A major new client had just signed on. Senior staff were at loggerheads. Angry words had been exchanged. Meetings stormed out of. Battle lines drawn, workplace disputes lodged. Staff had resigned and more were lining up. Tensions were high and morale had hit a new low. I’d been engaged to mediate. After two weeks of research, preparation and pre-interviews, I had a three hour drive to the city where mediation would take place the next day. Plenty of time to mentally review strategy, tactics and potential contingencies.
Maybe it was the intensity of emotions at play and the number of hurting people involved. Maybe it was the high level of issues and reputations at stake. Or the incredibly low expectations among stakeholders for a successful resolution. Maybe it was my own secret need to impress a new client. Probably all the above and more. Whatever the cause, I was thirty minutes into the drive when a sudden white-knuckle thought turned my brain to ice.
What was I thinking? I can’t do this. Everyone’s going to see right through me. I’m a fraud. I don’t belong here.
I was in the grip of impostor syndrome*. Perhaps you’re familiar? You start a business, publish a book, join the executive team, get nominated for a prestigious award, start your dream job. Everything is flowing your way. And yet… Riding alongside the excitement and exhilaration comes an unexpected and unwelcome thought.
You get a promotion. They must have been short on applicants. Make a high-value sale. Probably just dumb luck. Polishing your keynote slides. A nagging suspicion whispers in the back of your head – everyone’s about to discover how hopeless I really am.
Impostor syndrome is not a new idea. It’s genesis was a research paper in 1978 by clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. Despite ample evidence of earlier triumphs, some of us remain convinced we don’t deserve future success. A bias toward perfectionism and overworking, fear of failure, downplaying achievements and discounting others’ praise are all signs we might be prone. Impostor syndrome can be demoralising, a deeply distressing source of anxiety and paralysing self-doubt.
Or not…
Imposter syndrome most often occurs in new and unfamiliar conditions like a promotion or responsibility for a new team or project we’ve not worked with before. Rather than trust the positive qualities that gained us this opportunity, we allow uncertainty to creep in. We focus on our perceived flaws instead of our virtues. At its heart, impostor syndrome is a feeling of personal incompetence.
Interestingly, ten years before Clance and Imes called impostor syndrome a thing, Dr Laurence J Peter published a book called The Peter Principle. It was a tongue-in-cheek satire that poked fun at business and management hierarchies. It argued that everyone in an organisation keeps on getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At that point they stop being promoted. So given enough time and enough promotion levels, every position in a firm will be occupied by someone who can’t do the job. The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. It’s still in print.
Many a true word is spoken in jest, and despite being a satire The Peter Principle sparked some very real debates about managerial incompetence. The book opened a space for deeper dialogues about the importance of ongoing training and professional development. More recently, researchers at Yale, MIT and the University of Minnesota confirmed that the book’s key premise is more than just an amusing theory. A study of 53,035 sales employees at 214 American companies from 2005 to 2011 revealed that the best salespeople were more likely to (a) be promoted and (b) perform poorly as managers. The Peter Principle is real.
Impostor Syndrome is the fear that we’ve arrived at our Peter Principle ceiling. This is all we’ve got. This is as far as we go. And worse, soon everyone around us will figure it out too.
Fortunately for us, impostor syndrome and the Peter Principle are both based on a common misconception. They share a zero-sum assessment of our personal abilities. A viewpoint Carol Dweck calls a ‘fixed mindset’ – a false belief that our qualities are fixed traits and therefore cannot change. That our intelligence and intrinsic skills are finite, so there’s no point working to improve and develop them. The idea that talent alone leads to success, so effort is pointless.
Impostor syndrome is a symptom of the fixed mindset fallacy. Thankfully, there’s a readily available antidote. All we need do is switch our thinking to a growth mindset. With a growth mindset, we accept that our abilities and intelligence can be developed with effort, learning, and persistence. That our inherited talents are simply a starting point for our true potential. We don’t believe everyone is the same, but we hold onto the idea that all of us can become smarter if we try. [For 27 great tips on fostering a growth mindset, check out this article]
With a growth mindset we see challenges as opportunities. So when impostor syndrome strikes and the white noise of self-doubt corrodes our confidence, we know what to do. We don’t dwell on our flaws or the possibility we may not successfully rise to this new challenge. We look instead at our prior victories, the achievements that brought this opportunity to our doorstep in the first place.
In his bestseller The Alter-Ego Effect, Todd Herman outlines a simple yet powerful way to do this. The Alter Ego Effect is not about creating a false mask. It’s about finding the hero already inside you. It’s a proven way of overcoming the self-doubt, negativity, and insecurity that hold you back, and empowering you to ultimately become your best self.
When self-doubt has you reaching for the fraud label, the recurring question is, ‘Who am I to think I can [insert new challenge here]’? Todd Herman’s solution is simple. Just answer the question. But when you do, don’t look ahead at all the potential pitfalls. Instead, look back. Look again at all your previous victories, successes, conquests and achievements. Remind yourself of all the times you rose above, stepped up, stretched yourself, and succeeded. Remind yourself how all your positive past performance led you to this moment.
To make it tangible, get a piece of paper and write it out.
At the top of the page, write: Who am I to think I can [your challenge]?
Then underneath, start a list of your previous accomplishments. For each item on your list, begin with the words: Well, I’m the one who [previous success example].
List as many concrete examples as you need. For most situations, three or four successes will be enough. If it’s not, just keep adding to your list until you feel a shift. Now read what you’ve written. Out loud. Hear yourself ask, ‘Who am I to think…’ Then listen to your own responses, ‘Well, I’m the one who…’
Read it again. As many times and as often as you need to.
It works. Your head comes up, your shoulders relax and you notice you’re breathing easier. Because it’s true. You are the one. And yes, you did do it before. So you already have everything you need. You can do it again.
Impostor syndrome survives on a diet of doubt and uncertainty. Starve it and it dies.
Feed your confidence instead. I’m the one who…
Driving to the mediation venue, I gave myself a good talking to. Who am I to think I can mediate this dispute? Well, I’m the one who… and I reminded myself of every instance I could think of when I’d negotiated successful outcomes in the past. Years of running youth and children’s programs for churches, schools and community groups. All those stakeholder and committee meetings, pitching programs, getting buy-in, attracting volunteers and financial support. As an academic, negotiating funding, pitching curriculum ideas, arbitrating agreements between rival faculties, brokering study pathways for students with overseas institutions.
Of course, in amongst it all I’d had my false starts, setbacks and failures. But even then, I’d learned, grown, come back stronger and smarter. I improved.
By the time I scanned my last decade’s experiences working with management groups and business leaders I was starting to feel pretty good. The next day, I walked into the meeting confident that no matter what happened, I would give it my best shot. And all things being equal, we had an excellent chance for a positive outcome.
On the drive home I had much to be grateful for. And I couldn’t help laughing at how anxious I’d been on the trip out. What was I thinking? In any mediation, it’s the clients who do the heavy lifting. These folks had turned up, opened up, owned up and stepped up. The results were far more positive than anyone expected (me included). Even better, the experience had gifted me another success story to draw on should impostor syndrome come knocking again.
‘Incompetent’ comes from ‘competere’, the same Latin base that gives us words like competition and compete. Competere means to ‘strive to gain, or contend for (something)’, from com- ‘together’ + petere ‘aim at, seek’. So incompetence literally means we’ve stopped striving or competing. We’re no longer aiming at something, we’ve stopped seeking.
Feeling hungry reminds us to eat. Feeling thirsty reminds us to hydrate. We don’t get upset about the feelings – we just acknowledge them for what they are and take action. Feeling incompetent simply reminds us that our appetite for learning and growth is not yet satisfied.
No need to need to fake it. We can face it till we make it.
We can embrace our incompetence. It’s a psychological nudge that it’s never smart to be the smartest person in the room. That there’s always room in our toolkit for another skill. And effort trumps talent every time.
We can welcome impostor syndrome with a smile. Because we know what’s really going on. We’ve forgotten the success that brought us here. That our leading edge is our learning edge. So we can quickly redefine moments of uncertainty for what they are… learner syndrome. This situation may be new, but we bring to it host of battle-tested wisdom.
Like Carol Dweck, we can trust our capacity to change and grow. Like Hamlet’s Ophelia, ‘We know what we are, but we know not what we may be’.
Doubt nothing but your own limits. You’re the one who…
Get more articles like this one: Subscribe