The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It Read Online Free PDF Page A

sparked by a host of things. When you have an “impostor moment,” it’s tremendously helpful to understand the possible reasons behind it. That’s because when you shift away from the personal it allows you to put your responses into perspective more quickly. It’s the difference between thinking
Yikes, what an
incompetent fraud I am!
and knowing
It makes perfect sense that I’d feel like a fraud. Under the circumstances, who wouldn’t?
    Not only do you no longer need to feel the shame that comes from the mistaken assumption that you’re the only one who feels this way, but as you are about to discover, feeling like an impostor is not only normal, but in certain situations it’s to be expected. This alone can go a long way toward lowering your anxiety and raising your confidence.
Seven Perfectly Good Reasons Why You May Feel Like an Impostor—and What to Do About Them
    You are about to discover seven perfectly good reasons why fully capable people like you wind up feeling like impostors. Even if you can’t relate personally to every reason, knowing about them will help you see the larger picture. None of the seven are unique to women, and most are situational. As such you may identify with one or some more than with others. However, there’s one source that everyone can relate to. Raise your hand if …
1. You Were Raised by Humans
    Since it looks like almost all of you have your hands up, we’ll spend a bit more time on what is for some the start of their impostor story. Your family—with help from teachers, coaches, and other significant adults in your life—had a profound impact on shaping your early self-expectations and, therefore, how confident, competent, and even successful you feel today. Discouraging messages especially can linger for years. In his memoir, crooner Andy Williams speaks of never having been able to get out of his head what his father had told him when he was a child: “You’re not as good as them, so you have to work harder.” They were words thatprompted a “crisis of confidence” that haunted Williams throughout his long and exceptionally successful career. 1
    Impostor feelings can be spawned by far more subtle messages as well. If you were the kid who came home with all As and one B and your parents’ only response was “What’s that B doing there?” there’s a good chance you grew up to be a perfectionist. If your parents were preoccupied with grades to the exclusion of anything else, you may have come to believe that being loved depended on being smart.
    Or you may have grown up in a family where your talents and accomplishments went unnoticed. You made honors or took home the trophy and all you heard was “That’s nice,” or worse, they said nothing. For kids, approval is like oxygen. The absence of praise during childhood can make it difficult as an adult to own your accomplishments and feel deserving of your success. If that resonates, you should know that there are any numbers of reasons why a parent would withhold praise—none of which involve a lack of love.
    Your parents may have been afraid that praise would give you a big head or that you’d come to depend on it. If you always brought home the gold, your parents may have simply come to expect it. If you had siblings who struggled academically, your parents may not have wanted to single you out for your achievements. Depending on your parents’ own education level, it’s possible they simply didn’t value schooling. Or they were raised to believe that modesty and not calling attention to oneself are virtues.
    On the other hand, you may have been lavished with praise no matter how well you did. As enviable as this may sound to the approval-deprived, unearned applause has its drawbacks. After all, if everything you did was considered remarkable, you may never have learned to differentiate between good and great, or between taking a shot and giving it your all. You may have grown so dependent on constant