Maybe Let’s Stop Talking About Impostor Syndrome

Maybe? Please. Can we?

Just when you thought we were done talking about impostor syndrome, here’s a new study that raises all sorts of interesting questions about whether or not it’s real and if it is, how it could be negatively impacting your career.

Impostor Syndrome Can Be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The study, which was conducted by Frontiers in Psychology claims that those suffering from impostor syndrome are locked in a horrible self-fulfilling prophecy, doomed to repeat the same patterns in their career that are ultimately leading to their inaction.

The study authors surveyed 238 college graduates on a wide variety of job-related factors, including career satisfaction, job flexibility, how they defined success, how much they knew about their chosen fields, and how much they thought they were valued in the workplace.

When they crunched the numbers, they found that people with higher levels of impostor syndrome were both less optimistic about their future job prospects and less satisfied with their current situations — and they also tended to have lower salaries and fewer promotions to their name.

Basically, if you feel like an impostor in your current career, you’re more likely to succumb to those feelings and less likely to take the action you need to find a way out. Logically, that makes sense — if you’re working in a career that doesn’t feel right, but you’re convinced that you’re not even good enough at the job you do, making any effort to ameliorate your situation feels futile. What the study — and the entire discussion about impostor syndrome at large — does is conflate job dissatisfaction with impostor syndrome without taking into consideration the fact that if you’re unhappy at your job, you might just be unhappy.

General unhappiness and malaise is a tougher nut to crack; slapping a name on it in the interest of neatly categorizing perfectly normal anxieties, concerns and emotions experienced by people across the board makes it much more palatable. Those feelings of anxiety — that you’re bad at your job, that you’re not qualified to do your job — are possibly impostor syndrome as it is currently understood in the pop psychology vernacular because they’re anxiety that’s career-specific. If you want to call that impostor syndrome, that’s fine. Maybe it is!

Consider this: feeling bad at your job is normal. Feeling like you don’t necessarily belong is fine. Humility is beautiful and anxiety is just one of the emotional responses human beings have to life. Almost everyone feels like they’re bad at their jobs at some point. Ask someone who exudes the kind of confidence you lack and see how much of that is actual, earned confidence and how much of it is fluff, meant to fill in the spaces to get through the day.

Not every day is a banner day. Some are good, some are bad, and most are right in between. There’s no cure for impostor syndrome, real or otherwise. “Fake it til you make it” seems callous maybe, to someone convinced that they don’t deserve what they’ve been given, but it’s a lot nicer than telling them to buck up, stop whining and keep at it.

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