What is impostor syndrome?

- So what is imposter syndrome really? It's a term that was originally coined by Dr. Pauline Rose Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes, who first studied this phenomenon among high achieving women back in 1978. They call imposter syndrome a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in the face of success. So despite the fact that the high-achievers that Clance and Imes studied were very successful students, they felt that their successes were due to some mysterious fluke or luck. They were afraid that all their achievements were due to just a break, and not the result of their own ability and competence. And they were pretty sure that unless they went to great lengths to do so, their one time successes will never be repeated. So while the term imposter syndrome can be helpful to explain the feelings of fraudulence that so many of us experience, it can also be a little misleading, because it's not due to some deficiency in confidence, or any kind of psychological problem. It's an extremely widespread phenomenon. Studies find that impostorism is prevalent across gender, race, and age, although it might be more common among some underrepresented groups, and it tends to impact high achievers especially, because highly skilled people tend to believe that others have the same level of skill or ability, and that the accolades and achievements they receive are unwarranted. But labeling high achievers and marginalized people as suffering from imposter syndrome has come under fire in recent years, because it wrongly puts the blame on the individual's internal psyche, rather than the systemic challenges, like racism, sexism, and the prevalence of toxic workplace cultures that these individuals are often up against. Look at it this way. If you were the principal of a grade school with a serious bullying problem that disproportionately targeted certain kids more than others, would you say that those certain kids had a resilience problem, or would you say that your school had a bullying problem? How we label this problem impacts how we develop solutions for it. One easy way to shift our mindset when it comes to talking about imposter syndrome is to simply stop calling it a syndrome, and instead call it imposter phenomenon, or impostorism. This way, we're acknowledging that there are broader systemic causes for this widespread experience. The bottom line is impostorism is more often a byproduct of a threatening or hostile environment. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you. Instead, it has more to do with where you are in your career than who you are as a person. While we certainly need solutions on a broader level, the fact is that culture wide changes are slow to come by. So while we work towards systemic change, I want to focus on sharing some tools for how you can manage the effects of imposter phenomenon today.