The Impostor in the Mirror
Impostor syndrome is commonly described as persistent doubt about one’s abilities despite objective evidence of competence. The term has become broad enough to encompass everything from ordinary insecurity to the conviction that one’s career is built on a misunderstanding. At its more interesting end, however, the experience involves a specific concern: other people may hold a higher opinion of your intelligence, judgment, or competence than you believe a complete accounting would justify.
A person can accept the facts of a successful career without accepting the conclusions other people draw from them. The promotion happened, the company succeeded, the clients continue to call, and colleagues seek the person’s judgment. None of that resolves the private awareness of mistakes, uncertainty, uneven abilities, fortunate circumstances, or the considerable effort required to produce work that others experience only in its finished form.
We know our own competence from the inside and other people’s largely from the outside. We have access to the hours of preparation behind our own polished performance, the questions we were relieved nobody asked, the decisions about which we remain uncertain, and the occasions when confidence exceeded knowledge. With other people, we generally see a much smaller sample: the answer they gave, the position they hold, the decision they made, or the finished work they produced. Comparing another person’s visible performance with the entire record of one’s own internal experience creates a distorted standard even when every individual observation is accurate.
Greater expertise does not necessarily produce greater certainty. Experience expands knowledge while also improving our ability to recognize ambiguity, exceptions, competing interpretations, and the limits of what can be known. An experienced attorney sees weaknesses in an argument that a novice may not recognize. A physician with substantial clinical experience knows how much uncertainty can remain after the available evidence has been considered. An executive responsible for consequential decisions understands that several defensible choices may exist and that outcomes will depend partly on variables outside anyone’s control. If competence is expected to produce certainty, the uncertainty that accompanies sophisticated judgment can be misread as evidence that competence is lacking.
Achievement Changes the Comparison
A person who performs exceptionally well in one environment may earn entry into another populated by people who performed exceptionally well somewhere else. The strongest associate becomes a partner surrounded by experienced partners; the successful founder begins interacting with founders who have built much larger companies; the physician who distinguished herself throughout training joins a department filled with accomplished physicians. Ability has increased, while relative standing may feel less impressive because the comparison group has changed.
Advancement also brings problems that are less defined and decisions for which prior experience provides guidance rather than an answer. The executive who has spent years developing expertise in one function may suddenly be responsible for several. A new partner may be expected to manage clients, generate business, supervise younger attorneys, and exercise institutional judgment that was never required of an associate. Being qualified for advancement does not mean already possessing every ability the new role will require.
The experience of I have never done this before can become I should know how to do this already. Embedded in the second thought is an assumption that deserving the position should have eliminated the discomfort of learning it.
Each achievement can therefore introduce new reasons for self-doubt. The person moves into harder work and stronger comparison groups, then interprets the uncertainty produced by that advancement as evidence against the ability that produced it.
How High Performance Can Preserve the Doubt
Preparation, conscientiousness, checking one’s work, anticipating objections, and seeking additional information generally improve performance. They can also make it difficult to determine how much preparation the work requires when the person is using preparation to reduce the possibility of being seen struggling.
Consider someone who believes colleagues have overestimated her ability and consequently prepares for an important presentation far beyond what the assignment reasonably requires. She anticipates every question she can imagine, researches peripheral issues, rehearses repeatedly, and continues revising after the substantive work is complete. The presentation goes extremely well.
She may conclude that she performed well because she is capable and prepared appropriately. She may instead conclude that the excessive preparation prevented her colleagues from discovering how inadequate she would have been without it. Under the second interpretation, excellent performance provides little evidence against the original belief.
Repeated checking, difficulty delegating, reluctance to speak without near certainty, or postponing an opportunity until one feels exceptionally qualified can operate similarly. Each reduces the likelihood of visible imperfection while also reducing opportunities to discover what would happen without so much protection.
For some high performers, anxiety therefore contributes directly to behaviors that improve their work. The quality of the work strengthens other people’s confidence in them, while the person attributes the favorable result to the extraordinary effort required to produce it. What colleagues regard as evidence of ability is privately recorded as evidence of how hard the person must work to appear capable.
Competence, Identity, and Other People’s Regard
Intelligence or achievement may have been an important source of recognition early in life, particularly for a child who was repeatedly identified as bright, responsible, talented, or unusually capable. In other families, educational and professional achievement may have been closely connected to economic mobility, parental sacrifice, or expectations about what opportunities should be made of.
Adult experience can create similar sensitivities. Entering a profession without family connections or familiarity with its unwritten conventions can heighten awareness of what other people seem to know intuitively. Repeated experiences of having one’s credibility questioned can make professional competence an area in which evaluation receives close attention. These histories differ considerably, but each can increase the importance attached to how one’s competence is perceived.
A mistake can be corrected. What may linger is concern about what the mistake says about the person who made it and whether other people will draw the same conclusion.
This is where impostor feelings intersect with shame. Shame concerns the self under evaluation, including how we imagine ourselves in another person’s mind. Someone whose self-respect has become strongly organized around competence may experience ordinary limitations as socially revealing. Not knowing an answer, asking for help, being corrected publicly, or performing poorly can threaten an identity that has been personally important and externally rewarded.
A person may have considerable confidence in many areas and still be unusually invested in preserving other people’s estimation of a particular ability. The vulnerability lies in how much psychological importance has been assigned to that assessment.
A More Accurate Standard for Competence
Popular discussions of impostor syndrome frequently emphasize learning to believe that one’s accomplishments are deserved. That approach leaves an important fact unaddressed: some of what the person fears other people will discover is true.
Knowledge is uneven. Judgment fails. Success reflects ability and effort alongside opportunity, timing, other people’s assistance, and circumstances that could have developed differently. A promotion can be deserved while the person remains unprepared for parts of the new job. Expertise in one area can coexist with striking ignorance in another.
An accurate assessment of competence includes these limitations. It distinguishes a gap in knowledge from a conclusion about overall ability, and inexperience in a new responsibility from evidence that the opportunity was undeserved. It also recognizes uncertainty as an unavoidable feature of difficult work, particularly when decisions involve incomplete information and outcomes that cannot be fully predicted.
Other people’s opinions cannot be fully controlled. Colleagues may discover that you know less about a subject than they assumed. Someone may disagree with your judgment after learning more about how you reached it. A person whose respect you value may see you perform poorly. If preventing those experiences becomes necessary to preserve a sense of competence, an enormous amount of effort can be devoted to managing other people’s impressions rather than responding to the demands of the work itself.
The impostor’s case is built from accurate evidence used to support an inaccurate conclusion. You did need substantial preparation. You have made mistakes. Other people know things you do not. Luck has contributed to some outcomes. You are inexperienced in parts of a new role. None of those facts, considered individually or together, establishes that your accomplishments resulted from other people having mistaken you for someone more capable.
A credible assessment has to include the whole record: what you have accomplished, what it required of you, what you know, what you still need to learn, where your judgment has proved reliable, and where experience has exposed its limits. That is a more useful understanding of competence than either the fear that you have fooled everyone or the reassurance that you have nothing left to prove.
Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT works with individuals and couples in Hermosa Beach, including clients from Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes, the South Bay, and greater Los Angeles. Online therapy is available throughout California. Learn more about therapy for anxiety, perfectionism, and internal pressure or request a consultation.
