What do we get wrong about...impostor syndrome
An interview with Dr. Valerie Young, the world's foremost expert on impostor syndrome
In this series, ‘What do we get wrong about…?’ I speak to world-leading experts and/or those with unique insights on topics related to human thinking and behaviour.
Dr. Valerie Young is an internationally-recognized expert on impostor syndrome; co-founder of The Impostor Syndrome Institute; and author of ‘The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women.’
Valerie earned her doctoral degree in education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1985. Her research sought to understand why so many bright, capable women (including herself) felt like frauds.
She has since spent her career dedicated to helping people to better understand and overcome impostor syndrome.
You can find out more about Valerie and her work on her website.
You can also watch her Ted talk on the topic.
My top 3 takeaways
Don’t conflate competence and confidence - being competent doesn’t mean having zero self-doubt and feeling confident at every turn. When we conflate the two, we start to interpret other people’s externally projected confidence as meaning they are more competent than we are (which may or may not be true!)
How to spot impostor syndrome - At your core do you truly believe you're less capable, competent, talented and intelligent than other people? If the answer is yes, then it may be impostor syndrome; if no, then it may simply be normal levels of self-doubt.
The path out of impostor syndrome involves dedicated practice - whilst we’re often looking for quick fixes to problems, when it comes to matters of mindset and patterns in thinking, we can’t suddenly undo entrenched beliefs overnight. We need to intentionally experiment with reframing our thinking and the various practices that might help that; but perhaps more importantly, we need to be willing to ‘fake it till you make it’ at times - to do the thing, despite feeling like an impostor, and acknowledging that behaviour might be quicker to change than our thinking.
Seb: To kick things off Valerie, I would love to hear a bit about why you do what you do.
Valerie: Why do I do what I do? Some days I ask myself that very question. Sometimes people phrase the question as, ‘Why do you decide to become a so-called thought leader on this topic?’ I don't think just about anybody sets out to be a thought leader. I didn't set out to be any kind of expert. Truly, I got into this conversation on impostor syndrome because I experienced it myself.
Over the years, I’ve spoken to literally thousands of people at all different levels in organizations, in a hugely wide scope of careers and industries, and across many countries. I've learned a few things along the way. So the short answer is, I've gained some knowledge and insight that other people have found valuable.
Could you elaborate a little bit on your own experience with impostor syndrome and the origin of that?
I was a 25/26 year old doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US. Somebody brought in a paper by two clinical psychologists - Dr. Pauline Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes. Clance and Imes' paper talked about this overwhelming feeling that you're fooling people; you're going to be found out; you're not as intelligent, capable or competent as people think you are. You’ve just been lucky - right place, right time. In other words, dismissing our accomplishments, and having a fear of being found out. I immediately identified, as did all the other doctoral students in my program.
My background is education, it's not psychology, so I decided to study women’s self-limiting attitudes and behaviors more broadly, and then designed what we would call an educational intervention to impostor syndrome, which is a very fancy way of saying I designed a workshop so people could take control of their own learning and understand how it showed up in their life and what to do about it.
There are some statistics out there that suggest somewhere in the region of 70 to 80% of people experience impostor syndrome. What's your take on why it’s so prevalent?
Yeah, let me just comment on the statistics. What they're really referring to is, ‘of the people who have been studied or asked.’ I don't think globally it’s necessarily that high. Some people are busy just trying to survive. They’re not worried about impostor syndrome.
Great point to clarify!
There's not one reason.
Family messages and expectations
For some people, it might be family messages and expectations. If you grow up in an immigrant family, for example, often the message is that you have to be successful academically because your success depends on it. I could spend the entire time just talking about family messages but there's other reasons as well.
Organizational cultures
Certain organizational cultures are known to fuel self-doubt. So medical culture, for example. I did an interview for a podcast with a British medical journal, and there was a medical student and what we would call in the US, ‘a resident’ - a few years into being a physician. They were lamenting the lack of positive feedback that you get in medicine, and in medical school. Apparently, in the UK the highest grade you can get in passing your final exams in medical school is ‘no concern.’ That sucks. You're working so hard. You're getting nothing positive back. Same thing with academic culture which is very much a culture of critique. Or people in certain creative fields - writing, acting - they're being judged by subjective standards by people, whose job title is professional critic.
Societal sources
I should also add societal sources. If you belong to any group for whom there are stereotypes about competence or intelligence, you're going to be more vulnerable to impostor syndrome.
Misunderstanding of competence
For me, in my research, the core source of impostor syndrome is our unrealistic, unsustainable expectations for ourselves about what it means to be competent.
I see a lot of confusion around impostor syndrome in my line of work, so I’m interested to hear what you believe we get wrong about it (aside from the statistics)?
Gosh there's so much. Because the topic suddenly kind of exploded on the Internet, it's just ripe for misinformation. And you’re right, so many things get described as impostor syndrome or people get immediately labelled with impostor syndrome, which may or may not be true.
We fail to recognize fear, nervousness and anxiety as part of the achievement journey.
Sometimes it really is just what I would consider normal and understandable nervousness, anxiety, and insecurity. I think what we need to start doing is to recognize that a certain amount of fear and self-doubt are part of the achievement journey, and that does not necessarily mean you're experiencing impostor syndrome.
We think it just affects women.
I think what a lot of people also get wrong, is they assume this is something that just affects women, even though it's been clearly said for decades that men experience it too. The conversation has been primarily with women and the focus has been on women, because I think in many ways it has the potential to hold women back more, but it's not just a gendered issue.
I know your book is entitled ‘The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women.’ So I'm just curious if you could, maybe elaborate a little bit more on any differences you see there?
Yeah, I will mention, I just did a revision of the book and the new title reads ‘The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women and Men. So ‘and men’ is in the subtitle. So it is more inclusive and assumes there's men reading the book, but clearly, it's aimed at some differences and some external realities that undermine women's confidence.
It's hard to ‘genderalise’ because the more I do this work, the more I'm taken aback by hearing men say the exact same thing in many situations, that women say. There truly is this myth of the ever confident male
That said, I do see women having a harder time with constructive feedback. Sometimes we let it mean more about who we are as a person. So if somebody says to you ‘that report was inadequate’, we hear ‘I am inadequate’.
I think as a group, men have more socialization in acting braver and stronger and tougher than they really feel. So it's harder sometimes for women to project confidence, when they don't 100% feel it. We feel like we need to be more credentialed, more experienced, to be seen as credible. The point that I often make in my talks is that a lot of us are running around trying to get credentials and more experience, when in fact, what we need to also focus on is feeling more confident, and projecting it even when we don't 100% feel it.
In most organisations today, a woman is going to be in a minority in a leadership meeting for example. So I imagine there is an organisational thing there too?
Absolutely. Then you've got that pressure to represent your entire group. Now you don't feel like you're just Susan in the meeting, you represent other women.
It’s been rebranded as a good thing.
There's a new narrative, which is that impostor syndrome is a good thing. Not only is it a good thing, but it's our superpower. I started delving into this because I was kind of curious about the origins of this, and even though it's not uniquely men talking about it, it's mostly men talking about it. And I realized that the more men jumped into a conversation that had largely been a female conversation, impostor syndrome got rebranded to be kind of a good thing. The reasoning used is often, ‘Don't worry, keep your impostor syndrome, because it means you're learning.’ I look at it like, ‘are you saying we have to feel inadequate to be learning?’ I don't think so, I don't think they have to go together. I think you can just realize that you’re on a normal learning curve and that's okay.
The second reason given is, ‘It's a good thing because it motivates you to work harder.’ My response to that is a) do you really want your motivation for working harder to come from fear? That's not where I want my motivation to come from. And b) whilst the research shows that for a lot of men that does work, this ‘I'll show them’ kind of attitude; the research also shows that women are less likely to be propelled by self-doubt, and are more likely to pull back.
The third reason I’ve seen is, ‘It's a good thing because it keeps us humble.’ I've been doing this for 40 years and I can tell you I have never heard a single woman say, ‘You know I think I'm gonna keep my feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy and fraudulence because it keeps me humble.’ Never. Not once.
We have a misunderstanding of what it means to be competent.
I see a lot of coaches use what I call ‘the pep talk approach’. So they might have their client make a list of all of your accomplishments, which I think is great if you are having a performance appraisal, to remind you of the things you've done, or you have to write a professional bio on LinkedIn. But what happens if your client looks down the list and they see they really did get that job because of a connection? They actually were in the right place at the right time. In other words, what if they see validation of the ways they've been externalizing their success. Then they're right back to where they started. If a pep talk was all it took there'd be no impostor syndrome. I think we have to balance being aware of our accomplishments with a healthy awareness of our limitations.
Google has a program called, ‘I Am Remarkable’ and it's mostly designed for women who have a hard time talking about their accomplishments in a performance review setting. And I've said to them, I think you should call it, ‘I am remarkable, but some days I suck.’ We're not always remarkable. We have good days, we have bad days, sometimes we stumble, sometimes we're brilliant, but we're not always remarkable. So I think unlearning impostor syndrome requires us to have a healthy understanding of our skills, our past achievements, our abilities, but also the areas where we need to build up our skills, or the things we’ll never be good at, and guess what - that's okay.
If I'm somebody reading this and trying to figure out - is my doubt Impostor syndrome or is it just a normal level of doubt? How would I go about answering that?
I think I would go back to the definition of impostor syndrome, there’s some elements that have to be there. At your core do you truly believe you're less capable, competent, talented and intelligent than other people? Is this a situation where you feel like you fooled other people? Are you externalizing your accomplishments?
Let me give you an example. I did a six minute Ted Talk. I spent hundreds of hours writing it, rehearsing it, timing it. And I wanted to crush it, I wanted to leave the stage with that feeling of I nailed it. And I did not have that feeling. As a matter of fact, I lost my train of thought in the middle of it. With the bright lights and big cameras it was a very intense experience and I all of a sudden went blank. I got back on track, but I went blank which was a panic moment. I was telling someone that story, and she said, ‘Oh, so you had Impostor syndrome,’ because I told her how down I was for days afterwards; but I said no, I didn't feel like I fooled anybody. I didn't discount all of my accomplishments leading up to that. I was just disappointed. So it's peeling back to get at the core feeling; and for me it was disappointment not inadequacy.
So, if you are somebody for whom that core sense of inadequacy is a very real thing - how should you go about managing or resolving that impostor syndrome?
You can be an arrogant jerk or you can keep your impostor syndrome, is kind of how it's presented. I really advocate for a third option, which is to become what I call a ‘Humble Realist’™. When you're a Humble Realist™, you recognize that a certain amount of fear and self-doubt go with the achievement journey. You have a healthy response to failure, mistakes, constructive criticism, setbacks. And you have a realistic understanding of what it means to be competent.
There are five competence types I've come up with: the perfectionist, the expert, the natural genius, the soloist, and the superperson. [Each of which represent a different cognitive distortion of what it means to be competent]
To me, the solution is always going to lie in reframing that conversation going on in our head. How I can shift my current thinking to learn to think like someone who is genuinely humble, but has never felt like an impostor. And again, that's a person I call a Humble Realist™. So to imagine, if I was going to redo that scene, and I could call in the script writers to play the part of me - what would I rather think, feel and do in that situation?
Everybody wants to stop feeling like an impostor but feelings are the last to change. The only way to stop feeling like an impostor is to stop thinking like an impostor. So to work on the thoughts even though you don't believe the new thoughts. Act like somebody who really did believe the new thoughts and then over time the confidence will catch up.
I imagine putting that into practice becomes a challenge for some people
Absolutely. Somebody wrote a blog post a while ago referencing some of my recommendations and she wrote, ‘Easier said than done.’ And she was very surprised that I commented and I said, ‘You're absolutely right.’ Everything is easier to say than to do. So I think it has to start with not just thinking you want to change but proactively experimenting. What is the next moment that you can try on pretending to be this person who believed the new thoughts? To give yourself some conscious, deliberate practice and rehearsal.
And in some situations, maybe it’s natural to not feel confident?
I think to your point, a lot of people think, if I was really intelligent, capable, and competent, I'd be confident. They're conflating competence and confidence. So they think they should feel confident, 24/7. And my message is always good luck with that. So to recognize that again, there's going to be a certain amount of fear and anxiety and not to let that signal that you feel like an impostor. And what I see, sadly, is so many people waiting until they feel more confident - then I'll speak up, then I'll go for the promotion then I'll change careers or grow my business. It truly doesn’t work in that order.
Any final thoughts to share?
There’s another narrative out there, that came from a Harvard Business Review article called ‘Stop Telling Women they have impostor syndrome’, that means it's become a polarizing issue for some people. A lot of people are saying we need to change organizations. Stop, trying to change people and change organizations. And they're absolutely right - you have to look at the ways organizations might make people feel less valued or just explicit bias going on, but a) not everyone works in an organization, and b) I would argue that even if systemic bias went away tomorrow but we maintained our unrealistic expectations about what it means to be competent, then truly not a lot would change. So we have to address it on both fronts. You're looking at what are some ways organizations and managers can make people feel safe, but if my internal definition of competence is in conflict with that - if I think it's perfection with ease, or not needing any help - it's going to be hard for me to embrace that organizational culture. That’s the missing link there in my opinion.
As I get this ‘What do we get wrong about…?’ series off the ground, I’d love to hear your feedback.
What did you like?
What could have improved this for you?
Any suggestions on future topics or guests?
You can reach out to me via comments here, my website, or Linkedin.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Seb