Imposter syndrome at work: why capable people feel like frauds

Imposter syndrome at work is the persistent feeling that you are less capable than people think, and that sooner or later you will be found out, even when your track record says otherwise. It is not a medical diagnosis. It is a common pattern of thinking, and the most useful responses are practical: keep a record of the evidence, talk about it with people you trust, and change the way you talk to yourself.

It turns up in new jobs, after promotions, in rooms full of experts and on teams where you are the only one like you. It often gets louder the better you do.

What is imposter syndrome?

The idea goes back to 1978, when the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes wrote about what they called the imposter phenomenon. Their paper described high-achieving women who believed they weren't really intelligent, despite their degrees, honors and jobs. Since then the same pattern has been described in people of every gender and in almost every line of work. You will see it spelled both imposter and impostor.

It is not a diagnosis, and you won't find it in the manuals doctors use to diagnose mental health conditions. It is better thought of as a set of beliefs that tend to travel together:

• Success is luck. When things go well, it was timing, help from others or an easy brief.
• Mistakes are proof. When something goes wrong, it confirms what you suspected all along.
• Exposure is coming. One day someone will notice you don't belong.
• Praise doesn't stick. Compliments feel like errors, or like people being kind.

A cycle tends to follow from those beliefs. Some people overprepare, putting far more hours into a task than it needs. Others put it off until the last minute. Either way, when the work goes well, it seems to prove only that the effort or the luck got you through, and the next task feels just as risky.

Why do capable people feel like frauds?

Imposter feelings are often strongest in people who are doing well, which is part of what makes them so confusing. A few reasons:

• You see your own inside and other people's outside. You know every doubt, shortcut and late night behind your work. You see only your colleagues' finished results, delivered calmly in meetings.
• New roles are supposed to feel hard. A promotion or a new job puts you at the edge of what you know. Feeling out of your depth is what learning feels like, but it is easy to read it as being found out.
• Knowing more shows you how much you don't know. Beginners can feel confident because they can't see the size of the field. The further in you get, the more you see that no one person covers it.
• Being the only one. If you are the only woman, the youngest, the only person of your background or the only one without a particular degree in the room, it is easy to feel watched, and harder to see people like you doing well.
• Little feedback. On busy and remote teams, good work is often met with silence. Without evidence, doubt fills the gap.
• Very high standards. If anything short of perfect counts as failing, almost everything will feel like failing.

It helps to know how common this is. When one person on a team admits to it, others often say "me too". That doesn't make the feeling vanish, but it does make it harder to believe you are the only one faking it.

How to deal with imposter syndrome: keep the evidence

Imposter feelings are very good at forgetting. The simplest answer is a record that doesn't. Keep it somewhere easy to add to, and read it when the doubt is loud.

A wins note

In Notes, make a note called Wins and pin it to the top: Control-click it in the list of notes and choose Pin Note. Add a line, with the date, whenever something goes well: a project shipped, a problem solved, a question only you could answer. In recent versions of Notes you can also add a tag such as #wins and find every tagged note from the sidebar.

A folder of kind words

In Mail, choose Mailbox > New Mailbox and call it something like Kind words. When someone thanks you or praises your work, drag the email in. For praise in a chat app, press Command-Shift-4 and drag a box around the message to take a screenshot, which lands on your desktop by default, then move it into a folder in Finder.

A Friday line

Once a week, add three things you did that week to the note, however small. Give it a slot with a Reminders item that repeats every Friday afternoon, so the habit doesn't depend on memory. After a few months you have a record your doubts can't easily argue with.

Read it before performance reviews, before you apply for anything, and on the days you feel like a fraud. It won't stop the feeling arriving, but it gives you facts to answer it with.

Should you talk about imposter syndrome at work?

Usually, yes, with the right person. Imposter feelings grow in private, and saying them out loud takes away much of their force.

• A peer you trust. Someone at your level, in your field or another. Quite often they feel the same.
• A mentor or a senior colleague. Ask whether they ever felt like this. Many will say yes and tell you about the time they did.
• Your manager, framed as a question about the work: "How am I doing on the migration? What's going well, and what would you change?" Specific feedback replaces guesswork with facts.

You don't have to use the words "imposter syndrome". "I'm not sure I'm pitching this right" or "I feel out of my depth on this one" starts the same useful conversation.

How to answer the imposter voice

The voice that calls you a fraud speaks in absolutes. You can learn to notice it and answer with a more accurate version. Not a pep talk, just the facts, put fairly.

A useful test: what would you say to a friend who described themselves the way you just described yourself? Most people are far fairer to their friends than to themselves. Try speaking to yourself the way you would speak to them.

A daily reminder of what went right

Notchpals has a couple of moments that fit this, quietly and in passing. With Boba, the Self-care dragon, in your crew, the One good thing moment arrives once each evening, some time from 6 to 9 PM, provided you are at the Mac. Boba is firmly on your side:

BobaWhat was the best thing today? Tell me! I'll add it to my treasure pile!

Whatever you answer, put it in the wins note while it is fresh.

If you work in focus sessions, a Focus character marks the end of each one. Start a 25 or 50 minute session from the Notchpals menu, and when the time is up, Debug the rubber duck has the last word:

DebugYou did that alone. I only listened. Honestly, it was a really good listen.

Neither keeps score or records anything. You press Done and carry on, and the record that matters is the one you keep yourself. One good thing has more on making the evening habit stick.

When is it more than imposter syndrome?

Imposter feelings are common and usually manageable. But if self-doubt comes with persistent anxiety, low mood, poor sleep or a dread of work that won't lift, see a doctor or a therapist. Those are worth looking after in their own right, and good help exists.

It is also worth separating the feeling from the facts. Sometimes a workplace really is treating someone unfairly: credit goes to others, ideas are talked over, work is judged more harshly than a colleague's. That isn't imposter syndrome, and better self-talk won't fix it. Write down what happens, talk to someone you trust, and take it to your manager or HR if it carries on.