20. The Cure for Imposter Syndrome
20. The Cure for Imposter Syndrome
Lessons from the Jennifer Coolidge School of Believing in Yourself
I don’t know the last time I met someone who didn’t profess some level of imposter syndrome.
That doesn’t mean that I think it’s good to have imposter syndrome, only that a) it’s exceedingly normal, and b) it definitionally only affects high-achieving people. (So you must be doing something right if you have it!) There’s also a big difference between just experiencing imposter syndrome and letting it be a barrier to what you want to accomplish creatively, professionally, or personally.
According to the National Institutes of Health, imposter syndrome is a behavioral phenomenon where “individuals cannot internalize their success and subsequently experience pervasive feelings of self-doubt, anxiety, depression, and/or apprehension of being exposed as a fraud in their work, despite verifiable and objective evidence of their successfulness.”
When you read it written out so irritatingly logically like that, it seems like the kind of thing that should disappear under the slightest scrutiny. But that’s not how our brains work. I can already hear your internal monologue going, “Ok, but what is ‘objective evidence’? How are they defining ‘success’?” Because of course that’s exactly what I’m thinking, too.
Especially for those of us who have made career transitions from one field into something (seemingly) unrelated, the imposter syndrome can be particularly strong. You feel like you don’t have the “right” experience, you haven’t put in the reps, and there must be some secret bank of knowledge that everyone else has accumulated that you cannot possibly ever catch up on.
At my first agency job after I left the freelance writing and theater world, we were the “brand agency of record” for an enormous multinational telecom company. Part of that engagement involved little old me traveling out to their headquarters every quarter or so, training literally hundreds of other marketing and advertising professionals at other agencies how to bring our client’s brand voice to life.
When I told my dad about this setup, he said, “Wow. They let you do that?”
To be fair, he was only saying what I was thinking. I was also thinking about how much money was on the line with this account, how much older and more experienced all the people in the audience were compared to me, and how disturbingly recently my title had been “Intern.”
What I wasn’t thinking was that my agency would never have jeopardized such a huge account by sending someone they didn’t trust. How all the older, more experienced people in the room didn’t actually know the particular information that I had to share with them. How maybe the fact that my title went from Intern to Senior in about a year meant that perhaps I was actually good at what I was doing.
Hindsight, blah blah.
In the years since then, with every role, industry, and career change, I’ve experienced some form of that same imposter syndrome. I don’t think that will ever change, and I’ve stopped trying to “get rid” of those feelings. But what’s different is that I no longer allow it to prey on my psyche the way it did in the early years. And while I don’t think there’s some magic advice that applies in all cases and will be useful to everyone, I want to share the few things that I keep in mind whenever the imposter syndrome bubbles up.
Nobody knows anything
When I was in college, renowned Hollywood agent and producer Paula Wagner came to address my class because she was an alumna of the drama school. At some point during the Q&A, someone asked her something about what her secret was to picking the right work. I don’t remember the question exactly, but it basically boiled down to “How do you move forward with confidence in an industry with so much risk?” While the exact question escapes me, her response is burned indelibly on my brain:
“The secret,” she said, “is that nobody knows anything.”
She went on to explain that rarely, if ever, are there actual right answers. Rarely is there a single, brightlined, obvious path to success. Rarely is there a special sequence of buttons that, if pushed perfectly, will open the doors to your dreams…but if pushed imperfectly will lock that door forever.
Instead, almost all of it is taste, best guesses, honest effort, spaghetti-throwing, lucky chances, timing, and being prepared. Nobody knows the right answer, so you don’t have to feel bad that you don’t either.
Certainly, building up experience in something means that your taste is honed, your guesses get more accurate, and you’re more likely to be prepared when the stars align. But that’s a far cry from “Some people have it, and I don’t.”
If nobody really knows anything, then the idea of you lacking the “right” experience is a myth. It's not that you've missed the secret bank of knowledge; the bank never existed in the first place
The Jennifer Coolidge school of life
I would watch Jennifer Coolidge do almost anything, I swear. (She was the best part of White Lotus, for sure!) She’s just one of the most effortlessly entertaining people ever, and is unforgettable in every role she plays.
Last year, she was being interviewed at a festival in Sydney, and she said this:
"I think one of the best things to cure self-doubt is just to go to really bad stuff."
Cue audience laughter.
“I’m talking about plays you hear about that are terrible—go to them,” she insists. “There’s shows on television that are terrible—watch them.”
As the laughter continues to roll, she talks about a musical she saw in college when she was full of self-doubt and self-hatred…and it was so terrible. Everyone in it. The whole production. Awful.
And she realized that if this crap got made, maybe there was a place for her in this industry after all.
By only focusing on people and achievements you admire most, she continues, you’re just going to be intimidated into inaction.
This principle applies beyond the arts and entertainment industry, of course. I am sure we can all think back on various jobs…or perhaps current jobs…and marvel at how certain people got elevated to the roles they were in. Or we can side-eye how that startup idea got funded, or that campaign idea got greenlit…
You get what I mean. I’m not encouraging pettiness and cruelty here, but sometimes we do forget just how many “successful” things are out there that we know, in our bones, we are just as “good” as.
Let them tell you no
Ok, this one is related to Ms. Coolidge’s point. At that same agency job, one of my colleagues had an email printed out and pinned to her wall. It was from the Chief Technical Officer of one of our clients in response to a long thread of discussions about us building their website. The email was a single line. It said:
“What is SEO?”
My colleague had taken a highlighter and written #FailUp on the email. She was being cheeky of course, but that CTO clearly wasn’t concerned with his lack of knowledge or experience with this critical aspect of the project and felt perfectly comfortable confessing that ignorance on a huge email chain that involved his peers and subordinates.
That email serves as a reminder to me that often the only person counting me out of being “good enough” for something is…me.
That’s not a new idea, right? There’s lots of advice out there about letting other people tell you no, setting goals to “get rejected” as many times as possible with the idea that you’ll surprise yourself with how often you get accepted, and research that shows that while men apply for jobs when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, women won’t unless they meet 100% of them.
If you think you don’t belong, you might be alone in that opinion.
Worth finding out.
Over to you
I know that this topic resonates deeply. When I was managing a team, one of the things I talked about with them most often was their feelings of imposter syndrome—all in separate 1:1 conversations. Meanwhile, I was talking about the same thing with my manager, too! It was a real wake up call that if we all felt like imposters…maybe no one was “real”?
Besides, the opposite of imposter syndrome is the Dunning-Kruger effect. And no one wants to have that!
So let’s hear it! What are your favorite strategies for moving through imposter syndrome when it comes up? Anything from this post you want to try? Let us know!
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Love the thoughts Paula Wagner shared with you. Even with 15+ years of experience in marketing, I still feel like I don't know merely enough compared to others. But, this graph really hit home. Our knowledge and expertise partially overlaps, but all of us are good in something different, and that's ok. Thanks for this post. It made my morning!
P.S. As a marketing leader, my 1:1s were also often about impostor syndrome (both with my team and with my manager), lol!
I love this so much. Somewhere along the road I was blessed with what my last boss called “a low shame receptor” - aka, imposter syndrome has no place here in my lifestyle of confidence. I don’t know what caused it, age or hormones or just not giving a fuck anymore, but it’s damn liberating.