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Using Impostor Syndrome to Your Advantage
Do you ever get selected for a role in a team and think, “I fluked that,” or “Well! There wasn’t much competition anyway, heh.” Or you walk in feeling like you know far less than everybody else there, you don’t really deserve to be there, and someone’s going to find out sooner or later? These are signs of self-sabotage. Recognising it, realising that everyone else also started somewhere, and training yourself to overcome this is what I’ll try to cover in this article.
The term “Impostor Syndrome” was first coined by psychologists Dr Pauline R. Clance and Dr Suzanne Imes in 1978. It is a psychological phenomenon defined as a “collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in the face of information that indicates that the opposite is true.” People who experience impostor feelings tend to attribute their success to luck and have difficulty recognising the role they played in it. They feel like a fraud and are always wary of being discovered as one.
Before I jump right into it, is it a syndrome or a phenomenon? The Imposter Syndrome is not recognised as an official disorder by the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition), although it is a frustrating condition that interferes with your professional and personal life. Syndrome, phenomenon and experience are all valid. I will be using these words interchangeably throughout the passage.
My first advice to anyone who struggles with this is to go to a licensed therapist. Most of the time, they will be able to help you out much better than you or I can. Incidents that shaped your past are the roots of much of this self-doubt, and it may be entrenched in your subconscious.
That’s why positive affirmations, meditation, and coaching will have a more powerful impact on subsiding these thoughts than simply convincing ourselves that they are not credible.
But, if you find it difficult to approach a therapist at this point in time for whatever reason, read on.
How do these impostor thoughts affect you?
Self-doubt is, to an extent, a helpful tool in assessing your abilities and achievements. But after a point, this self-doubt does more harm than good. It can often impact a person’s image of themselves, leading to them devaluing their worth and undermining their abilities.
So even when people with feelings of inadequacy do achieve a milestone, they are unable to recognise it and feel terrible because now it’s even worse if people find out they’re “actually a fraud.” They will often turn down praise and deny their competence.
Interestingly, people who tend to attribute luck or external factors to their success also tend to blame themselves when things go wrong due to actual external factors.
People who experience impostor syndrome are usually high achievers. Since they are so used to success, they have a fear of failure and have huge expectations of themselves. They have a high bar for overcoming challenges and inevitably set immensely demanding goals. This leads to disappointment when they are not able to achieve them.
Recognising the self-sabotage
Dr Valerie Young, the author of ‘The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It,” has identified five types of “impostors”:
- The Perfectionist — They feel like they’ve failed if their work is not 100% perfect. A minor flaw is upsetting despite the rest of the project being brilliant.
- The Expert — They need to know everything about a subject or task to feel like they have successfully learnt or completed the undertaking.
- The Soloist —They are convinced they should do the task alone and without accepting help from anyone else to be competent.
- The Natural Genius — Everything should be easy for them, or they are disheartened. If they don’t finish a task fast and find it easy, they disappoint themselves.
- The Overachiever (or Superman, according to Dr Young) — They usually shoulder multiple roles simultaneously and are upset when they can’t handle it. Tackling these responsibilities easily and perfectly is important to them.
The first and most crucial step to overcoming the impostor syndrome is catching yourself when you have these thoughts. If you find yourself thinking any of the thoughts mentioned in the previous section or relating to one or more of the five types of “impostors,” tell yourself that it is, in fact, the impostor phenomenon, and your mind is telling you things that may be far from the truth. Knowing these thoughts and spotting the pattern can help you apply some strategies to tackle them.
How to overcome the impostor syndrome (and, surprisingly, use it to your advantage!)
- Say it out loud.
When these thoughts stay on your mind, they can seem like a huge obstacle to get past.
Try talking to your trusted friends, colleagues, family members or therapist about how you’re feeling (or even write it down so you can read it yourself). Sharing your thoughts and getting their feedback can help you judge yourself more realistically.
This will lead to one of three things: (i) you’ll either realise how harsh you are being on yourself, (ii) your friends, colleagues, or therapist will let you know that you are inaccurate and point out to you where you’ve proven yourself otherwise, or (iii) you’ll come to realise you’re actually out of your depth and you should work on this. This will give you a lot more clarity and ease your mind so that you’re not anxious all the time.
Even the Michelle Obama always felt like she didn’t belong because she was surrounded by colleagues who were mostly white men. She was a woman. She was black. Everything screamed that she didn’t belong. And it doesn’t even have to be such visual cues. It could be their level of confidence, it could be their eloquence, it could be the different approach or style of their work that leaves you feeling like you don’t belong. Listen to Michelle Obama speak about her experience with the impostor syndrome here.
We are all unique, yet we try to fit in. And when we don’t, we feel inadequate. If truth be told, all of us are doing what we think is best, and we are being our own version of adequate. You genuinely don’t have to be like other people who are successful in your field. Be your own version of good. And when you can’t judge, compare yourself to your past self, look at how much you’ve improved. This brings me to the next point.
2. Keep a record of your current achievements, your past successes, and positive feedback others give you.
Try writing down your victories, no matter how small or big, so that you don’t forget them when you look back at your memories, and all you get are those physically cringe-worthy gaffes. You could write down something like, “Ooh! I came up with an utterly spontaneous comeback today that left everyone laughing out loud.” “I asked for help today.” “I have this thing I’m really proud of.” “I introduced a new topic I dived into to my friends.” And later, when you look back at it, you will realise how much you’ve grown.
3. Ask for help.
One of the most annoying things about impostor syndrome is that because you often feel like a fraud, you try to suppress that or hide it so other people don’t lose their confidence in you. But by doing that, you aren’t being honest with yourself. And you aren’t making it any easier to overcome it.
When you need help in completing a task, the first step is to accept that you need it. You’re still a beginner, and that’s completely okay; everyone has their own beginning. Now you will probably think: “Everyone is so ahead of me! They did all this a long time ago-” But no, there are other people who “haven’t even started yet.” And you have! That’s a massive step in itself.
Next, ask anyone you know, approach them for help. Trust me; in most cases, people are way more helpful than you would expect. Since they’ve gone through this before, they will try to make it less burdensome for you, and that’s going to give you a jumpstart and make it even easier for you to do the thing you started. Why waste all that time trying to figure it all out by yourself when everyone is ready and glad to help you out? It’s okay if they think you don’t know anything. In fact, it’s better that way. You can then improve using the help they’ve given you, and they will recognise how much progress you’ve made and that will make them happier.
Van Gogh is reported to have said this: “If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
“You call yourself a writer? LMAO” was probably the voice I heard the most in the past few weeks, but if I can make you read up until here, then…
Whenever you can’t bring yourself to do something because you feel like you’re not qualified enough to do it, by all means, do it. Chances are, your feeling of not being good enough will drive you to read more, learn more and practise more, which will set you up to do better than you ever thought you could. Every time you see someone being good at something, there’s always the behind-the-scenes you don’t see, the amount of effort they put in and the time it took for them to reach there. So don’t stop yourself from doing something when you have barely started. Do it once, do it twice, and slowly watch yourself improve. And do it at least ten times (or more, depending on the type of work you’re doing) before you decide to give up.
