Do You Feel Like An Imposter? A Fraud? A Phony? : Panic About Anxiety : A blog about panic attacks, panic disorder, and anxiety.
by Summer Beretsky, blogs.psychcentral.com
March 19
Do you ever feel like you’re “faking it” — at work, at school, or at home? Like you’re not qualified to be there, but by the grace of chance or luck, you are?
And do you feel like one day someone’s going to “out” you? Reveal you as a fraud? Point a finger at you and identify you as an impostor?
I remember my very first day of teaching business students at my local community college. The class? Introduction to Marketing.
Was I qualified? Well, yeah. I’ve got a master’s degree and several years of experience working for a marketing and advertising company. I’ve also taught college classes online before.
I know how to write lesson plans. I know how to put together activities and lectures that fulfill student learning objectives. And, despite that pesky anxiety disorder I deal with, I’m pretty good at speaking in front of a crowd.
But still, on that very first late-summer day, standing in the bright classroom on the second floor of a gigantic academic center, I felt like an impostor — like they’d chosen the wrong person to teach. Surely I wasn’t smart enough or qualified enough for this. I should be sitting at a desk, not standing behind the podium.
Appropriately enough, there’s a term for this feeling: the impostor phenomenon.
I CAN’T POSSIBLY BELONG HERE, CAN I?
From Dr. Pauline Rose Clance’s website (with spacing added for clarity):
Most people who experience the Impostor Phenomenon (IP) would not say, “I feel like an impostor.” Yet, when they read or hear about the experience, they say, “How did you know exactly how I feel?”
And how do they feel? Even though they are often very successful by external standards, they feel their success has been due to some mysterious fluke or luck or great effort; they are afraid their achievements are due to “breaks” and not the result of their own ability and competence.
They are also pretty certain that, unless they go to gargantuan efforts to do so, success can not be repeated. They are afraid that next time, I will blow it.
Can you imagine the anxiety that impostor phenomenon (also called “imposter syndrome”) might cause?
I FEEL FAKE, BUT MY NERVES ARE REAL
Consider Clance’s last sentence above — have you ever felt like you succeeded at something difficult, but only by the hair on your chin?
What kind of thoughts and behaviors might follow that feeling of undeserved success? Might you feel insecure about your own abilities? Might you avoid taking chances as a result? Might you begin to over-work yourself so that you feel like less of a phony?
Might you continue to feel like a fraud who is just barely making it?
Gosh — even typing out those last few questions made me feel uneasy.
(On that note, let’s pause for a brief interlude of Summer’s Uncensored Thoughts: Wow, I have a blog? On a psychology website? Why do I deserve this? I can’t write. I don’t belong here. Everyone else here can write well, but I can’t.)
Well, I guess it’s clear why those questions made me feel so uneasy.
MEET SOME LIKE-MINDED IMPOSTORS PEOPLE
But it’s not just me who feels this way. I know at least one other blogger who understands the impostor phenomenon intimately: my fellow PsychCentral blogger Margarita Tartakovsky, who felt like a fraud during grad school:
I felt like the program made some exception to accept me, that I really didn’t deserve to be there, that I wore my stupidity on my sleeve and that soon the professors and powers-that-be would find out and kick me out…
…[e]ven when I received high grades and positive feedback and praise, I still felt a gnawing discomfort that I just didn’t belong in such a smart place.
I also wasn’t the only one. My cohort and I talked regularly about feeling like our department had a made a mistake in admitting us. We worried about keeping up, regularly questioned our intelligence and abilities and felt insecure all-around.
In my next post, I’ll take you even further into others’ experiences with impostor phenomenon.
Until then, Clance offers a test on her website that allows users to gauge the extent and severity of their impostor phenomenon symptoms.
Where do you fall on her scale? Which situation in your life — work, school, or something else — makes you feel like you’re not quite good enough to belong?
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/panic/2014/03/do-you-feel-like-an-impostor-a-fraud-a-phony/
Do You Feel Like An Impostor? You're Not Alone! : Panic About Anxiety : A blog about panic attacks, panic disorder, and anxiety.
by Summer Beretsky, blogs.psychcentral.com
March 22
In my last post, I introduced you to what Dr. Pauline Rose Clance calls the “impostor phenomenon” — that nagging feeling that, despite being perfectly qualified to do something, you just don’t belong.
That you’re just not good enough (even though you are).
That you’re just not smart enough (even though, again, you are).
Have you ever felt like this before?
I have to credit the good folks on Reddit’s /r/anxiety community for inspiring this series of blog posts about impostor phenomenon. In fact, they’re exactly who I’ll be turning my attention to now.
In my last post, I shared a few anecdotes about my own experience with impostor phenomenon at work, and my fellow blogger’s experience with it at grad school.
And now, to really prove that this is a commonly-shared experience, I’m going to share a few of the Reddit posts that opened my eyes to how common this phenomenon actually is!
DOES ANYONE ELSE FEEL LIKE A PHONY, TOO?
It all started when user Thinksincode posed the following question to the community:
Do you suffer from impostor syndrome?
I get this all the time. It’s a feeling that, despite having done well at your job, you feel like you’re a fraud and it’s only a matter of time before everyone finds out that you’re just an “impostor” and the house of cards collapses.
It can be really anxiety-provoking, and really hurts my self-confidence. Have any of you dealt with impostor syndrome?
And the response to his question was overwhelming. Several answers from fellow Redditors had to do with feeling like an impostor school or in academic settings. User Amateurpolymath wrote:
As a graduate student surrounded by genius colleagues who went to much better universities in undergrad, I feel this all the time. I don’t know know what to do about it, and it haunts me every second of every day.
User Bikemistress responded with some empathy and wise words (and I’ve bolded a very significant part of her response):
Same here. One thing that I learned after finally getting up the courage to talk to my closest friends in my department is that everyone feels like this in graduate school.
Once I opened up to one of my classmates about feeling like this, she told me she was shocked to hear that from me. Apparently since I would always leave when everyone was studying together for midterms, they assumed that I had all of my shit together and didn’t find it necessary to study.
In reality being around everyone else talking about details of the material would put me on the verge of an attack so I had to leave to avoid it.
I can guarantee that even when you’re feeling like an impostor and stressing out about if you can succeed there is someone else in your department having the exact same thoughts, and looking at you as the one that deserves to be there more than they do. Remember, your department would not invest time and resources in you if they didn’t think you were good enough.
User Teds101 related his own experience with the impostor phenomenon in the workplace:
I went through a few weeks where for no reason I felt like I was going to be in trouble, was doing inadequate and didn’t deserve my job and that my boss was going to fire me. I was doing the same thing I always did though.
And even people who are “successful” in the traditional sense of the word aren’t immune to feeling like a phony. From user Boomerangotan:
I was hired by a company in 1998. Been with them all the way. It was a small company of 5-8 employees when we were bought by a much larger company a few years ago.
I am happily a lead developer. My boss and his boss are good friends. The boss’s boss is now a VP of our division and still good friends -he still asks my advice for things and asks how other managers are performing. I still produce good stuff and occasionally blow away coworkers with some cool solutions to problems. The product my little company got bought out for went on to become a huge money-maker for the bigger company.
And yet I am still in a constant state of anxiety about my job. I feel that tightness in my chest throughout the day. I fear that my colleagues put on a facade and only put up with me for my seniority. I fear that everyone else knows what they are doing and so far I have just lucked out that I have been able to find good solutions to the problems we’ve faced.
I logically realize I couldn’t really be in a better position, yet I don’t know how to shake this constant fear.
So, how can we shake this feeling of fraudulence?
1. First, recognize what impostor phenomenon is. If you’ve read this blog post, you should have a pretty solid idea of its symptoms by now. Notice when you’re feeling it, and remind yourself that about a billion other people feel the same way. It’s not just you.
2. Avoid self-deprication. My own therapist calls this the “but” syndrome. After noticing that I tend to downplay all of my successes by following up with the word “but”, she urged me to begin noticing how often I do this in daily life. Turns out, I was doing it very often: I’m a college instructor, but only part-time. I was published in the LA Times, but only once. I went grocery shopping today, but I still couldn’t get all the way over to aisle 14 without panicking.
3. Make a list of your accomplishments.l Recognizing your triumphs doesn’t make you conceited; rather, it helps you to focus on the value of what you’ve achieved. Review the list regularly — especially when you start to feel like you’re a fake who is about to be “found out” by classmates or co-workers.
How do you manage the impostor phenomenon in your own life? Please share your own techniques in the comments!
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