According to a 2020 KPMG study, Imposter Syndrome affects approximately 75% of female executives. Males don’t appear to be as affected by it as much. A
Workplace Insights article from April 2023 puts it only at 12%, while others put it as high as 20%. Interestingly, one of the reasons cited for the lower stats for men is their reluctance to talk about it. Surely that’s a sign of Imposter Syndrome right there!
The feeling of Imposter Syndrome
Regardless of the accuracy or otherwise of the belief, Imposter Syndrome is experienced as a sensation in the body. You don’t feel good enough for the job. You feel as though you’ll be found out as a fraud and then kicked out. That would be so humiliating!
These bodily sensations are the end result of thoughts that we generate when we encounter the situation in which we feel like an imposter. It plays out like this:
You’re sitting in the Boardroom with your ELT colleagues waiting for the CEO to arrive and the meeting to start. You see your colleagues as they are doing their thing.
As you observe the scene, your brain interprets the signals from your senses and assesses what it thinks is happening. Part of this assessment includes drawing on memories that are not part of the current scene, but yet are given importance as though they are. This assessment then becomes about what it thinks is happening, not what is happening.
Based on the assessment of the scene and memories it has decided to include, your brain might conclude that you are not good enough to be in the room because everyone else looks, acts, or sounds more qualified than you to be there.
If your brain concludes that it doesn’t like what’s in the room, it will send a signal to your body that you find undesirable. You may even label that sensation as nervousness or anxiety.
Most strategies fail at overcoming Imposter Syndrome
The process above is automated and can’t be changed. Your brain chooses the thoughts it believes will give it the most accurate assessment of the situation. By the time you realise you want to have different thoughts you’re too late.
And this is why most actions for overcoming Imposter Syndrome fail. When you are told to think differently you are trying to replace automatic thoughts with manually generated ones. You will always lose with this strategy.
Deactivate the sensations
The only reliable way to move away from Imposter Syndrome is to work with the sensations the brain sends to the body in relation to it. We work with them by experiencing them and paying attention to them, all without reacting.
When you feel the sensation in your body that causes you to feel as though you are an imposter give your 100% close attention to the sensation. Don’t have any thoughts about it at all. If thoughts come up, ignore them and go back to the sensations - even while the thoughts scream loudly in your head. Just focus on the sensations.
Don’t make the sensations wrong by thinking I should feel more confident. Don’t justify them by thinking I have a right to feel this way. Don’t try and own them by thinking I always feel this way in these meetings. Don’t label them by giving the sensations a name like nervousness, and don’t try and suppress it by ignoring the sensations. Just pay attention to them and see what they do.
Nothing lasts forever
When we pay attention to the sensations we are giving them an opportunity to deactivate themselves. They do this naturally and without any effort from us. Just let the sensations rise, exist for a period of time (it will usually be less than a minute) and then watch as they subside. When they subside they are deactivating themselves and they will then be gone. When they are gone, they can’t bother you again. You will then be free of the Imposter Syndrome.