Thoughts on Impostor Syndrome

I am going to let you in on a little secret. I’m an impostor, too. After all these years, I still feel like I am going to be speaking in front of a crowd, explaining something at a meeting, I am going to hit publish on something, and the entire world is going to “see through the charade,” and realize I’m not all that good of an engineer. That I am an ordinary person, just doing ordinary things.

While I often think about these things, what has led me down the path of thinking about them this week is some reading I’ve been doing for a PhD seminar about human nature, work and leisure. Another part of the reason is that I have been struggling recently with some specific things at work. And, finally, another part of the reason is that I ran into a terrific post over at The Humble Lab on the topic of the impostor syndrome.

Some of this will be in agreement, and echoing, what I’ve read in other places. Other parts of this will be unique to my worldview (worldview warning here, for those too delicate to read things from a different perspective). Yes, this is going to be an honest post. Yes, this is going to be a long post.

Why do I feel like an impostor? For me, it is often fear. I think this is probably true of most people, if we are to be honest with ourselves.

I know many people who are afraid of public speaking. When talking to them in depth about this, what I normally find is a fear of failure. Some people who don’t get a degree or certification are hindered by a fear of failure. There are two kinds of fear of failure, I find: looking foolish in front of others, and losing control. I used to be able to climb tall towers without clips, and without fear. I could monkey the side of the RADAR tower at McGuire, 90 feet tall, and walk around on the top platform knocking wooden blocks out of their stays with a sledge. I could shimmy a 30 foot pole to reach the wind bird. I would struggle in doing those things now; I think more about what I cannot control.

So part of what drives the impostor syndrome is these two kinds of fear: fear of failure, and fear of losing control. Both of these tend to manifest themselves in another fear: the fear of missing out.

What can we do to address these fears? One answer I often hear is “man up and deal with it.” In other words, just address your fears, and get over them. There is some truth in this answer. Sometimes this is really what is necessary. My daughters have a hedgehog; this is one scared little animal. The only way the little hedgie is going to learn that it’s okay is to be placed in traumatic situations, and for nothing to happen. Sometimes we are hedgehogs, and our nails just need to be trimmed for our own good.

Sometimes you just have to deal with fear and keep going. Sometimes you are going to fail. It’s okay to fail.

To quote The Humble Lab here—

The point is, it’s what you do with that failure that defines you—not the fact that you failed at all. We need to drive a culture that encourages people to learn from failure, and grow from it.

But there is a danger in this answer, as well—that we will take this as the only answer. That whenever we face something we fear, or some obstacle, we will say to ourselves, “you can do anything you set your mind to, if you just try hard enough.” Or even “you can use every failure to learn something,” which implies that if you don’t learn from a failure, you are… a failure. The danger here is when stated absolutely, this is a lie. You cannot do anything you want to if you just set your mind to it. I cannot be a great baseball player, ice skater, or Olympic swimmer. I simply do not have the bodily attributes to do such things. And no amount of failure, with the attendant learning, is going to make me any of those things. Sometimes what you need to learn is I cannot do this.