Ever feel like an imposter at work? You’re not alone.
The authorities hot on the trail, ready to expose your fraudulent ways… time to pack that emergency bag!
Considering that about 3 out of 4 people report feeling like a fraud in the workplace, it sounds like our shiny red Canadian mounted police should start going around arresting everyone… eh?
My own nightmare has usually gone something like this:
*Knock knock*
This is the police!
We’ve been tracking you for years.
You are under arrest for impersonating a front-end developer at Airstory…
… and everyone important in your life has just been notified.
Pretty ridiculous, right? I chuckled a bit just writing it out — plus, the idea of appearing in court to write Javascript & HTML actually sounds rather appealing!
But seriously though, your mind has this amazing power to make life-destroying scenarios like this feel real — if just for a moment.
You can view it as a deep internal conflict, or a productive way to prepare doomsday, but eventually it’s going to creep its way into reality… causing problems in everyday life, feeding the insecurity further.
A vicious cycle.
I doubt there’s some a magical cure, but perhaps we can break that cycle through a greater understanding of this phenomenon.
Others people are better, and you don’t deserve it
Feeling a bit triggered?
With just a quick look through social feeds like Facebook & Instagram, it can seem like other people have got this life this alllll figured out. It’s a filtered view of reality.
Your old pal Josh you helped through high school just bought his first house, the shy guy from social studies is running a multi-million $ company, and your favourite celebs keep taking big elaborate vacations together. Queue the envy.
-1 for the ego.
On the other hand, we have popular news & media reporting only the most dramatic, awful, negatively-charged stories. Alright, I feel a bit better about my life now!
+1 for the ego, aaand we’re back to normal!
That’s quite the tug of war, and there’s only so many threads in that rope before it begins to snap. Maybe there isn’t even a ‘normal’ at all?
In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force measured more than 4,000 pilots on 140 dimensions of size, in order to tailor cockpit design to the “average” pilot.
Well, it turned out the average airman didn’t exist. This ideal cockpit they designed wouldn’t perfectly fit anyone at all!
By that logic, the average [insert your job title here] doesn’t exist either.
The typical job posting for a front-end developer often contains a wildly dense list of expectations. I imagine an HR person asked the CTO “what does your ideal rockstar developer look like?”, and then go on to publish their posting looking for some legendary 10x developer.
Even just 1 of these coding languages/frameworks is something you could spend years becoming good at. It soon gets replaced by the next cool thing, and you get to start all over again. Yay tech.
On the flipside, you could be the best coder in the world, and yet feel completely undeserving of the accomplishments and success.
For us mere mortals haven’t mastered the skills of everything, working in a team means knowing what you think you know, and knowing what others know, so in a way, their know becomes your know
… you know?
No? Diagram, please explain.
Is it a syndrome — or a spectrum?
Imposter Syndrome was first described in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes during their clinical studies of high-achieving women.
In a more recent interview about her book Presence, Clance told Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy:
“If I could do it all over again, I would call it the impostor experience, because it’s not a syndrome or a complex or a mental illness, it’s something almost everyone experiences.”
To be fair, wrapping it up in a neat little ‘syndrome’ bow simplifies things for us, right? We get to justify our symptoms in a few words, start playing the blame game on something ‘medical’, and just maybe feel a bit less alone.
I’m not a psychiatrist (real or imposter), but I highly doubt that anything in mental health is so cut & dry. To me, it feels more like a giant colour spectrum we live on together, as one big happy dysfunctional family.
Are you on the scale? Take the IP Quiz
While reading through Clance’s research, I discovered that in 1985 she also developed the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale, with a 20 question quiz to help identify IP feelings, and the extent.
I’ve done you a favour here, and turned the PDF into an interactive form that’ll add up the score for you. Just open the PDF, click the (select) dropdown on the right of each question. Your score appear on the last page.
(Keep in mind, this is intended for personal use only)
Click here to take the IP Scale quiz!
- 40 or less: has few Impostor characteristics
- between 41 and 60: has moderate IP experiences
- between 61 and 80: frequently has Impostor feelings
- higher than 80: often has intense IP experiences.
Where did you land? I came in at mid 40’s with moderate experiences.
Imposter! Grab him!
In Summary
Your IP score isn’t your “imposter level” — it’s just a way to measure whether perceive yourself as one, and how much. Keeping a healthy perspective reserved for yourself is key.
Next time you’re feeling like a small fish in the big sea, or feeling underserving of that new job, remember you’re not an imposter.
A hero? Maybe.
