Your Self-Doubt Is Not A Disease

The Imposter Syndrome Reimagined

Welcome to the first InPower Women newsletter on Substack! I hope you enjoy our new direction. Let me know your reactions in chat any time.

A “syndrome” is a medical term related to characteristics of your flesh and blood, not your psychology. Stop playing whack-a-mole with the Imposter and reimagine life as a woman free of history’s lies about your natural capability

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Listen to the audio of this newsletter

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Today’s Story: The Imposter Syndrome is your friend.

I often feel that my work to inpower myself and others is merely a game of whack-an-imposter, played on the gameboard of people’s minds. It just keeps popping up! That sick, gut twist of anxiety, shame, and guilt jumps up over and over, no matter how many times I slam it down. It keeps urging me back into hiding so I won’t be outed for my audacity to pretend I don’t have flaws. It plagues every one of my female clients. 

Every. Single. One.

Like everyone I know, women and men, I fell prey to the Imposter Syndrome during my early career successes, which is no surprise since it was “discovered” in 1978, less than a decade before I formally entered the workforce. Studies by two female clinical psychologists who noticed a trend in the women they helped, Dr. Pauline R. Clance and Dr. Suzanne A. Imes, named this pattern as the imposter phenomenon. These researchers highlighted the feelings of accomplished women who, despite their achievements, felt “less than,” attributing their success to luck, timing, or their ability to disguise the fact that they were incompetent. 

The Imposter held me captive even before I achieved career success, and the bars of its prison became reinforced when I heard other women talk about how they struggled with it. We are not alone. Women as accomplished as Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, Sheryl Sandburg, and Michelle Obama admit to dueling with it, even (especially!) when they are at their most powerful. 

I’d learned to live with the Imposter until I lost a huge business deal back in the day. My prospective client’s backchannel feedback? They worried I would “play small” on their behalf. 

And here I was, thinking I’d been playing big. But I wasn’t. The Imposter had me by the throat.

Stunned, I walked the streets of D.C. for an hour, gradually waking up to the fact that accommodating my Imposter meant I would never succeed in achieving my dreams. 

That’s when I got serious about inviting the Imposter off the whack-a-mole gameboard and into a true smackdown, for myself and on behalf of all the women I worked with over the following two decades. 

In this ongoing punching match, I learned I’ve been wrong about the Imposter all along. 

Turns out, the Imposter Syndrome is not a disease implanted in women’s bodies like Sickle Cell or Down Syndrome, passed down in the genome. Instead of a medical condition, it’s a conditioned mental and emotional response to messages we’ve received from our environment, and it can be changed. The Imposter Syndrome can be:

• An ally 

• A problem for men, too

• Overcome with small, persistent techniques and larger mindset shifts

Today, after calling a truce with this insidious nemesis in my own life, I’m pissed off. Why had I felt so powerless to it for so long? Why do I find my most accomplished and capable clients so bedeviled by it? Where did it come from, and how the hell do we all get rid of it?

Here’s a video interview where I explore some of these ideas in more deth:

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Eve’s Story and Eve Reimagined are a new feature of InPower Women, based on my shift to provide more direct tools and approaches to help women heal their broken relationships with power.

Eve’s Story: When did we first start feeling like imposters?

Curious about how far back we might find evidence of successful women feeling undeserving of credit for their accomplishments, Jennifer and I asked our handy-dandy AI assistants for help. Did the Imposter appear when women burned their bras in the '60s and went to work to support their families in the ‘70s and ’80s? When we entered the workforce en mass in World War II to help keep the economy afloat and manufacture the American war machine? When we got the right to vote in the US in 1920? 

Surely, Marie Curie, the only person ever to win two Nobel prizes in two different sciences, wasn’t pursued by the Imposter in 1903 when she accepted her first award, the first woman ever to do so! Or Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the British suffragette movement at the turn of the twentieth century, could not have harbored the Imposter underneath her fiery determination to get women the vote. Could they?

They could. They did. 

Must be farther back... 

Digging deeper, we found self-reported evidence from powerful women throughout history, documenting their personal feelings of inadequacy and how it drained their energy to do great things. This includes (but is not limited to):  Elizabeth I of England, Queen of England (1533–1603) ; Catherine de' Medici, Queen of France  (1519–1589); Nūr Jahān, Empress of the Mughal Empire (1577–1645); Christine de Pizan, writer and philosopher, one of the first women in Europe to earn a living as an author–ever (1364–c. 1430); Hatshepsut, Queen of Egypt (1479-1458 BCE); and Empress Wu Zetian, Empress of China and the only female emperor in Chinese history (624–705).

Crap. 

You know what this means, don’t you? These are just the written reports of the Imposter infecting our minds, speaking to us through a history that precedes these written records where women have often been subjugated as property. Why should we believe it didn’t exist before then? Why shouldn’t we see the Imposter Syndrome as a product of socialization that legitimized denying women recognition for their power as far back as Eve, and further?

Think about it. 

If you were a woman in a society where you could not have a bank account (c.1765-1970 USA), couldn’t vote (c.1765-1920 USA), and were considered legally non-existent as a separate entity once married (Medieval Europe-1966 USA), wouldn’t you feel vulnerable if you achieved the very types of power these laws were intended to prevent? 

Throughout history, power has made women targets. To be fair, powerful men are targets, too. But while women become targets for their gender, men become targets despite it. A man’s power alone can make him vulnerable, but it can also make him more powerful in a way women often find impossible to navigate, even today.

If your survival and safety depended on excommunicating your own power, might you not seek the ally of the Imposter to help protect you? To talk you out of trying to use whatever power you had in the world or go after it at all?

Of course, you would. You’re not stupid. You’re powerful. You’d take the Imposter’s hand in a second to stay alive and keep yourself and everything you cherished safe. You’d do just what Eve did. You’d choose life and love over threat and fear. 

This made the women of yesteryear who didn’t do that, and women today who brave public humiliation and death threats in the effort to gain and use power, even more laudable. 

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Reimagining Eve: What if we’d never been syndromed to begin with? 

But what if Eve had never been subjected to such emotional, financial, physical, and legal abuse? What if women throughout history suffered from the Imposter the same way men did–and do–not as a social disease but as a natural psychological ally? 

Yes, men fight the Imposter, too. The Imposter rides the coattails of power straight into everyone’s heart. 

Powerful people of every hue and gender expression face powerful risks with outsized downsides, greater consequences, and ruthless competition. Powerful people have fewer role models and few rules to follow. And they’re all just making it up. No one tells them this until they achieve the power others made look so easy. 

Attaining power of any sort, brings the Imposter to the fore, not to drag you down but to help you gather your strength to deal with all the risk that power brings with it. The Imposter is not an illness but an emotional immunization against the very real dangers of gaining and wielding power of any sort. 

The Imposter gives you a reason to overcome your fears, whether you’re a newly single parent, the only one like you at a table of powerful people, the first college graduate in your family, or anything else you’ve personally never been, doing anything you’ve personally never done. If you look objectively back at your own relationship with the Imposter, you’re likely to find as many instances where it helped you be more mindful with the power you had as it held you back from gaining power in the first place.

If you proactively invited your Imposter to help you overcome your fears instead of subjecting you to them, who might you become?

That’s the question we’ll be using to reframe our personal stories and relationships with our Imposters this month. Get ready.

Power Links:

• Interview with Dana on The Office Housewife, Boundaries and The Imposter Syndrome

• Does the Imposter trigger you? Learn to detrigger yourself

VIDEO COACHING TIPS: Mindset Shift-Imposter Syndrome

Mastermind Subscribers: Join us next week in chat and on October 16th in Zoom to share your story, your Imposter, and how to engage it in helping you gain and ma nage your power to make things better in the world. 

InPowering Powerful Women,

Dana Theus
Executive Coach
InPowerCoaching.com

Follow me on my YouTube channel and LinkedIn, for InPower clips and tips, (2-3 minutes tops) taken from these newsletters, blog posts, client advice, and whatever I’m thinking of.