UPDATE: wow, never thought this post would take off this much! thanks
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I’m sitting in an office making $30 an hour while my coworkers are making $20 in the field busting their ass, doing more physical work than me every day, bringing in the company income while I browse youtube. I used to do what they do out in the field, I have no college degree, there are people who have been here longer than I have, so why am I the one in this office when others have much more experience than I do? I fall asleep at my desk regularly. Sure every now and then I have to sign a thing saying a qualified individual who passed a test (me) acknowledges the information on the form is accurate, but I am not the only one in the office with that credential. I go home almost every day worrying that someone is going to realize actually what a waste of company profit I am and that I need to not spend the little bit of extra money I have on comfort food or nominal luxury so when I get fired I have some safety money until I can find another job at the bottom of another ladder where I probably need to be until I can actually prove myself to be worth a higher paying position, that I should only be in an administrative position like this when it feels right and I don’t feel so unqualified to be here.
That’s imposter syndrome.
Because the truth is that I often forget to consider the actual wealth of knowledge I have for my profession and often get asked questions of nuances I have retained, and commonly solve dilemmas in spite of ambiguity. I have a keen eye for successfully catching the minute but important details present in my line of work, and am naturally very thorough in the tasks I used to have to accomplish out in the field, making my review of those tasks at an administrative level helping to keep our company very efficient. The amount of subjects within this field I had to learn and continue to periodically get retested on to consistently prove my proficiency is why I’m able to legally provide the aforementioned signature. I am an expert in my field, and it’s not because I’m the best or the smartest, I am just reliable and deliberately keep up with these skills not because I’m paid to, ordered, or nagged to but because I give a shit about my abilities and about this career regardless of who’s paying: that’s why I was promoted, the owner of the company was looking to hire outside the company and every one of my superiors brought up my name instead. So I’m not an imposter, I deserved this and continue to prove my worth, I am made to be responsible for way more than my lesser paid colleagues (I could potentially go to prison for their mistakes if we weren’t as efficient in review) but because I don’t have a superiority complex, because I worked out in the field and did the dirty work for years, I feel equal to them and it feels unfair when it 100% is not. I need a reminder of this more often than seems necessary, and today this post served as that reminder 😀
The overwhelming sense that you aren’t as good (or the type of person) as people think you are
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It’s basically the opposite side of the curve as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The less skilled you are at something, the less skill you have at noticing your own mistakes or knowing how much more you need to learn, because you don’t have enough knowledge to understand what you’re lacking. This can lead to an inflated sense of confidence, which is the Dunning-Kruger Effect: Not knowing enough to recognize when you’ve made a mistake.
Imposter Syndrome happens when you become more skilled and thus more able to notice your own mistakes, and also understand where you still have gaps in your knowledge. Therefore, because you are more aware of the mistakes you make, you’re more likely to suffer a lack of confidence in what you’re doing and think that the praise you receive for your skill is unearned, even though your skill is objectively higher than other people’s. That’s Imposter Syndrome: Knowing so much that you recognize how much you still don’t know.
It’s basically thinking “Oh wow, everyone here is so smart and well put together. I’m literally just scraping by. I don’t deserve to be here. They’re going to find out that I’m just trying my best with no clue what I’m doing and then I’m going to get into trouble for faking it”
Newsflash though. Everyones faking it because nobody knows what they’re doing.
It’s a lack of confidence in what you have done, when others say you have done good.
You fabricate reasons to dismiss the postive evidence from external sources. Then promote invalid internal negative thoughts that haven’t been proven to fill the gap.
Impostor syndrome is where someone doubts their own abilities, qualifications, or expertise. More specifically, it happens to individuals who become more and more knowledgeable about their given field of expertise, which seems paradoxical. If you think about, it makes sense; the more you learn about a given field (in other words, the more of an expert you become), the more you realize just how vast the scope and depth of the knowledge in that field is. The nuances, intricacies, and details about a specific field of knowledge (of which the average person might not be aware) start to become apparent to you. You might then realize just how much there is to know about that field, and you might realize that the amount you actually DO know pales in comparison. Further, you might compare yourself to other experts in the same field, and might think that they know far more about it than you do (even though you might be just as qualified, or even more qualified than them). All of this may contribute towards the feeling of being an ‘impostor’ (feeling like you are unworthy of being called in expert, despite actually being qualified as such), hence the name ‘impostor syndrome’.
This (in my view) is the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which people with a low level of knowledge in a field tend to overestimate their competence in that field and view themselves as experts. Again, the less you know about a field, the less aware you are of the scope, depth, nuances, intricacies, and details of that field. For example, imagine a young child who got a 98% on a math test. They may very well tell you, “I’m great at math,” “I really know a lot about math,” or even “I’m an expert in math!” However, they are unaware of so much higher-level mathematical concepts, equations, problems, etc., and because of that, they are overestimating just how good they are in that field. They would be falling into the bias of the Dunning-Kruger effect. However, if you were to ask someone who had a PhD in mathematics, they would obviously know way more than the young child, but because they are more aware about the wide scope and depth of their field, they may hesitate to make claims boasting about their expertise. In fact, they may even hesitate to call themselves experts. This would be an example of impostor syndrome.
Hope this helps.
P.S. Take my explanation with a grain of salt – I’m no expert.
From a more causal perspective, there is a thing called the “dunning/kruger effect”
Essentially, those who know little know so little that they don’t understand how little they know, and those who know a lot absolutely understand how little they know.
This leads to incompetent people feeling as though they know everything, and extremely competent people feeling as though they are know-nothing fools.
Imposter syndrome is exactly the latter scenario: as an expert in the field, and given the breadth of human ignorance and the vastness of subject matter that even an expert doesn’t know, many experts end up feeling like they are faking, namely the knowledge that they know they lack. In reality, most such people operate by having the tools to get the knowledge they need, at the time they need it (rather than “just knowing it already”). While this is arguably far more valuable (knowing how to learn rather than knowing how to do), it leads to a constant feeling of struggle to achieve.
Whatever job, social event, friendgroup or hobby you’re in, you’re constantly looking around waiting for someone to notice you don’t belong there or deserve to be there. That’s imposter syndrome.
Last year, the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, said that she suffers from this. She said:
“Even though I have been in politics for a long time, I have been First Minister for four years, there will be days when I think ‘should I even be here? Is somebody about to find me out?’”
(This quote is from the Guardian newspaper, May, 15, 2019)
Exactly as described in this thread; a feeling of being found out, being a fake, even though properly qualified and experienced.
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