Feel Like A Fake?

If you think that deep down you’re a fraud you might suffer from imposter syndrome. Here’s how to fight it.

Hands up if this applies to you: you often feel you’re not quite up to scratch, that despite any success or praise that comes your way someone is about to out you for the fraud you really are deep down.

Sound like you? If it does, chances are you suffer from imposter syndrome, a phenomenon that’s more likely to strike women or members of a minority group.

Jessica Bennett, gender editor at The New York Times newspaper, is one such sufferer – and she’s turned the syndrome into the subject of a new book, Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace.

In her book she outlines the various types of imposter syndrome and what you can do to combat it.

Read on – because you’re worth it. Seriously.

SHORTLY after I was hired to be a columnist, I was asked to write about a book called The Confidence Code.

Having actually been recruited and hired as a columnist, you’d assume there’d be certain things I was capable of, such as writing a column. But I was rattled.

I laboured over my introduction, writing and rewriting, deleting and retyping, cutting, pasting, moving sentences around, moving them around some more, then spending the next 10 minutes command Z-ing my way back to where I’d started.

Eventually, hunched over my sad desk (kitchen table) in my office (living room), clad in my freelancer’s uniform (pyjamas), I decided I had no business having a column at all.

The irony was that the book I was supposed to write about was about imposter syndrome, or that crippling sense of self-doubt that women often feel in the face of a challenge, which in this case was the very thing that was making it impossible for me to complete the task at hand.