Impostor Syndrome: Other People Aren’t Magic
Impostor Syndrome comes up a lot, and, weirdly, it comes up the most with people who are doing well. It’s as if the more impressive our actual achievements are (multiple promotions, greater responsibility, stock grants), the less we believe that we deserved them. We think things like “well I was just in the right place at the tight time”, “I got lucky”, “my boss just likes me” — all thoughts designed to discount what we actually did and what are talents actually are.
At its worst, Impostor Syndrome is pretty painful: we wake up in the middle of the night wondering when the shoe will drop and we will be revealed as a charming incompetent; we don’t speak up in meetings because we know, for sure, that our opinion is shallow, naive, unworthy; we avoid making decisions which we know, we just know, we will screw up.
It’s nasty. And it gets in the way.
The pain of Impostor Syndrome comes from the emotions: shame and fear. The emotions are driven by thoughts (“lucky, lucky”) and the thoughts are rooted in a narrative, which gives a consistency and a sticky reality to the whole experience. And the narrative is a set of stories we are telling ourselves about our history.
A truly great engineer without a degree might tell himself: “well, sure I’ve driven this company from the ground up, but I was just around when they hired the first couple of people — any random engineer could have done it”. A newly promoted Marketing Director suddenly in charge of twenty people might feel: “anybody could do this, really. It’s only a matter of time before my boss figures out I have no clue what I’m doing”.
There’s often tremendous fear here: the bottom will drop out, I’ll get fired, end up back at home with my parents, all that work for nothing… And this happens to people who have routinely excelled, all their lives.
What needs to happen is a perspective change — a new narrative, one that explains the facts in ways that match a more likely view of reality.
So a classic way of approaching Impostor Syndrome is to confront the facts: what have you achieved? how hard was it? what skills did you bring to those hard tasks? what feedback have you received about your skills and talents? Write down your history. Be clear-eyed and careful, and take care not to heed the voice that says, “‘eh, yeah, well, but anybody could have…”. You did. Anybody didn’t.
Interested? Try it: write a list of your accomplishments in the past (say) three years. It’ll take about ten minutes. Take a look at it, quietly. Good, right?
And as a simple reality check question, try this: which is more plausible — “my boss, a competent professional, has promoted me twice because he thinks I’m charming” or “my boss, a competent professional, has promoted me twice because I’m killing it and he needs somebody to take more responsibility?”.
But there’s another thing going on here. A deeper, quiet, foundation of the skewed perspective is that the other people we are now working with possess some kind of magical powers. So: the execs I am now meeting with have scary “executive presence powers” of communication and decision-making; those Stanford MBA ex-Google product managers are infused with the Secret Runes of Greatness; the famous Principal Engineer you’re now partnered with can conjure the right architecture out of thin air.
This makes the perspective change is difficult. Even looking at your history of achievements doesn’t help because now you are working with, and (in your mind) being judged by, people with magical powers. And you don’t have magical powers, and you can’t get them because, well, it’s magic.
You’re powerless. At some point soon, somebody will see that you have no wizarding skills, and that’ll be it. Exposed as a fraud, you’ll be embarrassed and ruined (yes, this stuff is powerful).
So here’s the thing: these new folks you are working with are just people. Like you. The fact that you are in the same room with them indicates they are probably quite like you. Perhaps they are more experienced, perhaps they’ve seen more, but that’s just a factor of time passing, and something you can learn from. It’s not magic, and there was no moment at which these people became Special and Different.
Can we indulge a sports analogy? Sure: you are a minor league player brought up to the majors (could be baseball, could be soccer — choose your sport) for the first time. You walk into the locker room. There are people there you have admired since you were a tween. They have an aura. You don’t. You don’t deserve to be in the same space. But they are just players, and so are you. You are about to play the game you’ve played since you were five. It’s just the game. And you’re good at it, or you wouldn’t be there.
If you got into the room, you deserve to be there. Somebody put you there for a reason, an acknowledgement of who you are and what you can do. If you’re new, fine — your job is to contribute what you know and learn the rest. That’s all. There’s no magic there. Experience, energy, passion, skill, maybe — but you have plenty of that, and will have more.
You belong. Get comfortable.
(One of a series of notes stemming from my work coaching founders, execs and technical leaders in the tech industry. Also published in the “Leadership, Management and Being Human” newsletter).
