Impostor syndrome in creative people: when the award doesn’t convince you

“When they read out my name, my first thought was that they’d made a mistake.”

People in creative professions say some version of this surprisingly often. The designer whose client applauds after the pitch, and who spends the drive home picking over which part was “just luck”. The musician with a sold-out show who, during the encore, thinks people came because of good promotion, not because of him. The writer who wins an award and puts the statuette away in a cupboard, because looking at it makes her stomach tighten. From the outside, they seem to have arrived where many people want to be. From the inside, they feel as if they sneaked in.

I have already written about impostor syndrome in general in Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves — where the term comes from, how it shows up and why it is not a diagnosis. Here I am interested in something narrower: why this doubt is often even louder in people who make things, why awards don’t quieten it, and what you can do about it without losing your high standards for your work along the way.

Why doubt is louder in the arts

When a research team led by Dena Bravata reviewed 62 studies on impostor syndrome in 2020, they found that the share of people experiencing it ranged from 9 to 82 per cent — depending on the group studied and on how it was measured. A range that wide says one thing above all: this is not a rare quirk of a handful of insecure people, but something that wakes up in a great many people under the right conditions. And creative professions are conditions practically designed for it.

In accounting, the balance sheet is either right or it isn’t. In surgery, the operation either succeeded or it didn’t. In the arts, there is no external yardstick that settles once and for all whether the work is good. The same production gets a rave review and a devastating one in the same week. The same manuscript is rejected by ten publishers, and the eleventh publishes it and it becomes a bestseller. Because there is no yardstick, doubt can always claim that the “real proof” hasn’t arrived yet.

On top of that, a creative person’s work is almost always also the person themselves. When a designer shows a logo, they are showing their taste. When an actress is on stage, her body is the instrument. When a singer sings, he sings with his own voice. That is why criticism of the work slides so quickly into the feeling that it was the person who was judged. I write about how public criticism affects self-image separately in Javnost, kritika in samopodoba ustvarjalca.

The award as proof that doesn’t count

The psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who first described the phenomenon in 1978, noticed something that is especially pronounced in creative professions: success doesn’t reduce the doubt, and can even strengthen it. Every award is at the same time proof that you pulled it off this time and a raised bar for next time. If you believe you are an impostor, an award doesn’t make you think “so I’m good”, but “now they’ll expect even more, and that’s when it will show”.

In the creative world, discounting success has a whole range of very convincing explanations, available at any moment:

• Luck and timing: “The film came out just when the subject was topical.”
• The people around you: “The director carried the production, I only acted.”
• Connections: “There was someone on the jury who knows me.”
• The panel’s taste: “This year they just wanted something like that.”
• Lack of competition: “Not many of us applied.”

All of these explanations can be partly true — and that is exactly what makes them so stubborn. No award is given in a vacuum. But when all the credit always lies outside you, and all the mistakes always lie within you, that is no longer realism. It is a bias that only works in one direction.

Taste that runs ahead of your hands

People who make things have another source of doubt that barely exists elsewhere. A creative person usually develops taste first — they see, hear or read a lot of good work and know exactly what kind of work moves them. The hands that could actually make it come later. In the meantime, which can last for years, you see clearly the distance between what you make and what you would like to make.

That distance is not proof that you are an impostor. It is proof that you have a good ear or a good eye. Someone without taste wouldn’t notice the gap at all. But impostor syndrome reads the gap as a verdict: “If I were really good, I’d already know how.” And because taste rises along with craft over the years, the gap never fully disappears. Experienced creatives often feel it just as much as beginners do; they have simply learned to treat it as part of the job rather than a judgement about themselves.

A small scene where everyone sees everything

The Slovenian creative world is small. The people you studied with sit on the same juries, write reviews, apply for the same grants and go to the same premieres. That has many good sides — community, collaboration, support. But it also has one that constantly feeds impostor syndrome: endless comparison.

When a colleague gets the grant you also applied for, it is hard not to do the sums. When you see on social media that someone who started after you is already at a festival abroad, a voice in you says you missed the right moment. Comparison is human and can’t be switched off. But you can notice that you always compare your backstage with other people’s shop windows — your doubt, mistakes, rejected applications and unfinished sketches with their posts, awards and premieres. I have written more about what constant measuring against others does in Comparing yourself on social media: what constant measuring does to the brain.

“They’ll find out”

This is how a conversation might sound with a composer who has just received an important commission (composite, not a real person):

“I should be happy, I know. But I’m not. Since they called, I can’t write a single bar.”
“What happens when you sit down at the piano?”
“I hear how they’ll listen. The orchestra, the conductor, the critics. And I know they’ll realise they just got lucky with me last time.”
“Who will realise?”
A pause. “Actually … my father. He never believed you could make a living from this.”
“So it isn’t only the orchestra sitting at the piano with you.”
“No. He’s there too.”

This moment is often the point where a conversation about impostor syndrome moves from work to relationships. It almost always turns out that the voice saying “they’ll find out” wasn’t born at the first premiere. It was there before.

Where the doubting voice comes from

In relational family therapy, which I am training in at the Franciscan Family Institute, we see what happens inside a person as a trace of the relationships they grew up in. Inner voices were once outer ones. If, as a child, you heard that you were loved mainly when you succeeded, you learn that worth is something you have to earn again and again. Success then doesn’t bring peace, only a short breather until the next test.

In creative people, two very different patterns often appear:

• The child labelled “gifted”. If talent was part of your identity from early on, every difficulty in your work can sound like proof that the talent may never have been there. Someone “gifted” shouldn’t have to try — and effort becomes something to hide.
• The child whose creativity wasn’t taken seriously. If your family saw art as a hobby rather than a profession, as an adult creative you may still carry the feeling that you are playing while “real” people work. Every success is then a little undeserved, because it came from something that shouldn’t count.

Both stories are often invisible until you say them out loud. I have written about how the inner voice that judges you all the time comes about in The inner critic: where the voice that constantly judges you comes from, and you will also find a short explanation in the knowledge base under impostor syndrome.

Good doubt and bad doubt

Creative people are often afraid that losing their doubt would mean losing their edge. “If I’m satisfied with myself, I’ll stop growing.” The fear is understandable, but it confuses two different things. There is doubt that is part of the craft — when you hear that the chorus doesn’t hold yet, or see that the scene doesn’t breathe yet. And there is doubt that isn’t about the work, but about you.

Doubt about the work is specific. It has an address — this sentence, this colour, this transition — and it ends with a decision about what you will change. Doubt about yourself is general. It doesn’t say what needs fixing; it only says you are not enough. And because it offers no way forward, it doesn’t end in better work but in procrastination, over-preparation or despair. Research on perfectionism suggests that it is the fear of mistakes and of what others will think of you that is linked to anxiety and burnout, not high standards in themselves. More on this in Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear and under perfectionism.

If you learn to tell these two voices apart, you don’t lose your high standards. You only lose the part that made the work costlier without making it better.

Exercise: an archive doubt can’t erase

Impostor syndrome has a poor memory for evidence. Every success fades quickly, while every mistake stays sharp. This exercise won’t banish the doubt, but it will create a place where the evidence stays. To begin, you need twenty minutes and a notebook used only for this.

1. Choose one project you are rightly proud of — not necessarily the most decorated, but the one you still like to look at or listen to.
2. Write down three decisions you made on it yourself. Not what happened, but what you chose: which scene you cut, which colour you changed, which verse you took a word out of. Luck doesn’t make decisions.
3. Write down what you had to know in order to make them. How many hours of practice, reading, listening or failed attempts lay behind them?
4. Write down what someone whose opinion you value said about this project — word for word, as far as you remember. Then write down how you discounted it at the time.
5. Read it aloud and ask yourself: “If I read this about a colleague, would I say they just got lucky?” Add a new page with every new project.

At first the exercise may feel awkward, and you will hear an objection at every step. That is to be expected. Don’t try to silence the objection — just note it in the margin and carry on. Over time, the notebook becomes something doubt can’t erase, because it is written in your own hand.

If writing about your own decisions feels vain, I recommend Self-compassion instead of self-criticism: what Kristin Neff’s research shows. Kindness towards yourself is not the same as complacency — research shows that people who are self-compassionate admit mistakes sooner and learn from them, because mistakes don’t threaten them as much. And for doubt you just can’t stop, the knowledge base also has the exercise Two columns for the inner critic.

Where this view doesn’t apply

I want to be honest here, because the term “impostor syndrome” is used very broadly today and sometimes hides more than it explains.

Not every feeling of not belonging is in your head. If you are in an environment where you are genuinely overlooked, where you are the only one from your social group, or where the standards for others are clearly different from those for you, your feeling is not a distortion. The researcher Sanne Feenstra and her colleagues point out that the feeling “I don’t belong here” is often a response to the environment, not just a personal trait. In that case, working on yourself isn’t enough on its own; it also helps to name what is happening around you.

Sometimes the doubt is justified. If you take on a project you really don’t yet have the skills for, discomfort is a healthy signal, not a syndrome. Then the answer is learning, mentoring or an honest decision to turn something down — not persuading yourself that you are already good enough.

When doubt grows into despair. If for weeks you haven’t been able to create, everything feels pointless, you sleep badly and nothing gives you joy any more, this is no longer just impostor syndrome. It may be depression, which deserves an assessment by your GP or a psychiatrist. If you have thoughts that it would be better if you weren’t here, reach out straight away to the Klic v duševni stiski helpline in Slovenia (01 520 99 00, every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritan helpline in Slovenia (116 123, 24 hours a day), and in an emergency call 112.

How therapy can help

We don’t treat impostor syndrome with extra praise — most creatives have plenty, and it doesn’t help. In sessions, we look instead at who is sitting in your head while you work, and when each of those voices moved in. Often this is the first time a person notices that the fear of criticism isn’t fear of the critic in the newspaper, but of someone they have known for a very long time.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. When working with creative people, I find it important that therapy is one of the few places where you don’t have to show anything, prove anything or produce anything — where you can be yourself even without your work. For those interested in how attitudes to success and creativity were passed down in their family, there is also a longer genogram session, A Look into the Past. If, before a new project, what grips you is less doubt about past successes than fear of what comes next, you may also find When success becomes expectation: the fear of the next work relevant.

What to remember

• In creative professions there is no external yardstick for success, so doubt can always claim that the real proof hasn’t come yet.
• Awards don’t quieten impostor syndrome — they often strengthen it, because they raise the bar for next time.
• The gap between your taste and your hands is not proof that you are an impostor, but that you see well.
• Doubt about the work is specific and leads to a decision; doubt about yourself is general and leads to shame. Keep the first, observe the second.
• A sense of not belonging is sometimes a response to your environment and sometimes a sign of depression — either way, it deserves to be taken seriously.