IMPOSTER SYNDROME

PHILOSOPHY

In many challenges, both personal and professional, we are held back by the crippling thought that people like us could not possibly triumph given what we know of ourselves: how reliably stupid, anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lauded around us. The root cause of impostor syndrome is a hugely unhelpful picture of what other people are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we fail to imagine how deeply flawed everyone else is beneath a more or less polished surface. The impostor syndrome has its roots in a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited source of information. The solution to impostor syndrome lies in making a crucial leap of faith: that, despite a lack of reliable evidence, everyone else must be as anxious, uncertain and wayward as we are. The leap means that whenever we encounter a stranger, we are not really encountering a stranger, we are encountering someone who is – despite the surface evidence to the contrary – very much like us. Therefore, nothing fundamental stands between us and the possibility of responsibility, success and fulfilment.

This article is from The School Of Life

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