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Why you feel like an impostor (and why you shouldn’t)

All-too-familiar with imposter syndrome? You're not alone, explains If You Should Fail author Joe Moran.

Joe Moran

In a 1978 academic paper, the clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes identified a condition they called “the impostor phenomenon”. High-achieving women, they found, felt it most keenly. Often outnumbered by men in meetings, they were more likely to feel unentitled to be in the room. Their impostorism was self-fulfilling. The more successful they became, the more others expected of them, and the more anxious they were that they would fail to meet those expectations. The harder they worked, the more they felt that their success was only due to working harder, and the harder they had to keep working to maintain the charade.

“Impostor phenomenon” is a better term, I think, than the now more common “impostor syndrome”. A syndrome sounds like a recognised condition that can be treated but not cured – a sad, persistent fact that concerns mainly its victim and which, once it has been diagnosed, need no longer be discussed. A phenomenon sounds like something significant that demands an explanation.

So how do we explain it? Why do so many of us, myself included, feel like impostors?

'For self-identifying impostors, no success will ever be enough, because to our minds no success with our name on it can have been that hard to achieve'

Part of it derives, I think, from a mindset borrowed from the capitalist free market. In most of the western world, the values and imperatives of the free market have slowly pervaded our thinking. Over the last few decades, they have become the enveloping aroma and undertaste of our lives. As the free market endlessly demands more – there is always more growth to be had, a new rival to outsell, another goal to set – so do the reward centres of our brains.

Self-declared impostors behave exactly as the free market wants them to behave. We cannot see our success as something permanent, something we may safely deposit in a low-risk savings account where it will slowly accrue interest for ever. Rather, we see it as another casino chip that we must bet away in search of a better hand, and might just as easily lose.

Via smartphones and a general cult of busy-ness, the free market eats into our uncontracted hours. It delivers an infinite series of self-replicating demands, and the only reward it offers is permission to continue the race. For self-identifying impostors, no success will ever be enough, because to our minds no success with our name on it can have been that hard to achieve. It will never give us the reassurance we crave.

Michelle Obama captured the phenomenon perfectly in her memoir, Becoming, when she wrote that in her younger life as a high-achieving child from a mainly black, working-class part of Chicago’s South Side, she turned the thrumming phrase “not enough, not enough” over in her head “like a malignant cell that threatened to divide and divide again.”

'Now I see that the officer class has no more idea of how the world works than I do; they are simply better at concealing their ignorance and confusion'

There does seem to be a very specific group of people, however, who are immune from feeling like impostors: they are the people who run our lives. For a long time, I had a sneaking regard for the well-educated, articulate people who ran the government, the major banks and the country. Like most sufferers from the impostor phenomenon, I could not help but secretly admire and covet the charismatic confidence of those privileged few – mostly white men – who seemed immune from it. They spoke, after all, with unwavering poise and bone-shuddering certainty that theirs was the only way. Surely people so undaunted, it felt natural to assume, must have some clue what they are doing?

These past two decades – an age where the many failures of those in power have included the 2008 financial crash, an unwillingness to adequately confront climate crisis and the mismanagement of a global pandemic – the answer feels clearer: No, they do not.

Now I see that the officer class has no more idea of how the world works than I do; they are simply better at concealing their ignorance and confusion (and I suspect they conceal it from themselves as well as from others). Not even the most unvarnished encounter with their own failings seems to dent their confidence or shame them into silence. They simply carry on explaining to the rest of us how the world works.

Their lunatic assurance reminds me of Monty Python’s black knight, still asserting his invincibility after King Arthur has hacked off both his arms and one of his legs. These are the people with whatever the opposite of the impostor phenomenon is – and they are the ones we really need to worry about. They also remind the rest of us that it is not so bad to doubt oneself occasionally, that those who are worried about being “found out” are often the ones who get useful work done. So if you do feel like an impostor – and even if you really shouldn’t – you may be in the best company.

What did you think of this article? Email editor@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk and let us know.

Image: Mica Murphy / Penguin

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