By Valli
vallidated.com imposter
Let’s start with a little quiz. Would you rather agree or disagree with the following statements?
✅ At work (school), I often feel I receive praise (grades) that I don’t deserve.
✅ I am often surprised when I perform well at projects, job tasks or on tests.
✅ At times, I feel that I am in my present job or position through some kind of mistake or pure chance and that I don’t deserve it.
✅ I often feel like I am “in over my head” in my current line of work or course of study.
✅ I often worry about not performing well on a project, task or test, even though others around me have considerable trust in my and confidence that I will do well.
✅ I sometimes feel like I have to act or behave more informed and intelligent than I really believe I am.
✅ From time to time I pretend to be someone or something I am not.
Did you just mentally agree with one, some, or even all of these statements above?
That’s too bad, because this might be an indicator of you being part of us – the big group of people who have what is called imposter syndrome (IS). Imposter – what?
The existence of imposter feelings was first identified by the two scholars Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in the late 70s, who officially labeled what they found the “imposter phenomenon”. I usually call it imposter syndrome, because more recently it has become a big topic in the lay literature at least, and this is how I first heard about it.
What exactly is the imposter syndrome, though?
IS has been described as a subjective experience of perceived intellectual phoniness that is held by many, often high-achieving individuals who, despite their objective successes, fail to internalize these successes. Of course, these feelings are not only present in high-achievers, but exactly those individuals’ objective success is what makes these feelings of perceived fraudulence special: feeling like a fraud even though multiple achievements and successful experiences objectively paint a completely different picture.
It unfortunately happens a lot. “Fake” imposters struggle with making the correct attributions about their performance, independent of their actual competence (for example attributing success to external reasons such as luck or assistance from others, while failures are still attributed to internal sources such as their own lack of intelligence or effort).
At the same time, people with IS are likely to interpret setbacks (usually, this happens in a work environment, but it doesn’t have to) as evidence of their personal inadequacy, which can result in some pretty dangerous thinking habits and behaviours to cope with the associated stress and anxiety.
Individuals who suffer from imposter feelings indeed often display anxiety, lack of self-confidence, depression, and frustration due to their inability to meet what they perceive as other’s expectations of them, but mostly their own standards of achievement. 
Is has been found correlated with depressive tendencies such as low self-esteem, self-criticism or low efficacy, social anxiety, achievement pressures (from self and others) and high self-consciousness (i.e. they are overly concerned with reactions of others, and often overestimate the concern of others about themselves). Note on the side: causal relationships have not often been clarified yet (meaning, we don’t know exactly which comes first – impostorism or self-esteem issues).
Is has been found correlated with depressive tendencies such as low self-esteem, self-criticism or low efficacy, social anxiety, achievement pressures (from self and others) and high self-consciousness (i.e. they are overly concerned with reactions of others, and often overestimate the concern of others about themselves). Note on the side: causal relationships have not often been clarified yet (meaning, we don’t know exactly which comes first – impostorism or self-esteem issues).The personality traits Neuroticism and Conscientiousness (I have now published that post about the Big Five Personality Traits – check it out) have both been associated with IS as well. Especially the finding of a substantial association between imposter feelings and Neuroticism is not surprising: IS is partly defined in terms of negative affect such as self-doubt and low self-esteem, which are both aspects of Neuroticism as well. Thus, people prone to such negativity should be rather susceptible to imposter feelings. As personality traits are viewed as rather fixed states of being, the underlying trait of Neuroticism can be expected to predict the development of imposter feelings, although the association researchers found could also be due to other unknown variables contributing to both. For example, family dynamics could predispose some individuals toward both Neuroticism and imposter feelings.
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Compared to Neuroticism, there are mixed findings for the trait of Conscientiousness , with most studies I’ve read actually pointing to low conscientiousness being correlated with IS. This seems unintuitive, as we would usually suspect fake imposters to try to cover up their feelings of fraudulence by being extra conscientious, like putting in extra effort to the point of perfectionism. This is true for some, but not all.
The consequences and coping behaviors of imposter thoughts are diverse, as are the reasons for it. Long-term consequences of these perceptions of fraudulence have been shown to be increased impression-management and self-monitoring to manage one’s appearance and demonstrated ability, lower self-rated but also other-perceived of job performance, adverse effects on the development of one’s professional identity, and even worse outcomes such as physical burnout from overworking, emotional exhaustion, job stress or lowered job satisfaction, the loss of one’s motivation to lead and for career striving. This is bad, right?
Yes it is. These are some consequences that might very well happen if you don’t try to work on the damaging thoughts and related behaviors of imposter syndrome. What behaviors do I mean? Well, working yourself to the point of burnout, or spending more time on sounding smart than actually investing in your own development. There are of course different ways in how fake imposters immediately cope with their syndrome. Some studies have for example shown that while women mostly take direct actions against these feelings of fraudulence, men actually reported using more avoidant coping methods such as trying to get distance from their doubts through alcohol or other substance abuse, working even harder, or just ignoring those thoughts. The two major groups of coping mechanisms are actually complete opposites: avoidance versus overworking.
What behaviors do I mean? Well, working yourself to the point of burnout, or spending more time on sounding smart than actually investing in your own development. There are of course different ways in how fake imposters immediately cope with their syndrome. Some studies have for example shown that while women mostly take direct actions against these feelings of fraudulence, men actually reported using more avoidant coping methods such as trying to get distance from their doubts through alcohol or other substance abuse, working even harder, or just ignoring those thoughts. The two major groups of coping mechanisms are actually complete opposites: avoidance versus overworking.Overworking
The feeling that you are a fraud, in this case, makes you exert even greater effort because you think that this is the only way you will be able to keep up your facade: you believe you must work extra hard to keep it all up, otherwise, you will be found out. This becomes problematic if you invest more energy into a task than is needed, and therefore lose resources for other aspects of your life like relationships, hobbies, or relaxation.
We Each Get to Decide What Success Means for Ourselves By Orit Wittenberg
The difficult part here is breaking the cycle because you think you cannot just stop overworking, even though you often realize the problems it causes. Overworking then often leads to over-preparing, obsessing over minor details, reading and rereading papers or emails, trying to stay in control all the time, taking on projects of your colleagues in fear that they might put your team in a negative light, impossibly high standards and perfectionism. You might be very successful working so much, but rather than alleviating the underlying anxiety that you can’t cope with, you misattribute your success to hard work only and the further you get, the higher you move your standards and goals.
The limit is… well, the limits are your mental and physical health. The limits are the deteriorating relationships with important people in your life. And the limits are the 24 hours we are all constrained by in any given day.
The cycle needs to be broken, but how?
A first shot would be to take a mental step back and look at your life from back there: If you were at the end of your life and looked back at it, would you have done anything differently? What would you have wanted to spend more time on, and less? Would you regret not having worked so hard, or having worked too hard? If its the latter, maybe now is the time to take small steps back when it comes to your time and effort expended for work as well.
Avoidance
The other immediate reaction to pressure on performing well and keeping up the appearance of confidence is avoiding tactics.
Instead of overworking, some people avoid what they should be doing, procrastinate the important stuff, or stop halfway through when it gets difficult and comes down to actual crunch time.
These situations all give you a reason for not doing so well, kind of an excuse – you can say “had I just started earlier, or started at all, or kept going, I would have made it”.
Instead of investing and making yourself vulnerable to fail or take setbacks in the process, you don’t even give yourself a chance to really succeed.
You can keep up the facade that you could actually do well if you just tried harder, and this feels safe and secure because you will never find yourself in a situation in which you actually have to admit that despite trying everything, you didn’t make it.
When we (yes, I’m in that group, too) succeed with this last-minute approach, which often we do, we then cannot internalize the success because it feels like we haven’t even tried that hard – I mean, come on, we just prepared this presentation an hour before giving it, how could it have really been as good as the performance review says?!
We then discredit the presentation, exam, interview or project by doubting the examiner or interviewer or our supervisor and believe that they must have made a mistake, given us the benefit of the doubt because they like us, or simply didn’t have anyone else to fall back on.
But you know what’s really going on, don’t you…
This effort to control everything that happens in your life is an attempt to avoid feeling vulnerable. I know this is true for me at least, because it already makes me feel very uncomfortable writing about this just now. After all, my professors could read this and think less of me, right?
To be honest, I’m still a bit nervous and anxious before every meeting with a professor because I don’t 100% trust that what I do is good, or enough. So far I’ve received good feedback, but this feeling keeps creeping up on me. And I’m sure I’m not the only one of my classmates or friends to feel that way.
Common avoidance tactics tend to be avoiding difficult situations, struggling to be assertive, holding back, not taking risks, dreaming of escaping it all, not putting yourself forward for promotion, failing to ask for help, under preparing, procrastinating or blaming others for making you feel inadequate.
You don’t have to be using all of these tactics to be an avoider, some tendencies to opt for avoiding instead of overworking is already a sign. I’m obviously not avoiding my work, this wouldn’t be possible and for that i also simply like it too much. But I do feel the little urges inside of me to avoid – any situation that make me vulnerable and where I fear being exposed and criticized.
But these strategies ultimately lead to even worse outcomes, and you basically set yourself up for failure! If you lose control, you might end up not doing the work, missing job opportunities or aiming too low, letting others down for real, or never settling down for long, in a job, task or even place. Seeing this and understanding where these behaviors come from is a first step.
Remove The Mask A Practical Guide to
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome and
Embracing Your Self-Worth
By KW Horley
Just imagine what you might be capable of if you let go of your fears and actually invest fully and for real in what you want!
But you have no chance if you don’t try. Cognitively we know that the mentioned coping strategies will only get us so far. And even through empirical investigations, these short-term coping methods have been described as providing only temporary relief.
If you can relate to this blog post, and you want to stop these imposter feelings and behaviours associated with it, I really encourage you to read my Pick of the Month book recommended in February. In case you can’t find it on the website because its not February anymore, you can still find it on my Instagram page, I posted it there.
What is important to realize is that people who don’t have these feelings of fraudulence are not more intelligent or capable than those who do. Nor are they less intelligent, so no reason to become “proud” of this imposter syndrome either. 😉
Everyone has doubts and feels outside of their comfort zone when it comes to a new task, project, job or career – which often present themselves with a promotion or more responsibility given to us. But people with IS in these moments forget that these feelings of insecurity are normal. Instead, they believe that because they feel a bit overwhelmed at the beginning, this must mean that they are not capable of fulfilling their new role, have not earned their spot or that somehow they ended up way in over their heads in a project that was meant for someone much smarter, talented and capable.
But people with IS in these moments forget that these feelings of insecurity are normal. Instead, they believe that because they feel a bit overwhelmed at the beginning, this must mean that they are not capable of fulfilling their new role, have not earned their spot or that somehow they ended up way in over their heads in a project that was meant for someone much smarter, talented and capable.But this means that the whole imposter thing is pretty much just a wrong thought, and, as we all know, we can try to change our thoughts!
Please be aware, even though there are some articles and posts out there that highlight the positive sides of imposter syndrome, this has by now been shown to simply be wrong. IS is not the reason why you are hard-working or why you are humble and well liked by others. You will still be hard-working and humble even if you get rid of some of the feelings of fraudulence. It is not an either-or scenario in which you are either an arrogant ass (sorry – not sorry 💁🏼♀️) or a humble but self-doubting sweetheart. You can be an ambitious, hard-working, self-confident and humble sweetheart if you want to.
You will get additional benefits: you will OVERwork yourself less, or procrastinate less, you will gain well-deserved pride in your successes and work, and you will be able to improve your performance because you won’t be busy with impression and expectation management, pretending to be somewhat you’re not and down-talking yourself anymore. You will be able to walk into new environments, tasks, or positions with more confidence because you understand that little doubts will come up anyways and for sure. But you will also understand that these feelings are not just normal, but they’re in fact an indicator for growth and self-development, and that you’re in the beginning of a steep upwards-shaped learning curve.
Fear is simply a normal response to the unknown, and everyone is scared from time to time or doubts herself in new and challenging situations (otherwise you might be an arrogant ass, after all😉).
Failures, too, are normal, and even necessary for success because without failures we just don’t learn as much. This does not have to trigger shame, though. And you are able to learn healthier responses to success and failure than to blame the bad things on yourself but the good things to external causes. The consequences of IS are costly, to yourself just as much, if not more than to your organization.
Let’s all start to talk about this phenomenon (or syndrome, or bias towards undermining your own successes) openly and wipe it out because most of us have a little imposter somewhere inside of us that we should all get rid of.
On a final note, this is not supposed to give you another thing to worry about, in addition to the self-criticism and other doubts you might already experience. “I don’t want to be a (fake) imposter, though!” or “Great, she tells me that I have an actual syndrome to get rid of!”, you might say. Don’t worry. To quote my friend and colleague Beth Anne (quoting our friend and colleague Rohin, quoting – unfortunately, not our friend – Woody Allen):
Don’t worry. To quote my friend and colleague Beth Anne (quoting our friend and colleague Rohin, quoting – unfortunately, not our friend – Woody Allen):The first step is realizing that everyone is an imposter. The next one is simply showing up.
Because realizing that we’re all just winging it out here helps, doesn’t it?
SO let’s start working on defeating these little beasts – everyone for themselves as well as together. You can help others by letting each other know when a colleague does something well, when we admire a friend for something, or when someone works on something great. And you can help yourself doing the same things – celebrate and enjoy your successes for longer than a day, write down all the things you’ve ever achieved in your life and look at them when you hear your imposter voice, and tell your mirror more often that you love him or her, that they’re doing great, don’t need to be scared to fail and that they are (doing) enough.
And if it doesn’t work out right away, don’t worry either. Any step in the right direction is a step. After all, I’m writing this blog post instead of what I should actually be doing – my homework and studying for the Stats exam. Well, nobody’s perfect. I’ll forgive and keep working on myself if you will, too. Because we’re out there trying!
Lots of love and – stay curious!
Source: vallidated.com
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