Do You Think You’re An Imposter?

If so, it’s quite likely you’re female.

I had not heard of Imposter Syndrome until recently and I was fascinated to discover it is actually a thing. And it is something that causes problems for a huge number of people, quite often women.

Imposter Syndrome typically describes a way of thinking where the sufferer has severe doubts about their accomplishments, no matter how genuine, and lives constantly in fear of being exposed as a fraud.

Technically Imposter Syndrome it is not a Syndrome at all, in fact it is a state of mind, a general feeling of upset and concern, a malaise, and it is usually called Imposter Experience.

Professor Pauline Clance, working at Oberlin College in Ohio, noticed that a great number of successful women were asking for counselling and this was primarily because they didn’t really believe the success they had achieved was valid, and they thought there had been some sort of mistake.

Professor Clance had suffered from the same thing herself so she knew a thing or two about it, and in particular she knew that it was something that happened predominantly to high-achieving women.

In a paper Professor Clance noted that there are three defining features to feeling like an imposter — the first is the belief that others think of you as better than you really are, the second is the concern you’ll soon be found out and exposed as a complete fraud, and the third is that any success you have achieved has been due to factors other than your own ability; like simple luck.

In a 2006 study it was concluded that women were more likely to feel like imposters than men; for men it’s quite different —for them Imposter Experience is often driven by the fear of being unsuccessful, or not good enough in competition with other men.

Maybe you’re an achiever in some sort of art form; a writer say, or more specifically a writer on Medium.

Let’s assume you read 200 glowing comments on your work, all full of praise on the quality of the writing and the intellectual content. But you don’t really believe those, you much prefer to dwell on the one comment you received that wasn’t massively positive. Not a comment that suggested any sort of criticism, but one that was perhaps a trifle ambivalent, not as powerfully positive as the other 200.

And you dwell and you dwell as if you’ve been waiting for this final and incontrovertible proof that you are inferior and everything you are is a sham, until you’ve convinced yourself that this person, this perceived critic, has finally seen through you and you’ve now been outed as the charlatan you truly are.

Women seem to suffer most from this negative thinking, and maybe the recent New Yorker cartoon where a man interrupts a woman and says ‘let me interrupt your experience with my confidence’ can go a long way to explaining this.

The opposite to the Imposter Experience is called the Expert Syndrome, or the much-discussed Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes those who have a huge gap in their knowledge on a certain subject, but lack the intelligence to spot that deficit, and they are totally sure they know what is best in every case.

Bertrand Russell famously summed this up perfectly when he said ‘the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.’

I shall be waiting and sweating on any response to this…