The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It

Like all impostors you are a master at coming up with ways to explain away your successes. See if you recognize yourself in any of these statements.

Throughout this book I’ll be encouraging you to both get support from and give support to fellow members of the Impostor Club. I mention this now because you may have learned the hard way that sharing with people who don’t get what you’re going through is often not helpful. Your family, friends, or close colleagues either pooh-pooh your self-doubt,

“The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women.” Among the 162 high-achieving women they sampled, Clance and Imes uncovered a pervasive pattern of dismissing accomplishments and believing that their success would disappear once others discovered the awful secret that they were, in fact, “impostors.”

Still others abandon long-cherished dreams of writing a book, becoming a photographer, or starting their own business, all in an attempt to avoid detection.

Whether success came early or late in your career, the prevailing sense among impostors is, They’ll expect me to be competent down the road, and I’m not at all sure I will be. That’s because in your mind, one success is unrelated to the next. Rather than being cumulative, each accomplishment is its own sum game. This makes success a very tenuous th

Holding back can also take the form of what Clance and Imes refer to as “intellectual inauthenticity.” You remain silent in the face of opposing opinions.

When you have an “impostor moment,” it’s tremendously helpful to understand the possible reasons behind it. That’s because when you shift away from the personal it allows you to put your responses into perspective more quickly. It’s the difference between thinking Yikes, what an incompetent fraud I am! and knowing It makes perfect sense that I’d fe

switched career preferences away from those involving strong math skills after being exposed to TV commercials depicting women fussing over their appearance or engaged in stereotypically female activities23

If you believe that up until now you’ve somehow managed to fool people into thinking you’re smarter or more talented than you “really” are, then what’s your number one fear going to be? Being found out, right? Perpetually waiting to be “outed” as an impostor is stressful and exhausting.