Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves

You’ve been promoted. Colleagues congratulate you, your manager says she’s relieved that you of all people will be taking the project on. And you smile, say thank you — and hear a quiet sentence in your head: “If they knew how little I actually know.” Fear instead of pride: sooner or later it will come out that you more or less improvised the whole thing and got lucky.

This experience has a name: impostor phenomenon. And it has a surprising property — it most often afflicts not those who know little, but those who know a great deal. Competent people doubt themselves, while the least competent often glow with certainty; this irony is well documented in psychology and is part of the answer to the question of why your doubt is not proof of your incompetence.

In this piece we look at where the term comes from, how the loop that keeps the sense of fraud alive despite fresh successes works, whom it most often catches — and what actually takes its power away. Along the way I’ll also tell you why this subject is unusually close to me.

1978: the therapists who gave the feeling a name

The term was coined by the clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, after five years of work with more than 150 exceptionally successful women — women with doctorates, professors, respected experts. They noticed a pattern that repeated regardless of degrees, publications and awards: these women had not internalised their success. Despite objective evidence, they persistently believed they were in fact less able than everyone thought — that they had slipped into their positions through diligence, charm, luck or a committee’s mistake — and they lived in quiet fear of being found out. Clance and Imes named the phenomenon the impostor phenomenon.

A detail I like to underline: this was not a laboratory study with questionnaires but an observation from the therapy room — it came into being in exactly the place where this feeling is still most often first said out loud. And an enormous amount of research has accumulated since: Clance later also developed a measurement scale (the Clance IP Scale), used to measure the phenomenon all over the world.

Not a disorder — an experience

Before we go on, an important distinction: impostor syndrome is not a mental disorder. You won’t find it in the diagnostic manuals, and the word “syndrome” is in fact rather unfortunate — Clance herself later regretted that the term “experience” hadn’t caught on, because this is something most people go through at some point, not something a person “has”.

The numbers bear this out: a systematic review of 62 studies (Bravata et al., 2020) showed that the prevalence of impostor feelings in various samples reaches as high as 82 per cent — depending on the measure and the setting. In other words: it is one of the most common psychological experiences of successful people there is. It’s also true, though, that it isn’t harmless — the same review consistently links it to anxiety, depressive symptoms and burnout. That something isn’t a disorder doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt or isn’t worth working on.

The impostor cycle: a machine that turns success into doubt

Why doesn’t the feeling pass, even as the successes pile up? Because it isn’t a lack of evidence but a loop that dismantles the evidence as it arrives. In the literature it’s described as the impostor cycle (Clance, 1985; reviewed by Sakulku and Alexander, 2011) and it runs like this:

• A new task. A project, a presentation, an exam — anything where you’ll be on show.
• Anxiety. Not ordinary nerves, but a deeper fear: this time it will show who I really am.
• One of two responses: working beyond all reason (preparing until three in the morning “just in case”) or putting it off until the last moment — and then a desperate sprint.
• Success. The task goes well; often better than average.
• An explanation that cancels the success. If you slogged: “that’s not ability, I just killed myself over it — capable people wouldn’t have to.” If you put it off and it worked out: “pure luck, I fooled them again.”
• Nothing gets stored. The success isn’t attributed to ability, so it builds no confidence — and with the next task the loop starts again, often harder, because expectations are now higher.

Do you see the trap? Both responses — slogging and procrastinating — “work”, because the task turns out well. But that’s exactly why both confirm the wrong lesson. The loop is immune to success, because it has prepared in advance the explanation that will take it apart.

In practice this means that someone inside the loop gets objectively better year by year and subjectively no calmer. A career from the outside, a conveyor belt from the inside: every finish line crossed turns out to be the starting line of the next trial. Many people describe to me even a quiet sadness around their successes — the moment when they ought to be glad, and instead feel only relief at not being unmasked this time, and tiredness, because they know the game continues tomorrow.

Whom it catches — and why them

Clance and Imes described the phenomenon in women and for a long time it was taken to be a “women’s” problem. Later research corrected the picture: men experience it too, according to some studies almost as often — they just speak about it even more rarely, because self-doubt sits less comfortably with the male role. Systematic reviews don’t find consistent differences between the sexes; but they do find something else, more important.

Impostor feelings aren’t evenly distributed — they gather wherever a person stands out in their environment. The first generation in a family to go to university. A woman in a mostly male team. A member of a minority in a majority setting. Someone from a working-class family among academics. The logic is cruel and simple: if you don’t see people like yourself around you, it is harder to believe you genuinely belong in that place — and every slip carries extra weight, because it seems to say something not just about you but about everyone like you. Research with students from minority groups (e.g. Cokley et al., 2013) shows that impostor feelings significantly predict distress — in some groups even more strongly than experiences of discrimination themselves. So impostor feelings aren’t only a personal fault in self-image; they are often also an echo of an environment that tells you — subtly or less subtly — that you’re there as a visitor.

And one more group I meet often: perfectionists. If your internal standard is “flawless or nothing”, then every achievement that took effort, involved mistakes or needed help falls through the sieve — and the sense of fraud is the mathematical consequence of an impossible standard. I write more about this connection in the piece on perfectionism and overthinking.

Why successes don’t convince you: an error of attribution

One more circumstance worth naming: environments that cultivate impostor feelings. Professions with unclear criteria of success (creative, academic, managerial), cultures of constant comparison, workplaces where a mistake is publicly dissected while an achievement is quietly filed away — all of this fuels the loop. So sometimes the question isn’t only “what’s wrong with my self-image”, but also “what is this environment telling me every day”. Yet even in the healthiest environment the core of the mechanism stays internal — and that core is attribution.

If you’re wondering whether we’re talking about you: Clance’s scale measures agreement with statements such as “I often feel I achieved a success by mistake”, “I’m afraid that important people will find out I’m not as capable as they think” and “I put my achievements down to luck or chance”. If you’re nodding as you read, you’re reading the right piece.

At the core of the mechanism is something psychology calls attribution — the way we explain the causes of events. A healthy attribution pattern is slightly “self-serving”: we attribute successes to ourselves and failures to circumstances. In impostor feelings the pattern is turned on its head: success gets external, unstable causes (luck, chance, a kind committee, “an easy task”), while failure gets internal, stable ones (incompetence). With a key like that, no success can prove anything — and every failure proves everything.

So you can see why a well-meant “but you’re excellent” doesn’t work: praise is data, and attribution is the filter through which the data enters. As long as the filter lets successes through as luck, you can pile up a wagonload of them and confidence won’t shift. This filter is no passing thing — as a rule it was built early, out of messages that you only count when you’re achieving, or that your achievements “aren’t anything special anyway”; where exactly such messages come from and how they become a voice in your head I’ve laid out in the piece on the origins of low self-esteem.

A mask I know up close

Let me be personal. Before I came to psychotherapy I was an actor — and the theatre is a world that offers impostor feelings an ideal breeding ground. Your work is literally pretending; you are assessed every evening; between applause and rejection there is no middle ground; and there is never an objective measure by which you could know whether you are “really” good or whether nobody has yet dared tell you the truth. So the feeling of wearing a mask and of someone one day pointing a finger is not unfamiliar to me — and I admit it spoke up when I moved into the therapy profession too, as it likes to do at every new beginning. Today I understand it differently: not as proof that I’m in the wrong place, but as a sign that the place matters to me. I’ve written more about my journey from one stage to another on the page My Approach.

That experience taught me the most important lesson on this subject: the sense of fraud is loudest in people who care. Someone indifferent doesn’t fear exposure — they have nothing to lose. Your fear that you’re not enough is often just the clumsily inverted flip side of caring very, very much.

What really takes the power out of impostor feelings

Because the loop is driven by hiding and by mistaken attribution, the things that work are the ones aimed exactly there:

• Say it out loud. Impostor feelings live on secrecy — as long as you hide them, the logic runs “if they knew how I feel, they’d know I don’t belong here”. Almost everyone who confides in a colleague they respect meets the same surprise: “What? You? I feel exactly the same.” A shared experience is no longer proof of a personal defect.
• Collect the evidence before the filter voids it. A folder of compliments, successful projects, thank-yous — not out of vanity, but as an external memory the attribution filter can’t rewrite as it goes. At the next “it was luck”, you open the folder and check: how much “luck” repeats fifteen times in a row?
• Practise a different attribution — out loud. Instead of “it was nothing”, try: “thank you, I put a lot of work in and I’m glad it showed”. It sounds small; but it is precisely the exit point from the loop: a success credited to yourself before the filter takes it apart.
• Separate the feeling from the truth. “I feel like an impostor” isn’t the same as “I am an impostor” — feelings aren’t evidence. And incidentally: actual impostors don’t as a rule ask themselves whether they’re impostors.
• Trade the whip for compassion. Research shows that a self-compassionate stance is linked to fewer impostor feelings and softens their connection with anxiety — logically, since compassion disarms exactly that inner court which rejects successes as forgeries. How you actually learn self-compassion I’ve described in a separate piece.

When it’s time to talk to a therapist

The occasional feeling of “how did I end up here” is part of every honest beginning and passes as you gather experience. It deserves attention, though, when the loop starts shaping your decisions: when fear of exposure stops you applying, speaking up, charging what your work is worth; when slogging away “just in case” eats into your sleep and your relationships; when after every success, instead of gladness, all that comes is a short breather before the next wave of anxiety.

In therapy we don’t work on impostor feelings by convincing you how good you are — that, as you now know, doesn’t work. We work on the filter: where it learned that your achievements don’t count; whose standards you’re actually using; and how to build an inner place from which you can finally accept a success rather than merely survive it. If you recognise yourself in this, you’re welcome to get in touch — and I promise nobody will take the question “am I even a good enough problem for therapy” seriously. That, after all, is him again: the voice of the impostor.