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 B

did get to be the chosen one, you may have felt tremendous pressure to live up to the label. Either way it’s no picnic.
    Even if you had the most supportive family in the world, you no doubtlearned to measure your adult achievements through your family’s eyes. Of course different families can have very different definitions of what constitutes success for their children. For the Korean American teenager Patti in Paula Yoo’s novel
Good Enough
, the expectation was crystal clear. Under the heading “How to Make Your Korean Parents Happy,” Yoo placed three things:
        1. Get a perfect score on the SATs.
        2. Get into Harvard Yale Princeton.
        3. Don’t talk to boys. *
    Your own messages may have been far less explicit, but still you somehow knew what success looked like. In some families it meant that you graduate high school or train to enter a trade. In others, success was getting a four-year college degree. In some that wasn’t good enough—you had to earn an advanced degree. In still others it was about the “right” college or even earning the “right” degree—often in things like law, medicine, or engineering. Then there are families for whom education was not the focus at all. Instead children were expected to go into the family business, join the military, marry and have children, enter the clergy, or grow up to be a contributing member of one’s racial, religious, or cultural group—something some African, Latino, Native, and Asian Americans refer to as “collective success.”
    What about you? How was success defined in your family? If success centered on education, what did your parents expect of you academically? What would a typical report-card conversation sound like? What did your family assume you would grow up to do or be? In the eyes of your family, would you say you’ve met, exceeded, or fallen short of their expectations? What, if anything, does your family have to say about your current levelof achievement? If your family doesn’t speak of such things, what do you
imagine
they’re thinking or feeling? Once again, what impact has all this had on how you feel about your success today?
    We all want to feel like our family is proud of us. If you’ve achieved at the level of success established by your family—and you’re good with that—then everybody’s happy. But when you succeed on different terms than what was anticipated, you may wonder,
Am I really successful?
Go far beyond what your family had envisioned, and you might feel guilty for outdoing your parents or siblings. Fail to live up to parental expectations, and you may experience shame. Either scenario can send you running to the nearest therapist.
    No matter how old you are, you never fully outgrow the need for your family’s acknowledgment and approval. But needing it and getting it are two different things. If your parents designated another sibling as the family genius, as much as you may like to, you can’t unring the bell. On the other hand, if you did happen to be crowned “the smart one,” accept that you’re not always going to be able to live up to the title. Once you make the decision to stop wasting your time and emotional energy trying to maintain your family’s approval, you’ll free up a lot of time in your schedule. You can’t change the past. The future, though, is yours for the making. Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name, George Eliot, said, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” It’s also never too late to be the confident, self-affirming person you were meant to be.
    Finally, don’t lose sight of the fact that your parents were raised by humans too. If you were underpraised, it’s possible that your parents never received praise themselves. Or maybe the reason they demanded academic perfection from you was that their parents demanded it of them—or they wish their parents had. When you can finally understand and forgive your parents, you’ll