Why do I feel like an Imposter?

You may find your best friend or your worst enemy in yourself. ~English Proverb

When I was like eleven years old there was this movie I loved staring Tony Curtis movie called The Great Impostor. It was a movie loosely based on the life of Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr a guy who passed himself off as a doctor, a prison warden, a Trappist monk, and other characters. Demara accomplished things he should not have had the knowledge to do successfully. But when I think of the word IMPOSTOR I think of myself. When I see myself as an IMPOSTOR I feel sort of like the Demara character, only for me, in my real, daily life, and I don’t seem to have Tony Curtis’s hootspa. To some people I may appear as if I were tightly wrapped, or a talented artists or writer, or smart, or maybe even brave, but I know me, and I know that none of that is true. At least that is what I think when I am feeling like the yawn, YAAAWWWWN, so-so IMPOSTOR. I might seem happy and successful to the outside world, but I have a backstage view of myself.

I use to teach drama and direct high school plays, so I built a lot of stage sets. A stage set may look like a fairly neat, nice, orderly living room from the audience side, but from back stage you see boards propping up walls, and disorder everywhere. When I have Impostor Syndrome I feel exactly like that. I am presenting a face to the world, but inside (back stage) I am a disordered mess propped up with boards. I am actually swamped by waves of inadequacy and self-doubt. I don’t believe I deserve what little success I’m suppose to have had. You could try to point out my talent, and accomplishments to me, but if I feel I’m an impostor then I will, [have and do] discount what you tell me. Instead I will believe that my success is nothing more than luck, that I have no real ability. and I am driven by a fear that my failures will be exposed, that I am going to be found out, discovered as the fraud and pretender that I really am.

If you have felt like an impostor then you will recognize what I’m talking about here. Like me, you may be able to bifurcate the matter: one part of your mind may say, “I know I’m not a total impostor, that I do have some skills, talents, and abilities, while the other part of your mind is saying, I’m a loser and eventually everyone is going to know what I know about the flakiness that is me. If you suffer from this Impostor Syndrome then you may also have the same question I have:

What do I do to counter these feelings of being an impostor?

We concern ourselves less with becoming happy than we do to make others believe we are. ~Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I can’t say I have this under control in my own life, because I don’t. But I can share with you what I try to do in my own life. This is what I’m working on.

1. Admit that you have a problem. If you suffer from Impostor-ism, admit that you are doing this to yourself. Like AA says about alcoholism, the first step is admitting that you have a problem. Just admitting that you have Impostor Syndrome is not going to make it go away, but it is a first step. Once you admit you have Impostor-ism then when you start squirming from Impostor fears you can stop and move on to step

2. When you recognize that you are exercising your Impostor Fears you can stop and argue with yourself. You can’t stop and question yourself until you admit that you have a problem. Once you recognize your Impostor Fears you can at least try to stop these critical thoughts and feelings early in the process. Impostor Fears are like going down a hill on a roller skates. If you delay putting on the breaks the faster you will go and the harder it is going to be to stop. I don’t think you can’t just cure yourself by bragging on yourself, because that becomes a sly way for your Impostor Syndrome to sneak back in to the control room. Just stop when you notice you are in the Impostor downhill slide.

3. Once you stop, write down examples of times when you have achieve something worthwhile. Just thinking is not enough. Writing it on paper has a power that thoughts don’t have. Remember when the teacher made you write one hundred times, I will not chew gum in class.? It is something like that. When you write down a list of accomplishments, you can literally see the positive feedback, and this positive feedback came from yourself. If my wife tells me I did something good, what I think is, She’s my wife. She has to say that.. Write it down and pat yourself on the back.

4. Allow yourself to hear and accept praise from others. If your knee-jerk reaction is to argue, then just keep those feelings to yourself. Say thank you, and avoid articulating self-deprecating remarks. Feelings do not cause actions, feelings follow actions.

5. Setup rules for how you will engage that inner voice when your Impostor Fears reappear. The time to plan for an emergency is before you are having an emergency. The time to plan how to counter your Impostor Fear is before you are in a full blown attack by your Impostor-ism. Impostor-ism is a habits, and habits are hard to change. Setting up some rules on how you want to react can be very useful.