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IMPOSTORGREAT

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Tina Fey and Sheryl Sandberg, Meryl Streep and Maya Angelou—a legion of wildly talented,

exceptionally successful women have fallen prey to the Impostor Syndrome. They live in constant fear

of being branded a fraud or unmasked at their next public outing. PARIZAAD KHAN SETHI comes face

to face with this peculiar beast

IMPOSTORIMPOSTORIMPOSTOR

Vogue Italia, February 2012

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uthor Samhita Arni was at the col-ourful, fl uttering tents at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2012, attend-

ing a session by Tom Stoppard, the British playwright whom she

had long admired. Emboldened by the atmosphere of literary

inquiry and an untempered frisson of excitement at the sight of her hero, she put

up her hand to ask a ques-tion. “I was really inter-

ested in the ways that science in-

forms his work—from chaos theory in Arcadia, to physics and dimensions in The Real Inspector Hound.” In my excite-ment, I asked him a question about how scientifi c theories infl uence him in terms of ideas, and also in the construction of his plays,” she says. Like the majority of impromptu ques-tions asked at conferences and symposiums world over, Ar-ni’s query was not fl awlessly phrased; it didn’t elicit much of a response from the playwright and earned her the irrita-tion of fellow Stoppard-watchers.

For most people, that incident would have created a mo-ment of mental self-fl agellation and a few hours of residual embarrassment, only to be forgotten the next day. For Arni, however, it reinforced and drove home a long-held belief: that she was not intelligent, and only pretending to be so had got her this far.

Everyone’s personal defi nitions of achievement and suc-cess vary, but even by average human standards, Arni is above the median. The 30-year-old Bengaluru-based writer was fi rst published when she was 12; The Mahabharata: A Child’s View was an illustrated retelling of the epic. It was translated into seven languages and required her to do her fi rst international book tour at the age of 15. Her second, the graphic novel Sita’s Ramayana, was a New York Times Bestseller. Another book published by Penguin, The Miss-ing Queen, followed; she’s also been a scriptwriter for a fi lm directed by Locarno award-winning fi lmmaker Sabiha Su-mar, and a head scriptwriter for a 13-part TV series for Af-ghan TV. She has the kind of résumé that would be diffi cult to fi t into the prescribed one-page format. She didn’t neglect her family either; her last two books and the fi lm were done in the four years she spent being a primary caregiver to her grandmother who had Alzheimer’s. She admits that manag-ing her deteriorating condition, while struggling to have a career and make an income, was challenging.

Yet, Arni is part of an accomplished and successful breed of women who suffer from the Impostor Syndrome. First described in a 1978 paper titled ‘The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women’ by Georgia State University psy-chologists Dr Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, the Impostor Syndrome, as it’s more popularly called, “refers to people who have a persistent belief in their lack of intelli-gence, skills or competence. They are convinced that other people’s praise and recognition of their accomplishments is undeserved, chalking up achievements to chance, charm, connections and other external factors,” writes Dr Valerie

Young in The Secret Thoughts Of Successful Women.‘Impostors’ feel they got lucky, had good connections,

were at the right place at the right time, had a lot of help—there’s several crutches they use to minimise their success. This is how Arni explains her feelings about writing a book at eight. “I felt it wasn’t that remarkable to write a book. It was, after all, just a retelling, and the epic has been retold so many times. Most children write diaries or stories and this was simply an extension of that,” she says.

FAKING ITThe Impostor Syndrome is not an obscure condition that affects lab mice and 0.00001 per cent of the human popula-tion. It’s so prevalent among high-achieving people that, if it were not so believable, you could almost accuse them of do-ing it to be trendy. What follows is name-dropping of epic proportions, but bear with us: Sheryl Sandberg, Tina Fey, Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, Michelle Pfeiffer, WHO Direc-tor-General Dr Margaret Chan and several high-ranking executives have gone on record to say they constantly feel they’re not worth the hype and that soon enough someone will fi gure it out.

And success often makes an ‘impostor’ more nervous: they might be called on again to repeat their great perfor-mance and will be uncovered as a fraud. “I have written 11 books but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to fi nd out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to fi nd me out,’” said Maya Angelou. Doesn’t that almost sound like an internet meme? Like one of those obviously phony quotes that are attributed to Einstein or Lincoln. Yeah right, you think, Maya Angelou said that? But it’s not so funny when you realise Maya Angelou did say, and feel, that.

“It’s not a matter of confi dence,” says Young, a leading expert on the syndrome. She’s given hundreds of lectures on the topic, and fi nds that people who are confi dent could still identify with it and, though men are not immune, women are more prone to feeling like impostors.

THE UNDERDOGThere are reasons why women suffer impostor feelings more than men. “If you walk into a class or a conference or a workplace and you look around and not many people look like you, it can have a negative effect on your confi dence. The higher you go in an organisation, there are probably going to be fewer women,” says Young. Added to that is the dated but unfortunately internalised stereotype of a wom-an’s ability at the workplace. “Women do work harder and tend to be perfectionists who are more critical of their own work because they feel people are more critical of women as well,” says Young.

Research also fi nds that women are more likely to inter-nalise failure and blame themselves if something goes wrong. “If they failed a diffi cult exam, a woman is more likely to say, ‘I don’t belong in engineering,’ while a young man is more likely to say, ‘I guess I didn’t study hard enough,’” says Young, explaining how the Impostor Syn-drome holds women back more.

Women are not the only minority, however. Being ‘differ-ent’—like an ethnic minority or coming from a disadvan-

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taged socio-economic strata of society—might also be a con-tributing factor. Young herself suffered from impostor feelings as a graduate student. “I was about 25 years old, and at the same university where my mother was working as a second shift custodian—a janitor—at the time I was get-ting my doctorate,” she says. “You feel quite out of your ele-ment, that you don’t quite belong there.”

Women also tend to have a more layered definition of suc-cess, making the situation more complicated for them. “Suc-cess can separate us from other people. It makes us differ-ent. We’ve distinguished ourselves from our family and our community so that we stand out, and it can be uncomforta-ble,” says Young. Arni admits her precocious success was a source of distress when she wanted to make new friends as a child. She would hide the fact that she had written a book and is uncomfortable about disclosing it to potential suitors even today. “I feel that it could be a major deal breaker,” she says, echoing many women’s secret fears that there is such a thing as too successful. Look around you and chances are you will know at least one accomplished woman who has downsized her achievements to gain points for likeability.

At a time when more and more Indi-an women are taking up jobs and mak-ing careers outside the home, these feel-ings are a very real struggle. “An increasing amount of women are join-ing the workforce, many of whom come from families in which they are the first generation of working women,” says Mumbai-based psychiatrist Dr Amit Desai, who sees an increasing number of them with manifestations of the Im-postor Syndrome. They usually seek his help for professional stress, which of-ten, on further questioning, turns out to be feelings of inadequacy in the com-petitive professional environment. Though they are highly qualified, with degrees from prestigious universities in In-dia and abroad, most have deeply ingrained feelings of in-adequacy about themselves.

Namita Sarma, who has been a successful IT profes-sional for the past 18 years, admits she suffers from im-postor feelings. The 43-year-old now lives in Minneapolis, USA, but grew up in India, with what she calls “Indian culture and norms”. “We were taught not to speak too highly of ourselves, as it was considered egotistical or disrespectful,” she recalls. Her lack of confidence in her own capabilities started young. In school, her top ranks and high academic achievement would always take her by surprise. “During our childhood, no one told us that we were good at certain things, or did a great job [performing a certain task]. My family took it for granted and never praised us for any achievement,” she says, talking about her four siblings and herself.

For Indian women, a fear of success and exceeding the boundaries of the role that society expects them to fulfil might be another contributor. Dr Desai says, “They might

have been raised in an emotionally constrictive environ-ment, developing a negative mindset about their abilities, [even though they might have] an ambitious attitude,” he says. That might be what’s causing many women to ques-tion where they fit in and if they deserve to be there.

Young finds this situation is not uncommon. “If your family’s expectations were for you to reach a certain level, and you far exceed that, you sometimes wonder, ‘How did I get here?’ You didn’t imagine yourself there as a child growing up,” she says.

Sarma seems to be well on the road to figuring out her place, and the inspiration comes from an unlikely source: her two sons aged 14 and 10. “I am learning a lot from rais-ing my kids in the US. They seem so confident about them-selves, often saying, ‘I am so good at this.’ I used to be sur-prised first. Now I am learning to say the same thing about myself,” she says. It also helps to be in a workplace where “co-workers and my supervisor think I am the expert in cer-

tain areas and they seem to have more confidence in me than I have in myself.”

CHANNEL CHANGEArni, after several highs and lows, fig-ured out the formula to heal. Three years ago, she spent six months in Afghanistan for a scriptwriting gig and that taught her a few things. In a land where her previous achievements did not have much cultural currency, she re-invented herself. “My qualities were more important than my achievements. Was I friendly, sincere, empathetic and easily adaptable? Did I have courage and fortitude? Personal qualities became more important than achievement, tal-ent or intelligence,” she says.

For some people, the Impostor Syn-drome drives them to bigger, better,

greater feats. For others, the fear can be all real—paralys-ing and stifling their personal and professional growth. Like Arni found, change is not easy, but entirely possible.

The recipe is seemingly simple: “Our unrealistic, unsus-tainable expectations of ourselves is what needs to change,” says Young. She tells her audiences that non-impostors are no different in intelligence or competence. “The only dif-ference is they think different thoughts. I teach people not to never experience self-doubt, but how to talk yourself down from it faster,” she says. You have to think different thoughts, even though you don’t believe them, and do things that scare you even though you’re scared. “Ulti-mately the feelings will catch up and you’ll gain confidence. Feelings are the last thing to change.”

There’s a bright side for people waiting to break this cy-cle. It takes a significant degree of introspection and self-reflection to develop the Impostor Syndrome in the first place. “I think there’s a level of emotional intelligence to impostor feelings. I actually worry about people who have never had a moment of doubt,” says Young. “They scare me. There’s an arrogance to that.” n

“If your family’s expectations were for you to reach a certain level, and

you far exceed that, you sometimes

wonder, ‘How did I get here?’”

—Valerie Young, author, The Secret

Thoughts Of Successful Women