Why are so many smart people struggling with Imposter Syndrome?
For fifteen years, as a university administrator, instructor, and now as a coach, I’ve worked with hundreds of students and alumni of some of the world’s top universities.
Imposter Syndrome comes up again and again. It doesn’t look the same across the board, but nearly everyone is battling this monster. For some, Imposter Syndrome shows up in the classic way the media portrays it--as feelings of being a “fraud” or like your employer is about to figure out you’re not as great as they think you are. But for most people, the Imposter Syndrome feelings are a bit different--perhaps showing up as thoughts of “I just got here because I am a likable person” or “this was just a fluke experience and my luck is about to run out.” In other words--as a tendency to discount very real achievements as being the result of circumstance, not the actual skill and talent they bring to the table. The Imposter Syndrome feelings may look different, but they are no less damaging to their long term career trajectory and satisfaction.
But why? Why are these people--who have enviable academic backgrounds and a long track record of success (after all they didn’t get into these top schools by failing to perform in high school)--why are these top graduates still struggling with Imposter Syndrome?
There are a few factors that contribute to this phenomenon among smart, ambitious young professionals:
Fear of Failure
If success and achievement are embedded in your identity, then failure seems even more terrifying. Even more insidiously, this tends to show up not as explicitly as avoiding things because you’re afraid of failing, but rather as continuing to stay within the zone of things you already know you’re good at. (I went into more detail about this here).
The Seduction of Research
One of the biggest challenges of formal education, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is that it prioritizes knowledge gained from written sources like books and journal articles over knowledge gained from lived experience. While this research is an essential skill for thriving in academia, it’s often the case in the non-academic world that most learning happens through experience--of trying something out, seeing the results, and evaluating what works and what doesn’t work. This switch can be really jarring if you have never been taught that it is OK (and often, desirable) to learn by doing. This inability to trust what your lived experience is teaching you can severely undermine your career confidence and contribute to feelings of Imposter Syndrome.
Lack of Feedback
In school, there’s a predictable rhythm: do an assignment, hand it in, get it back with a grade representing your performance and mastery of the content (and often additional comments and suggestions about how to improve next time), repeat until graduation. Such predictable feedback is often nonexistent in the corporate setting, leading to a lot of anxiety and worry over whether you’re on the “right track.”
The More You Know
The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. This is a big one. From the outside, before we start a project, we can have a lot of confidence because it seems so straightforward. But, once we get started, we can sometimes have a drop in confidence because we start to realize where the gaps in our knowledge lie. We also develop more of an awareness of our relative level of skill, which can be a confidence deflater.
Understanding where your Imposter Syndrome comes from is a crucial first step to learning how to manage it. For example, if you recognize that a lack of feedback is contributing to your Imposter Syndrome, you can start setting up feedback mechanisms of your own, such as by getting clear with your supervisor on how your performance will be evaluated and then determining how you could track your own success metrics. In addition to mitigating feelings of Imposter Syndrome in the short term, this will also set you up to be very well prepared come performance review time.
Unmanaged, Imposter Syndrome can have a significant impact on your career trajectory and job satisfaction. There is no magical cure, but you can dramatically mitigate the impact it has on your life. For more resources and tools to develop career confidence, check out: