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

  With these guidelines in mind, write your new non-impostor directional statement here.

  Before moving on, it’s important to do a quick test to make sure your new self-confident persona is strong enough to oppose your crusher. You’ll know you’re on target if:

  1. It feels like a lie.

  2. It’s something you can hardly bring yourself to say out loud.

  3. Just the thought of saying it out loud causes a psychological reaction such as blushing, sweaty palms, or tight chest.

  If it doesn’t fit at least one of these three criteria, go back and work on it until it does. Then trust that with practice you will overcome these reactions and gradually begin to feel the rightness and truth of your statement.

  Unlearning the impostor syndrome takes time. To get the ball moving quickly, start not on the feelings front but rather with your thoughts and behaviors. Believe it or not, you can choose to respond differently. Instead of thinking Who would want to hire me? you can choose to think, I have a lot to offer my clients or, better yet, They should be so lucky as to have me on the team! Then you can act differently by picking up the phone and delivering your well-rehearsed script stating exactly why you’re worth every penny of your fee.

  Would you necessarily feel confident and worthy? Probably not. That’s because feelings are the hardest things to change, which means that your impostor feelings are often the last to go. But as you learned in the last two chapters, the solution is not to wait until you no longer feel afraid, insecure, anxious, inadequate, or undeserving. The solution is to change your thoughts and behaviors first, and let your feelings catch up later.

  Final Thoughts

  Benjamin Disraeli said, “Fear makes us feel our humanity.” If you’re hoping for infinite confidence, be careful what you wish for. Some of the most accomplished and creative people are also the most in touch with both the humanity and the utility of fear and self-doubt. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why Albert Einstein would say, “I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.” Did you catch when he said, “combined with self-criticism”?

  Remember, it’s been found that 70 percent of people have experienced feelings of fraudulence. That begs the question, what’s up with the other 30 percent? Given how widespread and normal the impostor phenomenon is, why is no one studying the people who’ve never felt this way? The point is, if feelings of self-doubt and phoniness and self-criticism and fear were all bad, it seems unlikely that they would be so familiar to so many emotionally well-adapted people. Or so useful.

  There was a time in Renée Zellweger’s career when, she says, she would wake up at night and think, “Oh, damn! Here we go again! What were they thinking? They gave me this role; don’t they know I’m faking it?” Zellweger told an Australian reporter that she felt “that luck plays a great part in this journey that I’ve been experiencing.” What’s different now is that she understands better the business aspects of the industry and what it takes to prepare for a role as best she can. “So in that way,” Zellweger said, she does “feel a little bit better. But never quite. And I’m fine with that, because when you’re comfortable, maybe you’re also complacent. I think there’s a danger in that. And it might be kind of boring too.”6

  Understanding and unlearning the kind of self-limiting philosophies and patterns that drive impostor feelings is not a onetime event. Personal awareness and change take time. There will be moments of profound clarity and abject confusion. There will be victories as well as setbacks.

  Fortunately, now when that tired old impostor pattern starts up, a new, more confident person, the one you just met here, will be waiting in the wings to tap you on the shoulder and say, “You are good enough right this minute.”

  The ball is now in your court. There truly can be no change without changes. If you close this book and do nothing to apply what you’ve learned, then nothing is exactly what you’ll get. I don’t expect you to remember everything you’ve learned here. Hey, I don’t remember it all, and I wrote it! But I do expect you to remember to be kind to yourself. In the words of the Hindu yogi Kripalvananda, “Each time you judge yourself, you break your own heart.”

  [APPENDIX]

  The Dirty Little Secret About the Impostor Syndrome

  The time has come to let you in on a dirty little secret about the impostor syndrome. It’s a secret I’ve known for some time. I purposely waited until now because if I’d told you at the onset, you may have thrown up your hands. So I’m just going to give it to you straight:

  THE IMPOSTOR SYNDROME DOES LESSEN–

  BUT IT MAY NEVER GO AWAY 100 PERCENT

  Before you panic, notice I said may never totally go away. There are certainly those who insist that their impostor days are behind them. Prior to stepping down as CEO of National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller told a reporter that she’d been intimately acquainted with the impostor syndrome. “You feel as if you’re getting away with something and one day you’ll get caught.… I’d get promoted and I would think, don’t they know?” As a former a senior vice president at NYTimes.com and first general manager of Discovery Times Channel, Schiller had been promoted a lot. It took a while, but as the then forty-eight-year-old reported, “I don’t have impostor syndrome anymore.… It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that way.”1 That’s encouraging for sure.

  At the same time, I don’t want you to feel discouraged if your own impostor feelings don’t vanish quickly—or completely. More likely you’ll find your old impostor voices go from a stressful roar to a more manageable whisper. Or they may go into deep hibernation for years at a time until one day, when you step out of your comfort zone in a big way and WHAM—like a cold you thought you’d finally beaten, it’s back with a vengeance.

  Even the psychologist who first identified the impostor phenomenon, Dr. Pauline Clance, struggled with occasional bouts of self-doubt long afterward. Speaking about her own impostor feelings in a magazine interview, she said, “When I was getting book contracts and I was on the Donahue show and the Today show and in Time magazine, I did begin to feel that way. Fortunately, because I had worked with it, I could say, ‘Okay, I’m getting ’impostor feelings.’ ”

  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Writing This Book

  There’s another secret you need to know. This one comes in the form of a personal confession. I had the good fortune to be approached by a phenomenal agent, who arranged for me to interview with seven major publishing houses. Unlike the others, which were in person, my first interview was over the phone. I felt really good afterward. But as the day went on I started second-guessing myself. Why did I say this? I wish I’d remembered to say that. Was I too long-winded … or worse, incoherent?

  The irony of pitching a book on overcoming the impostor syndrome while doing a total number on myself was not lost on me. In the past, a high-stakes situation like this could have easily led to countless days, weeks, even months of obsessive self-guessing. Instead my unexpected bout with doubt lasted less than twenty-four hours. I wasn’t any “smarter.” I just had the perspective and the tools to talk myself down faster.

  Then there was the actual book writing itself. A process I estimated to take no more than nine months ended up taking more than twice that. There were many days when I felt utterly overwhelmed and not at all up to the challenge. All and all, I tossed out as many pages as I ended up keeping. Fortunately there were enough days when the dots connected. Days when I remembered that, like anything else, writing is hard work. It’s one word, one paragraph, one page at a time, followed by innumerable edits.

  I told you earlier how something Ted Koppel said changed my life. It turns out that a chance encounter with another journalist would shift my thinking as well. During a low point when I thought I should be much farther along, I had the incredibly good fortune to sit next to preeminen
t investigative reporter and author Bob Woodward on a flight from Washington. As we parted, he graciously wished me luck on my book and told me he’d just handed in the first draft of his sixteenth book that very week, adding that this meant he was halfway done. To know that Bob Woodward considers a first draft to be only the halfway mark was tremendously reassuring.

  I’m a big fan of vision boards. After using one to find my dream house with a view, I created one for this book. On my most challenging days (of which there were plenty) the words and pictures reminded me of why I was working so hard. Did I still get discouraged? You bet. Then a series of events delayed the book by nearly a year. Normally this wouldn’t have been a big deal. But turn the page. Do you see whose picture is smack in the middle of that vision board? My new publish date was scheduled to come just months after the end of the final season of Oprah’s quarter-of-a-century run. Talk about a near miss.

  Was it “realistic” for me to think I could be on Oprah’s show? It was a total long shot. Then again—why not me? I vastly prefer dwelling in the world of possibility than in the so-called real world. As Will Smith said, “Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity.” The secret is, it didn’t matter if I didn’t get to be on Oprah or that if I had, I would have been nervous as heck. What matters is that I always believed it was possible.

  The reason I’m telling you this is because I know you and how your mind works. And I know how easy it would be for you to finish this book only to run into a situation that triggers your own impostor feelings and say, See, it didn’t work. I’m hopeless. What you want is sustained confidence 24/7/365. But that’s simply not how confidence works. As you’ve learned, mistakes, failure, and setbacks are to be expected, no one is perfect, and there’s always more to learn. And that, my bright and capable impostor friend, is a very good thing.

  [NOTES]

  Introduction

  1. Betty Rollin, “Chronic Self-Doubt: Why Does It Afflict So Many Women?” Hers, New York Times, August 19, 1982.

  2. Gregory C. R. Yates and Margaret Chandler, “Impostor Phenomenon in Tertiary Students,” paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, University of South Australia, Adelaide, December 1998; Catherine Cozzarelli and Brenda Major, “Exploring the Validity of the Impostor Phenomenon,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 9, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 401–17; D. Lester and T. Moderski, “The Impostor Phenomenon in Adolescents,” Psychological Reports 76, no. 4 (1995): 466; and Sharon Fried-Buchalter, “Fear of Success, Fear of Failure, and the Impostor Phenomenon Among Male and Female Marketing Managers,” Sex Roles 37, nos. 11–12 (1997): 847–59.

  3. Loretta McGregor, Damon E. Gee, and K. Elizabeth Posey, “I Feel Like a Fraud and It Depresses Me: The Relation Between the Imposter Phenomenon and Depression,” Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 36, no. 1 (February 2008): 43–48; K. S. Beason, “The Impostor Phenomenon: Incidence and Prevalence According to Birth Order and Academic Acceleration” (Psy.D. dissertation, Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, Boston, 1996); and Shamala Kumar and Carolyn M. Jagacinski, “Imposters Have Goals Too: The Impostor Phenomenon and Its Relationship to Achievement Goal Theory,” Personality and Individual Differences 40 (2006): 147–57.

  4. Mary E. Topping and Ellen B. Kimmel, “The Imposter Phenomenon: Feeling Phony,” Academic Psychology Bulletin 7, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 213–26.

  5. Joan Harvey, Ph.D., with Cynthia Katz, If I’m so Successful, Why Do I Feel Like a Fake? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985).

  [1]

  Feel Like an Impostor? Join the Club

  1. Ellyn Spragins, What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self (New York: Crown Archetype, 2006), 143.

  2. Leslie Goldman, “You’re a Big Success (So Why Do You Feel So Small?)” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 2005.

  3. Gail M. Matthews, “Impostor Phenomenon: Attributions for Success and Failure,” paper presented at the American Psychological Association, Toronto, 1984.

  4. Joseph R. Ferrari, “Impostor Tendencies and Academic Dishonesty: Do They Cheat Their Way to Success?” Social Behavior and Personality 33, no. 1 (2005): 11–18.

  5. “Jodie Foster Reluctant Star,” interview with Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes, January 30, 2000.

  [2]

  Consider the Source

  1. Andy Williams, Moon River and Me: A Memoir, reprint edition, 2010.

  2. Diane Zorn, “Academic Culture Feeds the Imposter Phenomenon,” Academic Leader 21, no. 8 (2005): www.magnapubs.com/newsletter/story/146[inactive].

  3. Mary E. Topping and Ellen B. Kimmel, “The Imposter Phenomenon: Feeling Phony,” Academic Psychology Bulletin 7 (1985): 213–26, http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1986=20664-001.

  4. Ellyn Spragins, What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self (New York: Crown Archetype, 2006).

  5. Jonathan Safran Foer interview, Entertainment Today, July 5–11, 2002.

  6. Kate Winslet interview, Interview, November 2000.

  7. Don Cheadle interview, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2004.

  8. Chris Lee, “A Hard Look at Himself; Colleagues and Reviewers Lavish Praise on Don Cheadle for Distinctive, Eye-Catching Performances but He’s His Toughest Critic,” Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2004.

  9. Michael Uslan, quoted in “How to Amp Up Your Charisma,” Olivia Fox Cabane, forbes.com, October 22, 2009.

  10. A. J. Jacobs, The Guinea Pig Diaries (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 67.

  11. Meryl Streep, interview by Ken Burns, USA Weekend, December 1, 2002. Streep was asked the question, “Will you always act?”

  12. Jenny Legassie, Elaine M. Zibrowski, and Mark A. Goldszmidt, “Measuring Resident Well-Being: Impostorism and Burnout Syndrome in Residency,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 23, no. 7 (July 2008): 1090–94.

  13. Carina Sonnak and Tony Towell, “The Impostor Phenomenon in British University Students: Relationships Between Self-Esteem, Mental Health, Parental Rearing Style and Socioeconomic Status,” Personality and Individual Differences 31, no. 6 (October 15, 2001): 863–74.

  14. Neil A. Lewis, “On a Supreme Court Prospect’s Résumé: Baseball Savior,” New York Times, May 14, 2009.

  15. Cary M. Watson, Teri Quatman, and Erik Edler, “Career Aspirations of Adolescent Girls: Effects of Achievement Level, Grade, and Single-Sex School Environment,” Sex Roles 46 nos. 9–10 (2002): 323–35, DOI: 10.1023/A:1020228613796.

  16. Sarah Anne Lin, “The Imposter Phenomenon Among High-Achieving Women of Color: Are Worldview, Collective Self-esteem and Multigroup Ethnic Identity Protective?” (Ph.D. dissertation, Fordham University, 2008).

  [3]

  It’s Not All in Your Head

  1. Janet K. Swim and Lawrence J. Sana, “He’s Skilled, She’s Lucky: A Meta-Analysis of Observers’ Attributions for Women’s and Men’s Successes and Failures,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22 (1996): 507.

  2. “Equality Not Taken for Granted,” Nature 390 (November 13, 1997): 204.

  3. Christine Wenneras and Agnes Wold, “Nepotism and Sexism in Peer-Review,” Nature 387 (May 22, 1997): 341–43.

  4. Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians,” American Economic Review 90, no. 4 (September 2000): 715–41.

  5. Geoff Potvin et al., “Unraveling Bias from Student Evaluations of Their High School Science Teacher,” Science Education 93 (2009): 827–45, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.20332/abstract.

  6. Rhea Steinpreis, Katie A. Anders, and Dawn Ritzke, “The Impact of Gender on the Review of Curriculum Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study,” Sex Roles 41 (1999): 509–28.

  7. Victoria L. Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead? Gender, Status Conferral, and Workplace Emotion Expre
ssion,” Psychological Science 19 (March 2008): 268–75.

  8. www.copyblogger.com/James_chartrand_underpants[inactive].

  9. Eleanor E. Maccoby and Carol Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Difference (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974).

  10. Jacqueline J. Madhok, “The Effect of Gender Composition on Group Interaction,” Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference, ed. Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz, and Birch Moonwomon, vol. 2 (Berkeley, Calif: Berkeley Women and Language Group, University of California, 1992): 371–86.

  11. Caroline Simord et al., “Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions of Mid-Level Women in Technology” survey of 1,795 technical men and women at seven high-technology companies in the Silicon Valley region (Michelle R. Clayton Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University/Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, 2008).

  12. Linda J. Sax and Alexander W. Astin, The Gender Gap in College: Maximizing the Development Potential of Women and Men (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008).

  13. Joan Biskupic, “Ginsburg: The Court Needs Another Woman: Panel’s Lack of Diversity Wears on Female Justice,” USA Today, May 6, 2009: 1.

  14. Dave Barry, “Why Men Can’t Help It,” Miami Herald, November 23, 2003.

  15. Rita Hardiman and Bailey Jackson, “Conceptual Foundations for Social Justice Education,” in Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, ed. Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007).