The Groove Issue 49 - Why Feeling Like A Fraud Can Be Good for Your Creativity
Welcome to the 49th issue of The Groove.
If you are new to The Groove, read our intro here. If you want to read past issues, you can do so here.
WHY FEELING LIKE A FRAUD CAN BE GOOD FOR YOUR CREATIVITY
You know the insidious but very popular phenomenon that makes people feel inadequate, like a fraud or that someone is going to find out that they aren’t as good as they seem to be?
Social media, with all its gloss and varnished reality, has only exacerbated this pattern.
Two American psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, gave it a name in 1985: the impostor syndrome.
They described it as a feeling of “phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement.” While these people “are highly motivated to achieve,” they also “live in fear of being ‘found out’ or exposed as frauds.”
They even developed a simple test to measure if you have impostor syndrome, you can do it yourself here.
Clance and Imes explained the cycle of the impostor in the chart below:
It starts with a task - it could be self-started like opening a new business or making a work of art, or given by others, like a project that your boss or client entrusted you. Then the self-doubt kicks in, and you choose to either overdo it or procrastinate and leave it for the last minute.
Regardless, if the task turns out well, and you receive praise for it, you dismiss it and assign your success to either the effort you put in when you overdid the whole process or the luck you had while procrastinating.
Have you been there? At times, I have.
Several of the people who enroll in my online course tell me at the beginning that they are convinced that they aren’t creative, that their achievements are pure luck and that they won’t be able to keep growing in their businesses, come up with better ideas or execute them in a way that makes a positive impact in their jobs or practices.
Of course, this isn’t true; it is their impostor talking to them. They end the program with a very different perspective from what they had at the start because they learn to trust their inner creative capabilities.
The good news is that if you’ve ever suffered from impostor’s syndrome: 1) you have plenty of (very good) company, 2) there are some benefits attached to it, and 3) there are ways to tame this beast.
Doing The Work Is the Antidote
Maya Angelou photographed by Chester Higgins in 1969. Illustration by Marissa Shea.
Research has shown that most of those who feel like an impostor are highly qualified and because of their self-doubt they work harder than if they didn’t question themselves. And that’s not a bad thing as long as you recognize the impostor and name it out loud.
Maya Angelou was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, won five Grammys for her spoken recordings, had fifty honorary degrees and was given hundreds of other awards. She once said: "I have written 11 books, but each time I think, 'Uh oh, they're going to find out now. I've run a game on everybody, and they're going to find me out.”
However, even in the face of self-doubt, she never stopped writing and getting published, and instead of letting the impostor steal her genius from us, she worked her way past it.
To the extent that in 2013, at the age of 85, Angelou published the seventh volume in a series of autobiographies related to her relationship with her mom, and at the time of her death in 2014, she was working on another book about her experiences with national and world leaders.
That is one of the ways to overcome the impostor: to keep working, creativity is all about staying in that flow, knowing that you are doing your best and that like every other human on the planet, you have had successes and failures and none of them really define who you are as a person.
You Can Be as Good as Your Idols
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has often admitted to feeling like an impostor at times. In her book, Lean In, she shares that when she was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society at Harvard, she didn’t feel like she deserved to be there.
She wrote: “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.”
In another interview she gave to the authors of The Confidence Code, Sandberg shared, “There are still days when I wake up feeling like a fraud, not sure I should be where I am.”
Sandberg says that part of the reason people suffer from impostor syndrome is that they reach the level of their idols and simply cannot believe that they could fill their shoes. People who appear successful from the outside are not superhuman, and they are not necessarily better than you.
Recognize that you too are capable of reaching their heights, because it’s possible and it happens all the time.
Show Some Vulnerability, Nobody Really Knows Everything
Starbucks Coffee in Robertson and Beverly Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA, a watercolor by Carlos G. Groppa.
The good thing about feeling like an impostor is that, if you are able to recognize it, you will also be able to develop the authenticity and vulnerability that many leaders lack and which is absolutely necessary for innovation.
Without making mistakes and acknowledging that there’s no way of attaining perfection, there’s no true creativity.
In an interview that Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, gave to The New York Times in 2010, he said: “Very few people, whether you’ve been in that job before or not, get into the seat and believe today that they are now qualified to be the CEO. They’re not going to tell you that, but it’s true. So everyone you meet has a level of insecurity. The level of insecurity that you have is a strength, not a weakness. The question is, how are you going to use it?”
Schultz's then gives a simple, but not necessarily easy piece of advice: demonstrate vulnerability, because that will bring people closer to you and show them your human side. Nobody really knows everything or is equipped with superpowers.
Be Proud of Your Impostor, It Protects You from Cognitive Bias
I know, this sounds counterintuitive, but it’s better to have a feeling of self-doubt than to be an overconfident prey of “cognitive bias”.
In 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, from Cornell University and Michigan University, respectively, conducted tests and four different studies that showed that people who lack the skills for something are also more likely be unaware of their lack of ability.
This is known as the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” and it is the scientific proof that people with low capabilities at a task overestimate their own, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own.
It turns out that the impostor propels you to a state where you want to keep learning, asking for feedback from others and developing your own skills. All of these are needed, if you want to enhance your creativity.
So, if you find yourself in the conundrum of having a great idea or project in front of you and your gripping impostor is telling you that you aren’t up to par, get to work and accept that as humans, many of us face these doubts at times. Even the most accomplished do, yet it is in the doing what we do best, that we push through to the other side.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
There are no affiliate links in this email. Everything that I recommend is done freely.
THE EXTRA GROOVE
Read:
Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself by Nedra Glover Tawwab
Watch:
The Impostor Syndrome by The School of Life
How you can use impostor syndrome to your benefit. A TED Talk by Mike Cannon-Brookes
Why incompetent people think they're amazing - A short lesson by David Dunning for TED Ed