It’s funny how life works.

When something has been occupying a lot of your time, it feels as though you see it everywhere. Or is it just that you’re seeing it more often that leads you to think about it all the time? Either way, I’m going to be telling you about something I learned about mental health today. Specifically, I’m talking about The Impostor Phenomenon, also known as Impostor Syndrome, Impostorism, or the Impostor Experience. It’s sort of complicated like that.

I want to talk about this because I find it super interesting for a few different reasons. It’s equal parts interesting for me in a run of the mill curiosity way, but also something I feel I want to understand better because of the place it holds in my life.

I’m fascinated by the way people think. We’re super simple and super complicated at the same time and it is endlessly interesting to me.

I try to surround myself with people that I think are cooler than me. They’re exciting, intelligent, erudite, and empathetic and I learn a great deal from being around them. Accomplished and deeply talented in their own ways, they’re exceptional people. But when you ask them about themselves, it’s as though they don’t see the same person that the rest of us see.

It would be easy to pass it off as polite humility, but there’s a point where it’s past being well mannered. I could have conversations with them where they’d deny any and all aptitude that they have for their subject of expertise, when not a week before I’d see them performing at the top of their game.

Earlier this week I had been watching TED Talks online when I found an animation of a talk by Elizabeth Cox from this past August, which you can watch below.

Essentially, The Impostor Phenomenon is an intense feeling of being a fraud who is lucky to be where you are or and that you don’t belong in your own circles, be it professional relationships or more personal ones.

Dr. Pauline Rose Clance noticed a trend through her work as a therapist that has become the basis for investigating the subject. Despite any academic achievements or consistently high performances, many of her undergraduate patients felt that they were out of place at their university, some even justifying their belief by saying that there must have been an admission error.

I did some reading myself, and I’ve put together a diagram that breaks down the steps of this feeling:

 

To run you through it, I’ll use entering a competition as an example.

1. From the moment that the submission date is set, you’d feel anxious about it and doubt yourself even before you begin any work. From here you would respond by being drastically over or under prepared, either overly exerting yourself or procrastinating.
2. When you would win the competition as you want to, then there would be a brief period of accomplishment or relief that comes with winning your reward.
3. If you were overly prepared and won, you’re likely to view your award as being purely the product of a great deal of hard work and not any actual talent or skill. If you instead procrastinated and won, you’d pass off that same reward as something that you were lucky to get, again, despite your own abilities and talents.
4. Regardless, the feeling of achievement is often short lived, and when you would be given any positive feedback or praise, you’d be likely to completely disregard it altogether in favour of focusing on anything that went wrong.
5. This heavy focus on the negative aspects of a performance can build up feelings of inadequacy in your work and, in cases such as the ones Dr. Clance dealt with, you may even feel that you’re a fraud amongst your peers. This self-detrimental perspective impacts you over time, and you’ll likely be inhibited by the time the next goal pops up on your radar.

One last thing I’d like to make note of is that Cox spoke about pluralistic ignorance in the talk, explaining that it’s a factor in feeling like an impostor. Defining this is a little more complicated than any experience I have with social psychology, but practically it is the feeling of being an outlier in a group because you cannot know all the internalised beliefs of the others in the group, despite not being an outlier at all.

The best way to help tackle this is to be open with each other. Cox ends her talk by saying:

We may never be able to banish these feelings entirely, but we can have open conversations about academic or professional challenges. With increasing awareness of how common these experiences are, perhaps we can feel freer to be frank about our feelings and build confidence in some simple truths: you have talent, you are capable, and you belong.

Support each other if you see someone you know struggling with these feelings. Be there for them. If you’re struggling with feelings like the Impostor Phenomenon, you are not alone, reach out for help if you need.

Thanks for reading! If you’ve made it this far down, leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Be kind to one another!

Tom