What is Impostor Syndrome?
If people really knew you, they could see that you shouldn't be standing here at all. If they looked closely, it would quickly become apparent that you cheated your way to your success. After all, most of your achievements were simply luck, and you were just in the right place at the right time. Do you sometimes feel this way too? Welcome to the world of Impostor Syndrome!
The term "Impostor" means fraudster, and the Impostor Phenomenon, also called Impostor Syndrome, describes an attitude with which many people walk through the world:
As soon as you achieve success, you feel as if you are a fraud.
The Background of the Impostor Phenomenon
In 1978, the Impostor Syndrome was first described by two clinical psychologists: Dr. Pauline Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes. They had found that some of their students were full of doubt about their own competencies and worried about how successful they could be. The British psychologist Jessamy Hibberd tells about this in her book "The Impostor Cure" (2019). She describes the effects it can have, and how much we can suffer from the Impostor Phenomenon:
“It can cause chronic self-doubt, fear and shame, making it hard to enjoy life or to live in the moment.”
— Dr Jessamy Hibberd, Psychologist
Clance and Imes found in interviews with 150 very successful people that despite their well-deserved degrees and titles, despite outstanding performance in tests, and despite praise and professional recognition from colleagues and authorities, they were unable to feel an inner sense of success. They saw themselves as frauds. (Hibberd 2019: 29) Therefore, the two psychologists named the newly recognized phenomenon the Impostor (= Fraud) Phenomenon.
How to Recognize that the Impostor Phenomenon Affects You
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Anyone can do that, right? That's self-evident!
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What am I actually really good at?
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My experience is useless to me. You have to be able to do XYZ to be allowed to work in that field!
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That's not my credit.
Thoughts like these are often a sign that we do not value our own skills enough and cannot clearly see our potential strengths. The feeling of not being enough accompanies us daily and sneaks into our behavior, our communication, and our self-image in a nasty way. It often prevents us from doing what we actually really want to do - and instead, we take another course, start another degree, or wait for another confirmation from someone.
All of these are signs that the Impostor Phenomenon affects you too. Depending on how strongly you feel the effects, you may now notice whether you are suffering from it or if these are rather accompanying phenomena of the Impostor Phenomenon, such as not standing up for your strengths and values, never actively communicating which tasks people should definitely turn to you for, and where they can trust you the most.
3 Tips on What You Can Do About It
Do you feel addressed right now? Do you suspect that the Impostor Phenomenon accompanies you too? Then you have already taken the first important step: recognizing exactly that. Here are 3 more concrete tips on what you can do now to refocus and free yourself from these hindering beliefs:
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Do a personal SWOT analysis
Learn here what it is and how it works.
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Treat Yourself to a waldzeit Coaching with Kerstin, who specializes in this topic.
Get your Strengths Update and find out which inner block is currently preventing you from seeing and feeling your successes as such. And learn how to resolve exactly these blocks.
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Inform Yourself About the Impostor Phenomenon.
The more you know about it, the higher the probability that you can overcome it. Get articles, books, podcasts, etc., on the subject and ask yourself what applies to you and how you can change it. The mentioned book by Jessamy Hibberd, "The Imposter Cure," is available in English as an e-book or as a paperback. You can find a guest article I had the opportunity to write for nachhaltigejobs.de here (in German).
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