Imposter Syndrome: How to Recognize and Combat It

Mentoring in CSE and Beyond: Personal Support in Professional Development—Patty Baskin, Leslie Neistadt, and Barbara Gastel have long been leaders for the CSE Mentorship program. Based on a session from the 2024 CSE Annual Meeting in Portland, they have developed a series of articles on mentorship. The other two articles are available here: https://doi.org/10.36591/SE-4704-02, https://doi.org/10.36591/SE-4704-04 Most of us doubt ourselves, at least occasionally, and some of us do so more often than others. In life, and particularly at work, do you see each new challenge as the one that will finally reveal you as a fraud? view any success as a fluke? assume responsibility for everything that goes wrong? define competence as absolute perfection? overprepare to cover your perceived ineptness? procrastinate so you have a ready excuse for a poor result? fear both failure and success? If you answered yes to any of these, you might have imposter syndrome, which has been described as the pervasive feeling of self-doubt, insecurity, fraudulence, and incompetence, often despite voluminous evidence to the contrary and despite the positive opinions of others. It is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,1 and no formal definition or list of diagnostic criteria exists. Imposter syndrome as a psychological phenomenon was first described in the 1970s, when Oberlin psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes began talking about their shared sense of not being good or smart or hard-working enough. They suspected they were not the only ones and so studied 150 women: accomplished professionals and […]