It's Not Just You—Everyone Feels Like a Fraud at Work

talking about impostor syndrome. Yeah, this is a phrase that gets used a lot in the how to Be a Woman in the workplace world that I spend a lot of time in. Yeah, it feels kind of recent and buzzwordy, but it's actually been around for some time. It was coined by some clinical psychologists in the late seventies, and it basically just describes this phenomenon of feeling like you're a fraud, uh, no matter how long you've been doing something,

and spite all evidence to the contrary. So basically like nothing can convince you that you're not gonna one day get exposed as a complete fake. Yeah. I had an acute experience of impostor syndrome very recently. Yeah, you were telling me about this, and I think this is like

the perfect example of impostor syndrome. I was asked to moderate a panel at the Tribeca Film Festival, and when the woman reached out to me, she said that she saw that I had written an article about Hetty Lamar and there was a biopic about her and they wanted me to moderate the panel on her. I had written this article in eleven so when she reached out to me, I said, I wrote this article five six years ago. I don't cover entertainment. I never moderated a panel, like

can you you you've got the wrong person. You were literally like I, you made a mistake, you called up the wrong number. And I felt then we need to tell her that to be like, you gotta you gotta know, And she said, I googled you, like I know what you do now. And she assured me that analysts are good moderators and that you know, I would be great for this. But I still had this nagging sensation that

I was just like baking it. Basically, yeah, you have you have felt the need to justify yourself or tell her you weren't qualified. Meanwhile, like she's the one who decides if you're qualified. She's picking the people to be on this panel, and she knew who you were and decided, Like that's all. That's all the qualification you need is that somebody decided you should be the moderator for this panel.

But that's what impostor syndrome is about. It's like, even if other people think you're good at something, they must have it slightly wrong and they don't know the real they mean, the facts. Yea, they need your whole history. I've had similar experiences with this, and one of the things that came to mind when we were talking about impostor syndrome was how I've basically had a decent career

in media. I've always had staff jobs at big media companies ever since I finished graduate school about ten years ago. And as you know, in our industry, it's it's kind of hard to get a staff job. A lot of people work freelance, either by choice or just because they can't get um salary jobs at sort of journalism outlets.

And whenever people ask me about my career outcomes, I always describe myself as extremely lucky for having that, like those back to back staff jobs, and luck is this word that I think is associated with imposter syndrome, because when I say I'm lucky, I'm sort of referring to other people in my field who I know are also really good journalists and just haven't been able to land

staff jobs. So I feel this need to point out that, like, yeah, I may be good enough to get a staff job, but lots of people are good enough to get staff jobs and didn't, and so I'm just a lucky one. Yeah, you're apologizing to those people, are like on behalf of them. It's like this all messed up thing. You feel the need to say that they too could have gotten the

job or something. I don't know. Yeah, it's just the luck of the draw that I got it, and you know, I look back on it and no, there was plenty of hard work there. And it's not to say be hard working and qualified and someone else can be hard working and qualified and that person not get the job

that you have. Yeah, And I want to talk about a related concept to this, which is the fake it till you make it idea, which is such a cliche, but it seems to me like this common advice that everybody in their career makes, just like act more competent than you are, and then you'll get this feedback, you know, because people will be impressed by your confidence and they'll treat you like you're better at your job and they'll give you better assignments and that will give you even

more confidence. And then eventually, like the confidence becomes real and the skills become real and this sort of virtuous cycle, and it's like a career strategy I think a lot of people employ. But then it kind of feeds imposter syndrome because you worry. I think that you'll be discovered as a fake if you're going into a situation and consciously faking it. Yeah. I think the difference to me

is the confidence in yourself. Like someone can be faking it until they make it, and they they know they're gonna make it, Like they have so much confidence they're like, oh, I can fake this until I make it. And then there's the person who's like, oh, I'm just faking it until I make it, and um, then when they make it, they still are going to have that lack of confidence in themselves. And I think that is impostor syndrome. Yeah, a lot of the in a lot of the reading

that we've been doing about impostor syndrome. People who are hugely successful but talk about feeling this way UM have said that they've partly dealt with it by just kind of accepting everyone is faking some part of what they're doing at any given moment. You know, they're they're pretending or glossing over ways in which they might not be

perfect at every single aspect of their job. And so it's actually not that productive to dwell on whether your confidence in something is real or not and fake it till you make it. Turns out to be a pretty use full strategy. UM. I found some cool research showing that it actually works. UM. There was a study where people were given a math quiz and one group was told that they had been flashed the answers on a screen so quickly that they couldn't register it consciously. Of course,

they hadn't. They had just been shown like garbled whatever, and the other group hadn't. The group that thought that they knew the answers to the test did better on the test, so even though they didn't actually have any more knowledge, just thinking they had more knowledge helped them

do better. There's another cool study where people were put in a flight simulator and given fighter pilot clothes and given all this feedback that was fighter pilot ishan they ended up doing better on a vision test than people who were just put in the flight simulator without all that feedback. So you adopt the costume and the posture of someone who's good at something, you get good at it.

That kind of says to me that impostor syndrome can be really bad for you then, because if you think you have all the knowledge and tools even though you don't, that's not impostor syndrome, right, that's the right. Then you do well on the test or you're the pilot, you're the good pilot. But if you're constantly have self doubt that I must have some negative impact. Right. You're like rewarded for being ignorant about how bad you are at something,

but you're punished if you're good at something. I don't know. Yeah, I think everyone experiences impostors syndrome, and anybody who is

more marginalized is going to feel more fraudulent. I think actually this is why UM women might have a stronger or different experience of imposter syndrome, because you get a lot of external validation for the idea that maybe you don't belong in the workplace if you're a woman, or, as you say, if you're a part of any marginalized group, if you're a person of color or a person with

a disability. You're getting these external messages that other people don't value your work as much, and so that's only going to feed your insecurities about that. And somebody who described the difference between men and women and how they experience imposter syndrome really well is our guest Dr Suzanne Covin, who wrote an article called Letter to a Young Female Physician, and in it she said, I believe that women's fear of fraudulence is similar to men's, but with an added feature.

Not only do we tend to perseverate over our inadequacies, we also often denigrate our strengths. To hear more about what she means by that and why she wrote a letter to young female physicians, we're happy to welcome Dr Suzanne Covin. Suzanne Covin is a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where she is also a writer in residence, and she's on the faculty of Harvard

Medical School. Welcome Suzanne, thanks for having me so start by telling us why you decided to frame the Vice article that you wrote about imposter syndrome as a letter

to young female physicians. Well, what happened was last June, when the incoming interns were going through orientation at my hospital, I was invited to participate in this wonderful exercise where the interns were asked to write a letter to themselves, and the letters were then sealed and collected, and they were to be handed out to them at an intern

retreat in January, so six months into their internship. And the idea of it was they would open these letters six months down the road and they would just see how far they had come. And as I sat there watching them, you know, hunched earnestly over these letters, I had this very powerful feeling of wanting to address my younger self when I was in their shoes thirty years earlier, and particularly as a woman, because in fact, I was delighted to see that more than half of the incoming

interns in the room were women. Why did you decide to focus on impostor syndrome in particular, because what I realized as I was writing this letter to myself, you know, is that the thing I wished I had known starting out was that while I would experience some sexism as a woman in a male dominated profession, that the thing that would cause me the most conflict would be a voice in my head perpetually telling me that I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't as good as my peers,

and that even and this was really the sort of the steps further, that the things I was good at didn't count particularly. Yeah, you write in your article that this feeling of being a fraud is more insidious than sexism itself. I'm wondering why you think female physicians in particular need to know about this imposter syndrome feeling. Well, I don't want to underplay the damage that overt sexism

can do. I mean, we have to remember that even today, as I point out in the essay, Um, you know, women in medicine have not achieved pay equality with men. We are grossly underrepresented in leadership positions, even in fields where we represent the majority, like pediatrics and O. B. G. W. Anne. But for me, uh, personally, the piece that was so damaging was this constant and nagging feeling of self doubt, and as to why it's more in women, you know, I think that what it has to do with is

having internalized the overt sexism. So the two things aren't really different. You understand what I mean by that, They're not completely separate issues. And I've gotten so much male since this piece appeared, and from all around the world, and most of it is from women, though many men and many older women, and uh indeed many people not in medicine have at all have told me that it

spoke to them. But the ones that I find most heartbreaking are from young women, particularly uh, young women of color, who tell me I don't feel I will ever be accepted, I will ever be good enough, and that, of course, is an internalization of not only sexism, but racism. The other piece of this, though, is not only self doubt, but this second part that I referred to, which is feeling that you know, it's a variation on the old

gradual marks line. I wouldn't join a club that would have me for a member, which is, if I am good at something, it must not be worth much. I have a friend who calls this the syndrome of yeah, I got in, but that was the year they didn't have very many applicants or a sort of love. We might call it asterisk syndrome. Yeah, I got that position, but you know, there must have been some reason I

got it, and not on my merit. And you know, I think, particularly for women in medicine, there is this long tradition of a false psychotomy between compassion and combat sense, and that is gendered. So uh many years ago, the way that played out was that the doctors were men and the nurses were women, and the doctors gave the orders and knew the stuff, and the nurses, who were women, provided the hands on compassionate care. Well, of course that was a sort of a stereotype, but it was never

really true, and it still isn't true. I think there are a lot of women and this certainly has been a theme in my inner life during my long career. I think, well, you know, the reason I'm good at this is that I'm a good listener and I'm empathic. But anybody could do that. That's not really an important skill, except that it's a very important skill, and not everybody can do that. And so, as I said in the piece, my observation is that women not only focus on our

deficiencies or our self perceived deficiencies. We also denigrate our own strengths. It sounds like now you have perspective to appreciate the skills that you do have, including some of these more empathic skills that maybe the labor force are people around us don't recognize as real work. But in your piece you also talk about how you overcompensated for this feeling, and you you did all these things that you tried to give yourself more experience, and that that

didn't really work. At what point did you just stop doing that? I wish I could tell you that that it wasn't so recently, but it really is rather recent. And you know, it's funny, as I was writing this piece, this pattern that I really hadn't thought about as a pattern became clear to me just as I was writing it. This overcompensation. You know. One of the examples I give is that I decided I should specialize in gastronrology because guesst aronrologists do stuff, and if you do stuff, then

your competency could never possibly be questioned. The only problem was I wasn't interested in guest rhonrology, so it took me a really, really long time to begin to be true to myself. And I think what ultimately I came to terms with is that, you know, in primary care, there are patients I've been you know, seeing and had a relationship with for twenty five years at this point, and I realized that the relationship that I build with

them is not an insignificant part of their healing. You know, this, this empathy thing, this relationship building thing, this communication thing, this isn't just the warm, squishy, you know, extra stuff. This is really at the center of medicine. And I think, you know, once I came to terms with that, I sort of let go of some of the perfectionism which made me feel that I was supposed to be everything.

I was supposed to have an A plus in every every possible subject, and I realized that people have different strengths, and my particular strength is not an insignificant one. I wonder how much it actually helped to just get more experienced, to log more years in your career. You know, we rattled off your accomplishments at the top of the of the segment, but you are obviously very good and very experienced and have all the credentials. Now, how did that

affect the feeling of imposter syndrome. Well, it's not so

much accumulating accolades as accumulating years. And I think you know, as the years have gone by, I've been both less reticent about admitting my own imperfections uh and vulnerabilities, and also on the other side of the coin, I'm less reticent about tooting my own warrant, which women are not as good at as we should be um with regard to those accolades, I have to tell you, getting back to the very first question you asked me, which is

why did I put this in letter form? It felt intuitively important to me to be able to sign this letter to hand COVID, m D, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and to say, hey, here I am, you know, at the Mecca, and I have had these thoughts. I've had them a lot. And the response I've gone to this piece tells me that, you know, that felt validating

for people, and I feel good about that. I feel good about the response, but I also, of course feel a little sad that thirty years down the road, particularly young women are still struggling so mightily with this. Yeah, I think that a lot of young women in all

professions feel this. I feel this. I know Francesca has felt it, and I think, yeah, well it's impossible statistically, UM, naming it's really important, and knowing that other are really accomplished people and women experience it feels good to hear. But I'm wondering what is the advice for someone young who has these feelings but we don't really know how to overcome? Oh golly, well, it's money just to again. Um. I keep going back to these many, many emails I've received.

I've just been so moved by them. What I'm hearing is a lot of isolation. I'm hearing a lot of I've never talked with anybody about this before, and yet there are so many people who feel this way that I've got to think that at least a partial remedy is for young women or young professionals of both genders to be gathering and talking openly about this kind of stuff.

I think that would help a lot. I mean, if ten of your young colleagues got together and have this conversation, don't you think that that would go a long way to sort of feeling less isolated, stigmatized? Torture it in your own head I saw only would have you know when I was starting out, of course, there was absolutely

no outlet for that. Then, yeah, when we started talking about this episode we're working on to people, there were definitely a few people who thought who told us that they didn't even know there was a name for this feeling. So so talking about it, we often come to that traite conclusion that talking about talking about things more as the answer. But in this case, it really seems like putting a name on it is a big part of

understanding how universal it is. And so I mean, we we we laughed before when I said, well, we can't, statistically speaking, we can't all be fraud But you know, I think, um as with anything you you ruminate over and don't discuss openly, uh, you know, it begins to sort of take on a life of its own in your head, and you you know, you don't get a reality check about it. And I think, you know, if everybody feels this way, and then you know, clearly it's

a pretty normal way to feel. And of course what compounds feeling like an impostor is the shame of feeling that you're the only one who feels that way, which, of course you're not well. Thank you for helping us fight that shame and talk about it. You're open. You guys got to plan the party, impostor's syndrome party. We'll believe me, they'll they'll be standing room only. You're really thank you so much for talking to us, Susan Oh,

it's my pleasure. So Dr Covin is at the end of her career, and she said, like basically last month she got over her impostors syndrome. You could feel kind of depressed by hearing somebody say that, you know, even with all that success, they still experience impostor syndrome. But I actually think that that's just proof that succe us

itself isn't the cure to this thing. So it must not be about whether or not you're really a fake, and that actually, if you can look at somebody like that and say, Okay, they have all the credentials and they still have these worries, so there must be another

reason for it. And to me, what I took away from everything she said was that it doesn't really matter where you are in your career or how good you are even at something um you probably are kind of you probably are worse at some things than some of your colleagues, you're probably also better at some things then you give yourself credit for. And the question of whether or not you're like for real is so unproductive and is not going to help you with the ultimate thing

that you want, which is to get really good. So you may as well put it aside altogether and Impostor's syndrome, banish Impastor's dreme from brain. And it's hard, but it's hard, but I mean, yeah, knowing it exists, and then maybe every time the thought creeps into your brain you can say, this is not a real thing. Yeah, like it's it's

easier send thing done, to stop thinking about something. But if you if you're armed with the knowledge that like people feel this way even when they're really experienced, that other people are all feeling the same way, and you know all this, then you can say, Okay, that feeling is there, let me put it aside and just do my job. I like this. It's a very like therapist thing to say, I feel like we really dug in the highly therapeutic episode. Um, let's do some non therapeutic

half big takes, half fake takes. If you would like us to hear your half baked take. You can tweet it at us, or you can call and leave a message on our voicemail. It's two one to six seven zero one six six. This week, we found a half bag take in the wild. Becca, let's explain to our

listeners what that is. So sometimes we'll be reading the internet and see what we think would make a great half bake take that somebody has tweeted, are they've written an article, and we share with each other, but you know, we don't have there's nowhere for it to live in our world. So I saw really great when this week on Jezebel that I thought would make a perfect half big take, and I just want to celebrate this great idea.

It's called just give It seven seconds. It's by Leah Beckman, and she talks about that feeling when you do something that's socially awkward and you marinate over it for a really long time. Do you know the feeling? Yes, So her advice is to give yourself seven seconds to worry about whatever it is you did and then stop thinking about it. It's very related to our impostor syndrome advice.

I was gonna say this is a perfectly practical application of our just stop thinking about it role for impostor syndrome. Maybe that should be our imposter syndrome advice. You get to think about it for seven seconds and then put it out of your mind. You get seven seconds to feel like a fraud, and then you have to be done. Great. Love this half bag take in the wild, Francesca, what

is your half bag take for the week? I want people to know that when they do this particular passive aggressive power move I'm about to describe, I see them and I know what they're doing. It is um apologizing for being late or saying that you're coming in late when you're coming in at a perfectly acceptable time, Like you're going to be in the office at nine twenty and you send an email to like some of your most important colleagues and you say I'm gonna show up

to work a little late this morning around. What you're really saying is normally I get to work at eight thirty, and I want you all to know it. I am the type of person who freaks out when I'm late. I can't. I think you are someone who, like, just let me know. Are you someone who is late to hang out with your friends all the time, Francesca, I have occasionally been late, but there are people who being late and it doesn't bother them. For me, like eats,

it's like impostorsyndrome. Either way, at my soul, it bothers me, but that's okay. Being late to hang out with your friends is different because everyone has agreed on an on an appointed time, and there are some workplaces where everyone just has to be at work at the same time. Ours is not like that. Like some people, you kind of show up at whatever time makes sense for your job. So some people do show up at eight or earlier.

Some people show up at nine thirty. And it's so you're only late if you're like late for a meeting, or you're late by your own standards. So I should have specified that this This is really a thing people do in flex time offices. It's it's basically the equivalent of what like inviting somebody into your home and apologizing for it being a total mess when it's perfectly clean and you know it's perfectly Maybe I'm just one of those people. How how messy is your apartment right now?

It could do some cleaning, Liar, Becca, what is your half by take. So I've discovered this great new soundtrack Hamilton's Okay, which I know I'm almost two years late, but I think it's really fun. Here's my half pic take. I think it's really fun to get into cultural phenomena years late. Okay, do you have an explanation or is at the end? I think it's like you don't have to be involved in like the take economy. You can really let your opinion be your opinion. It's also fun.

There's like a whole thing I get to do now that I know everyone really liked. I do this a lot with TV shows. I like binging, as many people do, and it's nice to have like six seasons of mad Men three years after it's off air, and then you can go back and find the thing pieces that you like and kind of I have like a little conversations with the critics. I like you have to experience it in real time, or like worry about spoilers because you have to look pretty hard to find the spoilers, and

it kind of like you can get overloaded. I think in the time there are things I've been up on in real time and you just get sick of it. It's just a nicer time scale. So I think you should, you know, find something that people were into that you weren't into, and just dig in. Yep. I'm totally with you on this, and I experienced this over the weekend because I just started the HBO show West World, which people were like very into circa seven or eight months ago,

and it's perfect. I can enjoy it without the like I don't, you know, I only have vague memories of the critical reception. And yeah, and I don't have to. I don't have to experience any undercurrent of zeitgeist around it. I can just watch it for what it is. And this has been half big takes, half bag takes. Thanks for listening to game Plan. You can find me on Twitter at francesco Today, and you can find me at RZ Greenfield. You should check out another Bloomberg podcast called Benchmark.

It examines the inner workings of the global economy. Very cool. If you like our show, please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and rate, subscribe, and especially review us. We always go on and on about reviews. You know you're sick of hearing it, but please review us if you like us, because it will really help spread the word about our show. The show was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. The hat of podcast says Alec McCabe,

and we'll see you next week. Goodbye, got it. We will do well.