How to Reap the Benefits of Impostor’s Syndrome
So this is our design expert…
This is how my boss introduced me to a Fortune 100 client. It was my first design job. I tried to pull my shit together and pretend to be a “design expert” as much as possible. I felt like a total fraud.
What does it mean to you to feel like an impostor?
The dictionary definition of impostor is someone who “pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain.”
Unless you’re a conman like Leo from Catch Me If You Can or Jennifer Love Hewitt in Heartbreakers, most of us who feel like impostors are rarely doing anything with malice. The harm we inflict is on entirely on ourselves.
Here are some impostor syndrome examples from my life…
- I coach designers in their job search, and most of my students are far more talented than I am
- I sell courses on wireframing and UX Portfolios. I don’t consider my own wireframing skills or my own portfolio to be that good.
- I don’t feel quite like an “entrepreneur” because that term indicates a level of success I don’t have, yet I do “entrepeneurial-y” things
- Friends look to me as a mature source of reason. I am still quietly laughing inside.
Over time, I’ve learned to not only deal okay with impostor’s syndrome, but also leverage it for good. Those learnings are codified into three steps I’ll share with you now.
Step 1: Normalize it
Managing impostor’s syndrome started by realizing that I wasn’t alone in this feeling. Almost everyone experiences impostor’s syndrome in their lives. Research backs this up:
70% of people will experience at least one episode of this Impostor Phenomenon in their lives (Gravois, 2007)
This finding is even more powerful with countless examples from executives, high performers and celebrities who consistently feel like frauds:
- “Every year, about 2/3 of new Stanford Business School students raise their hands to the question ‘How many of you in here feel that you are the one mistake that the admissions committee made?’” (Olive Cabana, author of The Charisma Myth)
- “Out of 21 great graphic designers I interviewed in my book, all but two –Massimo Vignelli and Milton Glaser — said they experienced that sort of fear of being found out, or not being able to repeat their successes, or suffered impostor syndrome.” (Debbie Millman, Designer, producer of Design Matters podcast)
- “There are still days when I wake up feeling like a fraud.” (Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO)
Half of my battle with impostor’s syndrome was remembering that I wasn’t the only one experiencing it. De-isolating myself from the fallacy of I’m the only one helped greatly.
Social media and advertising conditions us to believe that life should be perfect and legendary all the time. Which makes us forget that it’s okay to feel shitty from time to time.
The more we fight impostor’s syndrome, the more we give it power. It’s not anything to “get rid of” just as much as we can’t get rid of the sting of rejection. But it is something that can be managed, something that we can relate to on a healthier level.
In fact, impostor syndrome can help us in more ways than you might assume.
Step 2: Make it Useful
From an evolutionary standpoint, if everything felt good all the time…there would be no human progress. Without the motivation or need to solve problems, we’d already be extinct as a species.
So let’s take an experiment and change our relationship to impostor’s syndrome.
In step 1, we saw how I.S. is a normal part of our human condition. In step 2, we can think of impostor’s syndrome as a potentially useful feature of our human condition.
IT’S A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
There’s a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is the inability to recognize one’s own ignorance or lack of skill. The two researchers who named this bias conducted a study with university students, with these findings…
The group of competent students underestimated their class ranks, while the group of incompetent students overestimated their ranks (PDF from Colombia University)
Interesting implications, right?
There’s a chance that underestimating oneself (a common symptom of impostor’s syndrome) can lead to self improvement, which leads to competence.
competent students tended to underestimate their own competence, because they erroneously presumed that tasks easy for them to perform also were easy for other people to perform.
Counterintuitively, the same study suggests that…
imposter’s syndrome correlates with success, and that those who don’t suffer imposter symptom are more likely to be the real frauds. (Quartz)
Impostor’s syndrome can also be used as a cue to learn from others. It’s all a matter of reframing.
Impostor’s Syndrome: Omg, everyone here is so much smarter than me.
Reframe: This is a good learning opportunity.
“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” (James Watson)
(Conversely, always feeling like the smartest person in a group or room? That’s a cue to seek more challenging environments.)
In step 2, we reframed impostor syndrome from a liability to a built-in advantage of normal-functioning human beings.
The self doubt that weighs so heavy… was a booster rocket all along. But how can we ignite it?
Step 3: Action over Identity
What matters more…what you do, or the label that defines what you do? (Rhetorical question)
The ego is the fuel of impostor’s syndrome. Ego does this by making us focus on our identities, rather than taking action.
It’s a lot more pressure to become a writer than it is to simply write. It’s harder to become a master scuba diver than it is to just scuba. (Is that how it works?)
And it’s more paralyzing to become a successful person than it is to spend time doing things you value.
You get the point. It’s easy to get caught up in what I call identity-based thinking because our egos love being fed.
The ego, or our “sense of self,” wants to always grow bigger and feel ever more important. So much that it distracts from the actual work that matters.
So next time impostor’s syndrome strikes, try letting go of the identity for a minute. Let go of being a creative, being an entrepreneur, or whatever label’s being used.
Then return to the things that deserve true attention.
Habits are the strongest weapons against impostor’s syndrome. Consistent work turns the focus on action, instead of identity.
In this journey, I realized that I didn’t have much control over becoming something, which proved to be a vague, amorphous goal. But I did have control of how I spent the most important resource in my life — time.
Impostor’s Syndrome, managed.
The three steps we covered can be used to not only manage impostor’s syndrome, but get some use out of it too:
TL;DR on how to leverage Impostor’s Syndrome for good?
- Step 1: normalize — remove yourself from isolation, realize it’s okay (and normal) to feel what you feel
- Step 2: leverage — use impostor’s syndrome as a healthy self-check mechanism
- step 3: focus on action over identity
Impostor’s syndrome can be crippling. But it doesn’t have to be. It all starts with being kinder to ourselves, and realizing everything we’re feeling — good and bad — is just part of being human.
Other fun links I found related toImpostor’s Syndrome
- ImpostorSyndro.me — weird, interactive website spins up awesome celebrity quotes about impostor’s syndrome
- The Most Important Question of Your Life — MarkManson.net
- Why 70% of Millennials Have Impostor Syndrome- The Hustle
