In the few short months since The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women has been out I’ve received dozens of emails from people telling me what a difference the book has made in their lives.

Naturally this is tremendously rewarding for me. As the great Katharine Graham said, “To love what you do and feel that it matters, how could anything else be more fun?”

But as I read these stories I also couldn’t help but think how encouraging it would be for others to see how it really is possible to beat the impostor syndrome and to finally see ourselves as the bright and capable individuals we truly are.

I’d love to add your success story to the list – in the meantime I hope you’re as inspired by these readers’ stories as I am.

The Impostor Syndrome goes beyond lack of confidence. Everyone experiences bouts of self-doubt from time to time and especially when attempting something new. But for impostors self-doubt is chronic.

You can feel self-doubt without experiencing shame at performing poorly as impostor do. It’s also possible to doubt your abilities without believing that you ultimately succeeded because of some sleight of hand or that you are fooling others. A person could have normal jitters before, say getting up to give their first speech, do well, and then draw from this experience to feel more confident about the next time. The impostor doesn’t think this way. Because no matter how well you did or how loud the applause, you always think you could have done better or that you just had a “good audience” with no real bump in confidence.

Twenty years of well documented research by leading expert in motivation and personality psychology Carol Dweck and author of my new favorite book Mindset, confirms what I’ve been saying for years. Namely that for better or for worse, your perceptions of what it takes to be competent, has a powerful impact on how you measure yourself and therefore how you approach achievement itself. And if you feel like an intellectual fraud then there is an excellent chance that you have been operating from a definition of competence that is so grandiose that not even a certifiable genius could ever hope to attain. And it’s time to change that.

But before you can begin to create a new, attainable competence rulebook, you need to first uncover your current Competence M.O. or Competence Type. I’ve uncovered five. They are the Perfectionist, the Natural Genius, the Rugged Individualist, the Expert, and the Super Woman/Man/Student. If you asked someone from each of these Competence Types to complete the sentence, “I’ll know that I’m competent when…” and “If I were really smart…” they would approach it from a somewhat different angle.

• The Perfectionist’s primary focus is on “how” something is done. This includes how the work is conducted and how it turns out.
• The Rugged Individualist cares mostly about “who” completes the task. To make it on the achievement list, it has to be them.
• The Expert’s primary concern is on “what” they know or can do. Or more precisely, what they don’t know or can’t do.
• The Natural Genius also cares about “how” and “when” accomplishments happen. But for them competence is measured in terms of ease and speed.
• And the Superwoman/Super Student measures competence based on “how many” roles they can both juggle and excel in.

So what’s in your Impostor Rulebook? What internal rules do you use to measure your competence?

If so join the club.

What you’ve just seen is the “Impostor Syndrome” in action. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, you feel inadequate to do the work you’re fully capable of performing. Instead you believe they are somehow “fooling” other people into thinking you’re brighter and more capable than you “know” yourself to be. Deep down you feel like an impostor, fake, and fraud.

The fact is 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. After all, in your mind it’s your failures that really count… 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?

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?

If so I’d love you to share your own impostor story here.

This week’s email came from something I wrote in a chapter in The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women called “Is it ‘Fear of Success’ or Something Else?”

The quote read:

“If the work you were doing and the environment in which you were doing it reflected your gifts and priorities, would you still question your competence to the same degree?”

That prompted K to write with a question:

“I would like to better understand what this quotation is trying to help me see… I want to say “yes,” which indicates I have Imposter Syndrome. But what is it helping me to see, to get beyond the syndrome?”

GREAT QUESTION!

I see now that without some context, it’s unclear what the take away is. So let me explain…

One thing that has become abundantly clear over the last decade is that generally speaking, women want more than the money/power/status success model traditionally associated with men. For women success includes quality of life and satisfaction.

Whether you embrace the money/power/status model or not, it is no coincidence that situations where these elements are in play — salary negotiations or being singled out for recognition in your field or being tapped for a promotion — are the very times when you wonder, Do I really deserve it? or Can I really handle it?

You assume it’s the self- doubt talking.

And maybe it is.

However, it’s also true that because women do have a more layered definition of success, it’s just as likely that your anxiety could be signaling a mismatch between the social definition of success and what matters most to you.

So that when faced with the opportunity to achieve greater levels of success – to grow your small business into an empire, to go after tenure, to accept the major promotion — ambivalence or reluctance can easily be confused with self-doubt when in reality there are any number of non-confidence-related factors that can make you reluctant to move ahead, including a mismatch between your definition of success and what is expected, the additional demands that come with success, and your relationship with money.

Once you’re aware of these things you can sort out for yourself, are you anxious about success because you don’t think you CAN do it, or do you just not want IT?

Chances are it’s not a simple either/or, but from situation to situation it’s probably more one than the other. Hence, the Impostor Buster question:

“If the work you were doing and the environment in which you were doing it reflected your gifts and priorities, would you still question your competence to the same degree?”

One way to tell the difference is to imagine yourself as the confident, fully capable person you would like to be (and in fact really are). If the supremely competent you was faced with the exact same decision, how would she feel?

If you’re still averse, then you know something other than confidence or lack thereof is at play, and you have an opportunity to explore what it is.

Once you clarify what success means to you, it’s just possible that old fears about whether you’re “smart enough” or “good enough” or, for that matter, “successful enough” will be cast in an entirely different light. You may find that what up until now you’ve thought of as your fear of success and impostorism may instead be a healthy reluctance to succeed on someone else’s terms.

As writer Anna Quindlen says, “If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.”

What do you think about fear of success? Love to hear your thoughts…

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. Most people who identify with the impostor syndrome don’t give up or give in. 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!

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.

What do YOU think? What role do you think the larger system of work and achievement play in so many people feeling like frauds?

I was sitting in class one day when another student rose to present the findings of a study conducted by psychology professor Pauline Clance and psychologist Suzanne Imes called The Impostor Phenomenon Among High Achieving Women (1978).

In a nutshell, Clance and Imes found that many of their female clients seemed unable to internalize their accomplishments. External proof of intelligence and ability in the form of academic excellence, degrees, recognition, promotions and the like was routinely dismissed. Instead, success was attributed to contacts, luck, timing, perseverance, personality or otherwise having “fooled” others into thinking they were smarter and more capable than these women “knew” themselves to be.

Rather than offering assurance, each new achievement and subsequent challenge only served to intensify the ever-present fear of being…

Found Out

“Oh my God,” I thought, “I’ve been unmasked!”

Clearly flustered, I quickly scanned the room checking to see if anyone had caught me nodding in dismayed recognition. No one had. They were too busy bobbing their own heads in like-minded unison.

It’s hard to describe what it was like to discover that these vague feelings of self-doubt, angst and intellectual fraudulence had a name. This, along with the realization that I was not alone, was utterly liberating. This experience proved to be a profound turning point in my life, both academically and personally. I made the life altering decision to change dissertation topics in order to study how and why so many intelligent women set themselves up to fall short.

I completed my dissertation in 1985. From here I set out to share what I’d learned with fellow “impostors” – both men and women alike – all over the country. Some twenty fives years later I wrote The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women.

The people I’ve worked with come from all walks of life. They are doctors and nurses, educators and college students, lawyers and accountants, executives and administrative assistants, engineers and administrators, human service providers and human resource managers, computer programmers and program directors, architects and artists, police officers and principals.

What they share in common is a deep desire to understand why, in the face of often overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they continue to doubt themselves, their competence, and their abilities.

But like me, it all began with the realization that there really is a name for these feelings. When was the first time you discovered there was something called the impostor phenomenon and how has that changed how you see things?