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

Copyright 2011 by Valerie Young

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Young, Valerie, Ed.D.
The secret thoughts of successful women: why capable people suffer from the impostor syndrome and how to thrive in spite of it / Valerie Young.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. WomenPsychology 2. Success. I. Title.
HQ1206.Y68 2011
155.333dc23 2011016330

eISBN: 978-0-307-45273-3

Jacket design by David Tran

v3.1

This book is dedicated to the codiscoverers of the impostor phenomenon, Dr. Pauline Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes.
By putting a name to the feelings, they have helped free countless peopleincluding myselffrom needless self-doubt.

APPENDIX
The Dirty Little Secret About the Impostor Syndrome

Women dont give themselves enough credit for what they can do. You see it in the twenty-one-year-old senior just coming out of school, you see it in the Ph.D. candidate just coming out of graduate school, and you see it in the professional whos been working for ten or fifteen or twenty years.

Director of minority-student affairs at a prestigious womens college

C ountless books promise to reveal the secrets of success. This is not one of them. Youre already successful. You just dont own it. And thats what this book is abouthelping people just like you who have already achieved some measure of academic or professional success to feel successful. This book exposes the kinds of hidden fears and insecurities well known to millions of accomplished womenand menand explores the myriad of reasons why they secretly feel undeserving of their hard-won success.

For the record, you dont have to feel especially successful to relate to the dichotomy of the public face of confidence and competence on the one hand and the private voices of self-doubt on the other. You could have won the Nobel Prize in physics, an Oscar, and the respect of peers and competitors alike, and still you would wonder, What if they find out Im not as smart as they think I am? Can I really pull this off? Who do I think I am?

Fortunately, this book shows you how to, in the words of the famous Apple ad, think different. Not only about things like competence, luck, faking it, failure, and success, but about yourself. Will you become more successful as a result? Undoubtedly. Once you have the tools to transform your thinking, youll find yourself reaching new heights. In fact, this book will help you positively thrive.

Frankly, this is the book I wish Id had in 1982. I was four years into a graduate program in education and procrastinating terribly on writing my dissertation. One day while I was sitting in class, another student began reading aloud from an article by a couple of psychologists from Georgia State University, Dr. Pauline Rose Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes, titled, 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.

My head was nodding like a bobble-head dolls. Oh my God, I thought, shes talking about me! When I looked around the room, everyone elseincluding the professorwas nodding too. I couldnt believe my eyes. I knew these women. Id been in class with them, Id taught alongside them, Id read their work. To me, they were intelligent, articulate, and supremely competent individuals. To learn that even they felt like they were fooling others rocked my world.

A group of us began to meet as a kind of informal impostor-support group, where we did what women commonly do under stresswe bared our souls. We talked about how intimidated we felt when we discussed our research with our respective faculty advisors, about how more often than not we left these sessions feeling confused and inept. How wed clearly put one over on the admissions office, and how anyone who looked too closely would realize we werent scholar material after all. A few of us were convinced that certain professors had overlooked our obvious intellectual shortcomings simply because they liked us. We all agreed that these feelings of fraudulence were keeping us from finishing our dissertations in a timely fashionor, in my case, from even starting.

The nineteenth-century English literary critic John Churton Collins was right when he said, If we knew each others secrets, what comforts we should find. Just being in the company of like-minded women was tremendously reassuring. Everything was going pretty well until about the third meeting. Thats when I began to have this nagging sense that even though they were saying they felt like impostors I knew I was the only real impostor!

A few months later I came across a column in the New York Times by then ABC news correspondent and author Betty Rollin, with the headline: Chronic self-doubt: Why does it afflict so many women?feeling that accompanied each new assignment.

So one day Rollin decided to put the question to a young male producer she worked with at ABC, someone who, she was quick to point out, is as competent as he thinks he is. Heres how Rollin described the exchange:

When youre on a story, I asked him, do you ever think its not going to work out? Sure, he said merrily. All the time.

Do you worry about it? Sometimes, he said, not sounding sure.

When it doesnt work out, do you usually figure its your fault?

No, he said, sounding sure.

Suppose it is your fault. Does it make you feel terrible?

Nah, he said.

Why not?

He looked at me. Arent I entitled to make a mistake once in a while?

Its been decades since I first read those words, but I still recall how this simple rhetorical question stopped me cold. Entitled to make a mistake? This was new information to meand, as I came to learn, to an awful lot of other women too. I was beginning to see that even if the myriad of occupational obstacles facing women at that time vanished altogether, our own inner barriers might well prevent us from taking full advantage of opportunity.

I realized then that I had a choice, I could let my own secret fears continue to stand between me and my goals, or I could channel my energy into trying to understand them. I chose the latter. The impostor phenomenon or the impostor syndrome, as it is more commonly referred to in the popular media, became the impetus for my doctoral research, in which I explored the broader question of why so many clearly intelligent, capable women feel anything but.