By Dr. Valerie Young

Do you dismiss your accomplishments as a “fluke” or “no big deal”? Are you crushed by even constructive criticism? Do you feel like you’ve “fooled” others into thinking that you’re more intelligent than you “know yourself to be.” If so, join the club!

There are lots of reasons why people feel like intellectual frauds. Psychologists look primarily to the expectations and messages you received as a child. For example, having parents who expected perfection or over-emphasis on results vs. effort, a notable lack of praise, or being over-protected from risk taking or failure.

Others take a more societal perspective. Examples here include the pressure to “do more with less,” working in a highly competitive environment like academia, being a first-generation professional, or being one of the “first or the few” in your workplace or field based on your race, gender, physical ability etc. Why do you feel like a fraud? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Please include as much information as you feel comfortable sharing – first name, current occupation, age, racial/ethnic background, state/province/country. Share as much or as little as you like. No matter what you share, I think just reading other people’s stories will be enlightening to all.

By Dr. Valerie Young

The fear that others will discover that you have been bluffing your way through is very real. Every day intelligent, competent people drop out of school, take jobs far below their true abilities and aspirations, and allow long-held creative or entrepreneurial dreams to wither all in an attempt to avoid detection. These are of course the extreme cases. The vast majorities of Impostor Club members don’t give up or give in. Much like you, they press on in spite of the persistent self-doubt to get the degree, advance in their field, take on the challenge, and by and large succeed, sometimes spectacularly so. Still the anxiety of waiting for the other shoe to drop remains.

I’ve spent the last quarter of a century talking to people in the “Impostor Club.” I’ve learned so much about them that at this point I probably know these parts of yourself better than you do. But there’s something else I know. Namely, there’s another story here too. And the other story is that deep down you really do know you’re smart – or at least smart enough. Although you may sometimes hold back or overcompensate for your feelings of ineptness, somewhere hidden deep within you is the equally certain knowledge that you can do just about anything you really set your mind to.

This other story is so well hidden that it can be somewhat unbeknownst even to you. At the same time that you feel like you’re faking everyone out, there exists a parallel secret. Namely, that buried under all the debris of self-doubt is the certain knowledge that you are infinitely capable. In your heart of hearts you know you are no impostor. Let me explain. A widely reported study by psychologists at Wake Forest University found that sometimes people who “say” they feel like frauds are secretly more confident than they let on. The researchers came to this conclusion by asking undergraduate students to predict how well they thought they would do on a test on intellectual and social skills. When students were told their predictions would be made anonymously, those who scored high for impostor feelings and those who scored low both thought they had a good chance of doing well. But, when students with strong impostor scores knew their test results would be seen by someone else they tended to lower their self-assessments. This led psychologists to conclude that for some, the impostor phenomenon is really just a self-deprecating strategy intended to take the pressure off. This does not deny that your impostor feelings aren’t real. They are. Even the researchers were quick to point out that it would be “unwarranted to brush impostorism aside as merely a self-presentation strategy.”

Lowering expectations in advance is a common way to save face in the event of a poor performance and take the pressure off. Political strategists worried that their candidate may fair poorly in a debate use this strategy all the time. I makes sense that if you don’t think you can live up to other people’s expectations then it makes sense that you’d try to protect yourself by minimizing expectations. “Better to play small,” you decide, “than to risk humiliation.” Plus, you get extra points for being modest.

But rather than conclude as these researchers did, that such people are in effect “phony phonies,” perhaps what we are really seeing is the other side of impostorism. What the study may have indeed revealed was the other part of you, however small and inconsistent, that secretly knows you are smart, you are capable, you can do it. It’s just that when, like the subjects in this study, you know that your abilities – and therefore “you” – will be measured and judged then you begin to second guess yourself. That’s when your louder and more insistent impostor story line muscles its way in to say, “Wait a minute, maybe I’m really not that smart after all.” In other words, perhaps what these findings of private self-confidence and public self-doubt really reflect is the competing voices of self-judgment. And, up until now that is, you’ve let the self-doubting impostor side of story has gotten the best of you.

I would love to hear your response to the Other Impostor Secret and the other side of YOUR story!

By Dr. Valerie Young

“I still believe,” confessed Mike Myers, “that at any time the No-Talent Police will come and arrest me.” Myers is not alone. The question is, why do so many clearly smart, capable, successful people feel like intellectual frauds who are merely impersonating a competent person? Most would consider this a bad thing. But at least one researcher believes that feeling like a fraud is in fact, “deeply wise.”

Most of the people who study the impostor syndrome come out of the field of psychology and therefore tend to trace its origins to either the family/childhood message or to various psychological characteristics like being introverted, pessimistic, Type A personality and so on.

Senior research scientist and associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, Dr. Peggy McIntosh was the first to take the unconventional position that, rather than being a psychological ailment, our feelings of fraudulence might indeed “come from deep and wise sources.” McIntosh comes down strongly on the situational nature of impostor feelings, making the point that the places where we feel incompetent and illegitimate are in the public spheres of power and authority. She writes, “I pat our cat and the cat purrs. I don’t feel like a fraud. It’s not the same as getting an A on a paper. When I bring home chocolate mint ice cream, the kids’ appreciation doesn’t throw me into a panic about who I am. I think that being praised for good spaghetti sauce or finding a bargain is not so unnerving as being praised for giving a speech.”

There is a reason why we feel like frauds in some places and not others. To McIntosh these unnerving feelings may not reflect simply a lack of self-confidence. Nor, she says, is it enough to focus on the nuclear family as the primary cause of the impostor syndrome. Rather, the root cause of fraudulent feelings is the fraudulent roles we are asked to play as part of systems of achievement that are hierarchical and competitive.

In a 1985 interview in New England Business magazine, Dr. McIntosh says that, in some cases, a woman’s sense of being a fraud may be an indication of her rejection of the traditional hierarchical power structure. “On the one hand we have to deplore women feeling fraudulent when they reach positions of power, because they are just as capable as men. But on the other hand there may be something deeply wise in feeling fraudulent when the forms you’re asked to behave within are themselves fraudulent,” said McIntosh.

She lays out her thesis in great detail in two thought-provoking Stone Center (Wellesley College) papers “Feeling Like a Fraud” (1985) and “Feeling Like a Fraud: Part Two.” In the first paper she writes:

“We feel fraudulent, I think, partly because we know that usually those who happen to get the high titles and the acclaim and the imagery going with them 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. Those men who feel the same way in such settings may be deeply wise as well, for the public forms and institutions tend to demand that one appear to be an authority figure, an expert, ‘the best.’ The forms require that one appear to be a person who sets goals and knows how to meet them, a ‘leader’ who is superior in certain qualities to over those who are ‘followers.’ The public forms of and institutions insisting on those images do require fraudulent behavior of us, and they will turn us into frauds if we accept the roles as written. The roles are dishonest and people who are still in touch with their humanity and with their frailty will properly feel fraudulent in them.”

In that New England Business magazine interview she says, “In some ways we have most to fear from those who never felt fraudulent, because they are the people who have never spotted the arbitrary elements in hierarchical arrangements of power. They are the people who buy into the myth that they are the best and the brightest and can see no alternative.”

What do YOU think? Share your thoughts, opinions, and questions here.

By Dr. Valerie Young

To the outside world you seem remarkably able and accomplished. But you know better. Any positive feelings about your accomplishments are woefully short-lived. Before the applause has died down, the performance review has ended, the acceptance letter fully read, four familiar words rise up inside to cancel out our glee… “I fooled them again.”

For the Impostor, there’s no sense of security. After all, as Lincoln famously observed “You may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Believing that you’ve somehow managed to slip under the radar screen, sooner or later you know that it is just a matter of time before you are FOUND OUT! It’s not surprising that instead of offering assurance of our competence, each new accomplishment only serves to intensify the ever-present fear of exposure.

The fear of being unmasked is also an incredibly stressful way to live. Betsy used to be the activities director at a nursing home. It was a job she’d slowly worked her way into and one which she genuinely loved. She felt comfortable in her role, well-respected by her coworkers, and received glowing recommendations. The only problem was she barely made enough to pay the bills.

So when a significantly better paying position as admissions director came up at another nursing home, Betsy’s friends and coworkers encouraged her to go for it. It was a whole new job with new people, a new staff, and an entirely different system to learn. From the moment they offered her the job, Betsy questioned her ability to “pull it off.”

Like any new job, the first few weeks were pretty stressful. But the stress of believing she had fooled the selection committee into hiring her made the stress debilitating. Betsey began each morning with a stomachache and ended each day with a headache. About two weeks into her new job, she started having chest pains. The pain was so bad one day that her secretary thought her boss was having a heart attack, and called an ambulance. Betsy’s chest pain was very real, but it wasn’t a heart attack. It was stress caused by the anxiety of having to “fool” all these people into believing she was qualified to be the admissions director.

Sometimes our impostor fears present themselves in the form of a dream. As my oral examinations drew closer I started to have a recurring dream that the university had discovered that I had not completed some fundamental aspect of my education and had to go back to elementary school. (As traumatizing as this was I recall taking some small comfort in knowing that had a leg up on my fellow third graders.) Peggy McIntosh of the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College had a remarkably similar dream but in her case someone from Harvard University calls to say they found out that she never took final qualifying exam – in German.

What about you… Have you ever had an “unmasking” dream? When do you most fear being “found out?” What do imagine will happen when they do?

I’d love to hear what you think!

By Dr. Valerie Young

In my last post I described the “typical” impostor. In fact, I probably know these parts of you better than even you do. But there’s something else I know – and I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you the other side of the impostor story!

While a lot of what I wrote in my last post may ring depressingly true, there’s another story here too. And that is that deep down you really do know you’re smart. And although you may sometimes hold back, somewhere inside you, you know that you can do just about anything you really set your mind to.

The problem is you don’t always feel that way. Sure you have your “on” moments. But you can also remember plenty of times when you couldn’t think to save your life, times where everyone around you seemed far more confident, talented, articulate, experienced, or knowledgeable than you.

But like I said, there’s another story here. The very fact that you’re reading this tells me that behind all the self-doubt and feelings of intellectual fraudulence, that there is a woman who knows she is bright, resourceful, creative, and infinitely able – and she desperately wants to be seen. I don’t mean seen in the sense of having your brilliance recognized by the world (although as terrifying as that may sound, it would also be kind of cool), or even acknowledged by your own family (now there’s a thought). No. The person you most want to finally and fully embrace your brilliance is you.

Am I right? If so, what’s your “other story”?

By Dr. Valerie Young

Do you dismiss your accomplishments as “no big deal” or “If I can do it, anybody can”? Do you agonize over even the smallest flaws in your work or beat yourself up when you make a mistake? Do you feel crushed by even constructive criticism, seeing it as evidence of your “ineptness?” When you do succeed, do you think, “Phew, I fooled ‘em this time but I may not be so lucky next time.”

If so join the club.

Sarah, a corporate attorney and only female partner in her firm, can’t remember a time when she didn’t experience extreme anxiety leading up to a big court date. Although she’s always well prepared – often over-prepared – she was obsessed with the fear of mispronouncing a word in court convinced that one tiny slip would prove her to be incompetent.

Despite a solid track record, Sarah was unable to acknowledge or enjoy her success. Instead, each case she won brought with it a growing dread. “I was lucky this time, but what if I’m not as fortunate next time?” To her own surprise, one day she found herself absentmindedly perusing the want ads for waitress jobs. As she struggled to understand her own behavior, she realized that at least when she’d been a waitress she always knew what she was doing.

When Joanne landed a coveted spot in a doctoral program, she thought the admissions office had made a horrible mistake. Once in school she’d sometimes find herself imaging the admissions police storming into the classroom accusing her of impersonating an intellectual. Despite her advisor’s high praise for her intellect and research, Joanne procrastinated endlessly on writing her dissertation. Six years and thirty pounds later Joanne did complete her Ph.D. and was hired to teach at a prestigious college. Deep down though she felt she didn’t really deserve the degree and was only masquerading as a scholar.

LaTonya has always been drawn to the world of alternative medicine and healing. Tired of going no where in her customer service job she invested thousands of dollars and countless hours training to become a licensed massage therapist. After acing her certification exam she ordered business cards and even tinkered with a web site. Then she abruptly stopped. Two years later LaTonya continues to tread water in the secretarial pool paralyzed by the thought of actively promoting herself and her massage practice. “I can’t help but wonder if I’m really any good. I mean, if I can get licensed I guess anybody can.”

What you’ve just seen is the “Impostor Syndrome” in action. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, these talented, accomplished women feel inadequate to do the work they are fully capable of performing. Instead they believe they are somehow “fooling” other people into thinking they are brighter and more capable than they “know” themselves to be. Deep down they feel like impostors, fakes, and frauds.

You may not be an attorney, a college professor, or aspiring small business owner, but I have a feeling that you have a lot in common with the Sarah’s, Myra’s and LaTonya’s of the world. First of all I bet you’re pretty smart. I don’t necessary mean “book smart,” although there’s a good chance that you have at least one degree. In fact you may have two or even three. Some might consider you a high achiever, although it’s unlikely you see yourself that way.

You’re the kind of person who likes to know everything you possibly can about the subject at hand before stepping out there. After all you’re not about to risk speaking up in front of others, going after that plum assignment, or selling yourself as some kind of expert unless you’re totally prepared. I’m not talking here about doing your home work. I’m talking about needing to know 150 percent.

And when you do make a mistake you have a really hard time forgiving yourself. And those major screw ups? Well, you can obsess about these for days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. After all, it’s your failures that really count – right? So you avoid them at all costs.

Which means you’re probably somewhat of a perfectionist. Not only do you like to get everything just right, but you like to do it right the first time. No first drafts or dry runs for you. You’ve got to nail it right out of the gate. Of course you also have to make it look easy.

That’s not to say that you’re a stranger to hard work. Just the opposite. You’re probably prone to over-preparing and you may even be a bit of a workaholic. But when it comes to buckling down to tackle the things that really matter – finishing your thesis, starting the big project, acting on that great business idea – you are a master procrastinator. After all what if you pour yourself into it only to find out you’re not up to the task? Or, worse, what if you actually manage to pull it off… the more you achieve the more they’ll expect it. And if you don’t know how it you did it the first time, how can you possibly repeat your success?

And you know those self-assured types who let criticism just roll off their backs? You’re not one of them. In fact the tiniest hint of dissatisfaction of your work from others can level you emotionally. For you approval is like oxygen!

Sure you’ve done pretty well so far. Some may even see you as quite accomplished. But then again you can probably explain all that right? “The stars were right.” “It was a small candidate pool.” “I just had good connections.” No wonder you often feel like you’ve managed to somehow fly under the radar screen undetected and it’s just a matter of time before you’re “found out.”

Am I close?