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

  But Boothe Luce was no ordinary woman. She’d met Condé Nast, owner of Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines, through mutual friends. When she ran into him at a dinner party, she saw her opportunity. According to biographer Stephen Shadegg, “She approached the publisher with a directness which must have been disarming and asked him for a job on one of his magazines.” Nast gave her the brush-off. “My dear girl,” she later recalled him saying. “I’ve had many like you come and ask for jobs, but you won’t stick it out. You won’t have any capacity for work.”9

  Undaunted, Boothe showed up at the Vogue offices three weeks later only to find that Nast had left for Europe. What others might have viewed as a setback Boothe recognized as an opportunity. “She noted through the open door another editorial office where there were six desks. Two of them were vacant. She popped into the office and asked about the empty desks,” Shadegg writes. “Someone told her that two caption writers had left to get married. [She] took off her coat and gloves and settled herself at one of the desks with the brief explanation that she was ready to go to work.” By the time Nast returned, she was already on the payroll, proving herself.

  Boothe continued to prove herself. Four years later she became managing editor of Vanity Fair. That was in 1933. From there she went on to write six plays, three books, and an Oscar-nominated screenplay, to work as a foreign correspondent for Life magazine in Europe and in China during the early part of World War II, to become the first congresswoman from her home state of Connecticut, then ambassador to Italy, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her service. Boothe used a bit of fakery to make it, but there was nothing false about her competence or her success.

  Companies do this kind of thing all the time. In the early days when cash was tight, the owners of Home Depot had employees stack up empty boxes to create the illusion of a fully stocked store.10 As new business owners, Claudia Jessup and Genie Chipps also recognized the value of appearing bigger than you are. In 1972 the two out-of-work actors started a creative personal-assistant company with ninety dollars and a catchy motto: “We’ll do anything that’s not illegal, immoral, or already being done.” They knew it would be hard to make the right impression when their world headquarters was a tiny Manhattan studio. So they bought a record of background noises called Sounds of the Office, complete with ringing phones and busy typewriters. And voilà, problem solved!11

  Our last chutzpah artist is a children’s book writer named Starr Hall. By the time she was twenty-one, Hall had written three books. Despite positive reviews, every time she tried to set up a reading at one of the major bookstores she was met with the same response: “It sounds great. Have your publicist call us.” “Even if I could find a publicist,” said Hall, “I couldn’t afford one.” That’s when she hatched a plan to take on the persona of “Holly Grant, publicist.” “Holly” even had her own phone line and business cards.

  Hall didn’t know the first thing about being a publicist. So she did what any resourceful chutzpah artist would do—she learned “on the job.” “Each time I called on a new bookstore I’d discover something more about being a publicist,” she said. “When they asked about the media release, I’d think, ‘Okay, time to figure that out.’ ” It worked. Kids lined up outside Barnes & Noble for story time, and once she even got a reporter from the Los Angeles Times to show up. And in one final act of boldness, when one bookstore manager innocently pointed out how much Holly sounded like Starr, Hall/Grant replied, ‘Oh yes, and people tell us we look a lot alike too!”

  Awakening Your Inner Chutzpah Artist

  You have been held hostage to your impostor feelings long enough. It’s time for you to set yourself free. And as Robert Frost said, “Freedom lies in being bold.” If you are already a risk taker, congratulations! You join a long line of women who have taken bold action in the face of uncertainty. Women such as Madam C. J. Walker, Andrea Jung, Dara Torres, Jessica Watson, and Julie Taymor remind us how satisfying and fun it can be to go for it. Chances are, though, you’ll need some help getting there.

  For the record, no one is asking you to trespass your way into a career or make up a fictitious persona. But you do need to start acting like you deserve a place at the table—whether that’s space on the bookshelf, in an elite school, the corner office, or a prestigious art gallery. None of the people you just heard about are any smarter, more talented, or deserving than you. Being bold is not about being right, being perfect, or knowing it all. Rather it is about marshaled resources, information, and people. It involves seeing problems as opportunities, occasionally flying by the seat of your pants, and ultimately being willing to fall flat on your face and know you will survive.

  Building your risk-taking muscles begins with the recognition that new challenges will always create a certain amount of inner tension. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t up to the task. Not only should you expect to feel afraid, you should worry if you don’t. Two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington certainly never took his starring role in the Broadway hit Fences for granted. “That last five minutes before we go on that first [Broadway] preview, if you don’t have that ‘what the hell am I doing here [feeling],’ … if you don’t have that, then they say it’s time to quit.”12

  Next, when performance jitters strike, you need to practice reframing the situation. That’s what Elizabeth Alexander did. When President-elect Obama tapped Alexander to be the inaugural poet, there was a flurry of interviews leading up to her big performance. One question everyone had was “Are you nervous?” (a question I would venture to guess was not put to the first inaugural poet, Robert Frost). Each time she was asked, Alexander spoke of feeling excited, thrilled, honored, humbled—but never scared. Why? The way she put it: “To be scared would not be helpful.”13

  The second you feel fear kick in, take a deep breath, then calmly remind yourself, This is not helpful right now. Then decide which emotion would be helpful in the situation. How about exhilaration, anticipation, wonder, joy, pride, enthusiasm, or determination? There’s a reason why famed psychologist Fritz Perls describes fear as “excitement without breath.” Think about it. Your body has the same physiological responses to both fear and excitement—nervous stomach, sweaty palms, dry mouth. And since your mind only knows what you tell it, it doesn’t know the difference.

  Say, for example, that you have a fear of public speaking. You should still expect to have some butterflies as you head to the podium. Just make sure you keep telling yourself, “I’m excited … I’m excited … I’m excited!” From there you can do things like increase your volume and use gestures that support your message. Not only will you be a more engaging speaker, but both techniques offer the bonus of burning off nervous energy.14

  Taking risks is like any other skill. The more you do it, the more comfortable you get. Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice was to “do one thing every day that scares you.” Try it for a week. Sign up for a singing or a fencing class. Submit your poem or an article to a magazine. Raise your hand for a challenging assignment. Naturally you’d like things to turn out well, but the outcome is not so important. Really! What is important is that you stepped outside of your comfort zone and learned something in the process.

  As you ponder different risks, make sure you put the perceived consequences into proper perspective. A bright midlevel manager at an international cosmetics conglomerate told me she’d spent her entire career erring on the side of caution because she didn’t want to be responsible if something went wrong. That is until her boss told her, “Look, there is no single thing you could possibly do that is going to bring this company down, so go for it.” Decisions do of course have consequences, but rarely are they as dire or as permanent as you think.

  Going for it comes down to having faith that, despite your insecurities, you’ll be able to figure it out along the way. And what if your plan goes awry? Well, in the words of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, “It’s much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.”


  Recognize too that playing it safe can be the riskiest move of all. If you don’t take chances or ever put yourself or your work out there, you will avoid failure. But you also need to consider what all that safety is costing you. In her book Perseverance, Margaret Wheatley writes, “Security is not what creates life. Safety, safe havens, guarantees of security—none of these give life its capacities. Newness, creativity, imagination—these live on the edge.”

  Stop now and think of a challenge or opportunity you could go after but have been afraid to. Name three things you’ll miss out on if you continue to play it too safe. It could be anything from a financial cost to the chance to get valuable feedback to the pride of knowing that win or lose, at least you tried.

  If you can’t “see” yourself doing something, it probably won’t happen. Using any of the chutzpah artists you met here as inspiration, picture yourself with more chutzpah. Go back in your mind to a specific situation where even a small amount of chutzpah would have come in handy. Replay the scene in your mind, but this time add a dash of creative boldness. What would you do or say differently? What would that feel like?

  Now that you have a mental image, just as a scientist would, I want you to set up some experiments and then evaluate what happened. Maybe you can’t imagine bluffing your way into a job, but if you knew it might keep you from being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous auto mechanic, would you feel all right about giving the impression that you know more about cars than you actually do? In other words, I want you to find your own chutzpah comfort zone—and then to stretch a bit further.

  Come up with two or three ways you can practice chutzpah where there is not a big price tag. What if, for example, you went into a Jaguar dealership and took a test drive? It doesn’t matter if you can’t afford a Jaguar or that you wouldn’t want one even if you could. The point is to see what it feels like to pretend a bit. Were you sufficiently convincing? Too bold? Not bold enough? Most important, how did you feel?

  Remember, the thing all risk takers have in common is that they love a thrill. If you’ve played the icebreaker game Two Truths and a Lie, then you know how fun—even thrilling—it can be to pretend. Here’s how the game works: Each person takes a turn telling a group of strangers two things that are true about himself, and one outlandish lie. Then everyone has to guess which one is false. So you might say something like I took a cooking class in Paris, my mother delivered me on the way to the hospital, and I used to be a competitive archer. Take a moment now to think up your two truths and a lie—the wilder, the better!

  You could try it with friends or, if you really want to practice “acting as if,” you might try it when you strike up a conversation with a stranger on an airplane or while on vacation thousands of miles from home. You can still be from Cleveland and have two kids. But instead of being Teresa from accounting, be a freelance writer who gets paid to travel the world reviewing health spas or an internationally recognized expert on the history of beer. Don’t know a thing about either subject? Make it up as you go along! You’ll be amazed at what comes out of your mouth when the person asks you how you got into that. What have you got to lose? In the worst case a person you’ll never see again thinks you’re delusional. Remember, it’s all in the name of building confidence and seeing what life is like in the “bold zone.”

  In her autobiography, I’m Wild Again: Snippits from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts, Helen Gurley Brown wrote, “People think chutzpah is in the genes. It isn’t … it’s in the needing and longing and being willing to fall on your face. It isn’t fun … who wants all that rejection, but life is sweeter if you make yourself do uncomfortable things.”15 Fortunately, not only do you have a choice about how you handle failure, you also have a huge say in what kind of failures to have. You can have relatively mundane ones like flunking a class or losing a big client. Or you can take the advice Garrison Keillor offered in a commencement address when he urged graduates to “have interesting failures.”16

  Let those words sink in for a moment. Have interesting failures. Each one of the chutzpah artists you met here could have just as easily failed. Lauder could have ended up building a mere multimillion-dollar cosmetics company versus a multibillion-dollar one—or she could have fallen flat on her face. Spielberg could have taken home only one Oscar instead of four—or he could have not won any. The point is, life is short. And since a certain amount of failure is inevitable, why should you settle for boring failures when you can experience failing at something amazing, like coming in a close second in a major election or getting only one of your inventions manufactured or being the twenty-thousandth person to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon?

  The Bottom Line

  Confidence comes from taking risks, owning the wins, and learning from the losses. Some people with impostor syndrome embrace uncertainty and have a strong desire to prove themselves. Overall, though, women take fewer risks than men. The reasons are complex but are likely a combination of nurture, nature, and how each perceives the benefits of a given risk.

  Women routinely take financial and emotional risks that go unacknowledged by society and themselves. Whether you thrive on the thrill of the risk or you take a more measured approach, you can always build up your risk-taking muscles even more. You don’t have to be a “BS artist” to fake it till you make it. But you can enjoy the creativity and potential benefits that come from being a “chutzpah artist.”

  What You Can Do

  Remember that not taking risks may be the riskiest move of all.

  Recognize those risks you do take that you take for granted.

  Take one step a day to build your risk-taking muscles.

  Practice applying lessons from the “chutzpah artists” you met here to bring a little more confident boldness into your life.

  What’s Ahead

  What you think is your greatest fear may be something else entirely. As you prepare to embark on your new life as someone who feels as competent and successful as you should, there are a few essential insights you need to take with you.

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  Playing Big

  It’s not psychologically good for you to make yourself a little person.

  —Liz Smith

  From now on everything is going to be different. When you started this journey you thought you were the only one who secretly believed you were fooling others. Now you know that these feelings of ineptness and fraudulence can strike any thoughtful, reflective person with a pulse. You used to assume that your self-doubt was all self-generated, which meant all your energy went into figuring out how to “fix” yourself. Now that you understand that your impostor feelings have a larger social context, you can do far more contextualizing and far less personalizing. This alone is tremendously freeing.

  You even have an entirely new competence rule book, one that acknowledges that you can be competent and human at the same time. Now when you nail an assignment, it no longer occurs to you to credit your success to anything other than yourself. If there was a bit of chance involved or if someone put in a good word for you, you think, “So what?” In the end, you know it was you who made your good fortune or connections count. By now you even sound different. Instead of pushing compliments away like you used to, today you just smile and say, “Thanks.”

  And it’s going to get even better. From now on, instead of dreading challenges because you’re afraid you’ll be unmasked, you actually look forward to them and seek them out. You know you don’t always have to feel confident to act confident. Even if some of the self-doubts creep back in now and then, you’re not worried. This time you know exactly what to do to tame those impostor voices. If you think I’m exaggerating, think again.

  Remember Joyce Roché, the former cosmetics-company executive and president and CEO of Girls Inc., whom you met in chapter 1? All you knew about Roché then was that she recalled thinking it was only “a matter
of time before you stumble and ‘they’ discover the truth. You’re not supposed to be here. We knew you couldn’t do it. We should have never taken a chance on you.” But not anymore.

  Her transformation from worrying about being unmasked to owning her success and competence offers hope to anyone who worries that she’s a hopeless case. Some years later Roché was asked to contribute to a book called What I Know Now. In a letter to her younger self she offers some pointed advice that could just as easily be directed at you: “Stop. It. Now. You’re not an impostor. You’re the genuine article. You have brainpower. You have the ability. You don’t have to work so hard and worry so much. You’re going to do just fine. You deserve a place at the table. So relax and enjoy your success.”

  You know she’s right. Behind your own mask is a woman who knows she is bright, resourceful, creative, able, and yes, even gifted. And she desperately wants that brilliance to be recognized. Not necessarily by the world (although deep down you probably think that would be pretty cool). Mostly, though, the person you want to see and embrace your brilliance is you. This is all incredibly good news. However, before I send you confidently off into the world, there are a few more things you need to know—and do.

  The Flip Side of Your Impostor Story

  Linus, the young and gifted character in Peanuts, once said, “I am burdened by a great potential.” And so are you. You’ve spent years explaining away your success … convinced that you’re really not as successful or as competent as everyone else knows you are … waiting for the other shoe to drop. But there is another truth and that is: