Time to beat the Imposter Syndrome

Have you encountered the Fraud Police?

I have. It was many years ago, but thankfully I’ve managed to develop a thinking style and mindset that helps keep them away.

I first heard the term ‘Fraud Police’ from the singer and performer Amanda Palmer, in her wonderful book “The Art of Asking”. She was in South Africa as part of her book tour, and I had queued to get tickets to her spontaneous concert on the Friday, and then met her at her book signing the next day.

She’s one of the most interesting people I have had the good fortune of meeting. She explains the concept of Fraud Police like this:

“I’ve had a problem feeling real all my life.

I didn’t know until recently how absolutely universal that feeling is. For a long time, I thought I was alone. Psychologists have a term for it: imposter syndrome. But before I knew that phrase existed, I coined my own: The Fraud Police.

The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of “real” grown-ups who you believe—at some subconscious level—are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying:

We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.”

– Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking, pg. 42

This experience of feeling like a fake is now known as imposter phenomenon (rather than imposter syndrome), because it is not an actual disorder, but rather a collection of thought patterns and reactions to particular events that have certain results.

It is a psychological pattern that we run, where we doubt our abilities and discount our achievements, chalking them down to being lucky (rather than to our skill or knowledge). We then live with this bottled up fear of being exposed for not knowing enough and not being deserving.

No matter the positive feedback from others, or the success we achieve, we remain convinced that we are deceiving others, and thus feel like an imposter.

Consequences of Imposter Thinking

The effects of this thinking style are that we tend to hold ourselves back and limit the opportunities we take. This is because any little chance of failing would be a huge catastrophe, as it would expose us to others. We tremendously fear this exposure to others and their (presumed) associated judgement.

If we do, however, take on a task, often because we are forced to as part of our job, another effect is triggered in us, which is we either over-prepare or we procrastinate.

When we over-prepare and work crazy hours, doing way more than is necessary for a good enough result, we feel some sense of accomplishment and relief in finishing the task. Yet we discount any positive feedback we get and attribute the success to the hard work, and not our own ability or skill.

If we procrastinate, the deadline is what pushes us to frantically finish the task at the last minute, and any success is then attributed just to luck.

This continual lack of attributing success to personal ability and the discounting of external feedback or praise, only further reinforces the less useful thinking patterns and increases our self-doubt and anxiety about being caught out. These fraudulent feelings then intensify with each further success, and we can feel stuck in what is known as the imposter cycle.

How do you know you experience imposterism?

The above description might immediately ring true for us. To help identify if we have aspects of this phenomenon in our thinking style, here is a list of some of the signs that might indicate we are experiencing the imposter phenomenon:

• Being plagued with self-doubt and feeling undeserving.
• Experiencing a low self-esteem.
• Lacking self-confidence.
• Discounting our achievements and an inability to accept praise or compliments from others, and rather crediting any accomplishment to pure luck.
• Self-sabotage and holding ourselves back from advancing our position in life, e.g. not taking risks, avoiding that promotion, not stepping up to lead the exciting yet challenging project etc.
• Fear of what others think about us and how they might judge us negatively.
• Constantly feeling on the defensive, expecting criticism and avoiding any exposure to feedback for fear of being criticised.
• Procrastinating in making important decisions.
• Experiencing the fear of failure, and even the fear of success.
• Experiencing stress, anxiety and/or depression.
• Putting pressure on ourselves to be perfect, perform perfectly, reach perfection.
• Repetitive thoughts like “I am such a fake”, “I must not fail”, “It was just luck, not me”.
• Needing to prove ourselves, and be “the best”, and often comparing ourselves to others and thus feeling “less than”.
• Suffering from over-preparation or procrastination on important tasks

There are certain situations that seem to trigger this style of thinking more often, and they include when we are being asked to perform on some work task or in an academic environment.

Some people experience it more often socially, when interacting with people and feeling like they need to be worthy of the company, deserving of a friendship or that they are being compared to others. And in relationships, especially romantic ones, we can feel the pressure of a set of expectations that we need to live up to, but continually think we fail to do so, and fear being found out.

Authentic Living Instead

So if the Imposter Phenomenon is a collection of ways of thinking and feeling, that is triggered by certain experiences, then what is a more useful mindset to adopt when facing those situations?

Over the last two decades I’ve been researching, learning, and growing myself in this area, and helping my clients, and I have come to know that authentic living is a far more useful strategy.

These are the seven key aspects of this more useful mindset to start developing:

1. Normalise it
2. Move from Other Esteem to True Self Esteem
3. Move from Perfectionism to Optimising
4. Develop a Growth Mindset, specifically the ‘not comparing yourself to others’ aspect
5. Turn the Spotlight Effect off
6. Grow your Authenticity
7. Build Confidence by taking Action

Shall I expand on these seven aspects further in some more articles? If you are interested, give me a thumbs up or some sign to nudge me ;) Thanks!

Yours in authenticity,

Telana

This was first published as part of an article on Inner Coaching.