Imposter syndrome happens when we have the feeling that we do not deserve what we have achieved, fearing that we’ll be discovered to be fakes or frauds. Our successes, we tell ourselves, were achieved not through our actual abilities and talents, but through some combination of luck, timing, and mistakes others made that allowed us to slip through the cracks. Nobody is immune to this feeling, and it affects all segments of the public—from leaders, artists, actors, and the people we see as high achievers.
Sheryl Sandberg, Harvard grad and former Facebook COO, wrote in her 2013 book Lean In: “Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time I didn’t embarrass myself—or even excelled—I believed that I had fooled everyone yet again. One day soon, the jig would be up.” Sandberg is joined by a long list of well-known people who have readily admitted feeling this way.
But emotional intelligence offers us help and direction in overcoming this pervasive yet very common problem.
Commonly understood as the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our emotions, emotional intelligence gives us the ability to understand ourselves and others in ways that increase our ability to work through our unpleasant thoughts and feelings.
As an author of two books on emotional intelligence, I have written extensively on the topic. When we experience imposter feelings, they provide us with guidelines and tools that will help us to release the negative impacts that come with them. Instead of experiencing self-doubt, we will move toward welcoming our success.
Self-awareness, the root of emotional intelligence, is a powerful aide in determining how we relate to self-doubt and our inner voice. When we are self-aware, we learn to create space between how we are feeling and what we know to be facts. We can choose to feel fear and self-doubt without accepting them as being based in reality. This allows us to choose thoughts that support that we have genuinely earned our achievements.
People with strong emotional intelligence have the ability to relate to and connect well with others. When sharing their doubts, they soon become acutely aware of how common this problem is, allowing them to normalize their feelings around the issue. This provides them with relief that what they are experiencing is nothing out of the ordinary that needs to be feared and overly stressed about. Knowing that there are many others who experience the same thing takes a lot of the sting out of our feelings that we are alone with this experience.
One of the characteristics of people who struggle with imposter syndrome is that they tend to be very hard on themselves. This was true for Suzanne Smith, a college professor and the CEO of the nonprofit management company Social Impact Architects, who describes herself as a “recovering perfectionist.”
As Smith tells her entrepreneurship students: “Imposter syndrome isn’t proof you’re unqualified. It’s often evidence that you’re growing.” She has spent the last decade becoming more emotionally aware of that tendency and intentionally practicing positive self-talk. And now she shares that journey with her students and clients and the readers of her weekly Substack newsletter, helping them differentiate between perception and reality in order to build healthier habits. Often, when we’re being hard on ourselves, it means that we are giving little attention to our strengths and instead are amplifying our weaknesses.
Empathy, a major aspect of emotional intelligence, helps us not only to see others’ strengths more clearly but also to acknowledge our own abilities and treat ourselves with compassion when we fail to reach our goals. It helps us to recognize that we are a work in progress, and to understand that setbacks and failures are a normal part of the learning process. It allows us to see our achievements, not with arrogance, but as a result of our determination and ongoing growth.
One of the skills of emotional intelligence is the ability to regulate our emotions. Imposter syndrome can bring up strong feelings of anxiety, causing us to overprepare or avoid so that we don’t have to deal with strong feelings. People who know how to regulate are able to keep thoughts and feelings from overwhelming their ability to think rationally and logically. They have developed the ability to remember times that they successfully overcame stressful times and to think of situations that ended well.
Emotionally intelligent people use setbacks and failures as learning opportunities rather than taking them personally as indicators that there is something lacking in them. They understand that oftentimes, very successful people have failed multiple times. This way of thinking becomes useful once imposter syndrome takes hold.
But when it does, we can look back and see that our progress indicates a persistence, determination, and ability that, over time, end up showing results—rather than internal doubts about our success.