Imposter Syndrome Isn't a Syndrome
You got the job, or the promotion, or the place on the course, and some part of you is waiting for the email that says there's been a mix-up. I know that feeling from the inside. I watch my students go through it on their first placement. And I once sat with a very capable woman on the day she was asked to give a talk and heard her say "who would want to listen to me?" So here is where the feeling came from, what the research actually says about it, and what I do with it.
Four Fighters Down, and Then They Told Me I'd Failed
In 1986 I took my first Dan grade. I'd been training for thirteen years by then, teaching at my club and fighting internationally, and the only reason I hadn't taken it sooner is that I wasn't bothered. Our club ran on ability first and grade second. Then Sakagami Sensei took me to one side and said it was time, so it was time.
The grading was in Tatsuo Suzuki's dojo in London, with Suzuki, Shiomitsu and Sakagami on the panel. I performed well. In the free fighting I fought four people and knocked all four of them down, which seemed to please Suzuki. At the end of the grading I was told I had failed.
Now, we'd always been told at the club that failing your first Dan was part of the test, to see how you'd react. So it wasn't a shock. But I'd like you to sit with that moment for a second, because it's the whole of this post in miniature. The evidence said one thing. Four fighters on the floor. The verdict said the opposite. And the thing being tested wasn't my karate. It was what I did with the gap between the two.
I also think it was Sakagami's way of putting my feet back on the ground. Four months later I took the grade again in Brighton and passed.
Where the Word Came From
Imposter syndrome is not a syndrome. The term comes from a 1978 paper by two psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who had spent five years working with about 150 high-achieving women: PhDs, respected professionals, students top of their year. Despite all of it, these women were sure they weren't really bright and had somehow fooled everyone who thought otherwise. Clance and Imes called it the imposter phenomenon. Not a syndrome, not a disorder. A phenomenon, meaning a thing that happens.
It appears in no diagnostic manual. A 2019 review of the questionnaires used to measure it says plainly that it isn't a diagnosable condition and turns up in ordinary people as much as in clinical ones. So if you've been wondering whether you have a mental illness, you can stop. What you have is a feeling with a name, and the name is slightly wrong. (The research spells it "impostor", with an o. Most people searching for it spell it the way I have here. Same thing.)
The Number Everyone Quotes
Somewhere on the internet you will have read that 70 percent of people experience imposter syndrome. I've never found the study. Nobody has, because it doesn't exist. The figure seems to have come from a 2007 newspaper piece that cited nothing, and it has been copied from website to website ever since.
Here is what the evidence actually says. In 2020 a team led by Dena Bravata went through 62 studies covering 14,161 people. Depending on which questionnaire was used and where the cut-off was drawn, the proportion of people who counted as having imposter feelings ranged from 9 percent to 82 percent. That isn't a finding. That's a shrug. It was as common in men as in women, it showed up in teenagers and in people at the end of long careers, and it often sat alongside anxiety and low mood.
And then the line that stopped me. Across all 62 studies, not one had tested a treatment. Forty years of research, and nobody had checked what helps. Bear that in mind next time you read a list of seven tips.
Losing Finals I Was Good Enough to Win
When I was competing I had a pattern. I'd win every fight on the way through, reach the final, and something in me would change. I'd lose. Not because the other fighter was better on the day. Because at the exact moment the win was there to be taken, part of me decided I wasn't the kind of person who takes it.
After one of those finals I went back to the club furious with myself. The next tournament was the national championships. I didn't change a thing about my physical training. What I worked on, hard, for weeks, was believing I was good enough to be the champion. And I won it.
I've said on the radio that the limiting belief behind almost everything I see in the room is "I'm not good enough". The imposter feeling is that belief wearing a suit. It doesn't stop you being competent. It stops you using what you've got at the moment it counts.
The Study That Says It Might Be Helping You
This is the part that surprised me. In 2022 Basima Tewfik at MIT published a set of studies that turned the usual story on its head. She looked at staff at an investment firm, doctors in training, and a general sample of employees, and she measured how often they had imposter thoughts at work. Then she asked their supervisors, and in the doctors' case their patients, to rate them.
The people with more imposter thoughts were rated as more effective with other people. They listened better. The doctors were rated as more empathetic. They made more eye contact and nodded more. And on the measures of actual competence, they were no worse than anyone else. Tewfik's reading is that the thought "I might not be good enough here" pushes you outward, towards the people in front of you, and that is precisely what makes you good to work with.
I'll give you the limits, because it wouldn't be fair not to. It's one researcher's programme of work, it's about thoughts rather than full-blown dread, and nobody is saying that feeling like a fraud is good for you. Tewfik herself says it probably doesn't hold if you work alone. But if you've ever wondered why people keep asking to work with you while you're privately certain you're winging it, this is your answer. The thing you're ashamed of is likely the reason they like you.
Who Would Want to Listen to Me?
My wife at the time, a successful businesswoman, was asked to give a TEDx talk. The first thing she said to me was "who would want to listen to me? What have I got to say?"
So I sat with her and told her her own life story, from where I was sitting. Not the version she carried around, the version I'd watched. We built the talk out of that, and in the end we left out more than we kept, because fifteen minutes isn't long. She had plenty to say. She'd just never heard it from the outside.
I use a version of that with people now. Imagine your own talk. Put someone in the front row who is going through what you have survived, or trying to do what you've done. What do you say to them? Most people can answer that in under a minute, and the answer is usually the thing they'd been telling me they had no right to claim. The imposter feeling runs on the inside view, and the inside view is the one seat in the house with no line of sight to what you've actually done.
The Room Might Be the Problem
There's one more thing the tips lists leave out. In 2020 a group of psychologists led by Sanne Feenstra made an argument that has stayed with me. We treat the imposter feeling as a fault in the person. But some rooms manufacture it. If you're the only woman at the table, or the only person who didn't go to the right school, or the only one with your accent, the feeling that you don't belong is partly an accurate reading of the room and not a defect in you.
Michelle Obama said as much to a hall of schoolgirls in north London in 2018. She still had a little imposter syndrome, she told them, and it doesn't go away. That's a woman who, by her own account, had sat at every powerful table there is. Some of what she was describing was hers to work on. Some of it was the buildings.
Your job is to work out which is which. That's a real piece of work, and it's one I'd be glad to do with you, but it starts with dropping the assumption that all of it is you.
What I Tell My Students on Placement
I tutor counselling and hypnotherapy students, and every cohort hits this wall at the same point: the first real client. Here's what I tell them, and it's what I'd tell you.
- Say it out loud to one person who's ahead of you. A 2024 review of 31 programmes designed to help with imposter feelings found that the ones with anything to show for it did two things: they named the feeling, and they put people in a room with others who admitted to it. Ask anyone senior to you and they will have a grading story of their own.
- Separate the thought from the verdict. I said it on the radio early last year: we are not our thoughts, thoughts are what we do. "I'm going to be found out" is a thought. It is weather, not a forecast. You can notice it and go to work anyway.
- Keep a record, the way a fighter reviews footage. Not a gratitude list. A plain account of what you did and what happened. Somebody once told me that our minds are Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good, and I've never found a better description. The imposter feeling works by forgetting. Write things down so it can't.
- Do the thing scared. I passed my Dan grade four months after being told I'd failed it, with the same karate. The confidence didn't come first. It came after, and only because I turned up.
When It's More Than a Feeling
Bravata's review found the imposter feeling keeps close company with anxiety and depression. If what started as "I'm not sure I deserve this job" has become "I'm not sure I'm worth much at all", that's a different conversation, and my self-esteem counselling page is the place it starts. If the feeling is specific to a role, a promotion or a room you've just walked into, coaching is usually the quicker route.
If you come and see me, I won't tell you the feeling is irrational. I'll ask what you did the last time it showed up.
Send me a messageFour fighters down and they told me I'd failed. I still passed. The feeling was never the verdict.
