There have been times in my life when I’ve found myself thinking, “I don’t know what I’m doing, and everyone else seems to have figured it out. I don't deserve to be here.” Sound familiar? There’s a name for it. Impostor syndrome - the persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of success - is a common affliction that 70% of people in the world face at least once in their lives.
There are three critical attributes of this concept:
Thinking that people have an exaggerated view of your abilities
The fear of being exposed as a fraud
The continuous tendency to downplay your achievements
It can at times be debilitating and anxiety-inducing, and when I tell you it doesn’t discriminate, regardless of how successful you are, believe me.
I recently read Michelle Obama’s memoir, where she talks about having to tackle the incessant, albeit incorrect belief of “feeling like I don’t belong”. She shared that her school counsellor once told her that she was not “Princeton material”. Guess what? She made it to Princeton and then even went on to attend Harvard Law School (pretty good for someone who wasn’t Princeton material in my opinion). Despite this though, she never forgot the words of her counsellor.
“I had to overcome the question ‘am I good enough?’” she said. “It’s dogged me for most of my life. Many women and young girls walk around with that question in their minds.”
Even with her immense success, she still struggles with it.
“It never goes away,” she said. “It’s sort of like ‘you’re actually listening to me?’ It doesn’t go away, that feeling of ‘I don’t know if the world should take me seriously; I’m just Michelle Robinson, that little girl on the south side who went to public school’… It takes time and maturity and successes under your belt to realize that you’re good enough.”
Literary legend Maya Angelou shared similar feelings about dealing with impostor syndrome.
“I have written eleven books, but each time I think, 'Uh oh, they're going to find out now. I've run a game on everybody and they're going to find me out.'”
So the question is? If the people at the top of their industry, can feel this way, then how credible is this whole notion really? And most importantly, what can we do about it?
I have personally found a sense of comfort in realising that basically everyone feels this way. Billionaire CEOs, Oscar-winning actors, athletes at the top of their game.
For me, Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, put it best when he said,
“Very few people, whether you’ve been in that job before or not, get into the seat and believe today that they are now qualified to be the CEO. They’re not going to tell you that, but it’s true.”
The truth is, all of us can do much more than we give ourselves credit for. It’s important to focus on what we can do, instead of what we think we can’t. Please remember, the opportunity would not be here unless you deserved it, it is no coincidence that you made it this far!
Finally, as always…in the wise, wise words of Kris Jenner:
Written by Chaahat Kadian