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By Hana Bradley |
Published to Gleam On April 10, 2019 |
Hi, Gleam Team! Hana here—publicist for Gleam and the Herd. In PR, I’m lucky to work with ambitious, accomplished, hardworking people who inspire others … much like yourselves! And you’d probably be shocked to hear that many of the women I work with come to me with a confession. They lean in and say it softly, like they’re letting me in on an awful secret: I feel like a fraud. I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m not sure I deserve to be where I am. That’s right: These incredible, inspiring people are diagnosing themselves with Impostor Syndrome.
It’s a term we hear a lot these days, and it seems to perfectly suit that secret, shameful feeling many of us experience. But it’s nothing new; Impostor Syndrome actually came from a scientific paper published by two female psychologists in 1978. They theorized, based on their own anecdotal research, that young women were vulnerable to “impostor phenomenon,” or feeling like an “intellectual phony.” The researchers observed that, despite “outstanding academic and professional accomplishments,” many women think they’re really not too bright and that they’ve fooled anyone who thinks otherwise.
They published the study, and the news went … nowhere. That’s because follow-up studies couldn’t link impostor phenomenon with gender or, specifically, with high-achieving women. And in 1993, one of the original researchers retracted her theory, admitting that the “syndrome” they’d originally identified actually applied to—wait for it—80 percent of the population. Old, young, male, female, anything in-between—almost all of us have these feelings.
And that should’ve been the end of it: Whoops, sorry, #notathing. But no. The term took on a life of its own—you’ve almost definitely heard a friend invoke it after nabbing a promotion, and maybe you’ve used it yourself. I have a huge problem with this debunked pop psychology term: It implies that occasionally doubting yourself is a pathology, when really, it’s just a part of the human experience. (Uh, maybe we should be worrying about the weirdos who don’t occasionally wonder if they’re as great as others seem to think they are?)
Feeling like you don’t know what the F you’re doing shouldn’t trigger shame. It means you’re challenging yourself—stretching, learning, and growing. And that’s something to be proud of.
This article was adapted from Bradley’s presentation at the Herd on April 9.