October 2026
Imposter Syndrome is surprisingly common. When I was doing my PhD at university many years ago, I became aware of the numbers of people I respected who believed they were frauds and who thought that, any moment, they would be found out. I certainly felt I was a fraud. The fact that so many of us thought liked this intrigued me sufficiently that I started asking everyone I worked with how they felt about their university positions. Practically everybody, most of the academics, felt fraudulent. Now, these people held lectureships, professionships, with the highest qualifications there can be. A PhD is the highest post-graduate degree you can get. Yet hardly anyone actually felt they deserved to be there. Very interesting stuff.
Imposter Syndrome is defined as the subjective experience of perceived self-doubt in one’s abilities and accomplishments compared to a perception of other people’s accomplishments even when there is no objective evidence to the contrary. Imposter Syndrome is associated with perfectionism and the desire to seem secure in positions of perceived power. It is not a psychiatric disorder, though it can be associated with high levels of anxiety, low self-esteem, somatic symptoms and depression. Certainly, it can interfere with personal relationships and, ironically, get in the way of achieving their full potential in their areas of interest. It can also lead to early burnout.
People, in all professions, can experience imposter syndrome: lawyers, doctors, engineers, nurses, architects, builders, carpenters, ship-wrights, etc etc. A lot of people are living with the belief that – at any moment – they will be found out and their very existence will be called into question.
A lot of people cover these feelings up with a lot of bluster. At university, quite a large number of academics hid behind a lot of bluffing: trying to seem more knowledgeable, in control, than they actually were. They hid behind abstruse explanations of their work designed to conceal their own self-doubt. I remember undergraduate students would come up to me to ask questions they’d already asked of some of my colleagues. These students would say to me that they appreciated me telling them that I didn’t know the answer to their questions because, on questioning other academics, they’d been told totally obscure things that were impenetrable. I am a simple peasant in the sense that if I don’t know something, I’ll say so. I won’t try to hide behind big words or high-sounding explanations of things. I like economy and directness. It’s this, I think, that allows me, these days, to see through the imposter syndrome thingie and see it for what it actually is.
I realized that since practically everybody feels fraudulent maybe there’s something intrinsically wrong with our perception of adulting. There is nothing that we can know or do that is the final say on things. No position is fixed, no person in any profession can know it all. Maybe a belief in this is a hangover from childhood when we looked to adults as if they knew everything; that being grown up means having an all seeing eye. Growing into adulthood never once brought in that capacity, for absolutely everybody. Who could ever say when exactly they grew up, nor precisely what being grownup actually is.
None of us are ever fully made. All our skills, knowledge and abilities are in process, and are never fixed. We are always learning, always discovering, always working things through. We learn and forget old ways, old ideas, old skills and we build on the knowledges that are useful. It’s a continual process of remembering and forgetting as we build our competencies as we go along. We cannot ever be a finished product. Realizing this, we can surely relax and keep our minds on the business of learning more, not turning inwardly on our self-perception as a being that doesn’t measure up.
We can develop a greater playfulness in our lives, more honesty and openness to our own wisdom as well as the wisdom of others. In this way, we can release feelings of being an imposter and simply be open to discovery and see what happens next.
