When you achieve a personal victory, when you get a high grade on an exam, when you get a promotion, when you achieve something you set out to do, do you feel you deserve the victory or does it feel more like you just got lucky?

If you fail to enjoy your achievements, you may be suffering from Imposter Syndrome. You might be glad to hear that this syndrome is most common in the most capable people. Real impostors don’t get into these kinds of merit problems.

What is imposter syndrome?

Imposter syndrome is an overwhelming feeling that you don’t deserve the success you enjoy. You think you’re not actually as capable, smart or talented as others think you are. You explain your achievements by external factors for which you have no credit: you were lucky, you were in the right place at the right time, it just happened and so on.

At the same time, you live in terror that you will be discovered by others as an imposter, that everyone will find out what you already know: that you don’t deserve what you have achieved.

Imposter syndrome was first identified in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. In their study, they hypothesised that it affects women who have risen to senior positions in male-dominated organisations.

Subsequent studies have shown that there is no gender difference, with imposter syndrome affecting men and women equally.

Valerie Young, who has studied the phenomenon extensively, has identified five types of people who are most likely to experience imposter syndrome:

• Perfectionists, who set extremely high goals and feel they have failed even if they achieve 99% of their goals, for the simple reason that they haven’t achieved that 1%, which doesn’t matter that much anyway and when for someone else that 99% is just a nice dream.
• Experts, who feel the need to know everything about a subject and are always looking for new certifications or courses to increase their skills. These people won’t apply for a job because they don’t meet all the requirements listed. Although, you may not know this, but even the employer doesn’t expect to find someone who is a complete match and who will also accept the salary they are willing to offer. It’s like a guy who thinks he’d like to meet a tall, lean, big-breasted, double PhD, rich chick but knows in his heart that that chick, if she existed, would never look at him. But that doesn’t stop him from hoping. So does the employer. The same people are afraid to open their mouths in the classroom or in meetings for fear of embarrassing themselves. Somehow on the principle of “better to keep quiet and look stupid than to talk and remove all doubt”. Again, a catastrophic error, because that leaves room for others to make themselves stand out, people perhaps less talented but with less doubt about personal competence.
• The natural genius, who finds it easy to do a lot of the things he sets his mind to, at some point inevitably runs into things that don’t come out right the first time. Which doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not talented at those things. But he comes to the conclusion that he’s an impostor, because, look, it doesn’t come out right.
• Lone wolves, who think they have to do everything themselves, conclude that they are impostors when they have to ask for help. And, as I said above, sooner or later you still end up in the position of asking for help.
• Superheroes, who make superhuman efforts to work harder than everyone else, just to show that they are not imposters. They feel the need to succeed on all levels of life, and all at the same time. When something goes wrong in one area, as it often does (rarely are they all at their best, and career, and family, and social life, etc.), they immediately become stressed and feel like they are failing altogether.
• Symptoms of impostor syndrome

Some of the hallmarks of imposter syndrome are as follows:

• Lack of self-confidence
• Inability to realistically assess one’s own competencies (they are usually undervalued)
• Attributing success to external factors
• Burnout
• Work addiction (being a workaholic): those who work countless hours of overtime, and without necessarily needing to or even being asked to do so
• Self-sabotaging their own successes
• Minimising own performance
• Fear of not living up to expectations (of yourself or others)
• Setting extremely high goals and being disappointed when you don’t achieve them at all
• Perfectionism
• Avoidance of responsibility: there are 2 diametrically opposed responses to imposter syndrome. Either you take full responsibility (perfectionism) or you avoid all responsibility. Procrastination (a word which is actually a barbarism, the correct term in Romanian is tergiversarea), i.e. the unnecessary and counter-productive postponement of things to be done, is also a method of avoiding responsibility.

What causes imposter syndrome?

The causes of impostor syndrome are complex, involving a combination of personality traits (levels of anxiety and neuroticism) and personal and family experiences.

For example, you might have impostor syndrome if your parents:

• They bullied you about your grades at school
• Compared you to others, your siblings or your peers
• Criticised you harshly for any mistakes
• Were extremely controlling or over-protective
• Constantly stressed your native intelligence (with the unspoken implication that everything should come easily, effortlessly)

Those who got straight A’s in middle school might also suffer from impostor syndrome as adults.

Depression and anxiety lower self-esteem and also produce worries about how others see us, so when they accompany impostor syndrome, they can create a vicious circle that is difficult to break.

In conclusion

Some studies suggest that up to 70% of people experience imposter syndrome at some point in their lives. It seems like a lot at first glance, but when you consider that people with impostor syndrome prefer to suffer in silence rather than ask for help, it’s not impossible.

And they prefer to suffer in silence because part of this mindset is precisely the fear of being found out as an impostor. Obviously, if you’re afraid of that, you’ll hesitate to tell anyone you feel that way. It would be an admission of guilt.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, just because you feel like an impostor in certain situations doesn’t mean you are. Most likely you’ve worked for your achievements, it’s a shame you can’t enjoy them.