Conquering Imposter Syndrome and Owning Your Success
Ever feel like a fake? Like you've somehow tricked your way into your career and everyone's about to discover you have no idea what you're doing? If you answered yes, you're not alone. Welcome to the world of imposter syndrome, a sneaky little voice that plagues high-achieving women everywhere.
High-achieving women often attribute their success to external factors like luck or downplay their contributions. This undermines their confidence and feeds the imposter narrative. Conquering imposter syndrome and owning your success is achieved by reframing thoughts and achievements, celebrating milestones, and focusing on growth versus outcomes. Your inner critic will always be there and help you in a lot of ways. Knowing when it needs to be silenced is a valuable tool for your path to success.
What is Imposter Syndrome?
Imposter syndrome, also known as the impostor phenomenon, is a psychological pattern where successful individuals doubt their accomplishments and have a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud. Despite evidence of their competence, they worry they don't deserve their success and fear being "found out." According to Ann Burey in her Harvard Business Review article, “It disproportionately affects high-achieving people, who find it difficult to accept their accomplishments.”
If imposter syndrome has been taking over your perception of your self worth and your success, it is time to take the driver’s seat in combatting the triggers and taking ownership in overcoming your self-doubt. Although imposter syndrome is typically the result of repeated hits to our confidence either through others or systems, we are still ultimately the ones responsible for our own success in managing it.
Signs You Might Have Imposter Syndrome
Discounting Achievements: You downplay your accomplishments and attribute success to luck or external factors. Ask yourself, how well do you receive compliments on your work? Do you immediately respond with ways in which you got help or play down the difficulty or importance of the task? Notice if this is different depending on who you receive the compliments from. Do you discount your achievements more when it’s a superior versus a colleague or someone outside your field?
Need for External Validation: You constantly seek approval from others to feel secure in your skills. Do you consistently run by your ideas or your work with colleagues or others to gain the extra seal of confidence? Are you constantly asking someone to read your emails before sending them? Do you seek validation through your friends on career moves by approaching the conversation around being unsure and insecure about your ideas and desires?
Fear of Failure: You avoid challenges or opportunities for growth because of the fear of failure and potential exposure as an imposter. You have grand aspirations to start a business or reach out to someone for mentorship but you live in the purgatory of inaction. Your thoughts are clouded with negative “what ifs” that always end up with feeling ashamed and embarrassed from things not working out exactly how you imagined it. This has led you to put your energy towards all of the worst scenarios instead of acting on your ideas.
The Perfectionist Trap: You hold yourself to impossibly high standards, leading to self-doubt and paralysis. It is important to remember that any action is more important than perfect inaction. At some point, you just have to start the task and give yourself room to make mistakes and improve as you work. Having standards of being perfect will only lead you to failure.
Strategies to Silence the Imposter
Reframe Your Thoughts: Challenge negative self-beliefs with evidence of your competence. The negative self-talk may come up most when you are facing a task that you don’t know how to best approach. Remind yourself that you can figure out the challenges ahead of you and you do not have to know everything or have all of the answers to start a task, you just have to start.
Celebrate Your Wins: Acknowledge your achievements, big and small. This reaffirms to yourself how you CAN tackle difficult projects. It also reinforces validating your success instead of relying on outside validation. Reflect on how you best perceive a celebration. Is it the satisfaction of checking the task off of your to-do list? Is it going out for dinner on Fridays to celebrate the week’s work? Integrate celebrations into your daily, weekly, monthly, and annual routines to recognize your accomplishments big and small.
Focus on Growth: Embrace learning and view mistakes as opportunities to improve. By giving yourself the room to not get it all right on the first go, you will still be more skilled than when you first started. Learning is a continuous process and mistakes are valuable stepping stones to the final destination. Shifting your mindset from viewing mistakes as a failure to mistakes revealing blind spots and areas for improvement helps you develop a healthy ability to bounce back after setbacks and continue progressing forward. Read more here on Activating Your Growth Mindset.
Find Your Support System: Surround yourself with a positive and encouraging network. You are just wasting your valuable energy if you have to filter out negativity and doubt from your friend circles. You need people who will celebrate the big and small wins with you, not use them against you. If you are looking for more ways to surround yourself with inspiring people, check out this blog post on Finding Your Girl Tribe.
Remember, you are not alone…
Imposter syndrome is a common struggle, but it doesn't have to hold you back. By implementing these strategies and fostering a supportive community, you can silence the inner critic and confidently claim your success. Our strongest critic is ourselves, and the more resilience we can build up against it, the more we can reach our full potential. Action is the best enemy of imposter syndrome, the more you act in ways that work against these self-deprecating beliefs, the weaker they will become and the more powerful and in control you will feel. Continue to build up your tolerance to your imposter syndrome and lay your inner perfectionist to rest!
