Take a second and think about all the successful people that you know personally. The girl from high school that turned her vlog into a six-figure income. The guy that is around your age that just opened his own restaurant around the corner from your home. Or, maybe your co-worker who resigned to start their own business. You may look at the successful people in your life and think that their confidence is the last thing that they have to worry about. The truth is that many people that have achieved notable accomplishments suffer from a common phenomenon called imposter syndrome.
The definition of imposter syndrome is quite simple. It is the belief that the only reason that you have been successful in your life is because of some form of luck, not at all because you are smart, determined, and deserve all the glory that you have worked for. The term was coined back in the 1970s by two psychologists but has been a phenomenon for centuries. It was originally considered to affect women more so than men but now, research has shown that imposter syndrome affects both men and women equally.
At the root, imposter syndrome is the inability to “internalize one’s own success” according to psychologist Audrey Ervin. Instead of feeling like your success is directly related to the work that you’ve put in to earn it, you see your success as dumb luck that you may or may not strike again. Imposter syndrome can affect people from all walks of life and in relation to any level of success. Even when everyone on the outside can identify how successful you’ve been and all the reasons there are to be proud of your accomplishments, imposter syndrome becomes a barrier between you and that ability to see your accomplishments through the same lens. In your personal life, you can find yourself never feeling good enough for your life. This can lead to a lasting sense of inadequacy and a lack of confidence. Imposter syndrome can bleed into your professional life causing you to either avoid going after big goals because of a lack of confidence or a sense that you aren’t qualified when you really are. Imposter syndrome robs you of the celebrations you deserve in your life after working for it.
From my personal experience, and that working with Black women, the issue of imposter syndrome can be much more complex because it fails to account for the experience of being Black and being a woman. A traditional view of imposter syndrome accounts for an either/or framework of thinking about gender and race. For Black women, racism and sexism intersect to form exacerbated feelings of intellectual inferiority or the need to combat negative racial stereotypes. This phenomenon is not just the embodiment of impostor syndrome when Black women are involved. Instead, it‘s the byproduct of internalized racism where it is consistently communicated that you are not worthy of professional success. Therefore, the way we think of imposter syndrome has to account for these social realities.
But why do we struggle with this inability to internalize the success that we have worked so hard for? Psychologists and experts have studied this phenomenon since the term was created. Imposter syndrome can come from many sources but there are a few that stand out. Perfectionism is the main trigger for imposter syndrome. When dealing with perfectionism, it doesn’t matter if you achieve most, almost all, or some of your goals. If you don’t finish all of them to your high standards, you will still end up feeling like a failure and become hyper-focused on the things you did not achieve. There is also the person that has to be the expert. In this instance, you have to research, research, and do more research before you even make a single step towards completing a goal. There is a constant need to know every possible thing about the subject in order to feel like you are qualified to even begin. Soloists feel as though they have to achieve every single goal without any assistance from anyone in order to prove that they can be successful on their own and validate it. Lastly, the “superwoman” complex creates this need to work twice as hard as any other person around you in order to prove that you are not an imposter. The cause can be one of these things alone or all of them at once. They all lead down a path of feelings of unworthiness of success.
Getting over imposter syndrome can seem like an easy mind over matter. However, when you are used to believing you aren’t worthy of your success, it is a difficult switch to turn off. For starters, when those feelings start to arise, understand that you are not alone in feeling like you are undeserving. It is a normal feeling that can be acknowledged without leaning into it and giving it validation. Challenge the truth of those feelings to expose the irrationality of the thoughts of being an imposter.
It is important to note that the feelings associated with imposter syndrome are normal. But, acting on our feelings should be investigated.
