bats a thousand; if you connect three out of ten pitches, you’re a star.
Failures offer valuable lessons—and opportunities for growth.
Failure is just a curve in the road.
It’s how you handle failure that counts.
What’s Ahead
In the next chapter we look at how other people factor into your achievement experience, which may point to yet another reason why the impostor syndrome is more prevalent among women.
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Success and the Female Drive to Care and Connect
I’m so glad I never feel important; it does complicate life!
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Throughout life we are all presented with the opportunity to say yes to success. Yes to applying to school. Yes to moving far from home in search of that big break. Yes to hanging out your shingle or showing your work. Yes to a huge promotion or another chance to prove your mettle. Yes to changing careers or changing course entirely. Part of you is excited, perhaps even giddy. And why wouldn’t you be? You’ve just put yourself one step closer to achieving your goals and realizing your full potential. Life is good.
But then the impostor syndrome kicks in and with it all the self-doubt and fear. Suddenly, merely entertaining the thought of saying yes makes you anxious—maybe even terrified. That’s when the second-guessing starts. You worry, Can I really handle it? Do I know enough? Am I smart enough? Obviously the fact that you feel like you fooled people all these years complicates matters right off the bat. If only you felt surer of yourself, saying yes to success would be so much easier. Or would it?
Believing in yourself will certainly get you far. But shoring up your confidence alone may not be enough to completely squelch the anxiety you have about saying yes to success. That’s because even though you are achieving as an individual, you’re not in this success game alone. Simply put, to grow up female means that other people’s feelings, needs, well-being, affiliation, acceptance, and opinions matter. Not just a little bit—they matter a lot.
And the fact that you do care means there will be times when it’s hard for you to know where the fear is coming from. Are you hesitant to forge ahead because you don’t think you can do it—or because on some level you understand that saying yes to success has implications for your relationships with others? This is your chance to find out.
It’s Not All About You
It was the work of social psychologist Carol Gilligan that introduced me to the central role that care, concern, and connection for and with others plays in women’s lives and choices. Her 1982 book, In a Different Voice, broke new ground when it challenged the prevailing theory of developmental psychology that said girls were largely incapable of achieving the same level of moral reasoning as boys. Rather than being lesser, she argued, women’s moral reasoning is simply different and has at its core an “obligation to exercise care and avoid hurt” and to avoid isolation.
The reason this matters is because the road to success is nothing if not a series of choices. Choose to attend a local college or move halfway across the country or the world. Pick this major or career path or that. Take the job or turn it down. Negotiate for more or take what’s offered. Share your accomplishment with others or keep it to yourself. Not coincidentally, these are also the very decision points where your impostor feelings get triggered.
Women in my workshops speak often of the real or perceived consequences of their achievement choices. These consequences play out in seven distinct ways, what I refer to here as “success scenarios.” Two involve possible consequences of success on others, while the other five speak to the potential of success to impact your connection with others. Here’s a summary.
Potential Consequences of Success
On Other People
If I win, someone might feel badly.
If I’m too successful, my family will suffer.
With Other People
If I’m too successful, I may feel isolated at work.
If I stand out too much, I’ll feel isolated.
If I’m too successful, I’ll lose connection with my family, friends, or community.
If I’m too successful, it may hurt my getting or keeping a man.
If I act too smart, self-serving, or bossy, people may not like me.
Before exploring each of these success scenarios, there are a few things you need to know. For starters, if one situation jumps out more than the others, feel free to start there. However, to understand the larger picture I recommend you read all seven. Also, even though in some cases I do offer advice on dealing with certain scenarios, in the end there are no one-size-fit-all solutions to what are often personal situations and decisions. Instead, at the end of each scenario are questions to help you decide if you’re dealing primarily with a confidence issue or if your reaction is more relationship-based.
Next, although these scenarios depict a primarily female experience, some may resonate equally with men from working-class backgrounds and men of color. Also, just because the ethos of care, concern, and connection is central to female culture doesn’t mean every woman will identify with the more typically female responses described here. In addition, the message here is not that success is bad or is something to be avoided. To the contrary, I want you to go as far and as high as your dreams take you.
Finally and most important, the message is most definitely not that there’s something wrong with your caring so much about others. Empathy, compassion, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness are valuable traits. So valuable, in fact, that not only do companies with the highest representation of female executives experience better financial performance, but as Gloria Feldt points out in No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, Ernst & Young, Catalyst, the World Bank, and McKinsey have “all discovered over the past few years that once parliaments and corporate boards reach 30 percent female representation, the quality of decisions improves, the guys behave better, and there is less corruption.”1
Empathy is also one of six aptitudes Daniel Pink cites as necessary to flourish in the new world economy. In A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, he makes the case that companies can move functions like customer service, tech support, and reading X-rays overseas. But you can’t outsource empathy. Once diminished as “touchy-feely,” empathy is now reshaping how training is conducted in fields such as medicine and law. These trends bode well for women, who more naturally tune in to other people’s pain and apologize when mistakes are made—behaviors, says Pink, that can be a stretch for a lot of men.
Success at the Expense of Others
To be a woman is to experience a certain tension between your personal ambitions and wants and the image you have of yourself as an unselfish person who cares about others. In fact, in her quest to uncover what women themselves think about ambition, psychiatrist Anna Fels found that most shunned the very word. “Ambition necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends,” says Fels.2
And why wouldn’t it? From a young age, girls learn from their mothers to sacrifice themselves by putting others’ needs first. This notion that being virtuous lies in self-sacrifice, says Gilligan, “has complicated the course of women’s development by pitting the moral issue of goodness against the adult questions of responsibility and choice.” These first two success scenarios depict this core dilemma.
Scenario 1: If I Win, Someone Else Loses
Even as girls, females are highly sensitive to the feelings and needs of others, and achievement situations are no exception. If you got an A and your best friend got a C, you may have lied about your grade to protect your friend’s feelings. Caring is commendable. However, often what you’re also seeing is the belief that your success will somehow diminish others—a belief that can cause you to feel more guilt than pride. As the British actress Rachel Weisz told a reporter, “Any success—getting a good degree, getting an agent, getting on TV [makes me feel guilty]. As if somehow by doing well, I was depriving someone else of something—it could be anyone, sister, mother, friend.”3
The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It Page 14
