Imposter Syndrome: You deserve what you’ve achieved. You are not a fraud.
By: Abhishek Chakraborty
Tags: Business, Human Behavior, Behavioral Economics, Pyschology, Cognitive Bias

Do you ever feel like a “fraud”? Do you ever feel that you would be exposed soon? Do you feel that you simply inherited your qualities and accomplishments, and got everything easy by just being lucky — that you might not really deserve the success you enjoy right now?

A friend of mine, Reshma, recently became the new tech head in a startup. She is a humble person, one who likes to read and learn. You’ll often see her reading a book or an article when she is not busy coding. She doesn’t have a CS degree, but has worked hard to learn everything she could, as fast as she could, to reach where she is now. Leading a team of smart coders in a booming startup at such a young age surely calls for a lot of responsibility and pressure — not an easy job in any way.

Recently she confided to me that she is under a lot of stress. What if her teammates find out that she is not competent to be their boss? How will she evaluate them when all of them might already be thinking that she is not fit to be in that role? What gives her the authority or the right to judge others’ performance, or review their codes? Is she even fit to give them feedback? Do they even care about her feedback?

I tried to give her the usual pep talk a friend would give. But I didn’t know what she was experiencing is very common. I’ve seen others go through more or less a similar anxious feeling. Another friend of mine got a chance to do a nice remote gig for a startup in Denmark. It was a small team of 11 and he was going to become the only designer. He ultimately didn’t take up the job because he felt he wasn’t competent for it — even after being selected after 6 rigorous rounds of interviews.

Have you ever had similar feelings? If you happen to be good at stocks, people might often come to you for investment advice. But deep down you might feel that you just got lucky with the money. The market was good, and you fortunately picked the right stocks. Maybe you watched the right YouTube video, or read the right book, or took the right person’s advice. Not only stock pickers, in fact a lot of high value CEOs of successful companies feel the same. They feel that they were simply in the right place at the right time, and hence can’t take much credit for the success they enjoy.

Would you believe me if I tell you that even Harry Potter has felt something like that? He confesses at one point that he is not special — he has always had help from Dumbledore and his friends, and he simply got lucky most of the time.

If you are looking for an example of a real life famous person instead of a fictional character, Maya Angelou once said, “I have written 11 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.’”

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The Imposter Syndrome

This feeling of anxiety is famously known as The Imposter Syndrome.

The Imposter Syndrome is the very same internal experience of believing that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be. It is accompanied by the anxiety that others will eventually find out that you’re not as smart, creative, clever, or capable as they think you are.

These are exactly the same motions my friend Reshma is going through. She feels she will be humiliated, shamed and ultimately deemed to be incompetent, thus confirming her inner fear of being unsuitable for this challenging job into which she has been promoted, and for which she has actually worked so hard.

It is so common that in fact, according to a review article published in the International Journal of Behavioral Science, an estimated 70% of people experience these impostor feelings at some point in their lives. Impostor syndrome affects all kinds of people from all aspects of life: women, men, students, managers, actors, and entrepreneurs.

Imposter Syndrome was first identified in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. They had published a research paper which had Initially theorised that women were uniquely affected by this.

But later research has shown that both men and women experience imposter feelings, and Pauline Rose Clance later published another paper acknowledging the fact that imposter syndrome is not limited to women. Imposter syndrome can apply to anybody who isn’t able to come to terms or internalise their own successes.