I’m a successful woman but worry I don’t deserve it. How can I shake my constant self-doubt?
I’m a woman in my 40s. On paper, I’ve achieved everything I set out to accomplish. Some milestones took one or two attempts, while others came with surprising ease. I’m now a specialist in a sought-after field, hold an academic position at a university, and am married with a substantial mortgage.
And yet a persistent sense of inadequacy lingers. There’s always someone who seems to have achieved more – at least on paper. I often feel like an impostor, as if luck or connections were the real reasons I got here. When success required more than one attempt, I can’t shake the thought that I didn’t truly earn my place. If I really belonged, I tell myself, I would have succeeded on the first try.
I see men striding in with ease, seemingly free from this constant self-doubt, while I endlessly nitpick and self-criticise. I can’t seem to let go. How do I stop this cycle? What can be my circuit breaker?
Eleanor says: Maya Angelou had dreadful impostor syndrome: “I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find out.” Someone at the very top of their game, 11 books in, can still have that critical inner voice asking, “Do you really deserve this?”
One strategy is to answer that voice, to prove its suspicions wrong. You could try to answer yours by noting that even if luck played a role in your success, that doesn’t mean talent didn’t – connections help, but people don’t tend to stick their necks out for someone they don’t think is deserving. You could also point out that skill takes time to acquire: you’d never say a cellist isn’t really virtuosic if they only got good by practising.
And while lots of people might be lots better in each given area, is anyone else as good at the combination? Try to list all the different things you’re good at across your personal and professional life. It’s probably quite an idiosyncratic set – your combination of skills, your style of being. People might outstrip you on any given item, but the combination is yours. Nobody beats you at being you.
Those are great ways to answer the inner critic when it asks, “Do you really deserve this?” But you can also look for ways to refuse that question instead of trying to answer it.
We fixate on questions when we think something important turns on them. What turns on whether you “really” earned your place? If you did get there partly by luck, would that mean you didn’t belong? Not remotely; not if you do a great job now you’re there. If it does turn out there’s someone who’s achieved more, would that mean in absolute terms you aren’t any good? Not even a bit.
Maybe the trick isn’t to prove beyond doubt that you deserve your success, but to deny that being able to prove it matters much. The fact is you’re here now; you’ve arrived. You can look backwards and tally the merits. Or you can ask how you’ll use your talents and time now that you’re here.
You asked for a circuit breaker. It might sound strange, but one strategy might be to nod a little thanks to this critical perfectionist tendency. Wretched as it is to hear that critical voice when it turns on you, it might also have helped to get you where you are. It might have driven you to perfect those skills, keep going, demand more of yourself.
Another strategy might not be in thought but in action. What would it mean to treat your discomfort here as an insight? Maybe you did get lucky. Maybe every successful person does. Maybe we’re condemned to uncertainty about how our talents stack up against those of others or against an imagined ideal. What would it mean to receive that lot with gratitude and responsibility? Perhaps we’d turn outwards more, ask less about what our positions say of us and more about how to use them. Perhaps, even, we’d shift from trying to prove ourselves to interrogating the very norms that make us feel we must.
