We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are, said Anaïs Nin.
Why do we feel like impostors even when the evidence says otherwise?
You have the qualification, the track record, the experience, people trust you with real things, and yet, somewhere just below the surface of a confident presentation, there is the low-level certainty that you have somehow pulled the wool over everyone's eyes, and that it is only a matter of time before someone notices.
The impostor feeling is not about the evidence. If it were, the evidence would have corrected it by now. It is about the gap between your internal experience of making decisions, with all its uncertainty, doubt, and guesswork, and the polished surface that others see.
It took me a long time to understand that everyone who is doing anything meaningful is operating with some degree of uncertainty.
Competence is not the absence of doubt but the ability to move forward thoughtfully despite it.
The person in the room who seems most certain has almost certainly just learned to carry their uncertainty more quietly.
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day, for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.” - Henry Moore
Christopher Bollas writes about the ‘unthought known’: things we know but have not yet been able to think clearly.
The impostor feeling, I think, often carries one of these: a truth about the self that is not yet fully articulated. Not ‘I do not belong here,’ but something more like ‘I am still becoming the person this role is asking me to be.’
That is a very different statement, as it is not a verdict but a description of being alive in a particular direction.
The best way to see this is that you are not a fraud, but a work in progress. Those are not the same thing at all.
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