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

  Being considered a specialist can bring challenges as well. This one can catch you off guard because your whole life you were told to “just pick something” and specialize in that. But after reaping the rewards of your hard-won expertise, you may be surprised to discover that the more narrowly focused your work becomes, the more your success can funnel you into increasingly specialized and repetitive roles. Over time, the work can lose the excitement it once held, so naturally the idea of becoming even more specialized will be disconcerting.

  More success also generally means more complexity. If you thrive on running a large operation, managing lots of people, and juggling multiple projects simultaneously, this is a nonissue. But if you’ve always been the keep-it-simple type or if you started out loving the fast track only to find yourself wistfully watching the gardener who cares for the company plants, then the more complicated things get, the more averse you’ll be to advancing.

  Success Female-Style

  It’s impossible to talk about women’s greater susceptibility to the impostor syndrome or for that matter about women’s supposed fear of success without looking at how women tend to view success. The fact is, hardly anyone talked about women being afraid of success until the 1980s when they began entering the traditionally male work world in large numbers. Once they did, it was naturally assumed that women would aspire to achieve the traditional measurements of success—status, money, and power. Plenty of women have. But not everyone got on board, or at least not to the exclusion of other priorities.

  Whether you embrace the money/power/status model or not, it is no coincidence that situations where these elements are in play—salary negotiations or being singled out for recognition in your field or being tapped for a promotion—are the very times when you wonder, Do I really deserve it? or Can I really handle it? You assume it’s the self-doubt talking. And maybe it is.

  However, it’s also true that women have always had a more layered definition of success, which means it’s just as likely that your anxiety could be signaling a mismatch between the social definition of success and what matters most to you. It’s not that status, money, and power aren’t important. For you they may be paramount. Overall, though, women place—and it should be said, have been allowed to place—a higher value on the quality of their personal and work lives. It’s one of the reasons, for example, that women-owned businesses tend to be smaller than businesses owned by men. Instead of being motivated by the opportunity to be the “boss” and to grow the enterprise as big as possible, more women report starting a business to be personally challenged and to integrate work and family.1

  To be clear, having different priorities is not the same as shooting low. Even high-achieving women often share a more expansive view of what success looks like. When asked to define it, female medical school students, residents, and faculty alike described the need for “career efficiencies that allow individuals to excel professionally while also honoring their personal values and responsibilities.”2 In plain English: They want a successful career and they want a life.

  There are, of course, more than a few men who would love to forgo obligatory golf outings or to log fewer hours on the job in order to spend time with their family. Unfortunately, men are more confined by a view of success measured exclusively in work and material terms. We know, for instance, that male business owners are more than twice as likely as women to cite family or financial pressures to keep a steady, traditional job and be the breadwinner as the main challenge to being able to make it as an entrepreneur.3 And a study exploring male-female attitudes about success found that many men who had pursued it to the detriment of their family later looked back at their lives with a sense of regret.4

  For many women, success also has a lot to do with the nature of the work itself. We know that income plays a smaller role in female self-esteem. So when given the choice between making a lot of money and doing work that is personally enjoyable or meaningful, a woman is more likely than a man to choose the latter. It’s the reason why efforts designed to attract more women into the fields of science, technology, and engineering must go to great lengths to emphasize the social value of the work to female candidates. Ideals are so important to women that in an experiment where college students who were enrolled in an introductory physics class were asked to reflect, even briefly, on their most closely held values, the women showed a significant improvement in their academic performance. The exercise had no effect on the male students.5

  If the work you do does not reflect your authentic self, you can become a different kind of fraud. You were cast as an attorney or an accountant when deep down you long to dig in the soil, help find a cure for autism, or be the next Jane Goodall. But rather than heed your calling, you go to job interviews and tell them you love doing this or that knowing full well that you’re lying through your teeth. One day you wake up and wonder, How did I get here? It’s a different kind of fakery for sure. Still, it can make it tougher to distinguish whether what you’re feeling is intellectual fraudulence or vocational inauthenticity.

  It’s not only women who get tripped up here. Just yesterday I received an email from a fellow named Frank with the subject line “What if I really am an impostor?” After recently completing his Ph.D. in physics, Frank was admitted into a postdoctoral program. By all outside measures Frank is a success. He should feel great about what he’s achieved. Instead the guy is so miserable he is seriously considering giving up his fledgling career. Frank writes:

  I can’t shake this feeling that I really am a fake. I’m not really good in the field I’m supposed to be an expert in, and that’s not talking bad about myself, that’s an actual objective assessment. I know what I am capable of, and I know what I should be capable of, and there is a huge difference.

  Make no mistake about it, Frank was faking it. But perhaps not in the way he thought. True, he did offer clues that he suffers from impostor syndrome: He certainly was hampered by the false belief that his being considered competent requires that he come up with “original ideas” (thinking, you may recall, that is indicative of the Natural Genius competence type whom you met in chapter 6). At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that there was nothing in Frank’s letter that remotely suggested a passion for physics. In fact, he ended by saying:

  I’m really depressed, and I have no idea what it takes to make me feel good again. I’ve given up basically all my hobbies “thanks” to science, and now I’m stuck in a rut, where I get the impression I’m not wanted/needed/useful.

  Obviously if Frank’s hobbies and the need to know that his work matters weren’t important to him, he wouldn’t have bothered bringing them up. The fact that he did suggests that his main problem was not that he lacks the intelligence to succeed in his field. The problem is that he is either in the wrong field altogether or in the right field but applying his training in the wrong arena.

  It’s something I see more often than you might think, especially among well-educated people. You invest six, eight, twelve years of your life and in some cases well over a hundred thousand dollars in training to become a lawyer or a surgeon or a professor only to wind up feeling conflicted and anxious. You think you’re just worried that you still don’t have the intellectual goods to succeed in your field when in fact it may be that in your heart of hearts, you know you’re on the wrong path. Given everything you’ve invested, you feel tremendous pressure to not “waste the degree.”

  If that rings true for you, first know that nothing is wasted. You can’t always fully see it now, but every experience you’ve ever had in some way contributes to your own unfolding story. Look at me. It was only after investing a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to earn my doctorate that I realized I didn’t need the degree to perform the work I do. But I don’t regret the experience for a moment.

  That experience is what inspired me to become an adult educator, which led me to be a professional speaker and workshop leader, which ga
ve me the credentials to snag a position in the training and development department of a Fortune 200 company, which, once I was on the inside, allowed me to move into management in a marketing function, where I gained the knowledge and skills that enabled me to go on and launch my own business, which, sixteen years later, brought me to write this book using firsthand knowledge of my three main audiences: students, people in the corporate world, and entrepreneurs. My point: No experience is wasted.

  American author and journalist Christopher Morley once said, “There is only one success, to be able to live your life in your own way.” How you define success matters, and even more so if you feel like an impostor. The question you need to ask is If the work I was doing and the environment in which I was doing it reflected my gifts and priorities, would I still question my competence to the same degree? If the answer is no, then a career shift may be in order. You don’t have to walk away tomorrow. But at least when the anxiety sets in you’ll know what you’re dealing with. If you do decide to change course, start by giving yourself permission to move in whatever direction your natural gifts and interests take you.

  Instead of trying to force yourself into a certain definition of success, imagine what it would be like if we all lived in a society that placed as much value on work-life balance and on pursuing work that reflects our authentic self as it does on who has the most money, power, or status. There are the obvious solutions that everyone would benefit from, like having the same six-plus-week vacations enjoyed by most of the rest of the industrialized world or easing the burden on women’s time by enlisting men to help out more at home.

  But what if there were other, more outside-the-box ways to allow people to enjoy some of the benefits of traditional success and more meaningful balanced lives? I’m thinking here of things like finding a way to make job-sharing arrangements work at higher organizational levels the way they do at lower levels, or encouraging young people to take time between high school and college to explore various interests before choosing a career path.

  I’ve thought a lot about different ways to help women entrepreneurs find a way to achieve financial success and still live life on their own terms. We already know that the money part is seriously lacking. In the United States there are half as many majority women-owned businesses with over $1 million in annual revenues as ones owned by men. Current efforts to encourage more women to grow microbusinesses into seven- and eight-figure enterprises emphasize strategies such as hiring and managing staff, raising capital, and creating the infrastructures necessary to support a larger-scale operation. I love that these programs exist and believe that they’re absolutely vital in helping women overcome both structural and attitudinal barriers to growth.

  Having spent the last decade and a half working with women in small solo businesses, I know many of them have operations that really could be scaled up. Many hold back because they lack either the confidence or the skills to go after capital, or both. However, there are others who really do know that they have what it takes to build an empire but who have zero desire to manage people or systems. In fact, a big reason a lot of women business owners fled the corporate world to begin with was to get away from all that.

  As Albert Einstein once said, “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” So what if there were a way to catapult more women-owned businesses to the seven-figure mark that was not contingent on “fixing” these steadfast lifestyle entrepreneurs? What I’m thinking here is that there is no shortage of experienced executives who feel stymied in their efforts to reach the top—individuals who’ve demonstrated acumen for managing and growing large-scale operations and who are drawn to entrepreneurship but don’t have a viable idea of their own.

  Another way to encourage more financially successful female-owned businesses might be to match talented but complexity-averse business owners with female execs who really would enjoy the challenge of growing a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Should the new venture hit its financial target, the result would be a win-win-win …

  It’s a win for the people hired to fill the new jobs required of a larger operation.

  It’s a win for the former executive who gets to utilize her skills in a more autonomous fashion than she could in a corporate job.

  It’s a win for the company founder, who gets to continue working in the parts of the business that drew her to start it in the first place.

  And of course, assuming the partnership works, everyone wins financially.

  You don’t need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to affirm your own definition of success. When you do, though, it’s just possible that old fears about whether you’re “smart enough” or “good enough” or, for that matter, “successful enough” will be cast in an entirely different light. You may find that what up until now you’ve thought of as your fear of success may instead be a healthy reluctance to succeed on someone else’s terms.

  Are You Wise to Feel Like a Fraud?

  You can be extremely ambitious and still be uncomfortable being a rising star in a system in which you know that the best and brightest do not necessarily rise to the top. One where hiring and promotion decisions are just as likely to be based on petty considerations like insider politics, age, even height and weight as they are on a person’s merits. If you do make it, you can feel like a fraud. Not because you doubt your competence but because you see the game for what it is—a point raised by Dr. Peggy McIntosh decades ago.

  In fact, whereas the vast majority of researchers zeroed in on family dynamics as the source of fraudulent feelings, McIntosh saw something very different. In her thought-provoking series Feeling Like a Fraud, she put forth a very different explanation for why the impostor syndrome is more common in women.6

  [Women feel like impostors] because we know that usually those who happen to get the high titles and the acclaim … are not “the best and the brightest,” and we don’t want to pretend to be either. When we entertain nagging thoughts about whether we belong or are deserving to be at the podium, or in the boardroom, or tenured, or giving an interview to a newspaper, or earning a good salary for what we like to do, we may be deeply wise in feeling anxious and illegitimate and fraudulent in these circumstances.

  When you are achieving in a system that is at odds with who you are—one that too often values style over substance, face time over productivity, competition over cooperation, there’s bound to be a certain amount of inner tension. If that rings true for you, then know that what you experience as fraudulence may at times be a healthy reaction to the low-grade deception and fakery that traditional success requires of all of us.

  There’s a reason it’s said that the truth is rarely told between the hours of nine and five. It’s hard to feel real when you’re wearing a mask. And that’s exactly what happens when you’re trying to win at someone else’s game or when you’re fulfilling someone else’s dream. Seen in that light, ambivalence about success may be a wise choice.

  “Stressed for Success”

  The most obvious reason you or any woman may be apprehensive about advancement is the time factor. Responding to a question about the lack of women in technology, Oracle Corporation co-president and CFO Safra Catz told her female audience, “You have to be better. You have got to work harder, work longer, be louder.”7 If you aren’t exactly leaping at the chance to work harder and longer, it may be because you know that nine-to-five has already morphed into eight-to-late. Add to that the expectation that you be constantly tethered to your work by technology.

  Even if do you covet that top spot, you understand that it’s a lot easier to log ten- to fourteen-hour days, travel for business, and attend after-work functions when someone else is taking care of things at home. If you don’t know, just ask the 75 percent of male executives who have a spouse who stays home full-time. Then compare their answers to those of the 74 percent of women executives who are marri
ed to someone who also works full-time.8

  Women at all organizational levels know what it’s like to feel constantly caught between a clock and a hard place. It’s precisely this dilemma that led psychiatrist Anna Fels to conclude that the majority of working women today are “stressed for success.” “As contemporary women evaluate their goals, they must decide how much of the stress and discomfort that comes with ambition they are willing to tolerate,” says Fels. All the more reason it’s important that you take time to sort out for yourself: Are you shying away from success because you feel inept? Or is it because you understand the sacrifices required to get and stay at the top?

  On the Money

  To really explore women’s complex relationship with money would require a whole book. Instead we’ll quickly touch on a few aspects of money that speak to the qualms many women have about financial success—qualms that can be easily confused with fear of success.

  For starters, despite what you see in the media, financial success is not necessarily a sign of greater confidence. In fact, not only has materialism been found to arise from self-doubt, but increases in self-doubt also heighten materialistic orientation. The connection between materialism and poor psychological functioning led psychologists to conclude that materialism is a “precarious basis for judging self-worth.”9